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

of terrible famine in Iceland, an expedition of some twenty-five ships had set sail for a vast and empty land that lay even further west: ‘Greenland’ as it had been named by an early prospector, somewhat disingenuously, for all its eastern flank stood barricaded by colossal walls of gleaming ice. On the western coast, however, along the margins of jagged fjords, there were indeed patches of grass, and even meadows, to be found; and it was on these, at an unimaginable distance from the fjords of their ancestral homeland, that the settlers from Iceland, some 450 of them in all, had sought to put down their roots.

‘A house of your own, however mean, is good.’ Nothing better illustrated the passionate intensity with which the Northmen clung to this conviction than their scattered presence, by the side of the bleak immensity of the western ocean, on the windswept shores of Greenland. Their new home may have been teeming with wildlife, but it was in almost all other ways barren of resources; and so it was not surprising that some of the colonists, in their quest for timber, above all, should have continued to strike out west. Over the succeeding years, such expeditions would bring back reports of yet further islands, including one, named ‘Vinland’ by those who claimed to have discovered it, on which grapes were said to grow wild, ‘producing excellent wine’: a fabulous story. Perhaps, as the tall tales told by the Greenlanders suggested, there did indeed lie strange lands along the westernmost limits of the world; but if so, then they might just as well not have existed at all, for it was clearly out of the question to settle such fearsomely distant isles. Some few of the more lunatic among the explorers, it would subsequently be claimed, had made the attempt— but their enterprises had failed. Vinland – if it truly existed – was a stepping stone too far, that much was evident. The settlers’ lines of communication, drawn out as they had been over many thousands of miles, across savage and storm-swept seas, a whole world away from Scandinavia, had been stretched to breaking point.

For even the Icelanders, clinging to the habitable margins bf their harsh and smouldering isle, were dependent for their ultimate survival on links with the lands they had left behind. Like the Greenlanders, they had to look abroad for timber, let alone the gold and silver that were the essential marks of status for any self-respecting chieftain. As a result, captains from Iceland were regular visitors to the harbours of the North Way – where their presence did not go unnoted by Olaf Trygvasson. Neither – a standing provocation to the self-appointed warrior of Christ – did the fact that many of them remained ruggedly, even defiantly pagan. Trygvasson, who was hardly the man to find his fingers around a windpipe and not apply a little squeeze, duly announced his kingdom closed to all heathen traders. Those already present in the North Way were arrested and taken as hostages. The news, brought back to Iceland, caused its inhabitants predictable dismay and consternation. Even at a distance of 750 miles, it appeared, the shadow of a warlord such as Trygvasson could reach out across the ocean to menace them. Perhaps there really was no escaping kings.

Yet rather than admit this, and submit to all they had sought to escape, the Icelanders were prepared to countenance any expedient; even to embrace the faith of Christ, if that was what it would take. Not on Trygvasson’s terms, however. Rather, they would do it as free men, gathered together from all across the island, meeting in the Thingvellir, the rough-grassed plain that was the site of their assembly, and the cockpit of their self-governance. Ever since 985, the task of presiding there as the Icelanders’ ‘law-speaker’, the arbitrator of all their disputes, had belonged to a chieftain famed for his powers of foresight by the name of Thorgeir Thorkelsson: a pagan, to be sure, but respected even by those who had already begun to worship Christ. All the Icelanders assembled on the Thingvellir, Christian as well as pagan, duly agreed to accept his judgement on what the faith of Iceland should be; and Thorgeir accepted the fateful charge. ‘He lay down and spread his cloak over himself, and lay all that day and the next night, nor did he speak a word.’ Then abruptly, on the following morning, he sat up and ordered the Icelanders to accompany him to the great Law Rock – and from there he delivered them his verdict. Some customs, Thorgeir pronounced, were to continue unchanged. Men were still to be permitted to eat horseflesh; to expose unwanted children; to offer sacrifices, provided that it was done in private. In every other respect, however, they were to submit themselves to the laws of the new religion. Whether in cold water or warm, all were to be baptised. The inhabitants of Iceland were to become a Christian people.

Such a judgement, for Thorgeir himself, must have been a painful one to deliver. What had he glimpsed, lying curled up beneath his cloak, not eating or drinking or stirring, that had led him to arrive at it? We can never know for certain; but it is evident enough, Iceland being what it was, a haunted and uncanny land, where mortals tended to regard themselves as mere interlopers, that Thorgeir’s aim had been to pass into the dimensions of the otherworldly and to look for guidance there. Not all the spirits that populated the island were malign. If Thorgeir’s own visions remain unknown to us, then there are hints, nevertheless, in an eerie story told of a black-hearted king and of his fiendish attempt to subdue the free men of Iceland, of what the law- speaker might conceivably have seen during his dreams. This tyrant, it was reported, had commissioned a necromancer to swim ahead of his fleet in the form of a whale; but