Of Flaw and Scorn
Vera Bell
Timebound Publishing, LLC (2026)
ISBN: 979-8994680506
Vera Bell is a Georgia Author of the Year nominee and a recipient of multiple literary awards. Though her faith journey began in childhood, a series of transformative events led her to embrace Christ, reshaping the stories she feels called to tell. After writing a secular historical romance trilogy, she now creates from a place grounded in deeper purpose. Her new novel, Of Flaw and Scorn, is her debut Christian historical romance, where fate collides with faith against the backdrop of the first Viking raid on Ireland. A former commercial artist, Vera lives in Atlanta with her husband, two teenagers, and one fur baby. Her favorite place to write is on her porch, overlooking a pond lined with river birches and magnolias. The topics she never tires of are bygone eras, our universal human condition, and the deeper currents of love, hope, and redemption. You can get a FREE gift https://www.verabellauthor.com. Connect on social media @verabellauthor.
Hi Vera, welcome to Reader Views! Tell us what Of Flaw and Scorn is about and what inspired the story.
The novel opens with the 795 A.D. raid on Rathlin Island, the first recorded Viking attack in Irish history.
What pulled you to that specific, brutal moment as your starting place rather than the later era of Norse-Irish trade and settlement?
The first recorded raid on Rathlin Island felt like a critical collision point, as terrifying and disorienting as the Lindisfarne raid portrayed in Vikings. Seeing that moment through the monks’ eyes, as their world splits open without warning, left a lasting impression. It made me wonder what that first encounter must have felt like in real life, when you have neither language nor framework to understand what’s coming over the horizon. However, I didn’t want to default to the predictable portrayal of Vikings as conquerors, but to turn the lens instead. What happens if, in the middle of that chaos, a young raider doesn’t experience it as glory, but as something unsettling? What if he comes face to face with the very person he’s been taught to see as expendable and is instead confronted with her undeniable humanity?
To raise the stakes, they’re both teenagers with nothing in common. No shared language, culture, or religion. They might as well be from two different planets. Yet in that brief, visceral clash, something shifts. His understanding of honor and strength begins to fracture, and she sees something she never expected in one of the Norsemen she’s been taught to fear. This tension between violence and compassion, expectation and reality felt like the most honest and compelling place to begin. It also sets up impossible choices and sky-high stakes from the very first pages.
The book includes a glossary, a pronunciation guide, a map, and a detailed cast of characters. Norse customs like the Althing, blodhefnd, and the thrall system are woven into the plot, rather explained from the sidelines. What did it take to build this world so that readers could live in it without getting lost?
I had to first accept just how foreign this world really is. Norse society didn’t grow out of the roots most modern readers instinctively recognize, such as the Greco-Roman political thought, Judeo-Christian values, and Enlightenment ethics. It operated on an entirely different moral and social framework. Such basic concepts as honor, justice, and even freedom carries an unfamiliar weight. So the challenge wasn’t only accuracy but interpretation that didn’t flatten this difference.
I started with deep research. In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Norway and visited a reconstructed Viking village. Being there gave me a real sense of the scale of the longhouses, the weight of pelts, the coarseness of linen, the distances between places, and even the gray-blue quality of the light. It stopped feeling historical and started feeling immediate. I’d also spent time in Ireland for an earlier project, so I already knew its lush green hills, the bursts of sunlight, the biting wind, the shifting mist, and the ancient stillness. Having experienced both settings allowed me to move between them with tangible contrast.
I also read widely, both fiction and nonfiction. Works like The Viking Wars by Max Adams and The Vikingsby Magnus Magnuson provided historical structure, while Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset helped shape my sense of the inner world. The key was immersing myself in the everyday life. I wanted to understand how people actually lived—what they ate, wore, feared, and believed. Once that was in place, the customs didn’t need to be explained. They could simply exist as part of the story’s fabric. The glossary, pronunciation guide, map, and cast list are there for readers who want a deeper connection with the story. But my goal was that no one would feel like a visitor being instructed. I wanted the readers to step into a world that, while unfamiliar, is fully alive and coherent on its own terms.
Reidar is fifteen when he claims Brigit, renames her Ingrid, and then releases her. That first encounter in the woods sets the entire novel in motion. Where did the idea for that scene come from?
