The Coming of the Dragon

Rebecca Barnhouse's The Coming of the Dragon is a Norse adventure for 10 year olds about a boy who washed up on the shore as a baby and still doesn't know who he is.

What happens

Nobody knows where the rowboat came from. It drifts in with no oars, carrying a sword, a shield, a coat of chain mail and a crying baby. One of the king's warriors wants the child sent back out to sea as an offering to the gods. The old King Beowulf says no. He hands the baby to Amma, a strange, silent woman who seems to have known the boat was coming.

Sixteen winters later, Rune works on a lonely farm with his foster family. His foster brothers can't stand him. They think he brings bad luck. The king insists he trains with a sword in the hall every winter, which only makes the other boys like him less.

Then a goat runs off with the pendant Rune has worn all his life. He chases her all the way to the giants' mountain as night falls. There's a stranger who seems to know far too much about that pendant. And then the ground starts to shake.

It's a real old-fashioned adventure, full of gods and feuds and farm work and a boy desperate to prove he isn't a coward. Rune is easy to root for. He does the right thing, then spends ages wishing he'd punched somebody instead!

This one reads older than its shelf, though. Rune is sixteen and the story takes its violence seriously. A warrior holds a sword to a woman's throat and suggests killing the baby. A scythe slices into a farmer's leg (there's blood). Early on, a dragon sets farms and fields alight, and two small figures fleeing a burning house fall. There's some crude language too.

For a young or sensitive reader, that's a lot. It sits much more comfortably with a confident reader nearer ten or eleven who loves myths, monsters and battles. If that's your reader, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

If they enjoy a Norse setting and a boy nobody quite understands, Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants is a lovely place to go next. Odd is a Viking boy on a crutch whose luck has run out, and the rest of his village thinks he's a bit strange.