Only one more week until “Eadric the Grasper” releases!!
Meanwhile, I’m really curious to find out which of the Lost Tales was your favorite. Vote below! I’ll post some results next week, but I’ll keep the poll up indefinitely for new readers.
*
Meanwhile, new info is available from Viking Shield about the Oct 5th special!
Buy “Eadric the Grasper” when it comes out on October 5th and receive a free J1028 Sihtric Silver Penny with any order placed with Viking Shield. If your order is over $125(shipping not included) we will give you a free penny and a free G1015 Viking Ship Model.
To receive your free gifts, buy the book October 5th on Amazon. When placing your order with Viking-Shield write in the Special Instructions: Eadric The Grasper and include your Amazon order#. They will then include the free gifts with your order.
FOR RELEASE ON OR BEFORE
OCTOBER 5, 2010
Contact: Jenny Gibbons
(314)443-5980
Dark Age Villain Brought to Light
New Book by St. Louis Author Explores the Most Villainous Man in Anglo-Saxon History, Eadric Streona
St Louis, MO. October 5th, 2010— When writer Jayden Woods stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for Eadric Streona, she wondered why she had never heard of him before. Staining the history books with his treacherous deeds, Eadric had been voted worst Briton of the 11th century by BBC History Magazine in 2005 for betraying the Anglo-Saxons to the Vikings. He featured as the villain in two obscure plays: Edmund Ironside of the Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canute the Great: The Cup of Water by Michael Field. Altogether, he seemed written off by the masses as simply a bad guy, a coward, a knave, and a scoundrel. But Woods saw Eadric in a different light, and thus came her book, Eadric the Grasper.
“Eadric certainly killed a few individuals,” says Woods in an interview with Medievalists.net, “but he also prevented a major battle from taking place, and in that way saved hundreds of lives. His actions eventually brought England and Scandinavia together under a single king (at least for a little while). So should we vilify him while glorifying the people who wanted the wars to keep going indefinitely? After two-hundred something years of Viking attacks, what were the Anglo-Saxons still fighting for but an incompetent king? I do not want to turn Eadric into a hero, for he certainly wasn’t that. But I want people to question their definition of one.”
In Woods’s interpretation of Eadric’s life, the wealthy ealdorman primarily desires peace and stability for himself and his country. He is not above taking a few ugly measures, such as an assassination here and there, to achieve this end. Manipulating King Ethelred seems easy, however, compared to outsmarting his masked opponent, the Golden Cross. The Golden Cross is a fictional character representing everything that Eadric is not. The masked vigilante is brave, strong, and devoted to the Anglo-Saxons—arguably to a fault.
Kirkus Discoveries says this of Woods’s debut novel: “Woods tells a ripped-from-the-chronicles story—most of the characters and major events are factual—with an entertaining blend of period realism and Zorro-ish dazzle. She brings to life the violence and skullduggery of the age in exciting scenes of action and intrigue, while vividly rendering the mindsets and motives of this distant era. Her Eadric is a fascinating figure, an amoral yet sensitive man in a chaotic world, trying desperately, and not always successfully, to tame hot passions with cold calculation. A gripping saga that reimagines a storied villain as a complex, sympathetic anti-hero.”
The book releases October 5, 2010, on Amazon. Customers who purchase the book that day also become eligible to receive a free Anglo-Saxon or Viking coin when they shop at Viking-Shield.com.
Ron Friedman, creator of Gi Joe, The Bionic Six, The Marvel Action Hour, and writer of The Transformers: The Movie, advises you thus: “If you had given up finding derring to match do in an exciting historical romance because Sir Walter Scott was dead, weep no more. Eadric the Grasper by Jayden Woods brings homicidal Vikings, ferocious lovers, and frequent murder most foul to brilliant life in literary 3D. Turn away from thy Twitter and grab it.”
—end—
Tales of Mercia and Beyond 
Leave a comment