All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie [Tordotcom Publishing, 2022]

From a speculative future history to a speculative history-history, Sarah Tolmie's new Tor dot com novella tells the story of Eyvind of Eyri, an 8th century Icelandic trader who travels through central Asia and into Mongolia to bring a herd of horses back to his homeland, including a mare whose supernatural origins have a far-ranging impact on the future of Icelandic horse genes. Except, the story isn't really about Icelandic horse breeding, so let's set all of that aside until it gets explained in the epilogue. It's Eyvind's story, and there is also a really cool horse. Right.

Immediate bonus points must be awarded for the fact that I'm in a real mood for travelogue stories at the moment, and Tolmie's is a great example of the form, with Eyvind chronicling the adventure with his fellow travellers - most of whom are from the historic trading empire of Khazaria, through which Eyvind travels on his way to Mongolia - and the customs and concerns of the places he passes through, especially during his time in Mongolia where he successfully barters for his herd of horses and takes on responsibility for a white mare who everyone else claims not to see. Tolmie has a fantastic literary style, switching between language that reflects the myth being created here and the supernatural origins of Eyvind's mare, and more down-to-earth descriptions of the journey itself.

Because it's a travelogue, the challenges along the way end up being very episodic - and, in fact, there's not much in the way of external challenge here at all, beyond a sequence towards the end (where, it turns out, having a supernatural mare comes in very handy). Instead, the tension is built up through watching a man travelling far beyond the boundaries of his own world to do something new, and the way the novella's mythmaking turns that novelty into something of foundational importance for his people. This is a short and delightful read, and well worth a look.

I received an ARC of All the Horses of Iceland from Macmillan-Tor/Forge in exchange for an honest review.

All the Horses of Iceland is a short book, about a hundred pages, so I am going to keep this review short too. The story follows Eyvind, a trader who meets a man named David and journeys with him from Iceland to Central Asia and Mongolia; he encounters unfamiliar people, cultures, and religions, and the horses with which he returns home provide the origin story for—say it with me now—all the horses of Iceland (the others die as a result of volcanic activity). It’s a simple story, uninterested in twists and surprises, so I feel fine telling you everything up front.

The most notable aspect of this novella is its writing style, which is the plain, almost comically blunt style of mythic texts; everything—the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundane and the fantastical—is given equal weight, which sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between what is mundane and what is fantastical. I love the ambiguity of that liminal space. The writing style won’t work for all readers, but Tolmie does an admirable job conjuring up a literary mode which is largely nonexistent in the twenty-first century. I found parsing the dense prose to be refreshing and invigorating, as if I had unearthed something from another time or another world.

The story itself is serviceable. It’s a bit slight where the horses are concerned; they do not factor in heavily even though they are the framework around which this book was ostensibly built, and how the horses of Iceland came to be is explained through what amounts to an offhand comment. I was most interested in Eyvind’s experiences with cultural practices and religious beliefs foreign to his own understanding of the world—his caustic dismissal of such practices and beliefs reads like bigotry, but it’s hard to blame him given the small scope of information he would have had access to as a person living in the ninth century. All the Horses of Iceland is his education.

All the Horses of Iceland is a novella which will appeal to a very specific subset of readers—readers who enjoy the straightforward, no-nonsense writing style of mythic texts. If you struggle with, say, The Epic of Gilgamesh, All the Horses of Iceland is probably not the book for you. But it was for me! I enjoyed every slow, sumptuous page of this lovely little novella. I wanted more.

Ahoy there me mateys!  I received a copy of this historical fantasy novella eArc from NetGalley in exchange for me honest musings . . .

Horses were me first love before the sea stole me heart.  And I loved Iceland when I visited there.  So of course this novella was a must read.  And I truly enjoyed it.

This story is set in the 9th century and follows Eyvind of Eyri as he travels from Helmgard to Mongolia with a trading caravan.  Once there he finds sturdy horses and aims to bring them back to Iceland.  This is a slow paced journey that has the feeling of the parts of the Icelandic sagas that I have read.