Although I don’t write young adult fiction, I think childhood and early adolescence are immensely foundational. When we face our first real tests outside our parents’ protection, our choices tend to echo for the rest of our lives. For me, these origin points also make for absorbing storytelling.
Reidar, at fifteen, stands at a threshold. He’s still a boy in many ways, but he’s straining toward manhood, trying to prove himself in a culture that measures worth in strength and conquest. I wanted to place him where all is tested not in the expected way of a battle, but in something far more intimate and revealing. I kept seeing the scene almost like a bird’s-eye view, from above. A young girl moving through a forest she knows by heart, completely at ease. Coming toward her, this young warrior shaped by everything he’s been taught about glory, honor, and what it means to take. They’re on an inevitable collision course that mirrors their two cultures and worldviews, about to clash in the most personal way possible.
The scene came alive for me when he doesn’t do the expected. There is something in him that resists the script he’s been handed. His unanticipated compassion disrupts his trajectory. And in that instant, it reveals who he really is beneath all the expectations pressing in on him. His single choice—an act of mercy—is the hinge moment that sets the entire story in motion.
Brigit carries Reidar’s twig for seven years through servitude, a miserable marriage, and a second Norse raid. It’s shaped like the Algiz rune, which is nearly identical to the Christian cross, just reaching in a different direction. Why did that object become the story’s emotional anchor?
The twig points toward something that will ultimately set them both free. For Brigit, as she carries it through all her awful trials, it’s a constant, tangible reminder of the boy who, against all odds, spared her when he didn’t have to. In an unstable and cruel world, it gives her something to hold onto. In that sense, it reflects a human instinct to reach for whatever feels like protection or meaning when everything else is falling apart. On the surface, the twig, or Algiz rune, looks strikingly similar to the cross. So often, what we cling to in place of truth isn’t obviously dark or evil. It can look familiar and even comforting. But it ultimately points us back to ourselves, to things made by human hands, and to systems of belief that can’t save us.
For Reidar, the rune is a reminder of the girl he spared. That single act of mercy, nearly buried beneath years of violence, is the one fault line in his soul through which God is reaching for him long before he understands it. God meets us in the middle of our confusion, misplaced trust, and pain. He doesn’t wait for us to have it right. And what He offers is entirely different from what the rune represents. It’s neither control nor superstition, but love—costly, sacrificial, and freely given. That’s where the cross comes in as the true turning point. When Reidar opens himself to the truth and lets go of what he’s been taught in exchange for something real, it rewires his world. This change is neither instant nor easy, but it is monumental.
The title names two defining traits: Brigit’s “Great Scorn” and Reidar’s “Great Flaw.” Both are masks. Brigit’s scorn reads as hatred for the Norsemen, but the novel makes clear it’s almost entirely self-directed. Reidar buries his love under duty and ambition. At what point does each of them stop believing their own narrative?
They are masks and carefully constructed ones. The title Of Flaw and Scorn points to what each of them believes is their defining weakness—Reidar’s “flaw,” his heart for mercy, and Brigit’s “scorn,” the armor she wears like a shield. On the surface, they look like opposites, but in reality, they mirror each other. His compassion isolates him in a culture that prizes strength and conquest. Her scorn places her at odds with the very faith that calls her to forgiveness.
What binds them is the slow, often painful realization that what they’ve been taught to suppress is not the problem but the entry point—the place where grace breaks through. Neither of them ever fully believed their own narrative. It was handed to them by circumstance, and they wear these identities because they feel necessary, even protective. But there have always been cracks in them.
For Brigit, the mask finally breaks when Reidar is injured and she’s faced with the real possibility of losing him. In that moment, there is no room left for pretense. Her anger, resistance, and self-protection fall away, and what’s left is painfully clear. She loves him. Not in theory but in a way she can no longer deny or reshape into something safer. Reidar’s breaking point mirrors hers. After the crossing to Norway, when Brigit’s life is in danger and he believes he might lose her, everything he’s tried to suppress rises to the surface. The future he thought he was building collapses under the weight of one truth. She matters more than honor, approval, and even his ambition.
Those life-and-death moments strip everything down to what’s real. In many ways, they echo their first meeting. But now they understand what they’re seeing. The masks don’t just slip but lose their power altogether.
