Al-Mansur." Writing process The Swedish writer Sven Stolpe reports that somebody asked author Frans G. Bengtsson "what intentions he had with The Long Ships", to which Bengtsson responded that he had no particular intentions. "I just wanted to write a story that people could enjoy reading, like The Three Musketeers or the Odyssey." The research for the book was based largely on Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla and other old Icelandic literature, but also on medieval chronicles and contemporary research, and historic names, people and events were woven into the fiction. The language of the novel is modelled on the Icelandic sagas. Early in his career, Bengtsson had held a romantic view on the saga literature, promoting an elevated, almost sacral prose in translations, but when writing The Long Ships he instead made use of the saga's faculties for wisecracks and comic understatements. The main characters were written as likable anti-heroes, far from the romantic view of Vikings. Like the sagas, the book relies on verbs and nouns to drive the narrative, with only a minimum of adjectives and descriptive passages. In essays, Bengtsson expresses disgust with "psychological realism" in the literature of his day where the thoughts and feelings of the characters are discussed explicitly rather than indicated by actions and outward signs. In the Swedish original of The Longships, the grammar is deliberately slightly archaic. Joan Klein noted that "Within the 10th Century plot, the book's Viking protagonists never heard of Jews, and have a completely open mind about them - and when encountering a Jew who allies with the Vikings and leads them to treasure beyond their dreams, they are duly grateful (...). However, one can hardly overlook the fact that the book was actually written in a very specific part of the 20th Century - during the Second World War, a time when Nazi Germany was involved in a horrific persecution and massacre of Jews, while the Nazis claimed the Viking heritage for their monstrous version of German and Germanic Nationalism. Bengtsson in effect throws the Viking heritage back in the Nazis' face" Adaptations The 1964 British-Yugoslav film The Long Ships (starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier) very loosely based on the book, retaining little more than the title (of the English translation) and the Moorish settings. In the 1980s, there were plans for a large-scale Swedish screen adaptation. The film was supposed to be directed by Hans