Bjørn "Heathen Viking" Larssen
In 1977 the Norse gods sent off the adventurous soul of a future Icelander took a wrong turn on its way to earth. With a broken GPS unit, the poor soul derailed and ended up inside a newborn baby boy in Poland. Things weren’t always easy living under a communistic regime. For instance, the boy often found himself standing in line for hours to buy bread. He was so desperately hoping they wouldn’t run out before his turn.
Years later...
Bjørn was ready to tackle the big city of Amsterdam where he sharpened his skills as a blacksmith. His talent radiated and before long he was ready to move on from small creations to bigger things like furniture. Little did Bjørn know that the gods had other things in store for them. They were desperate to tell their story in a way it had never been done before. As we know, the Norse gods have never been known to be subtle. So just like the thundery roar of the young blacksmith’s hammer and the fiery flints from the metal, Bjørn was struck down. He didn’t know if he lay motionless on the floor from pure shock or whether he had actually injured himself. It turned out to be both.
As a result of the Norse gods’ fierce appearance, Bjørn suffered an ominous back injury. The cause and effect didn’t end there. In addition, Bjørn was forced to sell the work he had put his heart and soul into. Fortunately, his talent didn’t go unnoticed and adoring customers picked up his beautiful pieces before he shut down shop for good. The love of his life was gone forever. What was he to do?
Let’s find out!
PS. Make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom for additional links to Bjørn’s MUST READ collection.
Armchair chat with Bjørn and his Norse gods
The writer of Norse gods
When I started working on what would become my first book, Storytellers, I had no setting in mind. It was based on a dream that wouldn’t go away for years, demanding to be written down. I needed a community both secluded and claustrophobic; fishing and fishermen; a church and a pastor. I had this vision in my mind of sharp cliffs, snow, mountains… I was also constantly listening to Ásgeir’s first album, Dýrð í dauðaþögn, and had this sudden revelation that Iceland was a place that actually existed. Until that moment, Iceland was a concept for me – the Björkplace
I bought Wasteland With Words by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and found out that Iceland was created especially so that I could use it as a setting for my book. (Although, technically, it might have happened the other way around.) Now that I knew it would work, I wrote a first, horrible draft of the book. It told me what I needed to research. I did what I could over the Internet, but I had to…smell it. I needed Iceland to become real for me, to check whether a place like that could really exist outside fantasy books.
Bjørn goes home to the Norse gods
Before our departure, I asked the runes what to expect. The answer was – you are going to the land of your ancestors, you will lose something, and you’ll never guess what it is. Obviously, I immediately began trying to guess. Generally, I tend to lose my keys and chargers, but I couldn’t imagine the runes giving a shit about my chargers.
It was a four-day trip. We exited the plane, I stepped into Keflavík, saw all those weird words with ð’s and þ’s and æ’s in them, and I knew I came home. It’s a feeling. It’s impossible to explain. Belonging. I get emotional thinking about it now. And that was just the airport. It felt right.
The Norse gods and the weather have spoken
It was a cold, rainy, awful day when we were leaving. 7 degrees Celsius, wind smacking our face with the rain. As if it wanted my last memory to be unpleasant. We arrived in Amsterdam in the late evening. It was +29 degrees Celsius and humidity around seven billion percent. In our bedroom, as we shut the windows before leaving, it was +35. I wanted to turn and run until I could stand in that wind and rain again, in the freshness and cleanness, rather than Amsterdam’s…mud pretending to be air. I used to love the heat. Iceland broke me.
Oh, and the thing I’ve lost? That was my heart, of course.
Bjørn’s personal Viking era
I need contact lenses or at least glasses and quite some prescription medication, so maybe “right now” is the right answer 
But I also know that 1100 years ago I wouldn’t have had a series of diagnoses. With my sight impairment, I wouldn’t even make a good farmer. I would be a seer, a seiðr practitioner, or possibly dead.
Well, that sounds optimistic, doesn’t it? I would make a good dead Icelander.
