by Tom Holt
Maybe; I think he could have founded a settlement there, just as he did in Greenland. But Greenland and Red Eirik moulded the Eiriksons and made them specially vulnerable to the dangers of Meadowland. When Harald Sigurdson asked my advice, I tried to ask myself, which is he, Eirik or Leif? And I looked at him, and thought of all the men and women he was planning on sending to that place, and I knew it was my duty to God and my brothers and sisters in Christ to talk him out of it - not because I thought he’d fail, but because I was afraid that he’d succeed.
So much, then, for the island of Meadowland, which lies further north and west than any other land we know about. I, John Stethatus the clerk, have written these words in the year of Our Lord 1066, with the express intention of advising my lord Constantine the Tenth, Emperor of the Romans, that he and his successors should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, send any expedition or invest any resources or commit any body of men to this remote and dangerous place, which might rightly be termed, in more senses than one, the end of the world. If anything is certain, this side of Judgement Day it’s that the Roman Empire will last until the end of all things, representing as through a glass, darkly, the Kingdom of God in this world. It will only come to its end on that day when, with the blessed apostle, we see a new Heaven and a new Earth, and all considerations of wordly rule and empire cease to have any meaning. Until that new world comes, we who live on the old Earth, under the old Heaven, all have our place, where we were ordained to be. Leaving our place, as Adam left the garden God made for him, we leave behind who we are, and inevitably become someone, something else; turning our backs on what God has ordained for us, we walk into abomination. This
Meadowland, and all other such places, if any waiting still to be discovered, are not the new Heaven and the new Earth promised to us by the apostle; we must be patient in our place, and wait for them to come to us.
Which is fine, I suppose, as far as it goes: a proper logical conclusion drawn from the facts as they were presented to me. Perhaps I’m biased; after all, I hate travelling by sea, so anywhere I can’t go by land must be a bad thing, and to be avoided. And it’s easy to block off the places where you don’t want to go anyway by stationing at the gate an angel with a fiery sword; God doesn’t want me to go there, so I don’t have to.
But a man who sits in the same chair all day looking out of the same window, can’t help being titillated by stories of far-off lands, curious and unknown places where the sun burns the soil to sand, or the sea freezes over. And a man who spends his life huddled on the deck of a bobbing ship dancing on the crests of mountain-high waves can’t help wishing that he was on dry land, sitting in a chair, looking sleepily into the fire. Kari said about his people, so poor in material things compared to us, that who they were was all they had; and that seems to have been true enough. What made the difference, in Meadowland, was that who we are depends so much on where we are, because context governs everything. What I wrote just now, about God ordaining a place to each of us, may not be so far from the truth after all, and that’s the disturbing thing. Take a man who has practically nothing, and put him in an empty place - a good place, unspoiled, fruitful even without the plough, almost a Garden of Eden - and you’ve stripped away everything that stands between us and God’s original creation, the very essence of Mankind. Shouldn’t you see in him a proper return to grace, as he comes back to the garden he was driven out of? Logically, I believe you should; and then I think about Freydis, and about my friends Kari and Eyvind with their axes in their hands outside the house on the shores of the lake, and somehow I’m not so certain any more.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The written sources make no mention of any further attempts at settlement in Vinland after Freydis’s return. By 1121, when Bishop Eirik of Greenland tried to find it again, the route had been forgotten. Greenlanders occasionally ventured across to Forestland (Markland) to cut timber; but the Greenland colony itself eventually failed. Scandinavians were still living there in 1410, when a Norwegian ship landed there after losing its way en route to Iceland, but the Englishmen who rediscovered Greenland around 1500 found it uninhabited. Nobody knows for sure what happened to the colony It could simply have been climate change, overgrazing, and a decline in the demand for its exports as the Norwegian economy weakened. In 1448, however, rumours of a pirate attack on the Eastern Settlement reached Norway, and Eskimo tradition recorded in the eighteenth century seems to confirm that that was how the colony met its end.
In 1071, six years after Harald Sigurdson died at Stamford Bridge, the Byzantine Empire suffered possibly the greatest catastrophe in its 1,100-year history when its armies were massacred by the Turks at Manzikert. Deprived of most of its territory and manpower, it dwindled away until the city of Constantinople was finally sacked by Sultan Mehmet II in 1453, thirty-nine years before Columbus reached the New World.
Table of Contents
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