Of Ships and Suns - by Katherine Langrish

In all kinds of mythologies there are stories about sailing across the sea to a mystical land.  Maybe peoples of all races and all times have this in their blood: anyone who’s ever stood at the seashore and seen the sun rising or setting over the ocean must have wondered, like young Peer Ulfsson in my historical fantasy ‘West of the Moon’, what it would be like to find the lands beyond the sun:

He clambered across the cargo and up the curve of the ship into the stern, where he stood for a moment holding the tiller and gazing out westwards.  The sun was low, laying a bright track over the water: a road studded with glittering cobblestones.  It stung his heart and dazzled his eyes.

He felt a surge of longing.  Life was a tangle that tied him to the shore.  What would it be like to cut free, shake off the land, and go gliding away into the very heart of the sun?

That ships and suns go together can be seen from the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carried him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travelled through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.  

How old is Re?  Well, judging by the dates of temples dedicated to his worship, his cult rose to its zenith in the 5^th Dynasty, beginning approximately 2500 BCE.  The dead were expected to spend eternity travelling with him across the sky. (Later his cult was superseded by the resurrection cult of Osiris.)  The photo above this paragraph shows the full-size Egyptian ship known as the Khufu ship, 143 feet long and built of Lebanon cedar, which was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza: the remains of many other solar boats have been found in different locations in Egypt.

Rock engravings in Scandinavia, dated to the Bronze Age any time between 1500 and 400 BCE show the same correspondence between ships and suns.  Here are some examples, reproduced in ‘The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age' by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, showing ships embellished with sun discs and spirals. 

But people have been heading out to sea for literally hundreds of thousands of years.  Here’s a link to an article which seems to show that even before we were modern humans, hominids such as homo erectus ‘used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from Northern Africa to Europe’ – island-hopping as they went and leaving stone hand axes on Crete dating to at least 130,000 BCE.   How amazing – how utterly mind-blowing is that?  Modern humans crossed to Australia 60,000 years ago, and to North America earlier than 13,000 BCE. 

Whatever drove them to make these discoveries?  A nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle is one thing: but setting off in a boat or on a raft on a one-way trip into an unknown ocean is quite another, especially with no population pressure pushing you on.  I can’t help but wonder if there was maybe a religious, a mystical element to these early voyages of discovery.  Maybe, standing on the sea shore, gazing at the sun rising or setting (depending which side of which continent they were), early peoples believed themselves to be embarking on journeys to follow the sun to the land of gods and the happy dead?  

And those left behind, watching them depart, must have felt a huge sense of awe, wonder and mystery about what befell the seafarers. As it says in ‘Beowulf’, when the dead king Scyld Scefing is set adrift in his ship-funeral:

Then they set up / the standard of gold

High over head: / let the sea bear him:

Gave him to the flood / with sad hearts

And mourning minds.  / Men cannot

Say for certain, / neither court-counsellors

Nor heroes under heaven, / who received that cargo.  

Who received that cargo?  By the time the Beowulf poem was written down, England was Christian.  But the poem leaves us in doubt as to the eventual supernatural landfall of a pagan king: it was an age which could still hold Christian and pagan beliefs in relatively comfortable simultaneity – an age which, maybe, knew it didn’t have all the answers.

And people down the centuries have been buried in ships, like the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship, dating from the early 7^th century AD, and the Oseberg ship, circa 800 AD,  which carried the bodies of two women, priestesses or queens, and the Gokstad ship, built of oak felled around 890 AD, sheltering the body of a man, perhaps a king.  The 10^th century Muslim traveller Ibn Fadlan wrote an eyewitness account of a Viking ship-funeral in Russia: a chieftain interred in his ship along with many grave goods and sacrifices, including that of a slave girl who ‘saw’ into the land of the dead in a kind of drugged trance, after which she was strangled and stabbed and laid beside him to accompany him on his mystical voyage.  According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, she had voluntarily offered herself as the sacrifice, and we needn’t be too sceptical.  In all probability she utterly believed she would be accompanying her lord to the Otherworld.  He was her passport to immortality.  

So ships and suns and voyages into the west have been part of the human imagination for many thousands of years.  After Re the sun god, there came Odysseus, Jason, Maelduine, Brendan, Oisin and many a nameless adventurer with them.  There came the Christian hermits who sailed out to remote islets in the Atlantic, and the saints who founded monasteries on Holy Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne. 

