Today being Keith Taylor’s birthday, it got me to thinking about just when I became a full-blown fan of his work. It was in the spring of my junior year of high school. That’s when I bought Bard II.

It was a rough morning and I was looking for a pick-me-up. Being out of town, I stopped by a bookstore/newsstand. There was Bard II. I was familiar with the protagonist of the novel, Felimid Mac Fal, from a Keith Taylor story in the classic Swords Against Darkness II. The Maitz cover was gorgeous and the blurbs sounded cool, so I bought it.

It was a rainy day, so when I got home, I proceeded to dive into Taylor’s book. As is usual with the Bard novels—as I learned later—it starts in media res, with a full-on sea battle in progress by the second or third page. The ship on which Felimid had booked passage is under attack by King Oisc of Kent, the only-slightly-less badass scion of the legendary Hengist the Jute. Midway through the two-way fight, Gudrun Blackhair and her motley crew of Dark Age pirates show up to make it a three-for-all. Gudrun comes out on top, giving Felimid and the other survivors the choice of slavery or careers as pirates bold.

At this point, I was pretty well hooked. Taylor, like his literary forebears, Robert E. Howard and Poul Anderson, can write a fight scene. The whole Age of Arthur/post-Roman Britain setting has been an interest of mine since I was a preteen. I was ready to see where this thing was going.

It definitely “went”, that’s for sure. Because Gudrun had captured Oisc’s dwarf-wrought longship, Ormungandr, in a fairly damaged state, it required repairs by the red dwarves who crafted it—and they were to be found in southern Scania, east of the Dane-mark. That’s a long sail—without sails—from Gudrun’s base in the Channel Islands. The journey, and the adventures it entailed, make up the bulk of the novel.

The whole time I was reading Bard II, I kept saying to myself, “This is like a cool combo of REH’s ‘Cormac Mac Art’ and Anderson’s The Broken Sword.” As I found out later, that was basically the case, though Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga—which I hadn’t read yet—was also a huge influence. Felimid, an Irish bard, can sometimes draw on his—limited—druidic powers, though he usually resorts to swordplay. The sorcery and demons of Slavic folklore are real, right alongside Celtic horse-goddesses and Odin himself. Just as we find in The Broken Sword.

Felimid himself is one of the most original sword-and-sorcery protagonists of the ‘70s and ‘80s, being neither derived from Conan, Elric nor Kane. Taylor has admitted that Poul Anderson’s Cappen Varra was a big influence on the genesis of Felimid, but the Irish bard is in no way a copy of his worthy predecessor.

Gudrun Blackhair struck me then—and still does to this day—as the most believable and realistic “warrior woman” in fantasy literature. Koschei the Deathless, the “Boss” at the end of the novel, has always been one of the great S&S villains, in my opinion. If I could do it over again, I might choose to start with the first novel, Bard, but I have no regrets. Taylor is expert at bringing readers up to speed and the book itself is a classic. Easily one of the best S&S novels of the 1980s.