A thousand years ago the Vikings came to the North of England, leaving a lasting legacy in language and blood. Ted Edwards' consciousness of his own Viking origins, kindled in boyhood through a friend's discovery of a Viking short sword in a local wood, eventually became an urge to recapture his heritage in Iceland, where Viking language and blood retain their purity to this day. The Lancastrian explorer famed for the lone Saharan journeys which he described so memorably in his first book Beyond the Last Oasis set forth on another expedition. Ted Edwards: Fight the Wild Island,
Salem House Publishers, Topsfield, 1987
He imposed on himself the challenge of the first coast-to-coast walk across Iceland; alone, against expert advice. Carrying a seventy-two-pound load, he covered five hundred miles of some of the earth's most adverse terrain, including the largest of all lava fields, glacial ice, the mighty black sand desert of Sprengisandur, and the active volcano Hekla.
Fight the Wild Island is a modern saga reverberating with echoes of the Vikings and their gods, a tale of endurance in which the author twice came close to death . Ted Edwards, never losing his inimitable northern wit, graphically recreates the experience of his journey, the magnificent landscapes and dramatic geology of an island still battling with its own formation; and he brings to life the history and spirit of the country where the first true parliament sat and the first republic of the north was born. (Klappentext)