So let’s set sail for the western isles, the land of the gods, the land of the dead, the land of the ever-young.  Bid farewell to Middle-Earth.  This way to Aeaea, Avalon, Tir na n’Og, Valinor, Eldamar, the Hesperides and Hy Brasil.  Hush! Can you hear the seagulls crying?   

The Devil At The Centre of The World - by Katherine Langrish

The Flammarion engraving, 1888, artist unknown

“Medieval people thought the world was flat.”  No they didn’t, not educated people at least (and after all there’s still a Flat Earth Society today, whose members appear to believe that the moonshots were a hoax, though it’s hard to tell how many of them are simply having a bit of straight-faced fun.)  And there were plenty of educated medieval people. 

Actually, the pre-Christian early medieval Norse did – theoretically – believe in a sort-of flat earth.  They imagined earth surrounded by an encircling ocean, with Yggdrasil, the World Tree, growing up from the centre of the land.  Even then, the delving roots and high branches of Yggdrasil speak of other dimensions.  But this poetic, mythic explanation of the universe was unlikely to have been applied in any serious way to the voyages the Vikings made, which were guided by careful observation of landmarks and ocean currents, of drifting seaweed and circling gulls, of the migration of whales and the position of stationary clouds over land.

I rather suspect early medieval Norse sailors of performing that simple human trick of being able to believe two incompatible things at once: religio-mythic descriptions of the universe were one thing: the sea route to Greenland was quite another. In my book ‘West of the Moon’, the storm-driven Norse sailors of the knarr ‘Watersnake’, sailing across the North Atlantic, argue about their position:

“What if we miss Vinland altogether and sail over the edge of the world?” Floki piped up, conjuring in every mind a vision of the endless waterfall plunging over the rim of the earth.

“Showing your ignorance, Floki,” said Magnus.  “The world is shaped like a dish, and that keeps the water in.  Ye can’t sail over the edge.”

“That’s not right,” Arnë argued.  “The world’s like a dish, but it’s an upside down dish.  You can see that by the way it curves.”

Magnus burst out laughing.  “Then why wouldn’t the sea just run off?  You can’t pour water into an upside-down dish.”

“It’s like a dish with a rim,” said Gunnar in a tone that brooked no arguments.  “There’s land all round the ocean, just like there’s land all round any lake.  Stands to reason. And that means so long as we keep sailing west, we’ll strike the coastline.”

Gunnar is wrong, of course, but in a practical sense he’s also right.  Sail far enough west from anywhere in Europe, and you’ll strike the American continent somewhere.

And Arnë’s right too in his observation of the curvature of the world’s surface, obvious to any sailor who sees the land rising out of the sea as he sails towards it. In  Canto II of Dante’s early 14^th century ‘Purgatorio’, the boat bringing the souls of the saved to the island of Purgatory rises above the horizon as it approaches: Dante spies the tips of its guiding angel’s wings before the boat itself is visible:

...as Mars reddens through the heavy vapours, low in the west over the waves at the coming of dawn, so a light appeared… coming over the sea so quickly that no flight equals its movement, and when I had taken my eyes from it for a moment to question my guide, I saw it once more, grown bigger and brighter.  Then something white appeared on each side of it, and little by little, another whiteness emerged from underneath it.

My Master did not speak a word, until the first whitenesses were seen to be wings… and it came towards the shore, in a vessel so quick and light that it skimmed the waves.

(trans. A.S. Kline © 2000)

The Greeks of the 4^th century had discovered that the world is a sphere, and the fact was commonsense observation and no news to most medieval people, including churchmen.  However, commonsense observation can also deceive.  With their own eyes, medieval people could see the sun, moon and stars turning around the earth.  But as C. S. Lewis points out in his book ‘The Discarded Image’, this geocentric view of the universe didn’t necessarily mean they thought the central Earth was the most important thing in it.  To get a genuinely Euro-medieval view, you have to turn your ideas about the cosmos inside out.  The eternal, unchangeable, holy realms were all out there, beyond the circuit of the changing Moon.  The sun and moon and stars and planets all turned around the earth, set in crystal spheres, making heavenly harmony as they went.  This is why Lorenzo exclaims to Jessica in ‘The Merchant of Venice’,

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings…

Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1

From The Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

My 12^th century Welsh heroine Nest, in ‘Dark Angels’, expresses it with the aid of a mural painted by her dead mother:

“See this picture, how beautiful it is?  A map of the whole of Creation! Mam painted it herself.  I used to sit on a stool eating nuts and watching her.”

