Viking America: The First Millennium (review)

Reviews 217 Jewish courtiers, expelled from Spain in 1492, came to Alfonso's court he brought some scholarship with him but Naples was not a centre of Hebrew learning despite its involvement in the printing and circulation ofHebrew books. W e must look forward to a substantial new book which will synthesise these important insights. Sybil M Jack Department ofHistory University of Sydney Barnes, Geraldine, Viking America: The First Millennium, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2001; cloth; pp. xx, 187; R R P £40.00, US$75.00; ISBN 0859916081. This monograph surveys some 700 years or more of literary endeavour inspired by the Scandinavian landfall and possible colonisation in the N e w World. The treatments it covers range from the reverential to the caustic - the latter exemplified by the Morris & C o catalogue where a design for commemorative stained glass commissioned by a wealthy American patron carries the caption, 'Norse heroes on the sea, making for other people's property.' Geraldine Barnes's Introduction offers a brief critical conspectus of Graenlendinga saga and Eiriks saga rauda and other minor sources, along with some account of the vast scholarly literature that has accumulated around them. While acknowledging the possibility that the construction ofthe new-found land in the sagas was influenced by the Bible, encyclopaedic works, and vision literature, Barnes notes that memories ofgenuine geographical and ethnographical observations may also be embodied in them. Parallels from the descriptions of Early M o d e m European landfalls in the N e w World are invoked to support this viewpoint. The author's objective in what follows is not, however, to winnow 'fact' from 'fiction' or to evaluate the various supposedly medieval Scandinavian artefacts with North American provenances. Rather, alluding to recent historiographical and postcolonial theory, she concentrates on the different kinds of construction and stylisation to which the basic textual materials have been submitted over the centuries, each with its immanent ideology. Chapter 1 considers Graenlendinga saga and Eiriks saga rauda as narratives of land-taking and colonisation, culminating in the ultimate 'loss' of Vinland. Taking her cue from the setting of these sagas at the Conversion 218 Reviews moment, the author argues that contestation between pagan and Christian values andritualcentrally informs the narratives. B y contrast, the actual 'land-takings' achieve surprisingly little affirmation in these texts, which conspicuously lack the confident ethos and cultural richness that is such a marked feature of Landndmabok. If anything, there is a tincture of Christian guilt. Barnes tackles the saga accounts of cross-cultural contact with salutary caution, but her criteria for authenticity could with advantage have been made more systematic. O n the one hand, she is obviouslyrightto treat the story ofthe uniped as a literary construction, based on standard encyclopaedic lore (though the explanation she adduces, suggesting indebtedness toriddles,is fanciful). On the other hand, her scepticism about the indigenes' alleged thirst for milk is not really explained or justified. Then w e move to the reception of these saga traditions in nineteenthcentury England and America. Chapter 2 addresses the 'scholarship' of the day, exhibited in both its would-be rigorous and its wayward forms. It resulted in one useful by-product, the founding of Scandinavian studies in America, a topic that Barnes develops in considerable, perhaps even excessive, detail. More negatively, she points to the disproportionate efforts devoted to the reports of 'discovery' in the so-called 'Vinland sagas', to the detriment of an understanding of these texts in their broader significance. In chapter 3, considering the more popular side, Barnes attributes an astounding proliferation of schemes promoting the colony to 'dreams of Nordic empire, scholarly error, nineteenth-century missionary fervour, Yankee ingenuity, and perhaps Balkan fraud' (p 71). Concomitantly, she traces a hardening of attitudes towards the indigenous peoples, particularly on the part of enthusiasts for the 'master race'. Nonetheless, reservations concerning Viking savagery occasionally surface - not least, I imagine, because the European ancestors of these publicists had notoriously suffered under the same treatment. Chapters 4 and 5 consider uses of the Vinland story in British and American fiction from the early nineteenth century to the end of World War II. Here the value of the survey depends upon Barnes...