He had been causing nearby villages problems, and Harald agreed to put an end to him.

Then he heard of a great giant, named Grummoch, who was hiding in a cave with a huge hoard of treasure. Harald travelled to Jebel Tarik (Gibraltar) to raid coastal villages, along with a Danish bard named Arkil. This, combined with my adult reaction to the character, made me rather indifferent to the story. This made the narrative feel jumpy and the adult me thought that much of the story was treated superficially. The chronology moves in spurts: some days are treated in great detail, in other places weeks pass in a paragraph. There is a great deal of action in this book which presumably appealed to the young me (I first read this book as a pre-teen). He is, perhaps, a typical Viking hero but I found him charmless. This is a classic picaresque except that the main character is not a humorous trickster who survives on his wits but a defiant fighter whose main strategy is to threaten and bluster.

With a variety of companions including Haro, Radbard and Giant Grummoch, Harald's travels take him to Jebel Tarik (Gibraltar) and thence to Miklagard (the Viking name for Byzantium, also known as Constantinople, now Istanbul). He travels to Ireland, seeking fabled treasure. Harald Sigurdson sets off a-viking in charge of his own ship.

The Road to Miklagard by Henry Treece