Norseman Chief (38 page)

After skipping his meals all day, he strung together several disparate sentences, “Hurit looks fine, but I dream of Gudrid’s long blonde hair.  I sweat constantly now.  Have you seen Leif, lately?  I intend to strap my sword and my father’s saex about my waist and chop down a moose today.  Why did Kenna die?”

EPILOGUE

My father, Halldorr Olefsson, who is known to my people as Enkoodabooaoo has gone to the Earth Mother.  He walks with the One God, Christ Jesus leading him.  He celebrates in Valhalla, drinking with the mighty Thor and all the men he has had to kill in battle throughout his long life.

His priest, Torleik, taught me my Latin letters since I was but a girl and so some of the words you read near the end of his journal were written by my hand.  His eyes simply became too muddled for him to see the page any longer, his hand a bit too shaky, his heart not in it.  But I was there to write down the words he spoke even though at the very end they did not make much in the way of sense.  On the last day I saw him, he did, however, wrap his belt around his thin, wiry frame to hunt a moose as he put it.  My father must have died in the forest that day, but I have never sent out our runners to find his body or his bones.  Best to let them rest.  My best guess is that he lived one hundred years, longer than anyone I had ever heard of by at least a decade.

Regarding his words and why he wanted so badly to write them, I do not understand.  No one reads this language.  No one reads.  My father often told me that some of the peoples who lived across the sea could read more than one type of writing.  I thought that strange.  Why not have everyone use the same writing if you are going to go through the effort of learning it in the first place?  But I do not understand as my people, the Algonkin, are all I know.

I read these works, his memoirs, with great interest for as most men, he only shared bits of his life’s story with those around him, even less with his son, for though I am his daughter he treated me as no less than a man – as is common among all cultures, I am sure.  While reading his words I was struck time and again by my father’s dedication to those whom he loved.

Bitterness springs into his writing time and again.  Many of those times it seems warranted, but on the whole I believe my father’s life among the most pleasurable I can imagine.  To find love even once is a gift from the One God.  It must be his gift because of the many mentions love gets in God’s Word – I have read my father’s books through once, that was enough.  My father, Chief Enkoodabooaoo, has found love countless times in his life.  He loved his mother with the full breadth of his being, despite never knowing her.  He loved his father Olef, talking of him frequently as he aged.  He loved his second and third fathers, Erik and Olaf, respectively, proving his honor with faithful service to them both.  He even loved his adopted people, especially my mother, serving them until his body was so broken that all he could do was stew.

At times he is angry over his fate, other times accepting.  Rarely did he seize hold of it with a ravenous appetite.  He grabbed it tightly when he bled the life out of Bjarni, but for the rest he accepted his fate and did his duty to those he loved.  What more can a man do?

I place his words, his trinkets, treasures, and books into this chest and bury it as he told me to.

Signed – Alsoomse Halldorrsdottir, the Skjoldmo, Chief of the Algonkin

POSTSCRIPT

By my own hand have I discovered the accompanying manuscript.  I swear to this by the Almighty God, Maker of all things, who saw fit to place it in my path.

I was turning a long-fallow piece of ground at the outskirts of a new parcel of property I had recently acquired.  My success at farming the earth was marginal at best and so I had one more year’s worth of savings to make another go of it.  My single, broken-down, sway-backed horse slowly pulled the plow through the earth while I ambled behind, fighting the reins and handles as they danced in my hands.  The horse gingerly stepped over a rock.

As we cut the straight furrow toward it, the rock appeared manageable on the surface, no bigger than my balled fist, so I lazily decided to pick it up another day after the plow had dislodged it.  But we did not dislodge it.  My borrowed plow made a frightful noise and rattled my hands as it went beneath the stone and stopped.  I’m ashamed to say that I took the Lord’s name in vain at that moment, seeing the plow broken in two.

How would I ever repay the neighbor who lent me the implement?  I walked around between the horse and plow to inspect the damage.  I kicked the beam several times until my foot hurt, then fell to my knees in self-pity.

It was then that I saw the leather strap or satchel wedged between two rotted pieces of wood sticking out from the furrow as the whole mess lay across the moldboard.  I became curious so I dug.  That rock, which was much larger than it appeared, sat atop some type of old box or chest.

