George Mackay Brown, Vinland

Earlier this year my life was rather dominated by the Vikings. Hah!

My wife is an early medievalist, a specialist on the Viking diaspora. Consequently, at the end of April, I was driving her and a colleague around parts of North Yorkshire as part of a research trip. They needed a second driver and none of the rest of the team could drive. We made what I can only describe as a fantastic discovery, as we still need to keep it a bit secret, and as a result the team very kindly invited me to the end of project conference at which the find was unveiled to an academic audience. As a result of being around half a dozen experts on the subject, I got something of a crash course on Viking culture, immigration and assimilation. Obviously I've also picked up plenty here and there from my wife over the last 4 years or so, but this was much more concentrated. And being out in the places where they arrived and settled, listening to the bunch of them discussing the material, you could almost see the past coming to life before you.

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Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown appears to have drawn on the history of the islands for much of his work. Here, in a novel written towards the end of his life, he tells the story of the life of a fictional Orcadian man, Ranald Sigmundson, set in the 11th century. The writing owes much to the example of Norse sagas. There's a swiftness to the telling, and little concern for the interiority of any of the characters. We learn about their thoughts and feelings almost exclusively through what they choose to divulge. The stripped down language took a little getting used to at first - it's not simple by any means - but the result is a pure, elemental language entirely in tune with the harsh lives of its characters and their world, balanced between the 'pagan' Viking past and their Christianising present.

The title comes from the voyage which occurs in the earliest section in which Ranald, having abandoned his rather abusive father midway through his first voyage - and just before his father and his crew are drowned in a violent storm - joins another crew led by the famous Leif Ericson, the first European to reach what is now North America. The stay only a short while after, repelled by the native people of the land. After their return to Europe, Ranald joins another crew lead by one Hakon Treeman, and his travels eventually take him to the Norwegian court before he returns to Orkney to settle down. Thereafter the story focuses on his attempts to raise a family and increase the prosperity of his farm, whilst being occasionally drawn into the political machinations of the sons of Sigurd Hlodvirsson, Earl of Orkney. After one such encounter Ranald becomes thoroughly disillusioned with politics, drawing more and more into himself, until he eventually isolates himself in a remote cottage on his property, obsessing over religion and an escape from the difficulties of the world around him. The novel encompasses a single life, with all it's hardships and disappointments.

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Two things stood out for me in particular, especially given the nature of our conversations the other month. Firstly, 'Viking' is clearly not presented as an ethnic or cultural identity, in line with the stereotypical view of the Vikings our culture still appear to possess. It's a role that Scandinavians may choose to take on, and by the time of the story, 'Viking' raids are a practice which has largely been outlawed. It's equivalent to being a pirate. At one point, after Hakon Treeman is murdered, the remaining crew members debate among themselves whether they should become Viking, and eventually decide not to because of the risks which the role involves. It feels in line with the findings of the 'revisionists'.

Secondly, I was really struck by the way in which the world is connected up. Certainly, it's hardly as connected as our world now, is but people seem to think nothing about getting on a boat and travelling sometimes vast distances. As the story develops it becomes more and more confined to the family farm on Orkney, but it never feels isolated from the outside world. There are strong and functioning cultural, trading and political links between the islands and Norway, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland. The Viking world is, as my wife would put it, a functioning diaspora.

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Digging around online, I found several reviewers suggesting that the encounter with the native American tribe is unrealistic, and that the novel treats them in rather 'new age' fashion as noble savages, living in harmony with nature. I'm not sure that I agree. Leif and Ranald both conceive of the native Americans as such terms, but that is clearly presented as their belief. The tribes people we see in 20 pages or so of the novel in which they appear are completely unknown to the Scandinavian voyagers. There is the beginning of communication between the two groups before the possibility of harmony is destroyed by the actions of the Scandinavian man, Wolf, who loses his nerve and kills one of the tribesmen. Thereafter the native Americans are just as violent as their Scandinavian opponents in their attempts to repulse the people who have revealed themselves to be aggressors. The tragedy of this sequence, and what seems to stay with Ranald throughout his life, is the loss of the chance of understanding these people who were so very different from the Scandinavian and Christian culture Ranald has grown up within.

It links with his disdain for the political leaders whose actions seem to do little more than sow division. In contrast, Ranald is a decent man who does all he can to help the community of small cottagers who are his dependants. His success and prosperity as a farmer never encompasses a compassion for those for whom he is responsible. It may be a mistake to criticise the depiction of the native Americans as idealised, when from our own point of view the life of the Orcadian farmers is similarly pre-lapsarian. Based on small communities of farmers, their lives are just as 'close to nature'.

By the end of his life, for Ranald, Vinland is no longer the place he visited, but has become a metaphor, a land which is more akin to heaven. He dies dreaming of a ship. A ship of death, as D.H. Lawrence similarly puts it in one his final poems.