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The questions are endless and there’s no good answer but the way an author deals with solutions is what makes a time travel unique.

For me, language was the difficult part. Unless my heroine had a Norwegian parent who taught her to speak Norse, chances were she’d be unable to communicate with her hero. Which is exactly what happened. But – my hero’s brother, Sank became my solution to this dilemma. I allowed him to have taken French in college. And since Erik being the mighty traveler that he was had landed in Normandy after having lived in Ireland, it made sense that he would have learned French. Of course, it was “old” French, but still. Sank became my bridge of communication between Keelin (the heroine) and Erik (the hero).

I was also very fortunate to have an exchange student from Norway last year who kindly helped me with a few Norse phrases. And a friend of my mother’s who used to teach French helped me with those few phrases. It always pays to know a few folks here and there.

I always find it interesting that some time travels fail to take this language barrier into consideration. Sure, the story is still fun to read but that one little detail sometimes nags at me.
Another fun fact is that my hero first travels to the future where he learns to speak English. In doing so, it helped me forgo the painful process of finding words with an etymology tracing it back to the 900s. Truly, most of our common words have their origins much later than that. But authors of historicals often try to make the introspection as authentic as possible for the time period. I did try, and I did toss out a lot of modern sounding words in the process but I’m sure I missed quite a few. Thankfully, I only had to worry about it for the beginning two chapters. After that, Erik was given the capacity to understand and speak more modern terminology.