Bloodtide is a Young Adult novel by Melvin Burgess, first published by Andersen Press Limited in 1999.

Val, head of the Volsons, wishes for peace between the two and offers his daughter Signy as Conor's wife in order to broker a treaty.

Once they have been destroyed, he wishes to rise up against the rest of the world and claim it all in the name of the Volson clan.

He offers his daughter Signy as Conor's wife, in order to show his complete commitment to the Treaty.

A believed spy, who was strung up by his ankle returns to life and shows it was not a one time trick, as he crashes down head first from thirty or so feet up.

Siggy (who wishes for anything but the responsibility of leadership) removes the knife with ease, as his father acknowledges that it was a gift from Odin himself, blessing the treaty in his own way.

The hyena-man surprises her further by giving her a kitten named Cherry (who is said to have more than one shape), before leaping to the ground and meeting his end by Conor's convoy.

She wrote that "Melvin Burgess is shocking, and deliberately so, in his descriptions of stomach-turning cruelty, but his carefully constructed retelling of the Nordic Volsunga saga is rich enough in other ways to carry it.

[2] Publishers Weekly also wrote positively, "Given such a gory framework, Burgess's development of sympathetic characters is as surprising as it is convincing.

Rapidly shifting perspectives and deft dialogue expose minds as frighteningly real as growly gangsta rap and as unexpectedly compassionate as unconditional animal love, pivoting on Old Norse gods—or are they constructs of genetic breeding tanks?—who watch but cannot change the weaving of human fate.

Pilot can usually be relied on to provide edgy, aggressive and innovative work, but ultimately, Bloodtide is a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing.

[5] Kathryn Hughes of The Guardian gave the book a positive review, writing "By rights none of this should really work as narrative prose, sounding instead more like the jumbled backstory to a particularly complicated computer game.

But Burgess has imagined his future world so precisely ... that Bloodsong reads like the most reasonable of realistic fiction.