The Ice-Shirt
Page 39
L'Anse-axix-Mcadows^ Newfoundiand 1987
You should go to south Greenland. So beautiful! Trees higher than my head!
Greenlander (1987)
A
t L'Anse-aux-Meadows there are no trees. Or so it seems at first until you find them, green and almost lush, tucked away behind the ridges. They are not tall. The trees are so scarce that on the ridgetops they might be mistaken for men. - The sun in late afternoon best illuminates thoughts which are melancholy. What takes root on this great cold plain of historical remembrance, with its snowdrifts and cold hard outcroppings, at which the sea works sullenly? - Nothing but trees grown bad and grey; and seagulls, icebergs, half-dead grass. The rest is buried or blown away. - A little to the south, where Gudrid and Karlsefni once sailed to Marvel Strands, the grass, now brownish-grey, is pocked with broad shallow lakes to whose margins still cling snowdrifts on this first day of June, 1987. Then in places the grass begins to give way to stones. From time to time the waist-high trees and tuckamores return, as does the grass, shy between ever wider snowdrifts, but the rocky pavement becomes more and more in evidence, until the whole of the Great Northern Peninsula seems to be a hard flat road to Jotunheim. Markland is a blue smudge across the sea, patched with snow; and ahead there are two blue mountains with snow between. The snow glows white, even through closed eyes. - Sometimes on a hot dry day in southern California, shiny water-mirages will appear in the freeway's dark bends. Here there are cold-mirages in dark white bands on the highway. The sky is grey, and the grass waves in frigid breezes. - Farther south still, where Thorvald Eiriksson lies buried at Cross-Ness, grave-robbers and other archeologists wdll see a lone blue island, the usual blue island looking cold
The Ice-Shirt
in the morose Atlantic, which rubs its slimy hands against the long white slabs of granite in distant Nova Scotia, which is halfway to the equator; dear old Nova Scotia with its grey seas, its white rocks and its white lighthouses. On summer days a quiet breeze blows, and laundry hangs behind the tall narrow-roofed houses with brick chimneys, the houses blue and white and yellow, whose windows gaze upon the blue rivers in the grass, and here and there stands a tall maple tree. Towns have sprung up in windy meadows of camomile and dandelion. The grass is green and sometimes white, as if it were salty from the breath of sea-churches, whose arched windows and tall
LABRADOR
EAT SACPfD ISlANP
i^L'ANSt- A;x-1^ 6ADO W 5
THt VV/I^ECK OF '1-7
vinland ^n Tme frost Xears (m?)
clock-towers guard graveyards - for the traveler in Nova Scotia is certain to pass at least a dozen graveyards a day - to say nothing of those habitations of the living dead, the Indian reservations, with their mean houses set into rainy hillsides, the Skraeling boys riding their bikes round and round in the dirt, the Skraeling men and women, broad-faced and dark, walking along the road to nowhere - to say nothing of the cheap squat livegraves at Millbrook Reserve with their rickety steps and their warped screen doors; the church built like a red teepee, the craft shop that was closed, and then the highway going on into the drizzle - to say nothing of that great monument to the
Skraelings, the MicMac Mall - to say nothing of the memorializing going on in the very capital, so that, looking out the window of O'Carroll's Restaurant at the view, past the gleaming brass window-bar and between the curtains, whose floral patterns resemble dried mushrooms on velvet, you might hear two businessmen behind you discussing the commercial climate of Halifax, and one finally said, "Well, it's definitely becoming a big city. So is there any street violence here?", and the other said, "Oh, no no no no. Although I did have an Indian once ..." - and the other said, "Oh yes yes yes yes.''
