Study Eaters Of The Dead Conceived By Michael Crichton Available In PDF

very Arabian Nights vibe, A normal protagonist, without any gimmicks and an Arab/Muslim hero, a rarity in Western mainstream culture, A Middle Eastern met the Northmen and everyone got along just fine and fought a COMMON enemy, No taunting and no one called anyone an apostate or an extremist, Haha. Take heed. THEth WARRIOR

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.

The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!
Page/Plant, Immigrant Song,.


The idea for the book came after Crichton heard his pal giving a lecture including Beowulf as among the Bores of Literature.
Crichton notes in an appendix that the book is based partly on the Beowulf myth,

The full name of thisnovel was Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in AD.
After being made into a movie under the title, Theth Warrior, the book was republished for a time under that name.


The book is basically told as a edited translation of the account written by Ibn Fadlan, a Persian ambassador conscripted by a group of Vikings probably from Sweden as theth warrior in a hero's quest to save a northern kingdom from a group of "mist monsters" called "wendol," a group of vicious savages, perhaps surviving Neanderthals, who wear bear skins in battle.
After battling with the wendol probably based, in part, on Grendel, they must fight Grendel's mother:



I was somewhat disappointed by the lethargic lulls and the story's underdevelopment.
On the other hand, the action sequences were quite thrilling, As usual, Crichton's research was impeccable and provided an education on the Vikings and a more modernized account of Beowulf,

If you enjoyed Beowulf or you're a Viking connoisseur, you should like this,

From a kind of historical perspective this is pretty interesting, From a reading standpoint, it was a bit boring, Maybe it is the writing style, I am not sure. But I can say, the movie adaptation is fun, I just don't really have a lot to offer here, It is not a terrible book, but it is not the most awesome read of the year, I am glad to have read it, Just meh. Arabian Nights meets Vikings : how did I put off reading this book for so long when I loved “Theth Warrior” and when I have a huge weakness for Vikings I dont know.
Maybe I have way too many unread books piling up everywhere in my apartment, so some titles slip through the cracks, But my husband had not seen “Theth Warrior”, so we sat down to watch it the other day and I realized I had a copy of “Eaters of the Dead” somewhere, that was patiently waiting for me to get around to it No time like the present!

This book is a fictionalized account of actual historical figure Ibn Fadlan, an emissary of the Calif of Baghdad, sent on a diplomatic mission in northern Europe,

and enlisted more or less against his will in an adventure to rid a Viking village of a mysterious an terrifying enemy.
He travels with Buliwyf and eleven other seasoned Viking warriors to the kingdom of King Hrothgar, where they are told that the Wendol have been attacking the village and eating the flesh of their victims.


The style of this book is not exactly breezy, but what Crichton did was to try and imitate the style of theth century travelogues.
Ibn Fadlan is an absolute outsider: he doesnt speak the Northmens language he communicates with them in Latin, with the help of Herger, one of the warriors who speaks that language fluently, he cant really get over their womens behavior, or the cultures rather particular views on cleanliness.
But the record of his observations and adventures give the world an early version of the legend of Beowulf except, historically plausible, Crichton took off with the idea that all myth have a core of veracity somewhere, and that centuries of embellishments by bards, troubadour and so on have left us with only fanciful stories that dont seem all that believable.
The tone might turn some readers off: it is written in a very oldfashioned style, so its often repetitive, but its filled with great descriptions and interesting footnotes meant to help the reader interpret this translation of an ancient text.
I personally found it fascinating, just like discovering an ancient manuscript that gives you a glimpse of a world long gone, If Chrichton had tried to stretch this out any longer, it would have been ponderous and annoying, but at aboutpages, its perfectly constructed to be a diverting and surprisingly informative read! The film Theth Warrior was, as I'm sure you are aware, absolutely superb.
A classic Viking film and one of those to take on a desert island, As long as the desert island had electricity, plugs, and you had a BluRay player and a tv, . . anyway, it is absolutely essential viewing for anyone considering themselves anything of a Viking aficionado, I knew it was based on a book by Michael Crichton called Eaters of the Dead, and thought nothing much more, other than I had to read that book one day.
Which I have now done, So then, imagine my surprise when as clearly the last person on the planet to find out, or realise  the book on which the film is based, actually mixes in Ibn Fadlan's manuscript with the legendary poem Beowulf! Well, bugger me sideways!

If you do know the bones of the Beowulf story that's me then you will, as I did, recognise the elements Michael Crichton uses here.
According to the man himself, the first three chapters of the book use Ibn Fadlan's manuscript, then we're into a retelling of the important bits of Beowulf.
The book is more than just the basis for the film, it's written as though it is all by Ibn Fadlan, who travels with the warriors back to Scandinavia and takes an active part in their adventure there.


