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Margit Sandemo is Scandinavia’s most popular author. Her flagship multi-volume fantasy-historical saga The Legend of the Ice People, now about to be published in English for the first time, has made her something of a living legend among writers because it alone has sold 25 million copies in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.
 On her mother’s side Margit is a descendant of numerous noble European families. Her mother was a Swedish countess, Elsa Reuterskiold of the aristocratic Finnish-Swedish Oxenstierna family, which figures fictionally in some of her early books in The Legend of the Ice People. Margit numbers among her ancestry Scottish and European monarchs, dukes and duchesses as well as the odd robber baron – not to mention more distant emperors of the ancient world in a pedigree, which she has traced, back more than two thousand years.
The countess, who chose to be a teacher, met Margit’s crofter father, Anders Underdal, during a visit to the Norwegian countryside in the early 1920s. They married although the countess lost her title in the process, and raised five children -- two daughters and three sons -- on a small farm they bought in the Fagernes region. Margit, born in 1924, was the second eldest.
Anders Underdal eventually made a reputation as a poet; he was the illegitimate son of the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner, Bjornsterne Bjornson and a 17-year-old croft girl, Guri Andersdotter
Anders encouraged Margit to read the entire works of Shakespeare by the time she was eight years old. Shakespeare’s writings, particularly King Lear, inspired her deeply (‘I was fascinated by all the dead bodies’) – along with the works of Dostoevsky, J.R.R. Tolkien -- and Agatha Christie.
The Countess Elsa and Anders Underdal were divorced in l930 at her initiative, reportedly because by that time she felt her husband’s ‘back to nature’ way of life was unsuitable for a noblewoman like herself. She took her five children with her to Sweden and for some time they lived a life of ‘comparative vagrancy in corners of various manor houses belonging to relatives.’ This Margit remembers as ‘somewhat humiliating.’ She adds: ‘My mother and father met in the Norwegian mountains. She simply fell for him! So I lived both in the grandest mansions and a crofter’s cottage. In the cottage my hair and pillow was often frozen to the wall’s logs when I woke. So I learned the life of the highest born and the poorest. Very good for my writing.’
Margit enjoyed what she describes as ‘54 years of blissful marriage’ to Asbjorn Sandemo, an engineer by profession, who for many years acted as her business agent. He died in l999 and there are two sons and a daughter from the marriage as well as seven grandchildren and one great grandchild. Margit is dedicating the first English edition of The Legend of the Ice People to her late husband adding simply: ‘He made my life a fairy tale.’ Now in her eighties, Margit’s other great passion is white water rafting.
Books written by Margit Sandemo and published by Tagman Press
Spellbound by Margit Sandemo
In English now for the first time – The Legend of the Ice People has already captivated 25 million readers across Europe.
Winter 1581: a deadly plague outbreak robs sixteen-year old peasant girl Silje of all her family. Homeless, starving and shepherding two foundling infants, she stumbles through the corpse-strewn streets of Trondheim on Norway’s northern coast.
Heading desperately for the warmth of the mass funeral pyres blazing beyond the city gates, she encounters in the shadowy forest one of the infamous Ice People, a fearsome, strangely captivating ‘wolf man’. He offers help -- and she feels irresistibly drawn to him. But what is the terrible fascination ? And where will it lead ?
Spellbound, the opening volume in The Legend of the Ice People, begins a journey that spans four centuries and interweaves romance and the supernatural in narratives that are passionate, earthy, often erotic and imbued above all else with a powerful narrative drive.
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Witch-Hunt by Margit Sandemo
In "Witch-Hunt", Silje Arngrimsdotter, the seventeen-year-old heroine of the opening novel Spellbound, struggles to come to terms with the harshness of life in a high mountain valley among the witches and warlocks of the mysterious Ice People.
Having fled there for her life with her adored ‘wolf man’ and two foundling infants from the Trondheim plague, Silje has bravely borne their first child. But this life of austere poverty is shattered when bloodthirsty, witch-hunting troops invade the remote valley.
Warned in time, Silje, her ‘wolf man’ and their charges flee from the carnage to the lowlands again to begin a new life. But unknowingly are they also carrying with them into the future the accursed heritage of the Ice People?
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Depths of Darkness by Margit Sandemo
In The Depths of Darkness, Sol Angelica, the beautiful and restless niece of Tengel, becomes the focus of the story…At twenty years of age she is able to give full and free rein to her long-held wish to seek out ancient witches covens in the lowlands and to worship the Powers of Darkness unrestrainedly. At last she feels ready to fulfil all her secret and depraved dreams of power and carnal passion.
Yet like her uncle Tengel, all her impulses are not evil – it is not only the dark powers that guide her. And she finds she is ready to give her life to protect those nearest and dearest to her…
Buy this book online from the Tagman Press Online Bookshop | Join the Margit Sandemo Official Forum
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