Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

AT THIS POINT I should say something about Tyrkir. As a young man he had been captured on the coast of Germany and put up for sale at the slave market in Kaupang in Norway. There he had been bought by my grandfather, Erik the Red, on one of his eastward trips, and proved to be an exceptionally good purchase. Tyrkir was hard working and tireless and grew to be intensely loyal to my grandfather. He became fluent in our Norse language, the donsk tunga, finding that it is not so far removed from his mother tongue of German. But he never shed his thick accent, speaking from the back of his throat, and whenever he got excited or angry he tended to revert to the language of his own people. Eventually Erik trusted Tyrkir so completely that, while my father Leif was growing up, Tyrkir had the task of watching over him and teaching him all sorts of useful skills, for Tyrkir was one of those people who has gifted hands. He knew how to tie complicated knots for different purposes, how to chop down a tree so that it fell in a certain direction, how to make a fishing spear from a straight branch, and how to scoop out a lump of soapstone so that it made a cooking pot. Above all he possessed a skill so vital and wondrous that it is closely associated with the Gods themselves — he could shape metal in all its forms, whether smelting coarse iron from a raw lump of ore or fusing the steel edge to an axe and then hammering a pattern of silver wire into the flat of the blade.

We boys found the German rather frightening. To us he seemed ancient, though he was probably in his late fifties. He was short and puny, almost troll like, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious scowl emphasised by a bulging, prominent forehead under which his eyes looked distinctly shifty. Yet physically he was very brave, and during Leif s earlier voyage to the unknown land it was Tyrkir who volunteered for the scouting missions. His German tribe had been a forest-dwelling people, and Tyrkir thought nothing of tramping through the woodlands, wading across swamps, living off berries and a handful of dried food. He drank from puddles if he could find no clean running water, slept on the ground and seemed impervious to cold or heat or damp. It was Tyrkir who had first come across the wild grapes that some believe gave Vinland its name. He came back into Leif s camp one day carrying a bunch of the fruit, and so excited that he was rolling his eyes and muttering in German until Leif thought he was drunk or hallucinating, but Tyrkir was merely revelling in his discovery. He had not seen fresh grapes since he had been a lad in Germany and indeed, if he had not recognised the wild fruit, it is doubtful whether my father and his companions would have known what they were. But the moment Tyrkir explained what a fresh grape is, my father realised the significance of the moment. Here was evidence that the new-found country had such a benign climate that grapes — an exotic plant for Norsemen — actually grew wild. So he gave the land the name Vinland, though of course there were cynics when he got home who said that he was as big a liar as his father. To call a wilderness by a name that evoked sunshine and strong drink was as misleading as to call a land of glaciers and rock Greenland. My father was canny enough to have an answer for that accusation too. He would reply that when calling the place Vinland he did not mean the land of grape vines but the land of pastures, for 'vin' in Norse means a meadow.

'TEN DAYS AFTER repairing the broken keel,' Tyrkir said in answer to my father's question about Thorvald, 'we came across the entry to a broad sound guarded by two headlands. It was an inviting-looking place, so we turned in to investigate. We found that the inlet divided around a tongue of land densely covered with mature trees. The place looked perfect for a settlement, and Thorvald made a casual joke to us that it was the ideal place, where he could imagine spending the rest of his life.' Tyrkir paused. 'He should never have said that. It was tempting the Gods.

'We put a scouting party ashore,' he went on, 'and when the scouts returned, they reported that on the far side of the little peninsula was a landing beach, and on it were three black humplike objects. At first they thought that these black blobs were walruses, or perhaps the carcasses of small whales which had drifted ashore. Then someone recognised them as boats made of skin. Many years earlier he had been on a raiding voyage to plunder the Irish, and on the west coast he had seen similar craft, light enough to be carried on land and turned upside down.'

Here I should explain that the idea that these boats belonged to the wild Irish was not so incredible as it might seem. When the Norse first came to Iceland they found a handful of ascetic Irish monks living in caves and small huts laboriously built of stones. These monks had managed to cross from Scotland and Ireland aboard their flimsy skin boats, so perhaps they had also spread even farther. Thorvald, however, doubted that. Tyrkir described how Thorvald sent him with a dozen armed men to creep up on the strange boats from the landward side, while Thorvald himself and most of the others rowed quietly round the coast to approach from the sea. They achieved a complete surprise. There were nine strangers dozing under their upturned boats. They must have been a hunting or fishing party because they were equipped with bows and arrows, hunting knives and light throwing lances. When they heard the creak of oars they sprang to their feet and grabbed their weapons. Some of them made threatening gestures, drawing back their bows and aiming at the incoming Norse. Others tried to launch their light boats into the water and escape. But it was too late. Tyrkir's shore party burst out of the treeline, and in a short scuffle all the strangers were overpowered, except for one. He managed to flee in the smallest of the skin boats. 'I've never seen a boat travel so fast,' said Tyrkir. 'It seemed to skini across the water and there was no possibility that our ship's boat would have caught up. So we let him go.'

The eight Skraelings our men had captured were certainly not Irish. According to Tyrkir, they looked more like ski-running people from the north of Norway. Short, they had broad faces with a dark yellow skin and narrow eyes. Their hair was black and long and straggly, and they spoke a language full of high sharp sounds, which was like the chattering alarm call of a jay. They were dressed entirely in skins: skin trousers, skin jackets with tails, skin boots. Any part of their bodies not covered in these clothes was smeared with grease or soot. They were human in form, but as squat and dark as if they had emerged from underground. They squirmed and fought in the clutch of the Norsemen and tried to bite and scratch them.

Tyrkir's story now took a grim turn. One of the captive Skraelings wriggled out of the grip of the man holding him, produced a bone harpoon head which he had hidden inside the front of his loose jacket, and jabbed the point of the weapon deep into his captor's thigh. The Greenlander roared with pain and rage. He slammed the man's head against a rock, knocking him unconscious, and then in a fury plunged his short sword into the victim's body. His action triggered a massacre. Thorvald's men fell on the

Skraelings, hacking and stabbing as if they were dispatching vermin, and did not stop until the last one of them was dead. Then Thorvald's men disabled the two remaining skin boats by gashing the hulls to shreds with their axes, and climbed through the woodland up to the top of the peninsula while the ship's boat rowed back to the knorr.

'On the highest point of the land we sat down to rest,' Tyrkir recalled. 'Thorvald intended to allow us only a few moments' breathing space, and we threw ourselves on the ground, and for some strange reason all of us fell asleep as if we were bewitched. About two hours later I was roused by a great voice howling, "Get back to the ship! If you are to save your lives, get back to your ship."'