Two spiritual systems contrast sharply here: Norse gods who demand blood sacrifice and remain silent, and a Christian God who answers without one. Reidar prays to both before Brigit’s deathbed. Was it important to you that neither worldview gets simplified?
I never wanted to reduce the Norse belief system to a set of clichés or treat it with a heavy hand. The human impulse to worship is real and deeply rooted. The Norse people weren’t caricatures of brutality. They were men and women trying to make sense of their world, turning to their gods in fear, gratitude, and desperation. Their sincerity mattered to me, and I wanted it on the page.
At the same time, I didn’t want to blur the distinctions either. One of the threads running through the novel is the fruit a belief system produces. Historically, the Viking world was marked by cycles of violence, blood vengeance, and systems like slavery and polygamy that left deep scars. They weren’t anomalies but part of their society’s fabric. Against that backdrop, the message of Christ arrives as something radical and disruptive. It calls for mercy in place of revenge, for love that isn’t transactional, and for sacrifice that gives rather than takes.
Placing Reidar between those two realities felt honest and historically grounded. He’s trying to grasp what is true, what will answer, what will hold when everything is on the line. I didn’t want to resolve that tension too quickly, because in real life people rarely move from one worldview to another in a single, clean step. At the same time, when God makes Himself known, things can shift quickly. So the challenge was to show Reidar’s conversion as earned while also staying true to how it often happens in real life. In my experience, as well as in many others’, it’s in the darkest and most desperate places that God’s grace is unmistakable, and He becomes the only choice.
The Skírnismál stanzas run in their original sequence across forty-three chapters, placed after the final draft was complete. Yet each one matched the deeper message of the chapter it landed on. What did you make of that?
I don’t have a tidy explanation for it. On one level, this points to Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey, that across cultures and centuries, stories return to the same patterns of longing, trial, and transformation. But while this helps explain why an ancient poem might resonate with a modern narrative, it doesn’t account for the precision of each stanza falling into place almost exactly where it belonged.
I think part of it lies in the poem itself. Skírnismál is, at its core, a story about desire, resistance, and surrender. Freyr sees something he cannot have, sends another in his place, and what follows is not a gentle courtship but a tension-filled negotiation that moves through longing, refusal, pressure, and ultimately a kind of yielding. It’s a complicated and unsettling love story. Those same emotional currents echo through Reidar and Brigit’s journey. As in Skírnismál, both have to confront what must be surrendered before love can take root in any meaningful and lasting way.
It did surprise me that the poem aligned not only structurally but also thematically. It was as if both stories were circling the same truths from different directions, centuries apart. For me, as a Christian writer, this points to something deeper. As you follow the main thread—a love that endures, hopes, and bears suffering—you eventually arrive at the chapter that opens with Corinthians 13:7. To me, this verse fulfills what Skírnismál reaches toward but doesn’t fully resolve. Because in the end, Of Flaw and Scorn isn’t just about longing or redemption. It’s about love that radically transforms and the belief that such love is not only possible, but necessary. That with love, nothing is impossible because God is love, and with Him, all things are possible.
The story includes a moment that defies natural explanation and a wedding scene that doubles as a declaration of faith before a skeptical audience. Both are bold swings in a historical novel. What gave you the confidence to let the spiritual elements carry that much weight?
For me, those moments felt like extensions of the story’s foundation. Of Flaw and Scorn is built on both history and Scripture. At its core, Scripture is of the supernatural. Feeding thousands with a few loaves and some fish, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead are just a few examples that defy ordinary explanation but are central to faith. Like so many born-again Christians, I’ve experienced things in my own life I can’t fully explain. So I wasn’t trying to push beyond the story’s boundaries but rather write from within them. Because if God is who He says He is, then the extraordinary isn’t out of place. It’s present in our ordinary lives, whether everyone recognizes it or not.
The wedding scene had to carry not only historical but also emotional weight. I always knew it couldn’t disintegrate into something predictable and overly tidy. It’s tempting at the end of a story to wrap everything up neatly—love wins and everyone lives happily ever after. But in ninth-century Norway, with a newly Christian jarl, that simply wouldn’t be true. The Norse world didn’t embrace Christianity easily. It disrupted their entire lifestyle, values, economy, and honor system. A culture built on raiding and conquest doesn’t coexist with a call to mercy and sacrificial love, and that tension had to remain, even in a moment as personal and hopeful as a wedding.