Parallels between Bjørn and the world of the Norse gods
There is a scene in Land where my group of hopelessly lost people is on a ship during a storm. I shut my eyes and I was a small, terrified woman. Not only was I barely holding on to something, but I was also half-blind, half-drowned. Suddenly, I was smacked in the face by a wrathful wave a moment after realizing that there were three people in front of me and now there are only two.
Above all, I have been Týr, walking through a snowstorm in search of Fenrir. I cried when I realized I loved the creature and it loved me back, unconditionally. I called him “Fenrir wolf,” hoping others would believe Fenrir was nothing else, unthreatening… it didn’t work, it could have never worked. The snow, the cold, the touch of fur, the love in the wolf’s eyes, his quiet murmur ” I don’t want to hurt you…” When I returned, I nearly fell off the stairs in my hurry to write it all down. I made a stupid mistake – I stopped before I was finished, just because it was time to go to sleep. You can tell where writing down ends and the writing begins.
And then there is a story that can be found only in the hardcover of Children, because I needed to write it, but I don’t necessarily want too many people to read it.
Image on the stone is of Fenrir the wolf. The Runestone from ca. 980 by Sven Rosborn is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Bjørn’s precious Norse gods collection
You have a few books out, do the same characters appear in your books? Are the books interconnected?
Sort-of-kind-of. Children and Creation are very, very different takes on the Norse Gods’ stories. Children is dark and moody and personal and funny, but people told me it’s also so dark they had to take breaks from reading it. (I didn’t know. That’s my autobiographical book.) Creation is the first installment in a new series called Why Odin Drinks, the title of which should tell you how serious it is. So…technically Odin appears in Children later, but by then he has learned how to be a God and the results are not very funny. Mortal-wise, the main character in Storytellers is a blacksmith named Gunnar and I couldn’t resist adding a very different blacksmith named Gunnar to Children as well.
I am working on sequels for both Children and Creation right now, both the dark and the giggly. Odin finds all this amusing (luckily), and Freya and I are no longer on speaking terms.
STORYTELLERS
“Would you murder your brothers to keep them from telling the truth about themselves?“
CHILDREN
Gods make lousy parents.
Storytellers and Children are the kinds of books that transform your lazy chair into a Viking ship out on the roaring sea. You can find these in most ebook stores, including Amazon. Storytellers will be on Tantor Audio on Sep. 7th. I recommend buying the signed copies of the books here. Photo provided by Bjørn
Bjørn is currently working on his next book, Land which will be available later this year (2021).
Most inspirational saga of the Norse gods
There is no particular saga. It’s the vision of people telling those stories to each other in the darkness of the winter. The Gods and Hidden Folk and all the wights simply being parts of life, not “magic” or “fantasy.” While I know that Ragnar loðbrók is not an Icelandic hero, I love knowing that he might not have existed, but his sons definitely did. Storytellers is based on the realization that there is no objective “truth.” Everyone has their own truth and even if all of them had a chance to speak, there would still be more. (The Polish translation of the book will be titled All The Truths.)
Iceland is the land of stories, more of them lost than remembered. They’re in the glaciers; in the lava; in the air. So few people speak the language and so many wrote in it, hundreds of years ago or yesterday. For health reasons I had to take a (too) long break from my Icelandic classes, but I wish to be able to read some of those stories one day. Not sagas, but a memoir of a blacksmith called Gunnar who hated time, fought the darkness and kept being pestered by an elf who introduced himself as Grendel.
Inspirations in Iceland
Back during our first trip, in 2017, we somehow ended on some sort of road in the middle of Heiðmörk. We got out of the car, trying to figure out where were and how to start being somewhere else, and I felt it – the power of the land. I picked a random rock and it turned out to be rune-shaped. Not etched by a person. It was just elhaz-shaped. I had to get back in the car, because the power became too strong for me to handle. I use this experience in my next book, Land.