After a full day of digging the rock out and then an entire morning to dig out the box, I discovered Halldorr’s chest.  In it was his hacksilver, his beads, his gaming pieces, and most importantly for him, this very book and his two beloved works of the Lord.

My sister, a school teacher from St. John’s on the easternmost tip of the island, was fluent in Latin and she read the works to me on her next visit.  At first, I fully intended to keep the treasure as my own, but after hearing the story of Halldorr and his outstanding adventures and hardships, I believe that the Providence of which he speaks brought me that chest to provide just enough to repay my neighbor for his plow.  And I’ve kept enough to get us through just one more year.  The rest of the treasure and two of his books I’ve donated to the national museum.

This last book, his memoirs, I keep for myself and my family.  I hope them to be inspired by Halldorr’s successes and failures.  To learn perseverance.  To fight with Halldorr’s spirit.  The good Lord knows my family will need it if they continue to till this land.

Signed – John Kent, 1872

THE END

(Dear Reader, See Historical Remarks section to help separate fact from fiction.)

HISTORICAL REMARKS

There are many famous dates with which we fill our heads when we are confined to the uncomfortable chairs and institutionally-painted classrooms of our youth.  Many of my American readers remember July 4, 1776 as the day our independence from the crown of Britain or December 7, 1941 as the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Some of my British readers (and even I) remember learning that in 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta, or in 1805 Admiral Nelson defeated the combined fleets of the French and the Spanish navies off the coast of Cape Trafalgar.

But a single year that has stuck with me as being exceptionally important is one that actually had two events of international impact occur within its 364 and 1/3 days (three events if you count Halldorr’s death), one famous the world over, the other less so.  Recall that in 1066 William Duke of Normandy defeated Harold Godwinson (Harold II), Saxon king of England, in the Battle of Hastings, setting the stage for a French and English rivalry that lasted for centuries as it indirectly influenced far-future events such as the Magna Carta, the One Hundred Years War, and the French and Indian War.

So Saxon King Harold II was a loser.  Not so fast.  Less than one month prior to his death and defeat at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Harold II annihilated (yes annihilated) Norwegian invaders in Northern England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge – important and even germane to our story of Halldorr because many historians mark 1066 as the end of the Viking era, largely due to Harold II and his victory.  While in subsequent years it is certainly true that individuals or small bands of Scandinavians went a-Viking and performed the requisite pillaging and raping on their strandhoggs, but never again in history was a large Viking army able to be raised to invade another nation.

It may be important to note, however, that even our friend William Duke of Normandy has two reasons to thank the Norsemen for his zeal and battlefield success.  The obvious one is that the Norwegian army, while sent home with only thirty ships out of three hundred in 1066, completely exhausted Harold II and his army.  After winning in Stamford Bridge, the Saxons had to march all the way to southern England to immediately meet the fresh Norman army.  A series of feigned retreats and cavalry charges by William was “all-she-wrote” for the Saxon king.  The less obvious reason for today’s readers to think that William owed the Vikings a debt of gratitude is that he was descended from them.

I’ll give you a little genealogy here for fun.  A Norseman called Rollo invaded what is today northern France and set himself up with a neat little kingdom.  A treaty with Charles the Simple of France made Rollo’s little kingdom more or less official and independent called, wait for it, Normandy (North man, Norman, Normandy, get it?).  After a few generations of fellows the likes of William Longsword and several Richards, Robert I had an affair with a tanner’s daughter, leading to the baby who grew up to be William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy.  So, you see, through fun and amazing history we find that much of British history can trace its roots to the Viking conquests of so long ago.

At last, back to our hero Halldorr.  When I first conceptualized his story, I only had a hazy outline of some major events in his life.  But in addition to touching on some fascinating history along the way, I wanted Halldorr to represent the taming of or the decline of the Viking age.  The story is not meant to be allegorical or tell some mystical history, but I did want Halldorr to live out his years in the last one hundred of the Viking era.  To that end Halldorr’s youth before
The Norseman
takes place is filled with murder, treachery, blood feuds, old gods, and multiple exiles.  His young adult years in
The Norseman
take him to various locales in Western Europe on raids and great battles as the Vikings continue to influence or subdue other populations. 
Paths of the Norseman
takes us through his final crack at revenge to end a blood feud and then more exploration as the world began to shrink due to their superior longboats.  Finally, in
Norseman Chief
, Halldorr finds that he is jarl of a new people.

