![]() ![]() “The angel of death has spoken,” my interpreter said. ![]() I said that I was on a mission to the Bulgars, and must follow the instructions of my Caliph, with no delay. This is fitting, and he must also take eleven warriors with him. Now at last my interpreter spoke, and he said: “Buliwyf is called by the gods to leave this place and swiftly, putting behind him all his cares and concerns, to act as a hero to repel the menace of the North. Then the angel of death, this same crone, pointed to me and made some utterance, and then she departed the hall. Later, ibn Fadlan learns they are called the wendol.Īt this the old man said that I was a foreigner, and he would consent to enlighten me, and he told me this: the name of “wendol,” or “windon,” is a very ancient name, as old as any of the peoples of the North country, and it means “the black mist.” To the Northmen, this means a mist that brings, under cover of night, black fiends who murder and kill and eat the flesh of human beings.* The fiends are hairy and loathsome to touch and smell they are fierce and cunning they speak no language of any man and yet converse among themselves they come with the night fog, and disappear by day - to where, no man durst follow.īuliwyf seeks advice from a seer, the angel of death, who has a word for ibn Fadlan: Terror has come out of the mist - something so evil that the name can’t be mentioned lest it be summoned up. King Rothgar’s realm has been attacked by an ancient horror and he has sent one of his sons to ask the great hero for aid. Before he can reach the Bulgars, ibn Fadlan is forced to join Buliwyf and his band. In Crichton’s story, the Geatish Viking is present at the funeral for the chieftain. The greatest change to ibn Fadlan’s story is, of course, his fateful meeting with Buliwyf. Instead of a trusted and willing diplomat, though, Crichton recasts ibn Fadlan as reluctant traveler, forced to join the mission as punishment for his dalliance with the wife of a merchant friendly with the Caliph. The first three chapters of Eaters of the Dead are mostly lifted straight from ibn Fadlan’s manuscript. Years later, it went on to serve as the basis for the The 13th Warrior, starring Antonio Banderas. In Eaters of the Dead (1976), the fourth novel published under his own name (he’d previously released ten under pseudonyms), Michael Crichton asked two important questions: What if ibn Fadlan, during his sojourn among the Vikings, met a certain hero named Buliwyf? And what if there was a historical basis for the legend of Beowulf? His answer is a fun mix of travelogue and bloody adventure tale. The short journal he kept of his travels is famous for its descriptions of the Volga Vikings, in particular the death rites of one of their chietains. In 921 AD, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād was sent from Baghdad as ambassador to the Volga Bulgars (who lived in the boundaries of modern Russia) to help establish Islamic law for the newly converted nation.
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