Ottilie / Ottilia Adelina Liljencrantz (1876-1910) was the author of The Thrall of Leif the Lucky (1902), The Ward of King Canute (1903), Vinland Champions (1904) and Viking's Love and Other Tales of the North (1911). "It was back in the tenth century, when the mighty fairhaired warriors of Norway and Sweden and Denmark, whom the people of Southern Europe called the Northmen, were becoming known and dreaded throughout the world. Iceland and Greenland had been colonized by their dauntless enterprise. Greece and Africa had not proved distant enough to escape their ravages. The descendants of the Viking Rollo ruled in France as Dukes of Normandy; and Saxon England, misguided by Ethelred the Unready and harassed by Danish pirates, was slipping swiftly and surely under Northern rule. It was the time when the priests of France added to their litany this petition: "From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, good Lord. ""