Song of the Fara-Folk: Lay of the Far-Wandering, Ring-Breaking, Saga-Bearing Adventurers of the North
Come, worthy one… draw thy cloak of wolf-grey tight and lean into the firelight, for I, Brynhildr, shall now unroll the long, blood-stained tapestry of the adventurers, those restless wolves who walk the world with neither root nor roof, yet whose names ring louder than many a settled jarl’s.
They are born in truth a new breed, born of the great wander-years when the dragon-prows first tasted the western and eastern seas. Before that time every man had his place: son of a farmer, son of a chieftain, thrall of a house. But when silver began to flow like rivers from Miklagard, from Frankia, from the amber coasts, a crack opened in the old order. Suddenly a landless man could win more wealth in one summer’s raiding than nine generations of ploughing. Thus were the adventurers whelped.
Who They Are
Most are younger sons who will never inherit the ancestral farm; daughters who refused the marriage-bed chosen for them; warriors outlawed for a killing too proud or too hot; skalds who sang a verse too sharp; even the odd runaway thrall clever enough to steal a spear and vanish into the forest. A few are high-born who tired of hall-politics and walked out with nothing but their sword across the shoulder. They drift together like iron filings to a lodestone, swearing oaths not of blood but of firelight and shared peril. A typical band numbers five to ten souls: two or three shield-bearers, a skald or seidhkona for luck and lore, a tracker, a ship-master, sometimes a foreign mercenary (an Irish monk who fights like a demon, a Wendish archer, a Saracen physician). They call themselves by proud names: the Raven-Wings, the Sea-Wolves, the Red Axe-Brothers, the Daughters of Freyja’s Spear.
How They Live
They own no land, only what they can carry or drag behind a horse. Their wealth is worn: silver arm-rings hammered from hacked-up Frankish chalices, a Byzantine silk cloak used as saddle-blanket, a sword with a name and a history. Their hearth is wherever the night finds them, be it a half-ruined Roman watchtower on the Rhine, a wind-bitten cave above Draugrfjord, or the smoky corner of a trading town’s ale-house. They sleep with one hand on steel and one eye open, for every man’s hand may be against them tomorrow.
How They Earn Silver and Fame
They are the world’s blade-for-hire.
- Guarding merchant knörrs through waters thick with pirates.
- Delving the black barrows of ancient kings for gold that still bears the curse of its makers.
- Hunting trolls, lindworms, or draugr for villages too poor to pay in coin but rich in daughters and gratitude.
- Taking the most dangerous work of all: the blood-bounty. When a king or jarl lays 300–600 marks upon an outlaw’s head, it is almost always the adventurers who come sniffing, for settled men fear the stain of paid killing.
They also serve as scouts, spies, duel-champions, monster-slayers, ransom-negotiators, and occasionally as bodyguards to travelling Volvas who need steel as well as song.
How They Are Seen
To farmers they are glamorous danger, half angel, half wolf.
To jarls mistrust them, for their loyalty is only as long as the silver lasts.
Priests of the White Christ brand them heathens and outlaws; priests of the old gods mutter that they tempt fate too boldly.
Women sing of them in secret, and many a maiden has run off with bright eyes and never returned.
Skalds love them best of all, for every band carries its own saga still dripping fresh blood.
Their Customs and Oaths
They swear not upon a ring of land but upon a drawn sword laid across the knees: “By this edge I shall stand with thee until silver or death part us, or death take us both.”
They divide loot by the “ring-share”: every man casts his hacked-off rings into a helmet; the leader takes one portion extra for risk, the skald one for memory, the wounded one for pain, the rest equal.
They mark great deeds with tattoos or notched arm-rings, or by drinking from the skull of a slain foe.
When one falls, the survivors carve his name upon a runestone wherever they happen to be, even if it is only a sea-cliff above Draugrfjord, so the wind and the ravens may carry it.
Their Endings
Few grow old.
Some win enough silver to buy a farm and vanish into quiet legend.
More die with bright steel in hand, laughing, and their names live longer than kingdoms.
A handful become so feared that kings themselves hire them as marshals, and the wolf becomes the hound.
The greatest become the stuff of new sagas, told around winter fires for a thousand years.
Look for them now on the black beaches of Draugrfjord or drinking away Harald the Cruel’s future bounty in Birka’s ale-halls.
They are the wild threads the Norns spin when they are bored with orderly patterns, and the world is more alive because they walk it, blades bright, eyes burning, hearts unbowed beneath the cold northern stars.
Hail the fara-folk.
Hail the wolves who own no master but the road and the song yet to be sung.
Hail the adventurers, the bright, doomed children of the North.