I arrived at closing time. The road to the Visitor Center was already sealed off, so I walked around the barricades. There wasn't a soul in sight as far as the eye could see. The plain was brown and black; the sea was grey. The little parking lot was empty; the Visitor Center on its rise was like a dead space station, and the fishing village half a mile to the north was also still. An iceberg floated in the Atlantic. - A long walkway of elevated planks led fi-om the parking lot onto the tundra. Two birds swooped. As yet I had seen no sign of the ruins. The walkway went up a little rise, where the wind was gusting fiercely, and I saw two grey lakes, the water in each rippling and flowing like a river fi-om the north wind. Could one of these be the place where Helgi and Finnbogi had lived? The lake water was very clear. Close up, it appeared brown. Under the water were reddish stones. In the middle was a sharp boulder like a little islet, against which the water leaped up sharply in wind-whitecaps. The sky was grey and blue and white. A gull-feather lay fluttering; gull-down blew in the wind ... The rise was soft with moss, hard with rocks pushing urgently through it like tattletale graves. The rocks were orange and black and white with lichens. The tundra was soft. It was brown and green and lichen-white. The springy bushes had tiny leaves. Sitting there, I could finally see the turf house like a brown grass helmet on the plain below, then the white houses of the village, and then, by a dark island, the white iceberg behind everything . . . Just a little off to the left, land-black and snow-white in the mist, was Great Sacred Island, just in front of which (if you look through the binoculars) can be seen the hull of the cargo fi-eighter that was shipwrecked there in 1947. Two men lost their lives, and the others had to wait three days for help, the weather being so stormy. Was this the mild Isle of Dew on which Leif landed? Could his half-sister have done so much? Can we? I ask again: - Do we carry our landscapes wdth us locked in our ice-hearts,* and can we fit them over what
* "Most ice islands in the Arctic are small," says the CIA's Polar Regions Atlas (1987); "of the more than 100 tabular fragments recorded, only 7 have been large enough to accommodate manned research stations."
was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?
Wearing the Ink-Sfiirt 1235-1988
"You must not strike!" cried Snorri Sturlusson on the night of 22 September 1241 as he hid in his cellar in Iceland, and his assassins hesitated, but their chief repeated, "Strike!", and Snorri repeated, "You must not strike!", and then they killed him; so that later the Norwegian King Hakon could smile and fan himself and say, "If only he had submitted himself to Us, he would not have been so severely treated," and in 1262 Norway annexed Iceland, having digested Greenland a year before, and the ice-darkness fell pink and purple upon the sea-islands, and Vinland was lost forever, although its white birch trees still wave in some sea-breeze, black now in the twilight, and the ice came and the ice came and the ice came, and Blue-Shirt laughed in His high-seat on the Greenland snow-fells, and He laughed in snowy Vinland, and the People of Kluskap were compelled to add to their language the words Medooebook' (hard winter) and Tegebook' (cold winter) and so many more; but Snorri had written about the days when Vinland was WiNELAND THE Good, and a century and a half later, as we know, Jon Finnsson had many stories out of Snorri copied on vellum, and so WiNELAND THE GOOD lives on still and the story lives in the faded brown pages of the Flateyjarbok.
Here ends the
First Dream
In fbelce
1532-1931
Further History of the Greenland Skradin^s 1577-1630
The Greenlanders have had to accustom themselves to many new ways,
includmg self-service stores where they buy most of their necessities.
Bernadine Bailey. Greenland in Pictures (1973)
n
e la Peyriere, who called them Skrellings and Skreglingers, said that they consistently arrested progress. They were the reason that Eirik the Red's colonists had never continued to settle past the Vestrebug. This seems to have been a disappointment to Peyriere, for at that time Greenland was productive of unicorn horn, of which he was very fond.
The English sea-captain, Martin Frobisher, after whom Frobisher Bay in Baffm Island is named, set sail for Greenland m 157
7. When the Skrellings saw his ship, they abandoned their skin tents in a panic. Some hid themselves among the crags. Others, possibly foreseeing the future, threw themselves into the sea. Frobisher's party searched the tents. In one of them they found "a hideous old woman, and a young woman enceinte, w4th a child, whom she was holding by the hand. They took them away with them. They took them by force from the old woman, who howled horribly." - The black coast-ridge sloped up into the ice as steadily as a knife-blade. The moon rushed avariciously after the sun, round and round in the sky like the wheels of that Celestial Clock in which we may be certain that Frobisher beheved; his men stood moodily on the beach with their two prisoners; the unfastened door-hides of the Skrellingers' tents flapped and flapped, hke KlusKAP's blanket-door behind which something was never again going to happen. - Frobisher (whose memory still frowns down, suitably englassed, from the cliff-walls of vanous reading-rooms) found the country prone to earthquakes. He discovered gravel pits filled with gold, of which they took home three hundred casks.
