Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trygvasson could still not bear to end the conversation, continuing it even as he lay on his furs, late into the night. At last, the old man left him, and the king fell asleep; but his dreams were strange and feverish. Waking up abruptly, he cried out for the stranger again. Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found; and Trygvasson, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape. When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act: for clearly, it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin.

Quite what his own followers thought of their king’s scruples as they watched their supper turn fly-blown out on the dungheap, we are not told. Some, no doubt, would have felt roundly puzzled. A lord with any instinct for self-preservation denied nothing to his retinue. The supply of good things to the men who fought for him, whether beef, or golden armlets, or red cloaks, or coats of mail, was the only sure duty that a leader of Northmen had. Fail in that, and his doom would be swift. Trygvasson, who had never travelled anywhere but wolves and ravens attended on him, who had become the hero of myriad gore-bespattered songs, who had made all the West bleed so that he could bestow its treasures upon his warriors, was certainly not the man to have forgotten this basic truth. The beef he had been obliged to throw out would surely have been replaced with meat stolen or extorted from some other source. His tables would never have been permitted to stand empty. That same evening, no doubt, as his followers feasted in his hall, Trygvasson, the peerless ring-giver, would have scattered gold among them, or else ornamented helmets, or perhaps sword-belts clad in silver, wondrous treasures set to glitter by the blazing fire.

No wonder that the king of the ancient gods had paid him a call. The scene of a great lord sharing plunder with his followers was one well known to delight Odin; and perhaps, as the story ofTrygvasson’s late-night conversation implies, it did indeed require an effort of will for any Northman, even a baptised one, to send the ‘All-father’ on his way. Yet Trygvasson himself, whose entire career had been an exercise in worshipping force, had ultimately not hesitated in his loyalty to Christ — and for much the same reason that his own retinue continued to follow him. Far from cramping his style as a warlord, the Christian God appeared to offer him and all his predatory appetites, all his lust for power and gold, all his relish for combat, devastation and scenes of bloodshed, gratification on a truly awesome scale. As befitted a man so ambidextrous that he could hurl a spear simultaneously from both hands, Trygvasson certainly felt no call to choose between his new religion and his career as a marauder – for the one served to fuel the other. With the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had previously brought to pillaging the English, he now swaggered up and down the North Way, smashing idols, menacing local pagan leaders and forcing conversions at the point of his sword. No matter the resentful mutterings he left behind him in his wake, Trygvasson was not the man for qualms: everything that he did was calculated to redound to his own glory. He had seen enough of Christendom, and of the dignity, the splendour and the wealth of her kings, to know that heathendom offered nothing to compare. Just as Christ reigned supreme over other gods, so would he, as the image of Christ, reign supreme over his countrymen.

His countrymen, not surprisingly, responded with varying degrees of resentment and alarm to this. The arrogance of braggart warlords was nothing new in Scandinavia. Loot pilfered from Christendom had long served to strengthen the mighty, great chiefs as well as kings, at the expense of lesser men. Here, perhaps, rather than in the consequences of excessive rutting, as Christian moralists liked to claim, lay the true reason for the waves of emigration that had sent so many Northmen over the years sailing for Normandy, Britain and Ireland. Some, indeed, had sailed even further west. Beyond the setting of the sun, dotted across ‘the northern region of the earth from where all waters pass down’, adventurers from Scandinavia had discovered a succession of darksome islands, sundered realms formed of glaciers, and mountains, and the occasional expanse of grass. ‘Iceland’, the first- found of these had been named - fittingly enough, it appeared, if the claims of travellers were to be believed, for it was reported that any Icelander who ventured out into the open during wintertime, and then so far forgot himself as to wipe his nose, would find it snapping off, ‘frozen mucus and all’, and be obliged to discard it in the snow. Other inconveniences persisted all the year round, even into the nightless summers: from the troublemaking spirits who had lived in

The world of the Northmen

Iceland since the beginning of time, and would lure the distracted to their ruin amid lava fields or into pools of hissing mud, to the island’s notoriously indigestible food, its seaweed, suet and buttered porridge, which played such hell with the settlers’ stomachs that the glaciers were said to echo to the thundering of their farts.

Such drawbacks notwithstanding, however, Iceland had filled up rapidly in the decades that followed the arrival of the first colonisers, back in the 870s – so much so that by the 930s all the prime farmland had been taken. Men had duly begun to scan around for fresh horizons. In 986, during a time