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About our continent in the days of
THE SUN
making Explicit
many * REVELATIONS *
concerning Trees and Rivers,
Ancestors,
ETERNITIES
Vikings, Crow-Fathers,
Trespasses, Executions, Assassinations, Massacres,
Whiripooi - Lives)
Love-Souls and Monster-Souls,
Dca(CWor(ds
Wherein we made FOUNTAINS OUT OF PROLEHILLS;
Voyages Across ihe Frozen Sea
Told COMPLETE w^ith Accounts of Various TREACHEROUS ESCAPES,
Wfiite Sweet Ciover^
GOLDENROD &
* The Fern Gang *
As Gathered From Diverse Sources
by
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
{Known in This World as "WILLIAM THE BLIND")
For Janice Kong-Ja Ryu
and
Patti Simmons R.I.P.
Veronica Compton #276077
. . . just as Europe and Asia received in days gone by their names from Women.
Cosmographice Introductio (1507)
Pr^ace
s
MOULD I dream one dream or seven? - Anyone would prefer a single afternoon fancy to grease his heels, so that easy wings might flower there, and then he could play between blue skies and rooftops, but as I could never fly, having put on the Ice-Shirt, the Crow-Shirt and the Poison-Shirt, there is no hope in frivolous ambition. Any shirt, be it of ever so many colors, is but a straitjacket, which is why I see no beauty, nor hear of any, except among the naked. The clouds are as hard as stones, and we all dream one black dream. - I, however, will now dream seven, to which correspond the Seven Ages of WiNELAND THE GOOD. Each Age was worse than the one before, because we thought we must amend whatever we found, nothing of what was being reflected in the ice-mirrors of our ideas. Yet we were scarcely blameworthy, any more than the bacifli which attack and overcome a hving body; for if history has a purpose,* then our undermining of trees and tribes must have been good for something. - Be it so.
Readers are warned that the sketch-maps and boundaries here are provisional, approximate, unreliable and wrong. Nonetheless, I have furnished them, for as my text is no more than a pack of lies they can do no harm.
William the Blind San Francisco
* If not, then there is nothing wrong with inventing one.
am grieved that the book and many other writings on these subjects have, I don't know how, come sadly to ruin; for, being but a child when they fell into my hands, I, not knowing what they were, tore them in pieces, as children will do, and sent them all to ruin, a circumstance which I cannot now recall without the greatest sorrow . . .
NicoLO THE Younger, The
Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroenlanda, Estotilanda, & Icaria; made by Two Brothers of the Zeno Family: viz.: Messire Nicolo The Chevalier, and Messire Antonio (Venice, 1558)
I
mst DR€J!m
Cbelce-Sbirt
The Diverse Dangers and Discomforts of William the
Blind (Pangnirtung Fjord, Baffin Island, 1987) 11
The Dominions of the Bear-Kings in the Days before
Blue-Shirt (Norway and Sweden, ca. 900) 28
The Earls' Isles 42
Northwest Iceland in the Days of Eirik the Red 59 "'.
2
Greenland (1987) 80 ]
Dwellers in the East Bygd {ca. %-ca. 1010) 191
The World of the Vinland Voyage: After Sigurdur
Stefansson 202
Baffin Island: A Highly Unreliable Sketch-Map
(1984) 206
Markland and Vinland 217
Vinland in the Frost Years (Labrador and
Newfoundland, 1987) 338
I
I
Ice-Cext
Tfte Book ofTicAey 1382 A HistoricaC Note
T
he story of the demon Blue-Shirt (known in His native land as AMORTORTAK) is hinted at in a variety of codices, being revealed nowhere and everywhere, like cabalistic doctrine. Exphcation, therefore, remains a task of almost celestial difficulty - a pity for me, as I could otherwise be drumming my fmgers and peering admiringly through my window-bars at the driveway. But I must do my best. - In but two sources, then, has anyone found direct mention of this LORD of our secret worship: the Grcetilendinga Saga, known in English as the Tale of the Greenlanders {ca. 1190), and its companion Eirik's Saga {ca. 1260) - and in both of these He appears in the form of a great glacier-mountain, which some are disposed to equate with Gunnbjorn's Peak (at 12,500 feet the highest point in Greenland), and others with the lesser glacier-tower of Ingolfsfjeld, near Angmagssalik. No traces of demonic origin were reported by the expedition that first scaled the former's summit in 1935; nor is Ingolfsfjeld anything more than a sky-colored eye of ice, gazing dully out upon the sea. - Where then is Blue-Shirt? - Why, nowhere and everywhere. - History being nothing more than a long list of regrettable actions, such equivocation should not surprise us. But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by those to whom truth is more important than beauty.