The horses are in the later portion of the story but the main takeaway is Eyvind's journey and the people and different cultures he meets along the way.  I found Eyvind to be a thoughtful and lovely character.  There are evocative magical elements dealing with ghosts and other beliefs.  Overall the writing style was wonderful and loved it.  I just wish it had been a little longer because it ended too quickly.

I will certainly be trying more of this author's work.  Arrrr!

Couldn't access this book, maybe a glitch in the app, so I am unable to review it. The premise sounds really interesting thought so I will probably buy the book when it releases and than read it. Thank you for sending me a free copy, even if it didn't work out.

This is a poetic story about an Icelandic trader travelling through Europe and Western Asia in the early ninth century. His primary objective is to buy horses to bring back to Iceland, but this isn’t a story about trade. It’s also not a story about travel. I think the best description would be to call it a magical history. It’s beautiful and subtle, suggesting depth and tradition. There was, however, a bit of a learning curve while reading, specifically in regards to the names of peoples and places. Sarah Tolmie is a scholar, and it shows; she has provided readers with language that doesn’t immediately draw upon preconceived stereotypes or “historical” narratives. I found myself looking up certain place names in order to orient myself as I read, but it didn’t draw me out of the lyrical writing, and it made the reading experience even more rich.

Thank you to Tor Forge and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

"It occurred to him that access to power often resided with unexpected, even unwelcome people."

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All the Horses of Iceland is exactly the type of myth retellings that I like. Eyvind is a man scarred by a childhood illness, he has lost his hearing in one ear and is unable to father a child. He decides he to try to make his fortune by joining a successful merchant he has crossed paths with in the local market. David is a successful Jewish trader who traverses the Silk Road through central Asia, he is worldly in a way Icelander Eyvind is not. We follow the journey across the sea and the vast continent as they encounter the local peoples, some friendly and some not. Eyvind experiences different cultures, learning all sorts of new tactics and tools to bring back to his people.

Along the way he experiences some ghostly activity and learns about the magic within himself. He acquires horses which he thinks will revolutionize life in Iceland and he needs to navigate getting them successfully home. One of these horses is a majestic, and perhaps a little magical, white one that helps to guide him home.

The story is beautifully written and the pace is metered in a way that we can enjoy Eyvind's wonder but does not stay in any one place too long. We see not only the journey but its impact on Eyvind's life and the whole of Iceland.

Thanks to Netgalley for advanced access to this novella. All opinions above are my own.

all the horses of iceland is an entirely imaginary, fantastical origin story of the horses brought to iceland near the end of the early middle ages. in the ninth century, eyvind leaves his native iceland to seek his fortune abroad. his travels take him across eastern europe and into central asia, where he barters for the horses that will change not only his future, but the future of iceland.

my inner horse girl and i expected to love this, but it ended up being a very dry read. i had to pause and look things up so frequently (sometimes 3-4 times on a single page) that i was never able to fully immerse myself in the story, and the straightforward writing style felt at odds with the story being told. the amount of research tolmie did is apparent, but a glossary (or even a map) would have been so helpful—but this is only an arc, so it’s possible the final edition has one or both.

i also expected more focus on the horses in a book with “horses” in the title, but that one might be on me.

With its quiet, measured pace, and terrific, well-researched details, this book reads more like a straight historical. Except for a few, wonderful things that pull this novella into a different, slightly eerie place:
-a dead woman’s ghost that haunts a qan’s tent, and requires a ritual to leave
-an otherworldly, white horse who has a strong influence upon the group of the qan’s horses that main character Eyvind buys.
-the sounds only Eyvind can hear with his deaf ear.

There is both an awkwardness and seriousness to Eyvind, a man with certain intractable views, unwilling to compromise on some things, but also open to the otherworldly. He is unusual in his willingness to roll with the uncanny, and also ordinary, in his desire for profit and some degree of distinction. He is a quiet observer, and marked from the outset of the story by his easy conversations with David, the merchant who accepts Eyvind on his long route on the Silk Road to trade with the qan.

