There’s a Viking in My Bed and Other Stories

Jeremy Strong's There's a Viking in My Bed is a comedy for 8 year olds about a Viking who falls off his own longship and washes up in a British seaside town.

What happens

Sigurd is the lookout. He is the lookout because he can't row and he can't cook. The last time he cooked, he boiled the crew's best meat in a pot of seawater.

Asked what he can see through the fog, he holds his big red ears out like radar dishes, stares hard, and reports that there is water below. It is the sea.

Two minutes later the boat hits rocks, Sigurd goes over the front, and his captain decides not to mention it and rows quietly away.

So there he is on an English beach, with cold water running out of his helmet and down into his boots. He slips on a dead jellyfish. A crab takes a swipe at his ear and marches off.

The best of it is what happens when he gets up the cliff, because he has no words for any of what he finds. Cars are things with small black wheels. A window shows him a fierce warrior glaring back, so he stabs it and it shatters. A doorbell goes bing-bong every time he shifts his shoulder.

Then he finds a painted sign with his own face on it. Moustache, helmet, sword, the lot. So obviously this is his house, and in he goes. It's The Viking Hotel, and it is falling to bits.

Which is where the other half of the book lives. The Ellis family run the hotel, badly. Peeling paint, wilting plants, three rooms booked out of twelve. Zoe and Tim come down the stairs like a migrating buffalo herd. Tim is five and cannot say Mrs Tibblethwaite, so he tries Mrs Fiddleplate and then Mrs Piddlegate instead.

Their dad is quietly working out that they will be broke soon, and he says as much to their mum in the kitchen. It's light, and it passes, but it's there. A child in a family that worries about money may well notice it.

The swords have names, by the way. The captain's is Heartsplitter. Sigurd's is rusty and is called Nosepicker. That tells you the level, and it's about right for a reader who wants a proper story with a laugh on every page.

This edition collects more than one Sigurd story, so there's a fair bit of him to get through.

What to read next

If Sigurd goes down well, The Indoor Pirates is more of the same nonsense. A gang of pirates who all hate the sea move into a great-granny's house on Dolphin Street and fly a skull and crossbones from the chimney.