Thorbjorn Vifilsson born in Iceland.
Harald dies. Succeeded by Eric Bloody-Axe.
939
Hakon the Good expells Eric and Gunhild from Norway. They emigrate to England to rule under King Athelstan.
Athelstan dies. Eric no longer welcome in England.
Thule Inuit migrate east from Alaska, eventually reaching Greenland. ("To the archeologist, spending his nights alone on the gravel floor of a windblown tent, the excavation of a Thule winter house is an exercise in envy.")
Aud the Deep-Minded settles in Iceland; gives land to her ex-slave Vifil.
Althing begun in Iceland.
All good farmland claimed in Iceland.
Saga Age in Iceland.
?945
Eirik the Red bom in Jaederen,
Norway.
?954
Eric slain in Northumberland. Gunhild escapes to Denmark with her sons.
?960
Denmark becomes a Christian country.
390 ?961
?963
??
?965
?970
?975
pp
?978
pp
?980
?981
?981-3 ?985
?986 ?995
?997
The Ice-Shirt
Eric's sons kill King Hakon the Good. The eldest, King Harald Greyskin, takes the throne of Norway.
Eirik the Red is outlawed and sails to Iceland.
Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir born in Iceland.
Eirik the Red marries Thjodhild Jorundsdottir; moves from Drangar to Haukadale.
Leif, Thorstein and Thorvald born to Eirik and Thjodhild.
Eirik is outlawed from Haukadale.
Gudrid marries Thorir.
Eirik's bastard daughter Freydis born.
Eirik is outlawed from all Iceland for three years.
Eirik explores Greenland.
Eirik settles Greenland. East Bygd established.
Bjarni Herjolfsson sights Vinland. West Bygd established.
In Norway, King Harald Greyskin is slain in a sea battle with Gold Harald. Succeeded by Hakon Jarl the Great.
Terrible famine in Iceland, in which people eat ravens and foxes and kill the old.
In Norway, King Olaf Trygvesson succeeds King Hakon Jarl the Great.
King Olaf sends Thangbrand the missionary to Iceland.
A CHRONOLOGY OF THE FIRST AGE OF VINLAND
391
?999
??
1000
P1002-3
?1004 ?1005 ?1006
■?■? ?1007
?1008
?1009 ?1010
?1014
?1015-30
1032
Leif Eiriksson seduces Thorgunna the witch in the Hebrides.
Freydis Eiriksdottir marries Thorvard of Gardar.
Thorgunna sails to Frodis-Water in Iceland and dies. Her ghost haunts the country.
Leif discovers Vinland, rescues Gudrid and Thorir from a shipwreck.
Thorvald explores Vinland and dies in battle with Micmac Indians.
Gudrid marries Thorstein.
Thorstein dies.
Gudrid marries the Icelander Thorfmn Karlsefni.
Eirik the Red dies.
Gudrid and Freydis sail to Vinland with their husbands and followers. Accompanying Freydis are the Icelandic brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi.
Battles between the settlers and Micmac Indians.
Freydis murders the brothers.
Afraid of Indians, the settlers return to Greenland. Death of Bjarni Grimolfsson in the Greenland Sea.
Iceland becomes a Christian
country.
Greenland becomes a Christian
country.
King Eirik Jarl succeeds King
Olaf by the royal expedient
of killing him.
In Ireland, 7,000 Vikings slain at battle of Clontarf
In Norway, King Olaf the Saint succeeds King Eirik Jarl.
Icelanders pass a law mandating banishment for witchcraft.
The Ice-Shirt
77
1060
?1100
?1127
1385
In Greenland, Inuit boy, Angangujungoaq, kidnapped by blond, blue-eyed giants.
Jon Finsson in Flatey, Iceland.
Bjorn the Crusader (Bjarni Einarsson) saves two Greenland Inuit children from drowning on a skerry; when he sails for Iceland without them, they kill themselves.
In Sweden, sacrificial hanging abolished at Grove of Uppsala. (Some sources date this 200 years earlier.)
Sweden becomes a Christian country.
Landnamabok (Book of Settlements) written in Iceland.
Islendingabok (Book of Icelanders) written in Iceland.
Norway annexes Greenland.
Norway annexes Iceland.
Norway cedes Hebrides and Isle of Man to Scotland.