She pointed.  “Look, here’s the Earth in the middle, like a little ball.  All around it is the air. Above that, the Moon.”  She traced a line up the wall.  “Next, Mercury and Venus.”  Her finger landed on a fiery little sun with a human face, crackling with life.  “Here’s the Sun.  Then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, spinning around and around the Earth, all of them set in crystal spheres, each one bigger than the last!  Then, this dark blue circle with the stars painted in it – that’s the Fixed Stars, all turning around together. And then the sphere that makes them all move, and beyond that” – her finger burst through the last ring, like a chicken pecking through an eggshell – “Heaven.”

She drew a deep breath.  “That’s where my mam is!  Outside the universe.  Safe with God.”

There’s a grandness of imagination to the medieval design of the universe, which for centuries worked well as a mathematical model – it takes into account huge distances, but on a human scale.  Humans are small, living on a world that is tiny compared to the vastness of the Primum Mobile, the sphere of the First Mover - but not scarily insignificant. 

Chaucer’s Troilus, in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (written mid 1380’s), ascends to the seventh sphere after his death and looks down:

And when that he was slain in this manere

His lighte ghost full blissfully is went

Up to the holowness of the seventh sphere…

…And down from thennes fast he gan avise

The litel spot of erthe, that with the sea

Embraced is, and fully gan despise

This wrecched world, and held all vanity

To respect of the plain felicity

That is in heven above…

Dante's Satan by Gustave Dore

Hell was of course located underground, at the centre of the earth – where Dante and his guide Virgil find gigantic Satan buried up to the waist at the very bottom of the funnel that is Hell – and have to turn around as they climb down his hairy body, to find themselves ascending as they pass the midpoint of the world.  Dante narrates:

[Virgil] took fast hold upon the shaggy flanks

and then descended, down from tuft to tuft

between the tangled hair and icy crusts.

When we had reached the point at which the thigh

Revolves, just at the swelling of the hip,

My guide, with heavy strain and rugged work

Reversed his head to where his legs had been

And grappled on the hair, as one who climbs.

I thought that we were going back to Hell.

But Virgil explains:

...When I turned, that's when you passed the point

to which, from every part, all weight bears down.

(trans: Allen Mandelbaum)

I’m struck dumb with admiration at Dante’s utterly fantastic feat of imagination here. He died in 1321, and it would be over 350 years before Isaac Newton worked out his theory of gravitation – which underlines my point: people observe things, and can deploy them for practical purposes, long before they can adequately explain them.

By the way, the medieval universe also included another underground world besides Hell.  Tinged with a whiff of the same infernal smoke - with a suspicion that the back door might lead much deeper down - in shallow caves and holes and hollow hills was Elfland…

But that is another story.

Seidr Magic - Katherine Langrish

When I was writing ‘Troll Blood’ (the third book of my Viking trilogy ‘West of the Moon’), one character stubbornly refused to come to life. She was a young woman, Astrid, wife of the rough seafarer ‘Gunnar One-Hand’: and for ages I couldn’t find out who she was. Was she shy, timid and quiet? Tough and adventurous? Proud and stiff? Nothing seemed right, till one day as characters finally do she took scornful pity on my efforts, leaned in close and breathed in my ear, ‘There’s troll blood in me.’ At once I knew who she was. Manipulative, damaged, vulnerable, difficult Astrid became someone I really loved. Here’s where my heroine Hilde meets her for the first time:

Hilde turned, nearly bumping against a tall girl standing next to her, muffled in an expensive-looking dark blue cloak with the hood up. A brown and white goatskin bag was slung over her shoulder on a long strap, which she clutched with long thin-wristed hands. She had ice-maiden skin, so white and thin that the blue veins glistened through, wide grey eyes, a neat straight nose like a cat’s with little curling nostrils, and pale closely-shut lips.
Their eyes met. For a second Hilde felt she was looking into the eyes of a deer or a hare, a wild animal who glares at you before bolting.

And Astrid has - literally - a whole bag of tricks. She is a seidr-worker.

