Recent content by Puck

You could do worse than reading about Henry V's injury at Shrewsbury. Both in terms of the injury itself and the treatment and recovery. John Bradmore (Henry's surgeon) wrote a detailed account of the injury and the treatment. You can read about it here...

You can easily be hit by an arrow and survive. Henry V was shot in the face just below the left eye and survived (he had the services of one of the most talented surgeons in Europe however). If you were wearing late medieval armour of good quality you would be well protected from arrows. You...

Characters can only come from characters an author knows or has encountered. Or course this might include characters they have encountered when reading a book (fictional or historic).

We don't really have anything like a chronicle or saga or anything of any significant length written in Runes that can be definitively dated to pagan Norse times. The Eddas are (though thirteenth century) possibly based on earlier written material that survived in the C13th but did not last...

Yes but documents like the Codex Runicus are the product of a medieval Christian culture. I am talking about runes as they were used in the pagan Viking Age (pre-1000 CE), not during later medieval times. Codex Runicus can't be used as an example of how runes were used by pagan Norse cultures.

I think attempting to portray an anti-Christ or Lucifer character is far from easy to pull off. I have almost never seen that kind of thing done well in my opinion. The best Satan character in fantasy/horror that I can think of would probably be Captain Hatch from the TV Series Being Human...

I suppose if you look at history, the fact is that there are very few people (if any) who you could categorise as an out and out villain. There were people (many people) who performed acts of violence we would now consider atrocities. But these acts were considered more acceptable in medieval...

They were typically only used to write charms on items or for memorial stones or perhaps place an owners name on stuff. When used in magic they form part of the enchantment & in that sense they were magical - but I dare say only when inscribed as part of a spell/ritual. The memorial /...

In old Norse magic runes were important - as protections, charms etc. People would engrave them on swords to make them kill better, shields to make them protect better etc. You would need to employ a runemaster skilled at carving the runes and empowering them. Another thing you might want to...

It is a particular source of annoyance for a great many Scots history fans.

Tolkien stole most of the names he used from Norse and Old English writers whom he'd studied in his day job. Gandalf, Durin, Dain, Thorin, Nori, Gloin etc = all names stolen from Snorri Sturluson.

There are a few ancient Norse stories about shape changing into a fish. Loki did it to escape the gods but they caught him in a magic net. Loki himself catches a shape changing dwarf in fish form by grabbing its tail & forcing the dwarf to give him gold. The stock answer to shape changing...

Tolkien was massively influenced by Norse mythology - the Prose Edda in particular. The Prose Edda is well worth a read if you have not read it before. It also has the merit of not being hugely long and some of the old, blunt, Viking humour sometimes comes through. The Norse mythical...

I think it is important to be disciplined about it, otherwise there is a real risk that something like that will happen. Once you start doing both, you need to draw up a publishing schedule for yourself, or at least develop some rules in terms of how much time you will devote to which task.

Fantasy and SciFi are in many ways all about setting rather than theme. You could have a SciFi story that erred towards horror, or one that erred towards action adventure, or even towards romance. The only difference between a horror story set in the 'real' world and one set in a fantasy world...