I worked as a volunteer on the Coppergate dig in York when I was a teenager – the site that There are Viking remains all around Yorkshire, from runic stones to burial mounds. I’m more familiar with my Yorkshire home than I am with, say, Iceland or Scandinavia, and there are already so many links here to Viking culture. JH – I don’t think I made a conscious choice to set the books in a neo-British setting.

Why did you decide to use an English setting, rather than a Nordic one? Did the choice enable you tell a different type of story than if, for instance, the events took place in Iceland? Runemarks’ map shows that the Middle Worlds look like the British Isles, with World’s End in the general area of London. In the Runemarks world, Red Horse Hill is rumored to have been a place of heathen sacrifice or a burial mound, and it has an ancient carving of a horse that “never grassed over in spring, nor did the winter snow ever hide its shape” – which is reminiscent of the Uffington White Horse and other English chalk horses. The Old English runes represent the “New Script” in your novels the Old English rune poem provides lines for the cantrips spoken by your characters – cantrip itself being an archaic English and Scottish word for spell or incantation. Your books have a distinctly British feel. KS – What we call Norse mythology is sometimes thought to be purely Scandinavian property, but the old gods are documented in various forms in Europe and the British Isles.

Runemarks by joanne harris