Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

Yet, in the greater scheme of our Norse involvement in Vinland, I don't think it would have made any difference in the end. Even if we had realised that the Skraelings meant us no harm on that occasion, they would probably have come back on a later visit to drive us away from the lands where they lived. And, of course, we took the Skraelings to have the same responses as ourselves — when the Norse feel threatened, their natural reaction is to turn and fight, to protect their territory. They seldom consider the long-term consequences of such action, and they rarely back down. That day on the beach at Vinland our men were too frightened and too desperate to act in any other way than with violence.

It was that feeling of being under threat that lost us Vinland. We stayed for the winter — the season was too advanced to think of moving anywhere - but all through the winter months we worried and fretted that the Skraelings would return. 'This is a rich and fertile land,' was how Thorfinn put it to us on the day we assembled to make a final decision about leaving. 'Of course, we can visit from time to time and cut shiploads of fine timber for ourselves. But we would be foolish to think that we can establish ourselves here in the face of superior numbers of hostile Skraeling. In the end they would overwhelm us.' There was no dissenting voice. We knew we were too isolated and exposed. In the spring we reloaded our knorr with the products of our labour — seasoned timber, dried fruit, a rich store of furs, carved souvenirs of that splendid honey-coloured wood, the dried skins of some of the more colourful birds complete with their feathers — and we set sail for Greenland.

As our travel-worn knorr felt the wind and began to gather speed, I looked back at the gently sloping beach in front of Leif s cabins. On the very last morning of our stay I had stood barefoot in the sand and dug a final channel in the hopes of trapping a flounder, just as I had done when we first came there. Already the incoming tide which had floated the knorr off the landing beach, had washed away every trace of my labour. The only mark of my efforts to harvest the sea were a few piles of empty mussel shells just above the line of seawrack. A hundred paces farther up the beach, over the first swell of the dunes, I could just see the roofs of the turf houses we had abandoned. Already their humped shapes were merging into the distance, and soon they would be lost to view against the forest background. Everyone of us aboard the knorr was looking back, even the helmsman was glancing over his shoulder. We felt regretful but we did not feel defeated, and the one unspoken thought in our minds was that perhaps there were

Norsemen still left alive in that vast land and we were abandoning them to their fate.

I was thinking of one person in particular - my hero and tutor, Thorvall the Hunter. He had disappeared midway through our time at Leif s cabins when the bickering between ardent Christians and Old Believers reached such a pitch that Thorvall announced that he did not intend to stay any longer with the group. He would explore along the coast and find a more congenial spot. Anyone who wanted to accompany him was free to do so. Four of our men chose to go with him and Thorfinn gave them our small scouting boat, possibly because Gudrid encouraged him to do so. More than once she said that she did not want Snorri growing up in the company of men like Thorvall with their heathen ways. I was downcast for several days after Thorvall and his few companions rowed off, heading north along the coast. When we heard nothing more from them, I presumed with everyone else that Thorvall and his companions had been captured and killed by the Skraelings. It was what we Norse would have done to a small group of interlopers.

NINE

BACK IN BRATTAHLID, we received a muted greeting from the Greenlanders. The general opinion was that our expedition had been a wasted effort and it would have been better if we had stayed at home. Faced with this dispiriting reception, Thorfinn announced that he would spend only a few weeks in Greenland, then head onwards with his ship to Iceland. There he proposed to return to his family in Skagafjord, and set up house with Gudrid and their two-year-old son. This time I was not invited to accompany them.

Abandoned - or so I felt — by Gudrid and with only wizened Tyrkir as my mentor, I became morose and difficult. After nearly three years' absence in Vinland, my moodiness deepened when I found I had drifted apart from my circle of boyhood friends in Brattahlid. Eyvind, Hrafn and the others had continued to grow up as a group while I was away. They showed an initial curiosity about my descriptions of life in Vinland, but soon lost interest in what I had seen or done there. The boys had always regarded me as being a little odd, and now they judged that my lonely life in Vinland as the only child of my age, had made me even more solitary. We no longer had much in common.

The result was that I began to nurse a secret nostalgia for Vinland. My experiences in that strange land helped define who I was. So I yearned to return there.

The opportunity to go back to Vinland was a complete surprise when it came, because it was arranged by the last person in the world whom I would have expected: my aunt Freydis. While I had been away in Vinland, she had matured from a scheming nineteen-year-old into a domineering woman, both physically and mentally. She had put on weight and bulk, so now she was big and buxom, full-bosomed and with heavy arms and a meaty face that would have been better suited to a man. She even had a light blonde moustache. Despite her off-putting appearance she had managed to find a husband, a weak-willed blusterer by the name of Thorvard, who ran a small farm at a place called Gardar. Like the majority of the people of the area, he lived in fear of Freydis's temper, with its violent mood swings and bouts of black anger.

Freydis, who never lost the chance to remind people that she was the daughter of the first settler of Greenland, took it into her head that Thorfinn and Gudrid had been incompetent as pioneers in Vinland and that she, Freydis, could do better. She was so vehement on the topic that people listened to her. Leif s cabins, Freydis pointed out, were still the property of her half-brother, and she announced that the Eriksson clan should return to their property and make it flourish, and she was the person to do it. She began by asking my father for permission to reoccupy the huts. Leif prevaricated. He had decided that he would not waste any men or resources in Vinland after his failed investment with Thorfinn. So he put off Freydis with the promise that he would lend her the buildings and even loan her the family knorr, but only if she managed to raise a crew. However, when Freydis put her energies into a project there was nothing and no one who could stand in her way.

To everyone's astonishment Freydis produced not one crew, but three, and a second vessel as well. The way it happened was this: the spring after my return from Vinland with Gudrid and Thorfinn, a foreign ship jointly owned by two brothers from Iceland, Helgi and Finnbogi, put in to Brattahlid. She was the largest knorr that anyone had ever seen, so big that she carried sixty people on board. Helgi and Finnbogi had decided to emigrate to Greenland and had brought along their families, goods, cattle, and all the necessary paraphernalia. Naturally the two brothers went to see Leif to seek his advice on where they should settle. But on meeting the new arrivals, Leif was not at all keen to welcome them, for it was abundantly clear that the Icelanders were a very rough lot. Like Erik the Red before them, they had left Iceland to escape a violent blood feud which had involved several deaths. Three of the men had murder charges hanging over them. Leif could easily imagine the quarrels and violence if the newcomers tried unsuccessfully to settle the marginal lands, and then started to edge towards the better lands closer to the water. So while my father greeted the two brothers with a show of hospitality, he was very anxious that they should not stay too long. He advised them to proceed farther along the coast and find new land to the north — the farther away from Brattahlid the better was his unspoken opinion.