Sarah Tolmie gives us a Europe, Middle East and Asia similar to ours, with its hatreds, wars, trade and superstitions. But this world is also not exactly ours, as there are actual mages, and Eyvind regularly sees ghosts in his homeland, and is spoken to by the qan’s dead wife after arriving on the steppes.

I loved the way Tolmie conveyed her story, as a retelling of events by someone living years after Eyvind, giving the events both a sense of remoteness and grandeur, a myth recounting how Iceland came to have such hardy, tough horses, thanks to one trader and a strange and powerful mare.

Thank you to Netgalley and to MacMillan-Tor/Forge and Tordotcom for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Lyrical and vivid writing, the words came to life for me in this mythical and ghostly tale. Full of adventure, legends, and ghosts, this story follows Eyvind on his journey outside his homeland, and how he is responsible for bringing magical horses to Iceland.

It took me several pages to get used to the names and into the flow of the story, but once I was, I could not put it down. I think this is only because I have not read a book with this style narrative in a long time. A very quick read at just over 100 pages, this book is definitely one that I am glad I read. It is different from everything else I usually read, and for that will stand out in mind for a long time.

I truly enjoyed this novella. This historical fiction story covers an area and a time that I am not familiar with, ninth century Southeastern Europe, and a little bit of Iceland. While I went into the book believing we were going to get a lot of Iceland and a little bit of the Mongols, we got a lot of Mongols and Central Europe and a little bit of Iceland. With that said, I still am glad I stuck with the story, although I do wish I had a map for all of the tribes and areas/peoples that are now called something else. This was a quick read that had some great fantastical elements in a historical fiction story, I don’t think it was too heavy on the fantasy and I enjoyed that for this book. It truly read like the beginning of a legend of the horses of Iceland.

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<p>Review copy provided by the publisher.</p>
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<p>One of the difficulties of writing historical fiction--even writing historical fantasy--is making it as far-ranging, weird, and textured as actual history and still having the casual reader accept it. <em>All the Horses of Iceland</em> doesn't succeed at this, of course--it's just a novella and not a particularly long one at that, it doesn't have room for even a tenth the strangeness that its span might imply. But with its very structure it tries: Eyvind, a man of Iceland, travels to the Khazar Khaganate for horses to take back to his homeland. This, in itself, is more of history's weird loops and complexities than most historical fiction even attempts. Vikings go a-viking! The steppes are...steppey! What are we doing here! Well, we're doing exactly what we have very solid evidence that actual people did. And the way they figure out how to talk to each other, the places that they are uncomfortable with each other's customs--and cope, and find ways around that--are extremely historical.</p>
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Beyond that, of course, it’s a fantasy novella. So there are ghosts, there are differing cultural interpretations and interactions and rituals for those ghosts. There is the meaning of the white horse. Were this a longer book, I would start to be frustrated by how overwhelmingly male it is, and how straightforward the story. But it is not a longer book. It is, like a much earlier volume, allowed to go there, and then back again. And that is, for this short tale, enough.

I don't normally pick up novellas unless they're a part of a series I'm reading, but the cover for this one and the blurb on NetGalley were to interesting to pass up. This short story follows Icelandic trader Eyvind as he accompanies another trader on a three year trading journey to trade with the qan's tribe. There, he performs a great task for the qan and is given wealth (in horses) and prestige.

The story has a weird ebb and flow to it that took me a bit to get into. What really compelled me forward was the mythological feel to the story, like I was reading an actual retelling of a myth. The writing style was fantastic, I thought, and I know some people found Eyvind flat or distant, but I thought he was pragmatic and had a dry sense of humor. The horses, despite being the key part the novella hinges on, don't actually feature in the story until the last half or so, and I was a little disappointed at them not being more of a feature.

I'm still giving this novella 4 stars, if only because I liked the short journey we went on, and for a really unique and intriguing writing style.