But what if, as in our case, it is winter, so that the Sun has gone away and the grass lies deep beneath the ice?
Well, as on a darkly moonless night the sensible course may be to become a part of the darkness; so here we may learn to conceive Nothing from nothing. Proceeding gropingly upwards, then, against a frozen night-cliff of
twelfth- and thirteenth-century words, we must ascend many dark chimneys to attain the greater darkness; here the two sagas brace each other; for they are our chmbing-legs, left and right, Freydis and Gudrid, Bjarni and Leif; and so up the Ice-Mountain we dully trudge, as if we did not even know that the eyes decompose first, that arsenic is almost tasteless, that younger bodies take longer to putrefy! - But central to our preoccupations must be Freydis's axe, and though, being double-bladed, it Hes gleamingly across both accounts, only in the Grcenlendinga Saga does it take white Hves as well as red. And the Grcenlendinga Saga appears in that great graveyard of tales, the Book of Flatey.
The Flateyjarbok is so named because it was commissioned by Jon Finnsson, a wealthy farmer on the isle of Flatey, in Breidafjord. (The name of the scribe who did the work is, of course, lost.) The first page was begun in 1382; the last was finished thirteen years later. - In the meantime, Blue-Shirt's weather became more severe in Greenland, and two troll-children died there for love of Bjorn the Crusader, as will be told. -Jon Finnsson's descendants cherished the book and kept it in the family for nearly three hundred years, until one of them (moved, no doubt, not by coercion, but rather by piety and true regard) presented it to the Bishop at Skalholt - a place which, though ice-green on the atlas-page, must in reaUty have been as garden-green as the grass over corpses, for RELIGION grew there, and it had become a most flourishing diocese, as Leif the Lucky's lover foreknew at the turn of the millennium when she asked to be buried there between its river-bends. (Poor Thorgunna! Though she was a Hebridean witch, still she could not make Leif's heart bleed, for it was impervious in its Blue Shirt. Her tale too I will tell.) -When the Danes acquired Iceland in 1380, they necessarily, by the rule of metonymy, acquired the unwritten Flateyjarbok as well, and so in due time the Bishop sent the manuscript on to the Royal Library in Copenhagen. There it stayed for another three centuries, unmolested by the Danish Kings, who, between the gold crowns that encumbered their heads and the gold crowns that stuffed their purses, found their Hves to be quite full enough. (They had annexed Greenland, too, but they cared not a whit about Blue-Shirt.) So the Kings ate smoked fish and prayed. - In 1944, when Denma
rk was distracted by German troubles, the Icelanders helped themselves to their sovereignty, and so the decaying mass of vellum of which we speak returned across the sea. It IS now under glass in Reykjavik.
