A Mighty Dawn

In eighth-century Denmark, Hakan, son of Haldan and heir to a lord among the northern Jutes, is shaped by a culture of oaths, kinship and violence. A catastrophe within his household destroys the future expected of him and sends him into exile. Rejecting his old identity, he takes the name Erlan—“stranger”—and sets out to find a new lord worthy of his sword, carrying physical and emotional wounds that will follow him through the series.

His journey draws him north into a world where political rivalry and everyday brutality exist beside pagan belief, prophecy and supernatural fear. Brun deliberately sets the novel in the poorly documented generations before the conventional Viking Age, using archaeology and later Norse traditions to build the material world while allowing myth and invention to fill the gaps. The result is historical fantasy rather than a reconstruction of a single documented event.