I have held back from this, though someone out there may be able to help (hope so) because it is NOT MUSIC. But I am now getting to the end of options.

When I was 11-ish, I read a storybook which retold the saga of Olaf Tryggvason. It was satisfyingly fat, about two inches, probably octavo, and rebound in a boring library binding. Naturally, I cannot remember the author. It was a book which had been about what seemed a long time, then, and though written for children, was not written as a saga for the little ones. Olaf's mistress was dealt with, for instance.

It had wonderful black and white prints, which might have influenced Tolkein's Hobbit pictures - I remember a view down between the kings' burial mounds and tall pines to the temple at Uppsala, and a scene outside a small dwelling, where Olaf is sitting on a bench, and his mistress appears out of the forest. her name, I think, was something elvy, Alf.. something, and the suggestion was made that she was sent by such people to destroy what he was doing in his rule.

I want to read it again - it has disappeared from Folkestone and Kent library records. it is not in the Bodleian, or the American libraries. Something appears in the British library catalogue, published by the World's Work in 1913, but it seems to have been conflated with a small children's book published in 1964. It is not a book by Robert Leighton, called "Olaf the Glorious" which is a boy's own piece, without subtlety in personal relationships. Sometimes I wonder whether I invented it, but I don't hink my subconscious is up to it.

Can anyone help? Liz?