This was an interesting book but not an especially entertaining book. It read like a non-fiction and had only a touch of fantasy elements. I kind of wish she had either gone the non-fiction route or fleshed out the story more. The magic was lack luster.

This was a beautifully written icelandic saga about how horses came to live on Iceland. It was a short read, but a very beautiful one - the prose was stunning, and it very much felt like literary fiction at times.
The story itself was both drawn out and too short. I found the pacing to be weird, and I didn't come to care about any of the characters. I felt like everything was experienced at a distance. I think this might have benefitted from being longer, to let the history develop more.
The story was very histrical, but it lacked in the historical department. I wanted more, more details of the time period and about the wars!
Ultimately, it was a beautiful little novella, but one that sadly did not grab me as much as I would have wished.

I adore historical fiction, and this is such an interesting premise. I recommend because of the story itself, writing style, and its ability to transport you into a different world/time period.

Unfortunately, I did not love this. I felt like for such a short story, the pacing was extremely slow and bogged down in too many historical tangents. Further, many of the italicized words were not explained, even by context clues. I spent the majority of the book kind of confused but mostly felt like I was reading a textbook instead of a story about magic. I was unfortunately unable to connect or remember any of the characters or connect with the story at all.

This fable-like tale is a beautiful piece of writing that walks the reader through times and especially places rarely written about, following the star that is the founding mare of Icelandic horses. Anyone interested in stories of travel and trade among the Norse, Khazars, and others; in horses, of course; and in luminous writing. The framing device of a Christian priest relating the story is a bit weak, but does add an interesting layer in terms of religion.

The writing in "All the Horses of Iceland" is brilliant and lyrical. I fell in love with Sarah Tolmie's prose a few pages in. Slow pacing is not usually something I appreciate in a novel, but here, it felt appropriate and actually worked really well. Often times, folktales and myths take a long time to unfold. Therefore, the pacing really conveyed the legend in a way that felt authentic.

As for the story itself, I was quickly swept up by the mystical quality of this beautifully-woven aetiology. The depiction of different cultures felt so respectful and well-researched. I wish all historical fantasy stories were as magical as this one.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I didn't know what I'd think about this book, but the cover was gorgeous and the premise intrigued me. I also like reading books from non-American authors to see what is out there with a different plot structure.

All the Horses of Iceland reminds me of an ancient story meant to be told around a campfire. It feels legendary. The main character goes on an epic four-year journey to buy goods for trade. He is not a Christian, not a Jew, or of any faith of the other characters—but he understands magic when he sees it. Because he is from outside the culture where he's trading, his insights are colored by his perspective in a wonderful way. Also, he can offer that insight to others to solve problems. And he brings home a changed perspective and more from his journey.

This story is told at a lyrical pace. The wording is beautiful. It's not an adventure with explosions and crazy things happening as much as thoughtful and stirring. I think Americans are more accustomed to stories with big turning points instead of subtly, and more showing over telling.

It's also a fast read because it's a short book.
And I recommend this story!

Rating: Alright, 2.5 stars

This book was a very different reading experience than I am used to. I think that the most interesting part was the intro. This tells the story of where the horses of Iceland came from, but it is only very tangentially about that. Really it is more about the story of the man who brought the horses to Iceland. There are some fantastical elements, such as magicians, curses, spirits, and prophecy, but they are not very prominent. It really read more like a travel log with some adventures expounded on.

I think I would have liked this novella a lot more if it focused less on the historical fiction side of this. There were times where it was pages of explanations about why they couldn't pass through some place due to the war and it would just brush over the politics of the situation. However, this is a novella and the character we were following was not well fleshed out, there wasn't much focus on the horses (the reason I picked it up), and the journey just didn't have enough time spent on it to make it feel interesting or important. I did enjoy the time that our MC spent bartering for and earning the horses. We spent a little more time in one place and got some glimpses of the culture there. That was also where there was the most fantastical pieces.

Overall, this was a quick read, and I would recommend for people who are into ancient history as it seemed like there were a good amount of easter eggs in there if you know about that time period.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review. All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie releases on 3/1/22