by Poul Anderson (1935)
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Imagine the chill of a Danish forest in 1940, bullets whizzing past as you’re Holger Carlsen, engineer and resistance fighter, gut-shot and fading fast. Then blackness—and you wake in a world straight from the chansons de geste, your body whole, clad in chainmail, with a massive sword humming at your side that burns at evil’s touch. That’s the jolt that kicks off Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, and it never lets up.
You’re Holger Danske now, legendary ogre-slayer of Charlemagne’s court, thrust into a medieval Europe where elves scheme in shadowed woods, swan-maidens glide on moonlit lakes, and trolls—oh, those trolls—lumber from the mist, hacking off limbs that bubble and regrow faster than you can swing your blade. Picture the raw terror of that first fight: green ichor spraying, the beast’s roar shaking the earth as you learn fire alone stops its endless knitting back together. Anderson makes every clash visceral, your heart pounding with Holger’s as he grapples a nixie in a drowning pool or outwits Morgan le Fay’s seductive sorcery in her glittering Otherworld lair. The wonder hits too—the dwarf Hugi grumbling over his ale, the swan-girl Alianora’s feathers shimmering as she shifts form, the sky-horses thundering overhead in a charge against Chaos’s hordes.
What sets this apart? Anderson doesn’t drown you in flowery myth; he arms his hero with a slide rule’s logic in a Merlin-haunted realm. Holger tests spells like lab experiments, calculates sword arcs amid fairy dust, pitting human grit against primordial Law and Chaos in a cosmic war that feels earned, not preached. It’s fantasy with the bones of science fiction, WWII steel clashing against Arthurian haze, birthing ideas like paladins’ holy avengers and alignment battles that D&D players still swear by.
If you geek out over D&D’s deepest lore—the troll fights that turn deadly without fire, the knightly oaths that glow with power—or if The Broken Sword left you craving more Norse-edged heroism with brains, this is your grail.
Grab Three Hearts and Three Lions tonight; by dawn, you’ll be plotting your own quest.
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