The Vikings were terrifying, but they were also oddly civilised and democratic, author Robert Low
 tells STEPHEN LEWIS ahead of his appearance at this month’s Harrogate History Festival.

ROBERT Low became a Viking to get fit. He was a middle-aged Glasgow journalist obsessed with ancient warfare. Joining a Viking re-enactment group so he could limber up by bashing hell out of other Vikings with a sword and shield seemed perfect.

He certainly looks every inch the Viking, with his bald head, bushy eyebrows and grizzled beard.

So when interviewing him on the telephone it comes as something of a disappointment to learn that he's speaking not from some remote, salt-lashed headland in the Orkneys, but from genteel Malvern.

He moved there with his wife a few year ago, the author of modern Viking classics such as The Whale Road and The Wolf Sea admits.

Anyone who has read any of his Oathsworn books will know that they are wonderfully vivid evocations of the life of a Viking. The smell of the sea, the creaking of spars, the stink of sweat-stained men and the bellying of a Viking sail are almost tangible.

Growing up in the windswept Scottish seaside town of Largs helped him with that, he says – as did his Viking re-enactments. He's even been to sea in a recreated Viking longboat.

"It's fairly uncomfortable. Those scenes you see in the movies of a lone Viking standing with his hair flying at the prow of a ship – that's not what it's like."

But the books are dark and violent, too, as well as vivid. Low's Oathsworn are tough, dangerous men born into an age when life was cheap. Anything goes as they rape and pillage their way around Europe and the Mediterranean, loyal only to each other. Some of the rape scenes in particular are shocking.

"The times were violent," Low says. "It is difficult to believe how much people lived in fear. Most people didn't go far from where they were born. But these people (the Vikings) went across the sea. They were fearsome."

In one sense, Low was again able to draw on his own experience when writing some of the more savage scenes in his Oathsworn novels. As a young journalist of 19, he suddenly took it into his head to hitchhike to Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War.

He'd been reading too much Hemingway, he jokes, and believed, as Hemingway did, that you couldn't be any kind of a writer until you'd been as drunk as you could get, had a broken heart, and seen war first hand.

"I thought I had done the first two, and just needed the third."

He was in Vietnam for about 18 months, reporting for a number of newspapers.

And some of the things he saw were... unpleasant? "Unpleasant is a good word for it," he says. "I have friends who went out and never came back."

He returned to Scotland and a successful career as a journalist on newspapers like the Scottish Daily Record and the Daily Mirror.

'Lapses of judgement' in his middle years took him away from the safe life of a journalist in Scotland to war zones in Sarajevo, Romania, Albania and Kosovo for a while. "It was a mid-life crisis. I was in my forties. It could have been a fast car or a bike."

Again, his spell as a war reporter didn't last long. "I wanted a conflict with room service," he says.

He came back to Scotland, resumed his journalistic career, and in 1955 retired to write novels full-time.

His first, The Whale Road, came out less than ten years ago. Since then there have been three more Oathsworn novels, before Low started a new series about the Scottish wars for Independence (the ones featuring Robert the Bruce, not Alex Salmond).

It is the Vikings he will be talking about when he turns up in Harrogate on October 26 for the Harrogate History Festival, however.

He'll be joining Margaret Elphinstone, Giles Kristian, Phil Stevens and chair Gareth Williams to discuss the 'strange truths of an age of blood and poetry', as the blurb puts it.

It should be a good discussion, Low says. Because the Vikings were much more than just ferocious pirates seeking land and booty under the banner of their pagan gods.

They were family men, too, traders and farmers; some of them became Christian kings; they developed the first western democracies since the ancient Greeks – and their women enjoyed more freedom than perhaps any other women of their day.

"They could own property in their own right," Low says. "And they could divorce the man they were married to by walking around him three times and telling him to p*** off!"

Suddenly those Viking warriors don't sound quite so fearsome after all.

• Robert Low, Taming The Dragon, Harrogate History Festival, 2pm Sunday October 26, Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. Tickets 7.

Festival facts

Other big name authors of historical fiction appearing at the three-day Harrogate History Festival from October 23-26 include Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden and CJ Sansom.

James Naughtie will talk about his debut novel The Madness of July, a political/ espionage thriller set mostly in Westminster during a hot summer in the 1970s, while broadcaster and novelist Sandi Toksvig will reveal her choice of Desert Island Books (which may or may not include Mary Renault, Rosemary Suttcliffe and James Fenimore Cooper).

There will be plenty for lovers of historical fact as well as fiction – including Alison Weir debating with Sarah Gristwood what really happened to the 'princes in the tower', and broadcaster Peter Snow talking about his new book When Britain Burned The White House: an account of an incident 31 years after the American War of Independence when British troops really did burn the seat of the US President.

To find out more or to book tickets, visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com or call the Box Office on 01423 562303.