The Beowulf element that develops as the Vikings receive an important message from Scandinavia, calling on them to return 'home.
' But they need Ibn Fadlan to make up the war party, as the Soothsayer has determined that there must be thirteen warriors making the trip back and that one warrior must not be a Norseman.
So Ibn Fadlan is roped in as theth Warrior, It is then a stripped down, imagined version of the Beowulf legend, as Michael Crichton set out to make it, A sort of 'to explain the original events that might have become over time and retelling, the Beowulf legend as we have it today, it might have happened this way.
' The main themes though are all present, The warrior called to help fight an unimaginable evil, finally confronting the mother of all mist monsters herself, Beowulf is a classic us against them story, Insiders against outsiders. In the Viking period, where everyone was together in Longhouses for both comfort, safety and warmth and tales were told of creatures than moved, unseen or halfglimpsed out in the forests and the dark, inside the Longhouse at night, against outside the Longhouse at night.
Inside, in the light, was the good, outside in the dark and mist and unknown, was bad, The mist monsters of Michael Crichton's legend, we don't really need him to tell us, represent the last vestiges of Neanderthal man, pushed to the edges of the Vikings and Homo Sapiens world, kept to themselves.
Michael Crichton posits that they could have survived into recored history and were misunderstood and therefore feared, The Vikings fear of them is really Xenophobia, though that is in stark contrast to their acceptance, both in Ibn Fadlan's original manuscript and here in Eaters of the Dead, of Muslims and Muslim culture.
The only antiMuslim comments aren't really anti at all, "How silly!" is about as far as the Vikings go when presented with a view that is different to theirs',

Ibn Fadlan was actually Ahmed Ibn Fadlan In Arabic: أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn alʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād, and was sent out to report on the peoples of the areas in the far north of the Muslim consciousness, by the Abbasid Caliph, AlMuqtadir.
The report he compiled on his travels and observations of the Bulghars, Khazars and the Rus, is called The Risala, I have a Penguin Classics version which is a factual work based around his manuscripts or copies and versions included in other works, because, as is frustratingly common, the original is now lost.
I haven't read that yet, so I'm afraid I can't give you acomparison just yet,

The Michael Crichton book here, is written he says in the style of Ahmed IF, to appear as if it is a complete, contemorary document of his travels to the meeting with the Viking Rus and onwards or backwards with them to confront the title's eaters of the dead.
On that front, it to me works very well indeed, he has accomplished his aim, The annotations especially had me fooled, before I got to the afterword, . . I was captured and absolutely hooked by the book, helped no doubt by my regard for the film and trying to imagine the film while reading the book.
I raced through it, footnotes and all, in just a couple of days, My only regret being it wasn't twice as long, That said, it isn't a postfilm dramatisation or a version they filmed from, Though if you have seen the film, you'll know where you are with the book, What the book does, better than the film, is retain the sense of the Viking warriors Ahmed Ibn Fadlan met,

They were shockingly different to him at the time and really should still be to us, Nowadays though, our idea of what the Vikings were like, is rather a rather safe one, with many of their sharp cultural contemporary differences softened.
Michael Crichton keeps the feeling of awe, often shock, Ahmed must have felt and preserves something of the strangeness the Vikings were even to their own contemporaries.
The film, no less fantastic, but maybe due to its rocky path to completion, does fudge some elements though never goes full Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Ernest Borgnine "ODINNNNN!" Vikings on us.


The regard historians have for Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, is because his is the first, and if I'm not much mistaken, the only contemporary account of an aspect of Viking culture we have.
'Have found so far,' as I live in hope of 'them' finding others, Where this is different to other contemporary accounts of the Vikings, for those of you mithering "just a moment, what about "save us from the fury of the Northmen" and similar" Well, problem for us is that they pretty much only consist of "oh lord God, we have sinned and we deserve this punishment, but send more firey dragons!" or were written many years after any content, for a specific purpose.
To scare the nonbelievers mostly, The point with Ahmed Ibn Fadlan's text is it is unbiased, nonjudgemental on the whole observations of what he saw, Which is what his patron required of him, The famous parts of his texts are the only contemporary account of a Viking ship 'burial,' descriptions of their washing habits and their physique we have.
As Michael Crichton says, it can't follow actually chronologically on from Ahmed's encounter, as the Beowulf legend is much, much older, But in Eaters of the Dead there are no such problems and it all works splendidly well, As well as any scholar might hope to discover one day written in a contemporary manuscript,

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