So this scene holds both joy and risk. Not everyone present would understand and approve of it. To me, it was important to keep the story grounded and authentic. While Reidar and Brigit do get their “happily ever after,” it’s not necessarily sealed. Rather, it’s a beginning shaped by faith in a world that hasn’t caught up to it yet. This tension carries forward into the sequel.
Vargr Bloodgale murdered Reidar’s father and seized power, and Reidar’s entire public life is built around avenging that. But every time he gets close to acting, Brigit pulls his focus. The blodhefnd and the love story are constantly working against each other. Was that tension always the plan, or did it develop as you wrote?
That conflict was always part of the story, but because I don’t outline, many of those layers revealed themselves as I wrote. From the beginning, I knew these two forces—blodhefnd ( vengeance) and love—would be on a collision course inside Reidar. While it’s easy to see him as the one saving Brigit, in truth, they save each other almost from the beginning. He protects her and keeps her alive in a world that would otherwise consume her. But she saves him on a deeper level when her very existence forces him to stop and reckon with what he is becoming.
In Norse culture, blodhefnd was righteous and honorable. Walking away from it would be seen as weakness and failure. So when Reidar gets close to fulfilling his duty—avenging his father and restoring his honor—Brigit’s presence poses a different question. Not whether he can he do it, but whether he should. And what it will cost him if he does. That was very intentional. Scripture makes it clear that vengeance belongs to God, not to us, and I wanted Reidar to wrestle with that in a visceral way. He isn’t turning away from revenge because it’s easy. He’s being pulled away from it, sometimes unwillingly, by love and by the growing realization that answering violence with more violence will cost him far more than honor.
Reidar’s near-fatal shoulder wound mirrors the historical death of Håkon the Good at the Battle of Fitjar, and you discovered that parallel only after writing it. How much of this novel came from research, and how much arrived in ways you can’t fully explain?
I think most writers recognize the line between what you consciously build and what seems to arrive on its own. The foundation of Of Flaw and Scorn is very much rooted in research, and it absolutely shaped Reidar as a character. His worldview, instincts, and even the pressures he feels all grow out of that groundwork. But there are also moments that don’t feel planned. They emerge while you’re writing, almost intuitively, as if the story is following its own path.
The shoulder wound was definitely one of those moments. I wrote it because it fit what Reidar needed to endure physically and symbolically, and because it echoes a character arc from an earlier, now unpublished project. It was only later that I recognized the historical parallel to Håkon the Good. This kind of discovery always gives me pause because it speaks to how deeply research can settle into your subconscious. As a writer, you absorb so much of a world’s history and patterns that they sometimes surface in unconscious ways. Writers often describe it as a kind of “channeling,” and I think that’s fair, as long as we understand it’s grounded in immersion. When you live with a time period long enough and listen closely enough, sometimes the story connects the dots before you even realize they’re there.
Astrid’s story is next, and you’ve set her up with one of the most complicated exits in the book. Where do you see the Gracefire series going?
To me, Astrid is the most multi-dimensional character in Of Flaw and Scorn because she’s unpredictable in her capacity for both harm and insight, often in the same breath. Her story is next, and it’s a hard-won redemption arc, far from a straight line. In many ways, the second book stands in deliberate contrast to the first. Where Of Flaw and Scorn explores redemption in the aftermath of violence, Astrid’s story turns inward. It’s more searching and unsettled, with a strong undercurrent of the kind of wrestling you see in the Book of Job, i.e. questions without easy answers, when faith is all that remains.
What makes Astrid so compelling to me is her conscience. It won’t leave her alone. It haunts at the most inconvenient moments and refuses to let her settle fully into darkness, even when that would be easier. But while conscience can feel burdensome, it’s the first place where truth begins to take hold and repentance can grow. That’s where Astrid’s story unfolds. Her path is marked by brokenness, doubt, anger, and denial of God. There are confusion, shame, and moments where she actively resists the very thing that could heal her. And yet, grace is ever-present, and love is still possible, though not in any effortless or immediately comforting way. So while Astrid’s journey begins in a difficult place, it doesn’t end there. It leads somewhere hard-earned and, I hope, beautiful. And not just for her.
Book two is currently slated for 2027. I’ll be sharing more in my newsletter and on social media as it develops.
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