Seidr (pronounced roughly: ‘saythoor’, the d isn't a d but the letter ð) was a variety of Northern magic involving the arts of prophecy, spirit journeys, healing (or causing harm) and illusion. The word may come from the same root as the English verb ‘to seethe’ which means ‘to boil’ – like Shakespeare’s three witches boiling up spells in their cauldron.

Seidr was thought of as female magic; men might practise it but they endangered themselves and their reputations if they did. A woman skilled in seidr was regarded with awe, respect and a tinge of fear, as a prophetess or priestess. In Erik the Red’s Saga, there’s a famous passage in which such a woman is invited to the house of Eirk’s son Thorkel:

There was a great famine in Greenland; men who had gone out fishing caught poor catches and some never came back. There was a woman there in the Settlement whose name was Thorbjorg; she was a seeress … so …to find out when these hard times would cease, Thorkel invited her to his home. A high-seat was made ready for her, and a cushion laid down in which there must be hen feathers.
When she arrived in the evening, together with the man who had been sent to escort her, this is how she was dressed: she was wearing a blue cloak with straps which was set with stones right down to the hem; she had glass beads about her neck, and on her head a black lambskin hood lined inside with white catskin. She had a staff in her hand with a knob on it, it was ornamented with brass and set around with stones just below the knob. Round her middle she wore a belt made of touchwood, and on it was a big skin pouch in which she kept those charms she needed for magic. On her feet she had hairy calfskin shoes with long thongs… on her hands she had catskin gloves.

Thorkel and his family greet her with anxious courtesy, offering her special food - ‘porridge with goat’s beestings’ and ‘for her meat the hearts of all living creatures available there.’ Thorkel asks how soon she’ll be able to give them the news of the future which they are hoping for, but she calmly responds that she’ll have ‘nothing to announce till next day’ after a good night’s sleep.

Finally, however, the prophetess gives the show she’s made them wait for (and thus appreciate better). Seated on her high seat, surrounded by the women and aided by spirits called up by chanting, she reassures Thorkel and the settlers that the famine will not last beyond the winter, that spring will bring good things; and she answers the questions of all the men who approach her: ‘She was free with her information, and little indeed of what she said failed to come about’.

Reconstruction of a Viking house at Brattahlíð, Greenland.  To such a house Thorkel would have welcomed the seidr worker.

It’s a rare glimpse of a pre-Christian Norse priestess (although the saga specifically names a couple of Christian Greenlanders who feel uncomfortable with the proceedings, it’s clear that most of the settlers are only too grateful to have their worries set to rest by such an awe-inspiring figure). In other sagas, though, we can see the ‘witch’ element coming more to the fore in descriptions of such women, as Christian views became more widespread.


In ‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong’, an old woman cuts runes on a floating tree trunk, smears them with her own blood, walks round it widdershins – against the sun – and tells Grettir’s enemies to push the tree into the sea so that it will float to the island where Grettir has taken shelter, and bring him harm.

In ‘Eyrbyggya Saga’, a woman called Katla uses seidr magic to save her son Odd from a band of his enemies. On seeing them approach the house, she tells her son to sit next to her as she spins her wool. Though Arnkell and his men search the house, they don’t see Odd, only Katla’s distaff with the clump of wool on it. They leave, but suspect they’ve been tricked and come back a second time. Katla is combing Odd’s hair, but to the war band it looks as though she is grooming her goat. The third time, though Odd is lying on a pile of ashes, the men ‘see’ only Katla’s boar asleep there. Each time they leave the house, the men realise they have been fooled by Katla’s magic arts. Not until they enlist the help of another woman skilled in seidr, Geirridr who hates Katla, do Odd’s enemies succeed in capturing him. (Of course this story also illustrates how normal it was in those days for people to share their living space with large domestic animals.)

Stories such as these from the sagas should remind us that our modern, twenty-first century sceptical viewpoint is not really up to the task of understanding the world of early medieval people. To do so, we need to suspend our disbelief. Men like Thorkell and his neighbours, Arnkell and his warband, not only believed in seidr but shared their physical world with malevolent ghosts like Glam of Grettir’s Saga, and trolls, and wizards and sendings. Such things were not delightful tales to them, but fearsome realities. Fantasyland was real.

