Erland Gustavsson, a boy of about fourteen years of age, was very different from the other people in his village. While the other Vikings were fighting neighbouring islands in perilous wars, he was in a place that he called his “laboratory”. In there you could find many different prototypes of many different strange creations that had formed inside the boy's head. His adoptive mother, Dagmar, was tired of hearing his constant theories and formulas, and went to the point of hiding from her adoptive son in order to escape his endless talking.

Ah yes, I should probably mention: Erland was an orphan and had been from the age of eight, when his parents died in a storm at sea. The boy felt sad when he thought of that day; he remembered a man knocking on his door and saying that there had been a shipwreck on a nearby island. He remembered going on one of the search ships to see what had happened – and he remembered recognising his parents' longship, smashed into a hundred pieces on the empty beach.

But part of him acted like it didn't even happen, because he remembered hearing his parents talking about how little Erland was like a Viking, how little strength he had in his body, how he had never picked up an axe in his life.

Erland Gustavsson was the runt of the village. He was skinny, freckled, had messy black hair and a scar on his left cheek from an explosion during an experiment in his laboratory the year before - a shard of glass had stuck inside his face and left a mark ever since – so he wasn't really the ideal Viking teenager.

But as well as a being clever, Erland had a huge imagination and believed in a lot of things: magic, elves, spirits, but most of all: dragons.

He had read so many books about these mythical beasts and believed in them with all his heart, to the despair of the rest of the village. As well as his theories, he was always telling tales about his favourite Viking legend: a brave man named Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III and his fearless Night Fury dragon named Toothless.

Nobody believed in this legend apart from Erland, who had his heart set on finding evidence that dragons existed. He even asked the chief of the village, Thurman the Arrogant, if he could lend him a few soldiers to conduct a search with him. As you can imagine, Thurman wasn't very happy, especially as a few weeks before Erland had accidentally melted Thurman's favourite sword in a huge fire.

When Erland thinks back to what happened after he asked Thurman for some soldiers, half of him regretted it, but half of him was grateful. One half regretted it because Erland was severely punished, but the other half was grateful because if the punishment hadn't of happened, then Erland wouldn't be where he is today.