Viking in Trouble

Jeremy Strong's Viking in Trouble is a very silly story for 8 year olds about a real Viking with a job in a seaside hotel.

What happens

Sigurd sailed with Ulric Blacktooth, hit some rocks in the fog and fell in. He climbed up the cliff, soaked and cross, and found a hotel in Flotby with his own face on the sign.

That was about a thousand years after he set off. He has been living there ever since, waving his sword about. (The sword is called Nosepicker.)

This isn't the first book about Siggy. You don't need the others to follow it.

It opens with his wedding to Mrs Tibblethwaite. He wants ten sheep, five cows and a fire for Thor. She wants a church, a vicar and a white dress. You can probably guess how loud that argument gets.

Then a thin man from the Health Department turns up and tells Mr Ellis that his Viking is a public health hazard. Move him out of the kitchen or the hotel gets shut down.

So the family start looking for something else Siggy can do. Cleaning the bedrooms. Driving guests to the station. Gardening. Each one goes about as well as you would expect.

Most of the jokes live in Siggy's English and they are brilliant. Told to clean the bedrooms, he announces that he will "clean beetroots". Second gear becomes "second fear". A wedding is a "weeding". He raises a jug of champagne and shouts "Ears!"

What makes it work is that your reader gets the joke before the grown-ups in the book do. Siggy is completely certain he is doing the right thing every single time. He is told to fetch the bed linen from Room Nine, so he carries the whole lot downstairs on his shoulder with the sleeping guest still inside it.

There is a lot of shouting and crashing. One driving lesson ends with the car nose down in the hotel pond.

Siggy does pull out his sword and threaten to kill whoever has annoyed him. It is played entirely for laughs and nobody gets so much as a scratch in the chapters here. If your reader is at the stage of taking that sort of thing literally, have a quick look at the first chapter yourself.

This is one for a child who loves a character who means well and wrecks everything anyway. Something goes wrong in almost every scene.

What to read next

If they want to know how a Viking from the tenth century ended up working behind a hotel reception desk, that one is There's a Viking in My Bed and we have it as well.