"There is land far out beyond the seas, and danger, too. For it is said that men have lost their lives seeking the eyries of the white gyrfalcon..."

So spoke Kurt's father, falconer to the household of Graf Ulrich in Saxony, shortly before their annual spring hawking trip. Later, a few injured men returned from the hunt with the news that his father, Graf Ulrich and the rest of the hunting party had been carried off by Vikings and were being held for ransom. Kurt remembered his father's words, and knew that the only way he could redeem the captives would be to capture one of the priceless white gyrfalcons, each one of them worth a king's ransom, and offer it to the Viking chief Bror Spearfist.

Kurt had no illusions about the dangers involved in a trip from his relatively safe German homeland to the North, where Viking outlaws roamed the seas in their swift dragon ships, all too ready to carry off a lonely traveler, and stern kings ruled by the laws of the wergild and the holmgang. Yet nothing prepared him for what he found—the land of the white falcon was a desolate wilderness, shaking with volcanic eruptions and covered with great unmelting glaciers and burning lava flows. Above it loomed the dread Mount Loki, said by the people to be the home of all the demons of the Hel-world. There Kurt saw the falcon, as white as ice, soaring high over this wasteland—"the finest bird to spring from the hand of God."

In Ice Falcon Rita Ritchie has written a gripping tale of a world where brutality and bloodshed were the way of life. There rough Vikings were born into blood feuds and settled them by the sword, and men still worshipped the old gods of fire and thunder. Into this world came Kurt, whose family had been Christianized in Europe, to make his way among the Norsemen by his skill and intelligence and to succeed in a world more savage than anything he had ever known.

From the dust jacket