A hero emerges from childhood cruelly and incomprehensibly maimed. He travels in search of a way to heal his wound, inflicted by his own father. The father intended thereby to seal a sinister pact with dark forces, which would ever after lie in wait along the son's path. The hero rides astride a trustworthy and magical mount and provides from the aid of a god. This is the territory of ' Blade of the Minstrel.' The tone of the writing transports the reader to a landscape where destinies are played out and the soul is fashioned. The reader is cued to settle into a 'tale', a story of fated and fateful deeds in which the themes and happenings of myth and saga can be expected. People address each other here as archetypal personages in a language shorn of the prosaic and the everyday. It is the bardic language of the epic, the almost biblical language of ancient heroic ballads.