The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Blaðsíða 39

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
37
The Thrall’s Tale
by Gail Helgason
LhaalCs
Judith Lindbergh clearly remembers
the day more than 10 years ago when she
and her husband, who were then living in
New York, walked down to the harbour
and saw three replicas of Viking ships in
port.
“When I saw those ships I was dumb-
struck with awe,” says the author of The
Thrall’s Tale, a spellbinding historical
novel that explores the complex relation-
ships among three women of Viking times.
At the same time, Lindbergh thought “how
very small and vulnerable” the ships
appeared.
She was also struck by the physical
appearance of an Icelandic woman who
was one of the crew members, tall, blond
and wearing a thick Icelandic sweater. “I
thought she was the most beautiful woman
I had ever seen,” Lindbergh said during a
visit to Edmonton last September as guest
speaker at the Icelandic Canadian Club of
Edmonton’s Leifur Eiriksson Celebration.
“Ironically, I had never thought about
Viking women before.”
The next day, driven by the desire to
learn more about Viking culture, the
American dancer-actress headed to the
New York Public Library. There she came
across another inspiration—Helge
Ingstad’s book, Land Under the Pole Star,
which richly depicts the landscape of
Greenland. “I adore this book,” said
Lindbergh, noting that the Vikings were
the most technologically advanced culture
of their time and a force for cultural trans-
formation. “I discovered a rich society,
poets, thinkers, philosophers even.”
So began a lengthy quest that led
Lindbergh all the way to Greenland and
culminated in in the 2007 publication of her
first novel, now available in a 450-page
paperback edition. The Thrall’s Tale has
been praised as “an epic debut” by
Publishers Weekly and “a deeply imagina-
tive and moving tale” by such luminaries as
Gretel Ehrlich, author of This Cold
Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.
In writing The Thrall’s Tale,
Lindbergh says her goal was to portray the
majesty of Viking life, in particular a story
of Viking life that had not yet been told—
that of its women. To do so, she set the
novel in Viking Greenland in A.D. 985,
focusing on three women: Katla, a slave or
“thrall” whose Irish mother was seized by
Vikings; Thorbjorg, a prophetess who
practises the pagan Norse religion; and
Bibrau, the silent, vindictive child of a hor-
rific rape of Katla by her master’s son.
Lindbergh follows the lives of these