“Sword of the Vikings” is a strange Northern that appeared in St. John’s Strange Terrors #7 (March 1953). Neither the writer nor the artist is known. Viking ghosts and uranium are on the menu… It uses ideas similar to the Vikings in “Eric the Red”, and “The Northern Horror”. Uranium shows up in “They Saw the Light” and “The Horrible Fangs of Professor Prome”.
Uranium mining became a hot topic in the 1950s during the Cold War. Like the Gold Rush before it, the race for radioactive minerals drew people to the North. The comic book writers pulled these idea from the headlines of the day. Later writers like Farley Mowat would write about the Arctic and Vikings in books like Curse of the Viking Grave (1966).
Professor Holmes and his assistant, Dodge, are on the hunt for uranium. The local Eskimos refuse to take them into the land of the Everlasting Warriors. They go on alone.
Don Hollis and his men, Mac and Kring, later find the Professor’s camp. They discover Dodge dead, stabbed with a sword of solid gold. The Eskimos flee when they see the sword, crying it belongs to the Everlasting Warriors!
The men are stranded for the night. They see a Viking man standing out on the ice. He suddenly disappears. Mac is less worried about ghosts than he is about finding more gold.
That night Don and Kring discover Mac has gone off in search of gold. They look for him but don’t find him. They get the idea to use the Geiger counter to follow the Professor’s trail. It leads in a narrow stream into the ice hummocks.
They follow the uranium trail to two ice hills. The mist there gives them a twisting feeling inside. Two Vikings appear but before they can attack, Don and Kring are transported to a summery world. An old Viking takes them to a village and puts them in a hut. They find the Professor inside. He explains that the area is highly radioactive. It makes the weather warm and the grass grow. It also makes the Vikings immortal. If a man stays there for a week or more, he will have to stay forever, leaving only for short trips. Dodge was killed because he tried to steal a sword.
The two men also find Mac. He wants to leave too but the Vikings won’t let him. That day the Vikings are excited because it is the anniversary of their arrival in the magic land. The celebrations will allow the newcomers a chance to escape.
The men leave. Mac has gone off for gold but joins them later. They flee as the Vikings pursue them. Suddenly the Vikings turn around and go back. They can go no further or suffer the radioactive death. The scientists are free. That is when Mac decides to pull a gun on his friends. He wants all the gold. He begins to shrivel and die from the radiation sickness. Mac was one day longer in the magic land than the other two. They were there for six days! They bury the gold with Mac’s body and head home.
The idea of a polar paradise is as old as the Greeks, though writers like A. Merritt used it for Dwellers in the Mirage (1932). Like the Vikings in this tale, the Dwellers live inside a misty, secret land. The film version of The Lost Ones (1960) by Ian Cameron gave us Disney’s The Island at the Top of the World (1974) and more Vikings.
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