Sooo gorgeous

I'm assuming this is an attempt to further mine the pocketbooks of Tolkien fans (in case dividing The Hobbit into three movies wasn't shameless enough): Penguin has released a series called Legends from the Ancient North, described as "five classics of Norse literature that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien's epic vision in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings". The publisher assures us that reading these books will "[bring] us as close as we will ever get to the magical worlds of the Vikings and the origins of their twentieth-century counterpart: Tolkien's Middle Earth." I suspect the Icelandic tourism department would take issue with that assertion, but the books are absolutely lovely, and almost enough to make me want to try reading Beowulf again.

...but not quite.