Status Updates From The Viking

The action trundles towards the grand finale. It seems that the villainous Hastings has lost interest in Morganna. This makes rather an anti-climax for the rivalry between him and the lead character, who has just killed off Aella, King of Northumbria, in a dawn combat.

Grinding towards the climatic ending of this. I can't like this hero at all.

Why is 'Hastings Maidenface' (cruel name) happy to go plundering with Ogier, given he seems to know that O was instrumental in giving old Ragnor his chips? Is this a creaking plot piece of plot machinery or is he supposed to be influenced by his unconscious or the occult or both?
We shall see.
Meanwhile, I want to know why I find Ogier incredibly boring. He's probabably a typical hero of the 1950's.

I have just read a chapter with a completely redundant, sensationalist and gruesome adventure in it which doesn't further the main plot at all, though it is full of sensational detail. I don't know why the editors didn't recommend deleting it and making it into a short story.

Ragnor has had his chips, and the hero has just had his hand hacked off by the treacherous Aella. All that featured in the film, of course.
To be honest, this is one of the few cases - 'The Remains of the Day' was another - where I prefer the film to the book. The hero comes across as arrogant and tiresome, and despite defying convention in taking a pagan for a lover, the heroine Morganna is inispid.

I find the emotional tone of this bleak. Obviously, the Vikings are meant to be violent and insensitive. Oddly enough, I am irritated by a grotesque feature; Hastings' horribly wounded face was meant to be no longer bleeding when Ogier is tried for setting the falcon on him. How was that possible, if the wounds are so bad that his face is permanently distorted?

Unusually for me, so far I pefer the film. Here there are accounts of symbolic hunts, etc, but no indication of day-to-day relations of the protagonists. Marshall did his research, and research on the Vikings with their early culture being unwritten, must have been diffiicult. I continue to feel sorry for the Hastings character, though he is less human than Kirk Douglas' portrayal. People act in an histrionic way.

O has tried to bump off Ragnar and Hastings in a bear hunt, but it doesn't work, but he saved Egbert so he's been granted his freedom. The author must have done hours of research on the Vikings for this, not easy in pre-internet days. The style is florid, though, and oddly unemotional.

Thank goodness the poor bird of prey is dead at last. Infused with yet more spirit, the male lead calls on Odin to turn the tide and escapes from the icy cess pit. The sentences are written in the reversed sort of word order that I vaguely remember from old historicals.

The mutilation of the falcon is as harrowing as I remember.

I tracked this down as the original of the film a good ten years ago, and then was so upset by the horrible fate of the falcon that I stopped reading.
As the Balzac I ordered hasn't been delivered, here we are. I'm interested in the research; I believe, this not being a written culture, it is sparse. Did the author spend thousands of hours in specialist libraries?

OMG!! I've suffered through Part One of this book. Part Two is more like it. Vikings at their best!!

The pacing, the long descriptive whimsy of Ogier Gyrfalcon have forced me to take a break.