The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson
Published 1954 · 55,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fantasy
How hard is The Broken Sword to read?
The Broken Sword scores 37 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Deliberately archaic prose modeled on Norse saga translations. Old English and Norse terms throughout.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Saga-style syntax: paratactic, compressed, with kennings and alliterative phrases.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Fate, doom, and the amorality of the supernatural. Norse fatalism rather than philosophical argument.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- A multi-generational saga compressed into a short novel. Dense with characters, battles, and mythological events.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Saga-style omniscient narration. Events are reported directly, often with foreshadowing of doom.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- Tyrfing as doomed power. The changeling as displaced identity. The elf-troll war as cosmic conflict without moral dimension.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Anderson writes with saga sincerity. The fatalism is not ironic—it is the worldview.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Self-contained novel. The curse plays out. The doom falls. Norse saga endings are definitive.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Dual-protagonist structure with Skafloc and Valgard. Compressed epic spanning years.
How The Broken Sword is regarded
The Broken Sword holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.