The Man Who Came Early

"The Man Who Came Early" is a science fiction short story by Danish-American author Poul Anderson. Similar in some respects to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the story is in fact its antithesis; Anderson sharply differs from Twain in his treatment of the "primitive" society in which the time traveller finds himself, and his assessment of a modern person's chances of survival in such a society. In some ways "The Man Who Came Early" is a response to L. Sprague de Camp's novel Lest Darkness Fall, in which a modern man's skills prevent the fall of the Roman Empire.

"The Man Who Came Early" was first published in the June 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sixth Series and the Anderson collection The Horn of Time. In the 2010 collection Fragile and Distant Suns, this story is included under the name "Early Rise", a likely reference to the Hávamál poem.

The story is presented in the first person, related by a Saga-Age Icelander named Ospak Ulfsson. During a violent thunderstorm, an unexplained phenomenon transports the titular 20th-century American GI back in time to Ospak's homestead. The American, who becomes known as Gerald "Samsson", is an engineering student drafted to serve at Keflavik during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

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