Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships *****

The Long Ships is a Swedish adventure novel telling the saga of Red Orm Tostesson, a widely-traveled and notably lucky Viking in the years around the first millennium. Like The Island of Second Sight, it's a classic of world literature I'd never heard of before pulling from the bookstore shelf. 

From the Introduction to the NYRB edition, written by Michael Chabon:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Like traditional adventure novels, The Long Ships eschews psychological realism in favor of unadorned action. It is largely episodic but soon reveals a recurring theme about the role of religion in that world. On his first long voyage, Orm, raised with the old Norse gods, spends time captive in Moorish Spain, escapes to Christian Ireland, and comes home to find the King of Denmark converted to Christianity. Many of Orm's adventures, and even more of his moral reasoning, involve weighing the impact of each religion on the "luck" of the protagonists. They decide, for instance, that they should sacrifice a goat at the launching of a ship, because the sea gods are more powerful in this instance than Christ; on the other hand, they spare their injured enemies.

The joy of the book comes from the adventure and the dryly humorous way the story is told.

The year (1000) ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as a result of neighborly disputes.

Orm has a wise-cracking friend named Toke who is a particularly rich source of bon mots. 

The Long Ships is an entertaining way of learning about the state of Europe in the 10th century, with plenty of battles and violence when our heroes go a-viking.