Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

Christianity, I have noted in my seventy years of lifetime, boasts how humility and peace will overcome all obstacles and the word of the Lord is to be spread by example and suffering. Yet I have observed that in practice most of our northern people were converted to this so-called peaceful belief by the threat of the sword and our best-loved weapon, the bearded axe. Of course, there were genuine martyrs for the White Christ faith as our people first called it. A few foolhardy priests had their tonsured heads lopped off by uncouth farmers in the backlands. But that was in an excess of drunken belligerence rather than pagan zeal, and their victims were a handful compared to the martyrs of the Old Ways, who were cajoled, threatened, bullied and executed by King Olaf either because they refused to convert or were too slow to do so. For them the word of the Lord arrived in a welter of blood, so there is little wonder that the prophesied violence of the millennial cataclysm was easy to explain.

But I digress: Erik had sent his son Leif off to Norway to forestall trouble. Even in faraway Greenland the menacing rattle of King Olaf’s religious zeal had been heard. The king had already sent messengers to the Icelanders demanding that they adopt the new faith, even though they were not really Norwegian subjects. The Icelanders were worried that King Olaf would next send a missionary fleet equipped with rather more persuasive weapons than croziers. With Iceland subdued, fledgling Greenland would have been a mere trifle. A couple of boatloads of royal mercenaries would have overrun the tiny colony, dispossessed Erik's family, installed a new king's man, and Greenland would have been swallowed up as a Norwegian fief under the pretext of making it a colony for the White Christ. So Leif s job was to appear suitably eager to hear details of the new religion — a complete hypocrisy on Erik's part in fact, as he was to remain staunch to the Old Ways all his life - and even to ask for a priest to be sent out to Greenland to convert the colonists. I suspect that, if a priest had been found for the job, Leif had secret instructions from his father to abandon the meddling creature on the nearest beach at the first opportunity.

Erik also instructed his son to raise with King Olaf the delicate matter of Erik's outlawry. Erik was a proscribed man in Iceland -a hangover from some earlier troubles when he had been prone to settling disputes with sharp-edged weapons - and he was hoping that the king's protection would mean that certain aggrieved Icelanders would think twice about pursuing their blood feud with him. So, all in all, Leif had a rather delicate task set for him. To help his son, Erik devised what he thought could be a master stroke: a gift to catch the royal eye — a genuine Greenland polar bear to be presented to the royal menagerie.

The poor creature was a youngster which some of Erik's people had found, half-starved, on a melting floe of drift ice the previous spring. The floe must have been separated from the main pack by a back eddy and carried too far out to sea for the polar bear to swim to shore. By the time the animal was rescued it was too weak to put up a struggle and the hunters - they were out looking for seals — bagged it in a net and brought it home with them. Erik saw a use for the castaway and six months later the unhappy beast was again in a net and stowed in the bilges of Leif's embassy boat. By the time Birsay was sighted, the polar bear was so sickly that the crew thought it would die. The creature provided Leif with a first-rate excuse to dally away most of the winter on Birsay, allegedly to give the bear a chance to recuperate on a steady diet of fresh herring. Unfortunately this led to unkind jests that the bear and my mother Thorgunna were alike not only in character and gait, but in appetite as well.

That next April, when a favourable west wind had set in and looked as if it would stay steady for a few days, Leif and his men were eagerly loading up their ship, thanking the earl for his hospitality, and getting ready to head on for Norway when Thorgunna took Leif on one side and suggested that she go aboard with him. It was not an idea that appealed to Leif, for he had failed to mention to Thorgunna that he already had a wife in Greenland who would not look kindly on his foreign import. 'Then perhaps the alternative is going to be even less attractive,' Thorgunna continued. 'I am due to have your baby. And the child is going to be a boy.' Leif was wondering how Thorgunna could be so sure of her baby's sex, when she went on, 'At the first opportunity I will be sending him on to you.' According to Leif, who told me of this conversation when I was in my eleventh year and living with him in Greenland, my mother made the statement about sending me away from her with no more emotion than if she were telling Leif that she had been sewing a new shirt and would deliver it to him when it was ready. But then she softened and added, 'Eventually, if I have the chance, I intend to travel on to Greenland myself and find you.'

Under the circumstances my father behaved really very decently. On the evening before he set sail, he presented his formidable mistress with a fine waterproof Greenlandic sea cloak, a quantity of cash, a thin bracelet of almost pure gold and a belt of Greenland ivory made from the teeth of walrus. It was a very handsome gesture, and another speck in the eye for those hags who were saying that Thorgunna was being left in the lurch and was no better than she deserved. Anyhow, Leif then sailed off on his interrupted journey for Norway, making both a good passage and an excellent impression. King Olaf welcomed him at the Norwegian court, listened politely to what he had to say, and after keeping him hanging around the royal household for almost the whole summer, let him sail back to Greenland on the westerly winds of early autumn. As for the wretched polar bear, it was a temporary sensation. It was admired and petted, and then sent off to the royal kennels, where it was conveniently forgotten. Soon afterwards it picked up distemper from the dogs and died.

I was born into this world at about the same time that the polar bear departed it. Later in my life, a shaman of the forest peoples in Permia, up in the frozen zones, was to tell me that the spirit of the dying bear transferred itself to me by a sort of spiritual migration at the moment of my birth. I was reluctant to believe it, of course, but the shaman affirmed it as fact and as a result treated me with respect bordering on awe because the Permians worship the bear as the most powerful spirit of all. Whatever the truth about the transmigration of souls, I was born with a minimum of fuss and commotion on a summer's day in the year my present colleagues, sitting so piously around me, would describe as the year of our Lord, 999.

SHE CALLED ME Thorgils. It is a common enough Norse name and honours their favourite red-haired God. But then so do at least forty other boy's names from plain Thor through Thorstein to Thorvald, and half that number for girls, including my mother's own, Thorgunna. Perhaps Thorgils was her father's name. I simply have no idea, though later, when I wondered why she did not pick a more Irish-sounding name to honour her mother's people, I realised she was preparing me to grow up in my father's household. To live among the Norsemen with an Irish name would have led people to think that I was slave-born because there are many in Iceland and elsewhere whose Irish names, like Kormak and Njal, indicate that they are descended from Irish captives brought back when men went a-viking.

Thorgunna gave me my Norse name in the formal manner with the sprinkling of water. It might surprise my Christian brethren here in the scriptorium to know that there is nothing new in their splashing drops of water on the infant's head at baptism. The pagan northmen do the same when they name a child and it would be interesting to ask my cleric neighbours whether this deed provides any salvation for the innocent infant soul, even when done by heathen custom.