In 1605 the Danish captain Gotske Lindenau commenced his hobby of collecting Skrellings. When he anchored off the coast, they jumped into their Httle boats and came to see him. He offered them wine, but they did not like it. They drank some of his whale oil instead. One can easily imagine the scene - the fog, the grinning sailors in their oilskins, the creaking of the lantern, and Captain Lindenau standing in the doorway of his cabin watching the Skrellings as they squat on the deck drinking oil. Perhaps he has already decided which of the savages he wants to bring home. Or perhaps the choice is more of a last-minute impulse, after the trading, where the Skrellings happily part with skins and unicorn horns in exchange for a few penny looking-glasses. In that case, Captain Lindenau would have waited almost until the SkrelHngs had leaped back into their skin-boats before admitting to himself that he could not bear to part with them. Certainly they would enliven the voyage home. No doubt the King would be pleased to be presented with them. On the fourth day, weighing anchor, he took possession of two. They struggled so vigorously to free themselves that he had to have them bound. The other SkrelHngs howled and launched stones and arrows across the water, until the Danes fired their cannon and cleared them away.
An Enghsh captain whom Lindenau had engaged landed to the west, and after making his own desultory explorations of the stony ground he took four of the savages. One of them caused such a commotion in his rage that they were compelled to beat him to death with musket-butts. (This action, arbitrary as it may now seem, surely had its own divine justice: although the Danes were no longer Vikings, they paid reverence in their own way to Blue-Shirt.) - The remaining Skrellings, I need hardly say, became more tractable immediately.
The King was dehghted with the wild men. Unfortunately for Lindenau, he considered the English captain's batch to be better made. - "So I am betrayed," said Lindenau to himself, "and honor, it seems, is but wave-wind and fell-wind!" - But his perseverance was admirable: back he sailed to Greenland. - The Skrellings, alas, were now somewhat harder to approach. Like all dreamers, they hid shyly on their home-cliffs; they drank the mists and hunted for birds' eggs. One of Lindenau's soldiers volunteered to lure them out, but as soon as he got to shore they tore him to pieces. Eventually the Danes tricked them and caught them. One of the prisoners threw himself into the sea in his despair and was drowned.
They were sullen in Denmark, and refused to embrace the Christian faith. Throughout the years of their captivity they were seen worshipping the SUN. When the Spanish Ambassador came, the King amused him by making them
perform aquatic exercises in their boats. They maneuvered in so colorful and orderly, so painlessly exotic a fashion, like red-gold carp swimming round and round in a pool, that the Ambassador laughed and clapped his hands, on which shone rings worth more than noblemen's Hves. Afterwards he sent them each a sum of money, which they spent on spurs and feathers. Several times nonetheless, being unpersuaded of elementary facts, they tried to escape, which forced the Danes to guard them more severely. The majority, says Peyriere, died of melancholy; and although we may if we choose imagine them in the heaven of the Netsiliks, a place where spirits could play kickball forever with the laughing skull of a walrus, it seems most likely that in death as in life they did not find their way home. (It is not recorded whether the High Bishop permitted them burial in consecrated ground - for so little is known! It cannot even be said for certain why rigor mortis is noticed first in the smaller muscles, such as the eyelids; nor can we speculate as to which carven cabinet of the King's library entombed the Flateyjarbok.)'*^ - Two of the Skreglingers Hved on a dozen years after the rest. The Governor of Kolding set one to pearl-fishing, and he was so successful that the Governor made him continue to dive even among the icebergs, after which he unfortunately died. The last Skrelling thereupon tried again to escape in his little boat. They overtook him between twenty and forty leagues out to sea. They told him that he would infalHbly have been lost in the fog and the ice had he persisted, but he did not seem to understand them. When they brought him back to the King's fishponds, he too sickened and died.
