Prologue

So it was that Bjarne Herjulfson came to Greenland, and Jarl Érik received him well. And Bjarne spoke of lands he had seen, further to the west, but could not tell further stories, and so people gave his words no heed, and he was wroth. But Leif, son of Érik, was struck by his words, and with his father’s blessing took to the sea with thirty-five men, seeking Bjarne’s lands. And Érik would have come with them, but his horse stumbled as they rode to the ship, and he fell, and his foot was broken. Then said Érik, “Other lands there may be, but it is not for me to see more than that which I have claimed as my own.” So Leif, son of Érik, led the expedition.

The first land they saw had no grass, nor trees, but icebergs large as hills surrounded it, and a flat plain of rocks passed between the shore and mountains without pause. Then said Leif, “I will give this land the name Bjarne did not; I call this place Helluland [Baffin Island].” The second land they saw was of white sand and wood, and no hills rose up from the low shore. Then said Leif, “I call this place Markland [Labrador].” The third land they saw was an island to the east of a greater land, which they found after two days’ travel with a northeastern wind. And they sailed up a sound, and ran ashore at a place where a river flowed from a lake; and the water rose about their boat, and they pulled it to shore.

When they came to shore they found people dressed in wool finer than any they had seen, with daggers of bronze twisted like the tooth of a unicorn. The chieftain of these Skrælings, whose name was Glohvey, gave to Leif a blanket of wool as a gift, in exchange for a sword of iron. Then he showed Leif and his men their village, which he called Vantahek [L’Anse aux Medeaux], and their church of stone inscribed with a slanted cross, and the vast fields of roots and grass where their longneck sheep grazed. Then Leif said, “You are most fortunate to live in this land of meadows and calm forests. We seek your permission to remain a little while longer in this Vinland of yours.” And Glohvey agreed.

Leif and his men stayed the winter there, in longhouses they built themselves, and traded meat and metal with the Skrælings for roots and wool and good; and some took wives from among the Skrælings. When spring came, few wished to return to the land of Greenland; but a few Skrælings, whom Leif baptized, wished to see this new place for themselves. So Leif, with his new crew, set off to the north again…

—from The Saga of the Vinlanders​

12th of Róa in the Thirteenth Year of the Vestrföl/February 20th, 1014 CE

Agnarsbídur, Vinland

"And it all would have gone to Hel if it weren't for that chicken."

"Agnarr, please," Mother moans. "Dagrún is eight winters old. And she's a Christian, just like her parents," she adds proudly.

"Fine, fine," says Uncle Agnarr, grinning his special grin with his neice, who is sitting next to him by the fire. "It all would have gone to Norway if it weren't for that chicken."

Dagrún laughs. Mother rolls her eyes, but smiles all the same.

"Your uncle Leif found this place only about a year before. Sets out for Iceland from Grandfather Érik’s compound in Greenland, and the next thing you know, he's managed to confuse east with west and goes completely the wrong way." He raises his voice to where Uncle Leif is dozing on a bench. "Must've been the sun in your eyes, right?"

"Shut up, Agnarr," says Uncle Leif, gruffly but not unkindly.

"Anyway, he gets blown waaay off course, and manages to find a land that's all stone. And he calls it...?"

"Markland!" says Dagrún eagerly. She knows this story off by heart, but honestly it never gets old.

"Right! And then he sailed a little more, and found...?"

"Helluland!"

"Absolutely correct! And finally, he and his party came ashore on a beautiful land, with trees and grass and rolling hills, and he called it...?"

"Nýfundinnland!"

And right on cue, her cousin Ask, who's six and new to the story, asks, "'New-found-land', Uncle Leif?" It's a tradition for someone to ask at this point.

"You going to tell me it doesn't work, boy?" grumbles Uncle Leif.

"Uncle Leif, it had already been found. We lived here, giju' and nemijgami' and nugumi and everyone."

Of course, there was always room for traditions to be broken.

Uncle Leif looks a bit more awake at this point. He frowns, the lines on his brow creasing like perfect rune-stems carved sideways into a rock. Then he shrugs and says, "Good thing I settled on Vinland, then, isn't it?"

"Tell Ask about Drunk Uncle Tyrker and the wine-berries!"

"Why not continue the story?" says Mother, in a voice that means she's thinking about getting her rusty sword out.

"Fine, fine," says Uncle Agnarr, rolling his eyes. "So he gets totally and ridiculously lost—"

"Shut up, Agnarr," says Uncle Leif, back to normal again.

“—and then trundles back next year towing a boatful of berries and loaded with fresh timber. Naturally, we talked about it, and Grandfather Érik said we should give it another go. Greenland was finally, well, becoming green—"

"We've got a weird taste in names in our family," grumbles Mother.

