Greenlandic Armageddon

In the thirteenth century, Snorri Sturluson described in his Prose Edda the daily life of the Vikings ("Norsemen"): "Every day, as soon as they are clothed, they put on their armor and go out into the court and fight and fell each other. That is their sport; and when the time draws near color their midday mean, they all ride home to Valhalla and sit down to drink." The Valhalla was the hall for the souls of the heroes, slain in battle, where they would spend eternity feasting and drinking. The mythology of the aggressive and wine-drinking god of Nordic warriors, Wotan, along with the Valkyries, inspired Snorri to describe the pagan traditions, retelling the driving force between gods and giants, their divine power and influence, the symbolism of life and death that drove the Vikings to a martial life. The Viking warrior has becomes a popular subject of social history and folklore. The epic heroes return again in the Icelandic sagas, the Irish sea voyages of Saint Brendan, and the German epic Das Nibelungenlied to make global cultural history in the Wagnerian concept of "translating" mythology into music.

The mélange of myth, legend, and daily practice of the written Icelandic poetic version is fiction-and-reality. Snorri's heroic epic was written with the critical voice of a Christian scholar; his written word had replaced the original oral communication. In the high literary tradition of Iceland, Snorri retold the mythical settlements tales of the Vikings' settlement tales coming from overseas, the fjords of Norway. In the ninth century, Iceland had been settled by the Vikings; they pushed west under Eric the Red (Eirik Raude) to Greenland (first founding the fjord-like Eastern Settlement, later moving west and north). These inaccessible lands came under Norwegian overlordship and rule. The Vikings had fled overseas to escape from the tyranny of the first Norwegian king, Harald Hårfagre, also known in English as Harold Fairhair. But as the years wore on, the free and pagan Vikings were converted to Christianity and had to abandon their runic script and adopt the Roman alphabet. The Norse settlers turned the colonies into a western medieval society, with the Christian faith and their own General Assembly (Althing), until the final disappearance of the western Norse population in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The saga of the seafaring Vikings ventured out into the new territories placed in the dangerous west. The decoration of the heraldic symbols of power on the Vikings' ships—with other fearful images, such as colored square sails and shields, as well as warriors' winged or horned helmets, the spears, the axes, and the swords—must have struck terror in the hearts of non-Vikings. The Vikings' voyages brought them west to the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and by the year 1000, even the North American continent was reached, named in Old Norse Vínland or "Wineland"—five hundred years before Columbus. Simultaneously, the aggressive Vikings roved along the European coastline, attacking, plundering, robbing, stealing, and raping the towns, the citizens and their possessions. The warrior Vikings, who ruled the stormy sea in their fast, small, and open rowing boats with fifteen or more oarsmen on either side, bring the old myths alive. The explorations and adventures reveal the military practices and trade connections, bringing cruelty and horror to the villages long after the Christian Church was established in the towns of Holland, France, and Italy. What is fiction and what is the real story of the Norsemen?

Written in the spirit of Old Norse medieval history, archaeological findings, and iconography, Bernard du Boucheron's historical romance The Voyage of the Short Serpent retells the adventures of a sea voyage in the fourteenth century. An evangelical mission, under the guidance of Inquisitor Montanus, leaves Norway by ship to explore the fate of a disappeared or lost colony on an outpost of Greenland, called New Thule. The discovery of the cloistered island among the floating ice and snow, blizzards...