Last recorded visit of Greenlanders to Markland.
Iceland falls under Danish rule.
A CHRONOLOGY OF THE FIRST AGE OF VINLAND
393
1389
1400
1410
1468-9
1492
?1500
Inuit attack the East Bygd, killing eighteen and enslaving two.
Last ship from Greenland to Iceland.
The Norse are now extinct in Greenland.
Nicolo Zcno visits the monasteries of Greenland, reports the Norsemen firmly in control.
Norway mortgages Orkneys, Shetlands to Scotland.
Columbus discovers Vinland.
?1540
Jon the Greenlander, a whaler, discovers the frozen corpse of a Norseman in Greenland.
1576
1577
First voyage of Martin Frobisher to the Arctic.
On his second voyage, Frobisher visits the Greenland Inuit.
1587
?1600
John Davis sails to the Arctic in hopes of finding a Northwest Passage.
Modern Inuit culture present in the Arctic.
1605
Captain Gotske Lindenau begins kidnapping Inuit.
1615
William Baffin searches for a Northwest Passage.
1721
The Danish missionary Hans Egede sets sail for Greenland to convert the Norsemen. Finding none, he turns to the Inuit instead. Amortortak's influence begins to wane.
1801
Althing abolished in Iceland.
1894
The Ice-Shirt
1944
I960
1977 1984
1987
Danish report published of a woman's skeleton found beneath the ruins of a cathedral in Gardar, Greenland.
Seth Pilsk the Thin explores Baffin Island.
William the Blind explores Iceland, Greenland and Baffin Island.
Rev. Silas T. Rand's compilation of Micmac legends published. Rand reports that knowledge of Kluskap has almost died out.
Iceland seizes independence from Denmark.
Dr. Helge Ingstadt discovers Viking ruins at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland.
Greenland gains home rule.
Sources
And a few notes
Note
I
t may be of interest to the reader to know what use I have made of my sources. My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a "SymboHc History" - that is to say, an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the Hteral facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth. - Did the Norsemen, for instance, really come to the New World bearing ice in their hearts? -Well, of course they did not. But if we look upon the Vinland episode as a precursor of the infamies there, of course they did. In this Dream I have done several things which, narrowly speaking, are unjustified - which is to say that I consider them perfectly in order. To begin with, I have conflated the accounts of the Vinland voyages i
n the Tale of the Greenlanders and Eirik's Saga. There are many contradictions in these two sources, so many as to baffle the most ingenious interpreters. My conflation is no more satisfactory than the rest, from a literal standpoint. - Too bad. - Secondly, having been bom in an age of continental drift, I have played tricks with the location of Vinland. The sagas say that Vinland had no frost, but there is frost there now; so for my fabulous Vinland Paradise-that-was I selected Nova Scotia; for my corrupted present-day Vinland I used the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. In fact, given the number of voyages, and the vagueness of the accounts, it is perfectly possible that both of these places were Vinland. - For similar reasons, in describing the Greenland that Freydis saw I used the harsh region of Auyuttuq, in Baffin Island (Slab-Land); while the Greenland of the Skraelings, the real Greenlanders, was always Greenland. Landscapes are as we see them, and what was hell for the Norsemen was a happy heaven-haven for the Skraelings. Here one walks the proverbial tightrope, on one side of which Hes slavish literalism; on the other, self-indulgence. Given these dangers, it seemed wise to have this source list, so as to provide those who desire with easy means of corroborating or refuting my imagined versions of things, to monitor my originality, and to give leads to primary sources and other useful texts for interested non-specialists such as myself I have tried to do this as fully as seemed practical. For two explanatory cases of my method, see the extended notes under "Wearing the Bear-Shirt", pages 390-91 below. - All quotations, excerpts and epigraphs in the text, by the way, are genuine.
Tfie IcC'Sdirt
Ice-Text: The Book of Flatey
page 7 For equation of AmoRTORTAK with Gunnbjorn's Peak, see Bernardine Bailey, Greenland in Pictures (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Oak Tree Press, 1973), p. 2; and with Ingolfsfjeld, Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, introduction to The Vinland Sagas (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 17.
page 7 "... those to whom truth is more important than beauty" - As Paul B. Du Chaillu remarks, "The spade has developed the history of Scandinavia" {The Viking Age [New York: Scribner, 1889], p. 2).
page 9 For names of Icelandic flowers, see Askell Love, Flora of Iceland (Reykjavik: Almenna Bokafelagid, 1983), pp. 206-7, 194, 158, 198.