“—so there were likely to be new settlements coming up as more Icelanders and even Norwegians," he jokes, mainly at Father, sitting next to Mother, who rolls his eyes in a manner surprisingly like his wife, "think about expanding outwards from their over-crowded kingdoms. And of course there are barely any trees in Greenland, so we thought, why not go and set up business to the west?

"So we set off, with a few others, and found that nice bit of turf to build Agnarsbídur on—"

"I found the island first, I should have gotten to name the settlement," grumbles Uncle Leif, sitting up now.

"I was the one who spotted this place first," says Mother. Dagrún hasn't heard that bit.

"And I'm the only one who paid attention in runes lessons and carved the stela while you two were arguing over who forgot the mead," says Uncle Agnarr smugly. "Anyway, we'd settled down, got the livestock off the longships and started planting some wheat, and guess who comes out to visit?"

"Nemijgami'!" cries her cousin.

"That's right! Your grandfather, with nine canoes behind him. And they stayed for a while, the Skraelings, and we were just about ready to close a deal or two—”

“Nemijgami’ said you and Uncle Leif were the only ones who were allowed to give us axes,” says Ask. That cousin of hers…

“There was a reason for that,” says Uncle Leif. “We didn’t want everyone to give away their weapons. We thought you might hurt us. So it was better if the leaders traded the extra axes, and that left everyone feeling better.”

“Tell us about the devil-moose!” says Dagrún, eager to get the story back on track.

“Christ’s double-headed…hammer, I do wish you children would let me finish!” says Agnarr gruffly. He’s always doing that, mixing pagan and Christian oaths, with a hint of something else below the surface.

“Alright. It was the morning of the fifth day after the big fleet of canoes had arrived, when we’d agreed on a number of bargain deals, and then the bull we’d brought with us started acting up.”

“Giju’ told me it was like–”

“A demon-moose,” laughs Aunt Kaldr - Aunt Gaqaliteq, she says her “real” name is. She’s holding on to Ask - whom she calls Aqamoq, an unpronounceable word for anyone whose first and only language is Norse - but still welcome at their table. Uncle Hákon is already asleep. “A moose, or maybe a nayoomee, but big and fat and blotchy, and instead of soft antlers it had things as sharp as knives sticking out of its head. Enormous eyes! And it was roaring like nothing I’d ever heard before.” She looks sheepish. “It feels silly now, with every tribe in the area having a bull and cow each.”

“You were only twelve at the time, Kaldr, we can cut you a little slack,” says Mother.

Aunt Kaldr, even thirteen years later, isn’t very clear on Norse phrases that aren’t immediately obvious. Dagrún knows this, and it’s why she can guess that her aunt’s shrug is her way of hiding this from her family–one of them, anyway. “In any case, it was…frightening. We’d never seen something like that before. We had nayoomee, of course we did, but nayoomee aren’t built like rocks and they don’t have horns. And they didn’t…bellow…like that. Tata’t was ready to draw back, drive away the strangers from our shores. He wasn’t sure. But he was getting more sure.”

Dagrún sees it in her mind–a sea full of little boats, each with a bowman and dozens of arrows. It wouldn’t damage the longships, not really, but it could have killed all of her family.

“It could have gone to Hel so easily,” says Uncle Agnarr, and for once he says it so seriously that Mother doesn’t rebuke him.

“But then…”

Uncle Agnarr’s face almost splits in half, his grin spreads so far across it. “The chicken happened.”

“We hadn’t thought much of them,” says Aunt Kaldr. “Just very fat rock ptarmigans, tata’t said.”

“But this one rooster, he’s too close to the pen,” Uncle Agnarr goes on, now openly chuckling. “And then he–he–” And he roars with laughter. “He jumps out of his pen and screeches at the bull! Eeeeeeeee!” And he waves his arms like a rooster’s wings.

Dagrún is laughing again, and so is Ask, and so is Aunt Kaldr, and Uncle Leif, and even Mother is cracking a smile. The atmosphere in the turf house is warm, comfortable, alive against the pull of the winter.

“So then…Kaldr, do you want to cover this bit?” says Uncle Agnarr, calming down a little bit.

Aunt Kaldr nods with good grace. “And then the bull jumped backwards, and tried to hide itself at the other end of the pen. And we laughed. Oh, everyone laughed. Here was this terrible demon-moose, scared of a tiny fat bird? What possible harm could it be to anyone at all?”

Everyone chuckles in agreement.

Uncle Agnarr looks around the house, at the smiling family, Norse and Skraeling and - a glance at Ask that Dagrún doesn’t miss, her gaze never leaving her favourite uncle - people that aren’t quite one or the other but a mix of both. And outside the turf house, isolated by the cold weather but there, are dozens of settlements just like theirs, Vinland growing and prosperous.

“You know,” he says, “I think it all worked out rather well, don’t you?”