About the Author

AThingOfVikings (the author) first off finds writing in third person to be tremendously awkward, but shall soldier on. It didn't help that he originally had the foolish notion that he'd be able to write and publish a fanfic of this size and length without getting drawn into fandom as a participant. That lasted about two months. But, no, rather than pick a normal username, he decided to go with the title of his fanfic for the Tumblr and at this point, trying to refer to himself in fandom circles by anything other than athingofvikings or ATOV is pointless. So what can you do?

More seriously, athingofvikings--or, as he's known when not being a dummy and picking a poor username, Joseph--is a 30-something American-born Jewish man living in Germany, married to his wife, a German national. He likes to gush about her, but will refrain here given the nature of this page. Having attended the University of Rochester for his undergraduacy, studying psychology and education, he is trained as a high school teacher with a focus on science and history, and is an unapologetic nerd and geek, and will happily nerd out over space, archeology, geology, and various other such topics. He's also a cook, and is in the process of putting together a YouTube channel for the science of cooking.

The idea for the fanfic that would become A Thing Of Vikings was born when his wife (then fiancee) was visiting him in the US in Sept/Oct 2016, and showed him the first How To Train Your Dragon movie. The first comment made after finishing the film was, "Cute, but not very historically accurate." A few weeks later, during preparations for NaNoWriMo 2016, the plot idea of "What if it was historically accurate?" bit, along with the title, at which point, the original writing that was slated to be written was put aside and the outline for ATOV was begun.

A million-plus words later, and here we are.