The Ice-Shirt
page 14 Professor of Maps epigraph - R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven: Yale, 1965), p. 171.
page 14 Wainwright Eskimo epigraph - Richard K. Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Ice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 129.
Wearing the Bear-Shirt
page 17 Greenland epigraph -Jan Welzl, The Quest for Polar Treasures, trans. M. and
R. Weatherall (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933), p. 269. page 17 Thord Kolbeinsson - Snorri Sturlusson, Heimskringla, Part One: The Olaf
Sagas, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Laing (1844), rev. Jacqueline Simpson, MA (London:
Dent, Everyman, 1964), 1.XXIII. page 18 King Dag - Snorri Sturlusson, Heimskringla, Part Two: Sagas of the Norse
Kings, trans. Samuel Laing (1844), rev. Peter Foote, MA (London: Dent, Everyman,
1975), l.XXl, pp. 19-20. page 19 Alric and Eric - ibid., 1.XXIII, pp. 21-2. page 19 King On - ibid., l.XXIX, pp. 25-6. In some translations. King On becomes
King Aun. page 22 King Ingjald the Evil-Worker - ibid., l.XXXVII-XLIV, pp. 31-7.
page 22 In my account of these events I have been relatively conservative and literal. In the Heimskringla appear a few lines about the war-games between Ingjald and Alf
One year there was a great assembly of people at Upsal, and King Yngvar had also come there with his sons. Alf, King Yngvar's son, and Ingjald, King Onund's son, were there - both about six years old. They amused themselves with child's play, in which each should be leading on his army. In their play Ingjald found himself not as strong as Alf, and was so vexed that he almost cried. His foster-brother Gautvid came up, led him to his fosterfather Svipdag the Blind, and told him how ill it appeared that he was weaker and less manly than Alf, King Yngvar's son. Svipdag replied that it was a great shame. The day after Svipdag took the heart of a wolf, roasted it on a stick, and gave it to the king's son Ingjald to eat, and from that time he became a most ferocious person, and of the worst disposition.
This of course is the foundation for the whole story, upon which I have built. The suggestion that Ingjald's father despises him, the hunting of the wolf's heart by Gautvid, and Ingjald's ravishment of his bride are all "interpolated," the first and last because they make emotional sense and the other to color the story. The burning of the Kings in Upsal and the alliance between King Granmar and King Hjorvard-Viking are described in the Heimskringla in much more detail than I have given (but, as always with these old sources, sans any detailed exposition of feeling and motive; and I have of course manufactured as many details as I omitted). The Heimskringla mentions that Gautvid and Svipdag the Blind were killed in Ingjald's war on those Kings; I have used that bare fact to construct the scene of their end, with Ingjald's abandonment of them, and their own last words. There is no assessment of either of their characters in the Heimskringla, but it seems to me that I have taken no impermissible liberties here, since we do know that Svipdag gave Ingjald the wolf's heart, and he thus takes on a pimpish character; as for Gautvid, once I made the decision to send him off to get the wolf's heart, he became brave, and had to end bravely. 0( Ingjald's daughter Aasa the Heimskringla says only that "she was like her father in disposition," but her return to her father after murdering her husband, and her resolution with her father to die in flames, made it clear to me that the relationship was claustrophobically abnormal; hence my "interpolation" of the incest, and of the indestructible wolf's hearts beating in the coals.
page 29 King Halfdan the Black - ibid., 2.V-IX, pp. 46-50.
page 29 King Harald Fairhair - ibid., 2.vn-VIII, pp. 48-9; 3.I-XLV, pp. 51-82.
