The Lord of the Horses (Wodan's Children, Bk 3) - Hardcover

This is the conclusion of Paxson's treatment of the Nibelungenlied, the 13th-century epic made familiar through Richard Wagner's operas. Paxson indulges in little gratuitous deviation from the sources, and her prose style is blunt and unadorned. She does, however, bring color and dimension to her characters -- most notably Gudrun (Kriemhild in the epic), who stands at the center of the poem's plot yet is a caricature of hatred there. Here, Gudrun's motives are presented, and her Burgundian brothers become realistic, rather than ritualized. Paxson allows Gudrun to survive and come to terms (a modern idea) with her blood-guilt. Touches of shamanism, Germanic-Norse gods, and supernatural creatures are unobtrusive. Primarily, this trilogy is about people trapped by their own natures; the gods cannot help them if they will not help themselves.

Like its predecessor, The Dragons of the Rhine, this soundly researched conclusion to Paxon's Wodan's Children trilogy humanizes figures from Germanic myth. To survive against fifth-century European barbarians, Rome had to play its old Germanic enemies and sometime allies against the far more fearsome Turko-Mongol Huns, who swept west of the Volga around A.D. 350. King Gundohar of the Rhine-dwelling Burgundians and his half-brother, Hagano, coerce their sister Gudrun, still mourning her husband, Sigfrid-whom they have killed-into a political marriage with Attila, khan of the Western Huns. Ironically, Atilla's ambition will catalyze the horrifying vengeance that Gudrun wreaks upon her kinsmen. To vivify the power of emotion, Paxson gives Gundohar the gift of bardhood, Hagano the berserker's battle-ecstasy and Gudrun the seeress's sight-all attributes of the Germanic trickster god Wodan, embodiment of the irrational. Paxson brings her people and ideas to convincing life in this moving sword-song, which speaks the wisdom of the ancient North: "The mind knows only/ What lies near the heart."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.