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rosemaled waves with cloudberry and ship

Scandinavia in the Age of Sail

A HISTORY BLOG

A history blog on the Great Northern War, Sámi history as told in the works of Just Knud Qvigstad, and Northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. A hobby, the blog is ad-free.

A photo tour of a historical miniature collection as a free virtual museum. The pieces belong to a large extended family and are not for sale.

A forthcoming book series set in eighteenth century Denmark-Norway, woven with war, romance, and a thread of Norse myth and folklore.

Original art created for this website by @kris_tinsart.

Karen Nyenhuis

Author

I learned to write decades ago at Wellesley College, where I wept over paper essays covered in red ink, studied French and computer languages, and met women with myriad world views. I have read widely on military and religious history prior to 1750 in Northern Europe. I am also related to the late Norwegian linguist and Sámi historian Just Knud Qvigstad.

A particular soldier in the Norwegian artillery inspired six years of research and a large, mostly fictional story world spanning four decades. As of October 2026, I’ve written 379,000 of 720,000 words in the forthcoming series of nine novels.

All writing on my blog and in my books is my own, with no AI generation or revision.

 

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Harald stepped onto the wharf and breathed in the familiar salt air of the place he’d pledged his life to protect:  a small harbor encircled by mountains and cluttered with ships.

From the Draft of Book Eight