The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Qupperneq 40

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
characters with a dramatist’s flair, building
each scene with compelling graphic and
historical detail. The role of women in
Viking society, for example, is vividly por-
trayed through Thorbjorg’s right to draw a
boundary demarcating her property in the
new and empty land—a task she hands over
to Katla. “By the Althing law,” Thorbjorg
notes, “a freewoman’s claim is the distance
she may walk with a heifer in the length of
a new spring day.” Yet, as soon becomes
clear, the distance between a freewoman’s
life and that of a thrall is beyond measure-
ment. “Einar owns me,” Katla reflects at
the beginning of the novel, finding solace in
the Christian teachings of her mother to
overcome much hardship, but never able to
fully transcend her history of enslavement.
At the heart of the novel is the conflict-
ing relationship between Thorbjorg and
Bibrau, the mentor and the apprentice into
the ways of the Norse gods, Odin, Frey
and Thor. Herself the daughter of a Viking
priestess, Thorbjorg vows to imbue Katla’s
sullen daughter with all the wisdoms and
secret skills of those pagan beliefs and prac-
tices. From a world of Odin’s fluttering
ravens, wild chants and animal sacrifices to
Katla’s joy at the construction of the first
true Christian church she has ever seen, the
novel spans not only two spiritual worlds
but the gaping emotional chasms in
between.
Yet it is the theme of freedom and
enslavement, so integral to the novel, that
provides its most potent insights and most
strikingly holds up a mirror to our present
world. “Freedom?” says one of
Thorbjorg’s slaves. “Had it once, and for it
was harder beaten and far worse crook’d
by as many men as ever menaced you with
lustful glances.” For her part, the imperious
Thorbjorg declares that “we are all slaves.”
We are reminded once again that freedom
can be no match for the iron bonds of the
familiar and the routine.
Lindbergh’s success in evoking the
majesty of Viking life, however, is attained
not only through her intensely rendered
scenes but also through her surprisingly
fluid language and sumptuous historical
detail. Although she does not read or speak
Icelandic, Lindbergh combed translations
of Eirik’s Saga and Scandinavian folklore,
to name only a few sources, and admits that
she sometimes invented words, “or at least
used existing ones in unorthodox ways.”
As many authors do, she often read aloud
as she wrote, working to achieve unusual
syntax, alliteration and other elements to
create a layered and archaic effect. “Comes
the ship ashore,” she writes with a simplic-
ity that is as powerful as it is fresh. “It is
bare and creaking. All its crew look
stunned, a-fright and weary, weaving
through the waves.”
As is the case with the best historical
novels, Lindbergh chose to take the leap
from known facts into the unknown in
crafting The Thrall’s Tale. Although she
consulted with numerous Norse archeolo-
gists and scholars to inform the novel, the
main characters are “at most a footnote in
the well-recorded history of the Norse,”
she says. The Vinland Sagas recount the
journey of 25 ships and 400 settlers from
Breidafjord, Iceland, to Greenland in A.D.
985, with Eirik the Red leading this venture
to the distant, unclaimed land he had dis-
covered three years earlier. Eirik, as most
Icelandic Canadian readers will be aware,
gave the new land its appealing name to
make it more attractive to prospective fol-
lowers.
The Norse Greenland settlements con-
tinued for almost five hundred years, sus-
tained by a climatic anomaly that brought
warmer-than-average temperatures. There
the newcomers established small isolated
settlements. “Subsistence was never easy in
Greenland,” Lindbergh says, noting that
the settlements slowly diminished until the
onset of the Little Ice Age in the early four-
teenth century. By the time the Norwegian
priest Ivar Bardarsson arrived in the mid-
fourteenth century, he found “nobody,
either Christians or heathens, only some
wild cattle and sheep.” The Thule hunters,
who had arrived from the high Artie, out-
lasted the Norse and became the ancestors
of Greenland’s Inuit people.
The conversion of the Greenlanders to
Christianity is not well known, so
Lindbergh based many of her assumptions
on Iceland’s conversion, which occurred
through a vote at the Althing of A.D. 1000.