In the past I have made no bones about it that I did not enjoy the Tolkien LOTR trilogy. I loved the Hobbit. But I spent about a month trying to get through the Council of Elrond early on in the LOTR trilogy (if memory serves me well.) Don’t get me wrong, I loved the extended movie trilogy. I give Tolkien props for helping build a foundation for fantasy novels, but in my eyes writers like Dennis McKiernan did it much better (again, thanks to the road he paved.)

Back to War though. At the start of things we meet Helm Hammerhand, the king, and his children. His daughter Hera being the primary one here as this is really her story. As usual I am going to be fairly spoiler heavy here, but also glossing over some things. Skipping a few minutes in, we see Freca come to see the king. He has heard rumors that Hera is going to be married to someone from Gondor and wants the king to allow his son Wulf to marry her instead to help bolster their region. Hera herself rejects the idea, because she doesn’t want to be betrothed to anyone like a pawn, she wants to at some point choose. Her father opposes it because he believes Freca wants to get close and then kill the sons of Helm so that Wulf would be king. After a few harsh words, the two men agree to step outside and brawl over this situation. Freca gets rather nasty towards Helm and his daughter Hera as they square off to fight. Freca launches into a series of blows first. Striking the king in the face and gut and face again. Helm looks down at the assailant and punches him back in the face, knocking him to the ground. Helm stands triumphant over Freca telling him to stand up and fight. Wulf runs to where his father lies in the dirt and discovers he is dead. Shock ripples among the crowd, then Wulf stands drawing his sword and being mad about the end result of their fight.

Right away I have a problem with the setup of this story. Wulf is being a little brat here. Yes, his dad is dead, but his dad wanted to fight the king. He wanted to fight him because he refused to accept the marriage proposal. This was not Helm’s fault. It was Frecas. And it was an unintended consequence. Helm didn’t do anything other than return a single punch to the three he had received. Wulf takes it up a notch by drawing his sword, and at that point the king had every right to kill Wulf. Instead he smacks him down a bit and exiles him.

Wulf leaves with murder in his heart. And a vow to kill the king, his sons, and Hera as well. A petulant child who goes from love and lust for Hera to murderous desire due to rejection and the death of his father.

We jump a bit and see Hera and a few others out riding when they come across a rabid Oliphant. This only seems to set up the idea of Hera being captured. It was interesting, but the scene felt a bit out of place to me. There wasn’t really any reason behind the creature being rabid. And the way Hera dealt with it was just as bizarre.

Wulf is now a leader of some wild clans he has brought together, and he uses them to rain down destruction on the kings city. As they flee, the king is wounded, one of his sons killed, the other captured. As they retreat under Wulf’s advance, they hole up in what will later be known as Helm’s Deep. We all know that place. Wulf kills the captured son at the gates with Helm and Hera looking on before they close themselves up in the city.

In an unexplained way, the injured king has become pseudo supernatural and goes out hunting the enemy at night as Wulf and his men build siege engines.

There is more I could get into, but I don’t want to just tear into it relentlessly. One thing I found jarring was that the actor playing Wulf sounded to me like John Snow from Game of Thrones. Different actor. But I kept being pulled out of the story because I thought “Why is John Snow here?”

I did enjoy it, but the more I write, the lower the rating goes. I’m actually down to a 5 star rating now, and I started wavering between 7 and 8.