page 30 My life of King Harald Fairhair is based on the little we know from the Heimskringla. Almost nothing is given about his early life. The whole idea of the Bear-Shirt (and, for that matter, the Blue-Shirt, the Ice-Shirt, etc.) is an imagined one. The point of Harald is that he was a unifier and consolidator; therefore, if the wars of petty chieftains prior to his reign can be represented
as bear-wars, Harald's war, and therefore his character, must be represented as something else, something that brings the bears to an end. Most hkely such a person, not being a bear, would feel inadequate in a world of bears. Hence the bad feeling between Harald and his father (and in fact Snorri says that "he was much beloved by his mother, but less so by his father"); hence, therefore, the father's decision to hide the Bear-Shirt, and Harald's fruitless search for it in later life (with the suggestions of impotence); hence also Harald's dream of the bears as a boy (and by using that device I can also introduce other real bear-Kings). As for the disappearing Yule-feast, that, and young Harald's flight with the Lapp, are mentioned in the Heimskringla, but the journey itself, the magician's tricks, Lapland and the reappearance of the feast are all "interpolated." That Gyda refuses to be Harald's concubine until he conquers Norway is given in the original; her reason, that she suspects him of being emasculate, un-beared, is a logical supposition based on the Bear-Shirt mythology I have constructed. The tale of Herlaug and Rollaug is expanded and more prettily told than the original, but in essence it differs from it very Httle. I have made the Flight of the Earls into a single apocryphal incident, when actually, of course, it was a number of episodes over a long period of emigration. It was already stylized in the Heimskringla, and many other accounts of individual settlements are given in various sagas listed below. The death-scene of King Harald is once again totally invented as was required to put paid to my era of the Bear-Shirt.
page 33 Lapland - From various nineteenth-century memoirs of travel.
page 37 King Herlaug and King Rollaug - Heimskringla^ Part Two: Sagas of the Norse Kings, 3.VIII, p. 55.
page 39 For more details on the se
ttlement of the islands, see Orkneyingja Saga, Fcereyingja Saga, the beginning of Laxdcela Saga, and Landnamahok. In his book Ancient Emigrants: A History of the Norse Settlement of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), A.W. Brogger writes (pp. 5-6): "The Norwegian emigration to the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Hebrides covered, broadly speaking, two generations, between 780 and 850, when the great period of early settlements [in Norway] to all intents and purposes ended. During the same period an important contingent also crossed to Man and Ireland. This first wave . . . was quickly followed by another, to the Faroes and Iceland. This period fell in the reign of King Harald the Fairhaired, between the years 870 and 930."
page 41 "Then King Harald sailed southwards ..." - Sagas of the Norse Kings, 3. XXII, p. 66.
page 44 There is, of course, nothing to suggest that the real King Harald became a resigned or impotent King once he had achieved his end. I have felt free to change his character to suit me.
page 45 Eric Bloody-Axe and the witch Gunhild - Sagas of the Norse Kings, 3. XXXIV, pp. 74-5. Gunhild appears in Njal's Saga as a nymphomaniac whose jealousy and witchcraft helps bring about the burning aHve of Njal and his family.
page 45 Quoted summation of King Eric Bloody-Axe - ibid., 3.XLVI, p. 83.
page 45 Eilif Grisly - Ari the Learned, The Book of the Settlements of Iceland {ca. 1110?), trans. Rev. T. Ellwood, MA, Rector of Torver (Kendal: T. Wilson, 1898), p. 74.
page 46 "the great Macrobius" - That is to say, Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius {fl. AD 399-422); cf his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.
page 47 Speculum Regale on glacier-breath - The King's Mirror [Speculum Regale]/ Konungs Skuggsjd, trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1917), part XX (p. 153). Henceforth, passages from this work will be sourced directly in the text wherever possible, with the part appearing in Roman numerals, followed by a period, followed by the page number in Arabic.
page 48 The Ice-Mountain in the Swedish forest - Actually Mount Shasta, CaHfornia, in April 1987.
page 49 Kuae6i af Loga i Vallarahli6 epigraph - Adapted from Jacqueline Simpson, trans.. The Northmen Talk: A Choice of Tales from Iceland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 277 ("Logi of Vallarahlid").
page 49 The careers of Gunhild and her sons - Heimskringla, Part Two: Sagas of the Norse Kings, 4.I-V, pp. 84-8; X, pp. 90-91; XX, pp. 98-9; XXII-XXVI, pp. 100-103; XXVIII-XXXII, pp. 104-11; and 5.I-V, pp. 112-17; 6.I-XIII, pp. 118-26. I have tampered sHghtly with the facts as Snorri presents them.
The Ice-Shirt Page 43
