The North Star: A Tale of Norway in the Tenth Century

The “North Star” of this book’s title refers to Olaf Tryggevesson, first king of all Norway (995–1000).  Ms. Ruffin clearly did her homework on the subject of King Olaf, getting the known facts correct on Olaf’s lineage, the murder and overthrow of his father, Olaf’s subsequent exile until he was old enough to return, even the fact that the murderous usurper—Earl Haakon—sent an emissary to Ireland to lure him back to Norway under false pretenses... false pretenses which had remarkably become true by the time Olaf arrived!  So instead of being murdered when he arrived, as was planned, he was acclaimed king by the populace.  He must have acquired some Irish luck while he was living there.

Originally published in 1904, The North Star is a rollicking adventure and painless way to learn some Scandinavian history about an historical period which might otherwise be neglected by your self-educational efforts.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.