When We Were Vikings

When We Were Vikings is a novel by the Canadian writer Andrew David MacDonald, published in 2020 by Gallery/Scout Press. It was his first novel.

Zelda is a young woman with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder who lives with her brother Gert and who has built her life around her own written rules and her enthusiasm for Norse history, including the sagas and the archaeology behind them. The rules are practical arrangements that let her manage unfamiliar situations, and the Viking material gives her a way of understanding what a hero is. Gert supports the two of them and has become involved with people he should not have, and when that goes wrong Zelda has to decide what a person in a saga would do about it. MacDonald writes the book in her voice, so the reader is inside the way she reasons, and the plot is a small crime story that her brother is caught up in rather than something she goes looking for.

The novel was widely reviewed for the way it presents a character with a disability as a person with a project of her own, and it was followed by the author's later fiction.