Young - Thors Haven

About the Author

The youngest son of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and a Faroese mother, Richard Young aka Siggy has spent much of his working life with the Scottish Court and Tribunal Service. During this time, he has also forged a fine reputation as an accomplished amateur cricketer and also as a cricket historian. Youngs extensive cricketing background and passion for sport, allied to his long career in the processes of the law and an innate capacity for forensic probing, combined to produce, in 2014, the acclaimed As the Willow Vanishes, a remarkable work of scholarship and myth-busting revisionist history that has since made a significant contribution to the sizeable canon of Scottish sporting and social literature.

But while he was conducting the in-depth research for As the Willow Vanishes, Young discovered bizarre connections and coincidences in that, perhaps, his own familys history itself had a fascinating story or two to tell. This resulted, in 2016, with the publication of The Stream, a first time novel with a plot-line that made the reader, reconsider historical events.

Writing in an engagingly descriptive and informative style, Thors Haven is the sequel with a story-line that will make you certainly question established history, religion, faith and belief. What is actually the truth and what is just myth?

Read on and decide for yourself.

By Richard S Young

As the Willow Vanishes

The Stream

Thors Haven

A cknowledgements

I have many people to thank for their help and assistance in enabling me to write this book, but in the first instance, special praise has to be given to my three good friends, Muir, Paul and Vivienne, for all of their help along the way.

Of course I have to thank all of my Nordic relatives, especially Simona, Jrgen and Anni for their help, assistance and advice, but I also have to thank the Faroe Islands themselves, for providing, yet again, such a dramatic back-drop landscape to parts of the tale.

Grateful thanks to the Froya Politi for providing me with the detailed specifications concerning their operational practices.

Special thanks must be given to Debbie Brazendale for her unexpected, but welcome, inspiration and to Derek, Diane, Liz and Aileen for their continued support and input. To my Indian and Pakistani cricketing friends, as well as my many school chums and work colleagues - you know who you are thanks again for all your help, advice and support.

Finally, I have to thank my wife, Lesley, and my daughter, Freya, for their patience, and their support, in allowing me to finalise the completion of this latest project.

Thors Haven

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors vivid imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2018 Richard S Young

All rights reserved

F oreword

Having previously created a fictional character in the form of Daniel Lauridsen, it would have been remiss of me to have only written the one adventure for him.

Admittedly, I have probably gone to great lengths to create the character, explain his back story, give an insight to his personality, but most importantly, give the reader an individual that is plausible and realistic, and hopefully one that the reader can also root for while digesting his latest adventure.

There arent many fictional action/adventure characters that portray this type of individual, and it is my hope, that whilst giving the reader some information about Daniel, Denmark and the Faroe Islands throughout the story, the same reader learns something that they didnt know before.

I hope you enjoy this adventure yarn, and take it for what it is a twist on religion and mythology that maybe broadens perceptions.

Whatever you may finally surmise or conclude, I hope the book provides you with some enjoyment, intrigue and mystery.

There are a lot more Daniel Lauridsen adventures to come...

Richard S Young

Prologue
8.33pm - Sunday 12th March 1939
Kufstein Fortress, Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria.

Kufstein, a smallish town to be found in the Austrian state of Tyrol, is the administrative seat of the larger Kufstein District. With a population of about 8,500, it is the second largest Tyrolean town after the state capital Innsbruck. The greatest landmark in the town is the Kufstein Fortress, first mentioned as Castrum Caofstein in a document in 1205.

Sitting atop an elevated promontory rising some 90 metres above the compact buildings of the medieval town, the view to behold from the battlements of the Kufstein Fortress looking towards the Brandenberg Alps is somewhat impressive, but at this moment in time, admiring the view was not a pressing matter for Otto Rahn. The biting coldness of the wind tore at him as he struggled moving forward in the now horizontal sleet, and with each step that he took, his mind processed all manner of possible variables and permutations to find a justifiable reason that would satisfactorily explain his current predicament. Whatever he had done to upset Himmler, he convinced himself that he could try and resolve the situation in the morning, but that action would have to wait for now as he concentrated on the problems of his current situation - he needed to escape from his unknown pursuers - they were somewhere behind him and closing in fast. The narrow cobbled path along the battlements afforded Otto little cover from the weather and he hoped that he would be able to chance upon an opening or a staircase that would take him away to safety, to people and to another tomorrow.

Short of breath, he reflected on the vicissitudes of his life over the past few years. From relative obscurity, he had been thrust upon the world on the orders of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, and tasked to find and then bring before his Nazi masters, the fabled biblical treasures of the Temple of Solomon such as the Chalice of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. But his own personal theories and whimsical presuppositions had been his greatest downfall. With the publication of his 1933 book Kreuzzug gegen den Gral ( Crusade towards the Grail ), he had supported the ideas of Ariosophy, a belief that the Nordic races once had a great and ancient past. These mythical pre-Christianity Nordic peoples were learned, wise, philosophically and spiritually attuned races and not the all-slaughtering barbarians described by the modern day populist depictions of the Vikings.

But all of this legendary Nordic history had been lost throughout Europe as a result of nearly twenty centuries of suppression under the heel of Roman Catholicism and its associated doctrines. However, the concept of Ariosophy had recently gathered notable supporters in previous decades, such as Guido von List, an Austrian occultist, journalist, playwright and novelist who expounded a modern Pagan religious movement known as Wotanism. Up until his death in 1919, List had promoted a millenarian view that modern society was degenerate and was in desperate need to be cleansed through apocalyptic events to create a new Pan-German Empire worshipping Wotanism. But unknown to List, he had an ardent disciple and follower, and one that was determined to modify the concept to have an even more racial and anti-Semitic component. That follower was none other than Reichsfhrer SS Himmler himself, and the religion was Nazism with its perverse theories of racial hierarchy and the creation of a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of racial purity.