"Their coats, made of seal and walrus-skins," says Peyriere, who loves to track the dispositions of property, "their shirts of the intestines offish, and one of their under-shirts, made of the skins of birds, with their feathers of different colours, are hung for curiosity in the cabinet of M. Vormius ..."
The sailor Edward Pellham, who with eight companions was abandoned on western Greenland in 1630, never saw them. He asseverated in his pamphlet Gods Power and Providence as a matter known to all that of course the country had no permanent inhabitants, Christian or heathen.
* Nonetheless, the impression that one bears away from this epoch is one of transcendent order, of the kind achievable only when greed is married to meticulousness. It is written, for instance, that when Iceland fell subject to Denmark, detailed maps were made of the bird-cliffs of the Westman Isles; and none of the islanders could go egg-gathering there without first paying rent to the Danish crown.
Sea-Cfumge ofifie Denton
It is indeed strange, the manner in which we must begin to think about the higher world.
A
C. Howard Hinton, ma, The Fourth Dimension (1906)
.s for Blue-Shirt, they called it WHITE-SHIRT by now, for ice bleaches as it thickens.
. . . Taking a view of the desolateness of the place, they conceived such a horrour and inward feare in their hearts, as that they resolved rather to returne for England to make satisfaction with their Hves for their former faults committed, than there [in Greenland] to remaine, though with assured hope of gaining their pardon.
PELLHAM
I
n the map of Jacobus Ziegler (Argentorati, 1532), the ocean is full of swirling currents, over which a griffin hovers. Irelandia is a white hatchet-blade; Islandia (that is, Iceland) a white trapezoid (all land is white). Ziegler and his generation seem to have been the first to be apprised of the extent of things, because the entire top left quadrant of the map has been cordoned off into whiteness. GRONLANDIA, it says, and INCOGNITA. There is but one landmark, halfway up the coast (longitude 20°, latitude 67°): - a triple mountain overlooking the sea, with the legend HVETSARGH PROMONT. It is White-Shirt. The rest of Greenland is emptily white.
t is true, of course, that there is no longer a true Greenland or Eskimo culture in West Greenland. But while externally the people incline toward a complete adaption of European ways, there still survives a good deal in the disposition and intimate conduct of the people that is definitely Eskimo. It is a serious reflection upon our natures to say that the rare sweetness of nature, the prevaihng sunniness of the Greenlanders was definitely not acquired from European teachers . . .
Kent, entry for 9 October 1931
T
here is an obvious preference for a clean page of text, unburdened by explanation or any other supplementary matter, although it is easy to see that no text from the past can stand on its own and be
enjoyed without misapprehension by the modern reader.
Charles Rosen, "Romantic Originals" {The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIV, No. 20)
Glossaries
Chronology Sources
pRfcYpi^ ^//?k^Da77/;^
Glossaries
Note
I
have tried to define every term which may not be readily comprehensible. (1) Because this is a novel, not a treatise in linguistics, the words are entered as they appear in the text. For example, in Glossary III I refer to the East Settlement of the lost Greenland colony as the East Bygd. Therefore, the entry is "East Bygd," which is half Enghsh and half Icelandic. I have not rendered "east" in Icelandic, since if you know that, presumably you wouldn't need to find the entry at all. (2) Sources for terms are not in any way exhaustive; they merely indicate where I have seen them in my reading. Thus, for instance, it is entirely possible that an anegiuchak is known somewhere in Greenland as well as in Alaska, but in Glossary V only the Alaskan origin of this word is indicated. (3) The same word may be spelled a variety of ways in this book (e.g. "Vinland" and "Vineland"; "Eric" and "Eirik"; "m/o" and "m/m"; "Skraelings," "Skrellings" and "Skrelinges"). Every spelling is taken from a primary source. Rather than be a totahtarian, I have preferred to let the variants stand in all their charm.
Gtossaries
I
GLOSSARY OF PERSONAL NAMES