Eventually his blood, his genes, will be bred away and all that will remain is the existing culture.  Across the ocean, his Norse countrymen and their descendents are finding that they’ve passed their own apogee and now rule kingdoms which will be less influenced by Scandinavians and more by the local or regional politics of the day.  Yet they will always bear the mark of those fearsome adventurers through vocabulary, customs, and even genes.

Though this third tale of Halldorr is entirely fictional, it is based upon the histories as recorded from various oral traditions.  For reference in this and the previous Halldorr yarns, I relied heavily on
Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga
,
Greenlander Sagas
,
Erik the Red Saga
,
Algonquin Legends of New England
,
Native Americans of the Northeast
, and finally
The Viking and the Red Man
which was written by Reider T. Sherwin.

The last work listed above is intriguing.  Sherwin was raised on a remote island in Norway and was familiar with older Norse dialects before he immigrated to the northeastern United States.  He was surprised to hear that when many of the place names were spoken out loud they described the geography he saw around him in a sound very similar to the older Norse dialects.  Thus began his linguistic journey.  He ended up compiling a voluminous list of Algonquin words tied, he claimed, to Old Norse roots.  As a point of reference, the reader should know that the language of the Beothuk was related to Algonquin, itself of the Algonquian language family.

Mr. Sherwin was not the first to propose such a link between the two supposedly completely separate languages of Old Norse and Algonquin.  In his book,
Key to the Indian Language
, Roger William wrote in 1644 that he believed there were several different periods of Norse settlement in North America and that he could determine with some bit of accuracy when they were made, based upon the roots that were in use at the time and the resulting Algonquin word.

I am a cautious believer in these men and their rather astounding proposals.  For example, I used Sherwin’s suggested al gumna kyn for a predecessor to Algonkin (also please note that the Algonquin tribes of what is today Ontario, Canada are not related to the Algonkin/Beiuthook in my story).  If it were only one or two words that had such a similar sound, then I would discount the thought entirely.  However, I have seen their evidence and it is compelling, though admittedly, modern scholars dismiss much of it.  Language is a growing and evolving element of our world, created and borrowed by men and women all the time to describe newly encountered aspects of the physical world.  If one culture contributes a more efficient way to describe a place or situation, it will usually win out over the more cumbersome description.  Think of our use of “rendezvous” in English.  This clearly French word describes an intimate meeting so much more concisely than the countless English words we could cobble together for the same definition, but without the same effect.

Similarly I used the word merki in
Norseman Chief
to describe an uncharted land beyond, or past, a boundary.  There are some who discount the tale we are told as children that America gets its name from Amerigo Vespucci.  They claim that America is a derivation of merki since that is exactly what gentlemen like Leif Eriksson and others would have called these lands beyond their own explorations.  Then through basic etymology and philology merki became merik.  When the Spaniards came west across the Atlantic Ocean in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, it was picked up and made more “Spanish” sounding.  Tada – America.  Read Graeme Davis’ work called
Vikings in America
for more information.

A curious reader may wonder why, then, did John Cabot and those men who re-discovered North America and all its bounty not encounter tall, fair-haired men and women when they encountered the “Indians.”  Well it all comes down to proportion, raw numbers.  Even if two hundred Norse settlers successfully established a foothold in North America in 1,100 A.D. for example, the inevitable hardships and isolation from their own people would have resulted in many deaths – think of the Jamestown Colony’s difficulties many years later.  Then intermixing of the two bloodlines would mean that the more populous “Red” men and women would eventually and effectively make any physical sign of the Norse disappear.  But the words of these intrepid travelers may remain!  Kenna would be so happy (you’ll have to read
The Norseman
to understand this reference)!