What is there to say about this taUsman? Well, it is happily not so decomposed as the original NjaVs Saga, whose greasy tissue of black leaves most resembles a squashed crow's carcass. We read that one hundred and thirteen calfskins were required to make it - a fact singular in its uselessness, but certainly believable, for the page-height of this book is from my wrist to my elbow, and the margins are sumptuous. Each vellum sheet is brown with age, and upon this brownness is a sea of brown ink, stained with islands of darker decay, like Flatey itself, which is a flat island of grass and orange lichens and stones, where hunks of sheep-wool He on the grass like clouds, and the sheep themselves are so thick with it as to resemble haystacks. The lambs crunch grass very watchfully, but the old ewes and rams do not look up at your approach because nobody has ever hurt them and they do not understand the meaning of the sheep-skulls that he in the grass they graze on. - The birds, on the other hand, await the worst with hysterical foreknowledge, so that if you venture into their nesting-fields, where the grass is green and then white, as if frosted, thousands of them begin to swoop and scream and flap until their gull-cousins on the rocks offshore are infected with alarm, and sob like babies. (Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? / say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized.) - But these catastrophes are strictly local. The grey sea protects the separate fears and pains from each other. After all, there are so many islands in Breidafjord! Close upon the isle of Flatey, for instance, is gathered a constellation of little isles whose rocky tails wander into the sea; these skerries are sometimes white with birds, who hear not, or care not (I cannot say which) when the Flatey-birds begin to scream of broken eggs. Black-and-white ducks drift serenely around the perimeters of those isles - all low isles, by the way, formed of parallel slabs of rock piled upon each other at a steep angle to the sea; and their ridge-tops are nothing but rocks on rock, with grey and yellow hchens, so that your eye goes less frequently across the water to other low islands than down the mossy, rocky slope you stand on and across the rolling grass to the flowers, so many flowers, more flowers than islands! - for in the spring months of Sowing-Tide and Egg-Tide, Iceland is golden with Arctic poppies in their different races of Melasbl and Steindorssol and Stefdnssol with yellow milksap and white milksap spilling down your fmgers like liquid sunlight; and pink sandworts blossom by the water, and white orchids grow in the mire, and the stones are softly velveted by the Httle purple moss campions; and in the moss-chapters of the Flateyjarbok rise the spring-shoots of initial letters with their long tails and handles; from their cHff-ledges among the words they send down fertile runners, like the f that goes far down into the margin to sprout a red flower pillowed against little deHcate white leaves,
just as a woman's vagina is lovingly pillow^ed by secret fragrant hairs; and a whitc-and-grecn bone-blossom swells its ruffles inside the head of that P that begins the story of how Freydis and Blue-Shirt brought the frost to Vinland; and the words themselves are flower-silhouettes with wriggling dark roots; so that every story-isle is a flower-isle carpeted with ease. . . and every flower-isle is peculiar to itself, although, as I have said, there are uncountable numbers of them in Breidafjord; and the tide comes in and the tide goes out, but the isles remain on the sea-page like all the different stories that crawl letter by perfect letter in the two-column sheets of the Flateyjarbok.
Among these stories, for the reasons given above, I have trapped myself in the Grcenlendinga Saga, which rises like a column of rock in the grey sea between the Saga of King Olaf Trygvesson, among whose skull-cliffs scream gulls and Christian ghosts; and the Saga of King Olaf the Saint, a softer, mossier story generally, although not without eye-gougings or mutilations of hands and feet; by divine right I now command these story-isles to burst into flower! - and if they do not, no matter, for I will seed them with my own imagination: -Upon the rockiest chapters I will plant the moss of my speculations; through the moss my asphodels and orchids will rise, fertilized by that poor dead bundle of a hundred and thirteen calfskins . . .
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n a geographical tradition of northern Europe Vinland came to be located among the mists and ice of the Northern Ocean in Arctic latitudes.
Professor of Maps, 1965
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he ice is like a mean dog. He always waits for you to stop watching him and then he tries to get you.
Wainwright Eskimo, ca. 1964
1
Cbe Changers, on
Haw ihc Bear-Sfiiri was lost, andihc Ice-Shirt wasfoxind
Wearing the Bear-Shirt
ca. 200 - ca. 940
Towards the east... there is a place called the Ice Pass. Through it, they say, there is a way towards Greenland, but I was never there . . .