During our second stay, when we went for a month, because I hoped that I would stop missing my homeland (it didn’t work) I opened my laptop to look at my messages right before midnight. Which I never did. “How do you like the Northern lights?” our landlady asked. We ran to Sólfar – the darkest place we could think of on such short notice. I put my hand on the cold metal of the ship to keep myself grounded, to remember who and where I was, and watched the lights dance for 45 minutes. When we came back, at 2am, I said to my husband “you can go to sleep, I must write this down NOW” and I revised the scene in Storytellers where Juana saw the lights for the first time. YouTube hasn’t prepared me for this.
Bjørn’s life in Iceland
You move to Iceland with your husband, where do you live? How do you manage your basic needs? Animals? Do you use sorcery to protect your ship or sheep?
Ha! Obviously, I want to be a famous… no, scratch that. I want to be a mysterious hermit of an author, but filthy rich. As required in order to live in Iceland 
I don’t have that many needs, apart from someone to help me shuffle snow – I’ve got spine injuries that, unfortunately, can’t be cured with magic. But for the needs of this interview, let’s imagine they don’t exist.
I’ve been working hard on convincing my husband that what we need to do with our lives once he retires is move to Iceland. It took a pandemic for him to see the light. We watched and experienced people’s egoism, then aggression. The pretty, Insta-filtered shells fell off and bared the real people hiding underneath. The Netherlands is a small country filled to the brim with people you can’t avoid. When he started hiding in his laptop, watching YouTube channels made by people living off-the-grid, as far away from “civilization” as possible, we both knew I was right. We wanted space and silence (a roaring waterfall or a thunderstorm counts as silence for me).
Husby loves Iceland, Norse gods but when it comes to animals…
As I was preparing for this interview, I asked him about our future animals. He’s not so much into sheep, unfortunately. I like the idea of goats, but I’m not sure whether I would like the reality of them. However, I am very much drawn towards Icelandic horses. (I have things to say to everyone who calls them “ponies.”) But I also know that the idea of farming is very different from the practice, especially with Icelandic weather. So… do you need blacksmiths? What a silly question. Everyone needs blacksmiths.
It just feels right
When it comes to actual location, I’d like to live somewhere near Akureyri, in the north. Find a place near enough to reach the city reasonably quickly, but far enough not to see the light pollution. Why? No idea. I haven’t been to that part of Iceland yet. It just feels right. (A lot of my experiences with Iceland are based on “it just feels right.”) Even though I know that if I want as many problems with snow as possible, the north is the place to go. I’m not very smart, I guess. I’m not great with the magic, sorcery, seiðr, call it what you want, I’m not good at it. I feel like I’d need a few more lifetimes to learn what I want to know. (It would probably help if I spent more time learning and less on Twitter, but I digress.)
Bjørn’s personal magic collection
Icelandic soul
Ouch. This might be the most difficult one. When I was writing Storytellers, the book that started it all, I felt a bit hopeless. I knew what I had seen but, I couldn’t find the words to give it justice. In contrast,Imagine my surprise when the reviewers used words like “cinematic” and “visual” – I still don’t think it’s good enough. Iceland deserves better. In the sequel to Children – Land – a few deities and somewhat surprised mortals travel from Jötunheim to Earth in the search for the new Ásgard. Land is a re-telling of Hrafnaflóki’s journey.
At first the book was to take place in “the new Ásgard”. However, with the help of my characters to location transpired into the Hidden Land, the land of fire mountains… the ice-land. My “Flóki” hates everything about it as much as he used to love it before (spoilers spoilers) happened, but he can’t not return. There is no other place he could be. And this is how he found himself on the Icelandic coat of arms… Land will also come with a bonus, hardcover-only story that I need to write. Spoiler: it takes place in Iceland. And I die in it.
Thank you for having me and making me think!
Thank you, Bjørn for this amazing opportunity and privilege to share your talent with my readers, it´s been an honor. Good luck and may the gods be with you always.
Bjørn the Viking
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