I want to be clear that I do not believe a long-term, permanent settlement of Norsemen existed anywhere west of Greenland.  The Norse settlements of Leifsbudir and Straumsfjord were short-term, but real.  However, except for the occasional timber gathering expedition and its requisite temporary shelters, there were no more.  I know this for the simple fact that when other European explorers arrived centuries later, there was no wheel!  For crying out loud, if a huge band of Norse settlers were anywhere in North America for any length of time, one of them would have said, “I know, let’s use the wheel.  We’ve used it for years in the old country.”  Then after that, the local Beothuk, or Mi’kmaq, or Dorset population would have said, “Hey, I’m tired of lugging this stuff around.  Say, what about that wheel I saw those tall strangers using?”  A wheel barrow or small wagon would have certainly been employed and then witnessed, stolen, or shared with neighboring tribes by the time Columbus sailed.

Let’s talk about my use of “Red” to describe Ahanu’s people at various points in this work and these historical remarks.  The Beothuk peoples (Ahanu’s people in my work) were fond of using red ochre, spreading it everywhere.  Even the Mi’kmaq people described them as the Red People.  The first Europeans to encounter them in the post-Columbus world described the Beothuk similarly as Red Indians.  I do not use the term in the generic or more derogatory sense that has been seized to describe all of the American Indian peoples and tribes.  My intent was accuracy, not offense.

As you read about the hatred between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk peoples, note that such extreme animosity continued all the way until the death of the last Beothuk woman in 1829.  I tried to capture the way we as humans internalize some wrong done generations ago and allow it to burn on and on.  The loathing was so great that if a Beothuk ever tried to make peace (as Halldorr and Etleloo did in a manner of speaking or as Hassun did later) that individual would be offered as a sacrifice to the spirits of the dead ancestors, being officially cut off from their version of paradise with Glooskap.

Thorhall the Huntsman was a dear friend of Erik the Red.  He was known to be sullen and brooding.  He accompanied Thorfinn Karlsefni on his fantastic journeys as discussed at length in
Paths of the Norseman
.  However, as was also described in that particular work, he left after some minor disagreements, really fleeing all the Christianity which was now firmly in place among his people.  The sagas say that on his trip away from Vinland his ship encountered a great storm and he and his crew were driven all the way across the Atlantic to the coast of Ireland.  The story goes that he landed in an area controlled, not by his Norse brethren, but instead the Irish themselves and was promptly sold into slavery.  He died in squalor serving some person of minor importance.

Many scholars and I myself don’t believe this account, finding it to be apocryphal.  Had the Huntsman really found himself driven into slavery, there would be no Norse account of him.  The man and his crew would have simply disappeared into oblivion.  No one really knows what happened to him, so I put Thorhall in hiding in the valley like a hermit, escaping what he considered to be the oppressive confines of village life.

One of the most interesting scenes in this work describes how Kesegowaase became a man by going through the trials.  I borrowed heavily from actual accounts given by other Eastern Woodland, especially Algonquin-speaking, peoples further to the west than the Beothuk.  Wysoccan comes from Datura, a genus of plants which includes many species including Jimson Weed, Thorn Apples, and the Devil’s Trumpet.  It produces a hallucinogenic state when ingested and the description I give would be accurate, including the chance of resulting deaths.  There is no account of the Beothuk peoples performing a ritual using such mind altering drugs, but given the similarities in the Eastern tribes I believe some ceremony would have been performed to bring a boy into manhood, though I have no idea what it would have looked like.

At one point in our tale, Hurit carves a wooden doll of Halldorr wearing his tunic emblazoned with a cross – the tunic itself a gift from King Olaf in an earlier Norseman Chronicle.  In the real world, the doll exists to this day, though it was discovered far to the north of where our story takes place.  It is today known as the Bishop of Baffin since it may have been carved to represent a Norse priest complete with his robes and a cross etched on his chest.  I just moved it southward and made the apparent robes into Halldorr’s long chain mail.

Torleik came to tell Halldorr of Leif’s death in 1021 in my tale.  I needed a way for Halldorr to be released from his service and borrowed heavily from the year 1121, one hundred years later.  In that year, the first official bishop of Greenland named Erik Gnupson (called Erik Uppsi) boarded a ship for Vinland and was never seen again.  It has been speculated that he went to serve a small Norse settlement for why else would he go after so many years without Greenland-Vinland contact?