Jan Welzl, The Quest for Polar Treasures (1933)
I ust as incipient dizziness may be proclaimed by a change in the cadence ^ of running water, so Greenland, being too hard a fact to fall all at once upon the world's endurance, first presented itself by means of secret signs - or so I should write to please you, for what J|is(torp of ®XX Continent could be of interest that did not deal in secrets? - or at least with INTIMATIONS across the sea-bights which none of our northern fathers could readily interpret, being preoccupied of themselves by ungreen pursuits even in summer when the birds sang to the sun for all the long green moss-days; for grandfather-weather was grey weather, cloud-walled tight against the sun's golden tears so that wherever men came, came the thunder of grey armor, the screaming of grey warhorses, "the war-shower of grey arrows" (Thord Kolbeinsson); while in winter men were coldbound, greyhound, watching grey snow sifting down between grey branches, as silver-grey icicles grew long from the roofs of their houses. Snow-mists hemmed the farmsteads in; snow fell grey in the black forests, and north and east the mountains were greyly snowclad. Where the frost-seeds had sprouted grew new trees of ice, whose branches were harder than iron. But there was one tree that gave life, though it rose so high into winter darkness and summery afternoons that we could not understand it: Yggdrasil, the World-Ash, whose third root covered us (the first roofing PiEL, the Queen of the Dead, and the second affording Frost Giants sky in Jotunheim). This
tree was always green, dew-crowned; in its boughs the birds sang to the sun for the long green moss-days. This tree stood green above the Well of Weird. Yet even here there was no peace, for rabbits gnawed at its leaves and branches, and fat serpents gnawed at its roots beneath the earth.
The Bear-Shirt
This appears to me quite natural, but why the condition of our ancestors was so miserably perilous I cannot say, for they were wise enough: - ODIN could call the dead from the earth, and King Dag, between whom and the god Frey were only seven generations, knew the language of the birds. Surely it was not greed; nor could it have been selfish jealousy, for if our ancestors were selfish then what hope is there for us, when we cannot call the dead or converse with birds? - It must have been the wdtchcraft of the Finns, whom everybody blamed for everything in those days. - Lives sought to rule lives; Kings burned Kings sleeping in their houses. What glory there would have been in it, if only they had not been forbidden long since to be Lords of Rainbows and Angels! - They could still, of course, be Kings of Trees if they chose; or Fen-Kings, Snow-Kings, Bear-Kings; in the sagas we read that they were Bear-Kings. Although they did such wickedness that their victims' groans became moss, and their victims' tears became black seeds in the moss that sprouted into blood-slicked saplings, and the saplings grappled into the ear
th with their claw-roots, and thickened and grew into great pain-trees whose black shafts rose to heaven, the Kings, too, suffered, because on becoming bears their hairy shoulders grew so vsdde that they spanned the narrow forest-avenues, so that jagged pain-leaves and grief-leaves tore their flesh as they ran bellowing towards each other, and every leaf was green and fragrant and the light swirled around them. When they stood sniffing in the tree-shadows their faces ran like pigment down a canvas, in correspondence with their liquid desires, so that sometimes they sprouted yellow bear-fangs beneath their beards, and the hair thickened on their cheeks, and then a moment later their skin was grey-green-scaled like tree-bark, and they wept tears of sap; at times they were even men, ruddy-faced with full lips, looking abstractedly at their mismatched hands (one unclawed, the other still velvet-spotted with great black bearpads in which the talons gently curled . . . ) In those times a man might be bom a "wolf of evening," as the Icelanders called him - a bearsark. When his fit came upon him, he howled like a wild beast, foamed at the mouth and gnawed at the iron rim of his shield. Arrows could not kill him; fire could not bum him. So,
too, the Changing-fit came upon the Kings; and they made themselves bears; then, having overborne each other, they knew not how to be discreet, and charged on down their bear-roads, so intoxicated by metamorphosis that they were sure they grew bigger each time they changed their skins. Being heedless of the habits of their serpent-brothers and lobster-cousins, who hide under stones until they are surely hardened in new forms, the Bear-Kings gloated in contemplated cross-sweeps of their great arms across their enemies' faces, gashing and ripping; and as they gloated they lay in the sunlight that shouted so brassily through the trees, and the sun-music rolled from golden horns and lulled the bears to sleep head on paw; then by murder and trickery they were easily undone by others. - Sometimes they undid each other simultaneously, as was the case with the brother-Kings Alric and Eric, each of whom wanted to engorge his twin, and, so nourished, grow for himself a bright double kingship-skin. They went riding, and at the same moment smashed each other's skulls in with their bridles.
The Ice-Shirt Page 1