I think we often forget that ‘reality’ is something we construct. So much depends on our beliefs. Just as schoolchildren know for sure, via playground lore, that the dishevelled house on the corner, the one with the peeling paint and lopsided windowframes, is inhabited by a bloodstained ghost (and will often invent odd little placatory rhymes and rituals to be used if they have to go past it), so our ancestors’ concerns and actions were coloured by their perceptions and beliefs in creatures which, to us, are unreal fantasies. We can hold such beliefs at arms’ length, a tacit wink passing between author and reader as we congratulate ourselves on knowing better than our poor deluded characters, or we can immerse ourselves and our readers in the perceptual world of the historical past. I make no apology for preferring the second option.

New Worlds - by Katherine Langrish

The Sacred Way

"Our house stood in the Inner Kerameikos, not far from the Dipylon Gate. ...The roof had a border of acanthus tiles and was not very steep.  If one straddled the ridge, one could see right over the city wall, past the gate towers of the Dipylon to the Sacred Way where it curves towards Eleusis between its gardens and its tombs.  In summertime, I could pick out the funeral stele of my uncle Alexias and his friend, by the white oleander that grew there.  Then I would turn south, to where the High City stands like a great stone altar against the sky, and search between the roof tops for the point of gold, where tall Athene of the Vanguard lifts her spear to the ships at sea.  But I liked best to look north at the range of Parnes, snow-topped, or scorched brown in summer, or grey and green in spring, and watch for the Spartans coming over."

This evocative paragraph is from Chapter 2 of Mary Renault's marvellous novel 'The Last of the Wine', and as her biographer David Sweetman points out: 'The hours of work involved in calculating that deceptively simple 360 degree vista is awe-inspiring'.  In a few sentences we are anchored in place and time.  Sweetman goes on to describe how at a late stage in the book Mary Renault checked her imaginative reconstruction, written at home in South Africa and based on exhaustive research, by a visit to Athens with her friend Julie Mullard in 1954.  Standing on the Acropolis, she discovered that she had made just one error. 'She had written of Alexias staring at the ships in the harbour when, in fact, it was hidden by the curve of the land.'  This was easily put right, and in the passage above Alexias sees no ships.

The remains of the Kerameikos

 
There’s no short cut to designing a world. Even fantasy worlds, if they are to be believable, require enormous amounts of consideration. Tolkien famously took decades to explore the history, languages, mythology and geography of Middle Earth (and even so missed out the economy), and we lesser mortals still must spend time deciding what lies north, south, east and west of the village or castle from which our hero or heroine sets out. Only fairytales, which are set as close as next door and as far away as the Mountains of the Moon and make the sophisticated assumption that the listeners will willingly join in and don’t need to be deceived, can afford not to bother with this effort to locate the story in a ‘realistic’ place and time.

My current work in progress is set in the future, and I’m finding the research for it just as rigorous and rather more difficult than researching the past. I’m very busy, in fact, creating the history of the next one hundred and seventy-five years or so – starting with the present, adding a disaster or two, and extrapolating from that.  Although the story isn’t directly about it, this history of the future sets the parameters - and suggests the possibilities - for my new world.

I find myself looking back with some nostalgia to the time when I was writing ‘Troll Blood’, the third part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’. Set in approximately AD 1000, it tells how my young Norse hero and heroine sail across the Atlantic in a Viking ship, a knarr, to landfall on the coast of Vinland (North America): and I had the Greenland sagas, as well as modern archeological evidence, to demonstate that Viking seafarers did exactly this.  Leif the Lucky, son of Eirik the Red, sailed from Greenland across what is now the Davis Strait and named three lands on his way south: Helluland, which means ‘Slabland’, a country full of rocks; Markland, ‘Forest Land’; and finally Vinland, a grassy, wooded peninsular where he and his men built houses and overwintered, naming the place for the grapes they claimed to have found there. These locations are now thought to be Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland respectively, and a small Viking settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland may even be the place where Leif built his cabins.
 
But North America was already full of people – and Leif and his crew met them: calling them ‘Skraelings’ (an obscure but contemptuous term). The sagas tell of battles. Leif’s brother-in-law Thorvald murdered eight ‘Skraelings’ whom he found sleeping by their canoes - paying the price for it when he died of an arrow-wound in the counter-attack. And so began the sorry history of European behaviour in the New World.

Iroquois warrior, circa 1812

I wanted to open my tale from a Native perspective. I was fully aware and have written here about the problem of cultural appropriation, so I won’t repeat that argument now, but it seemed to me important to show my Norse hero and his companions in the light of intruders rather than adventurers bold. And so the book opens with a brutal Viking quarrel – a massacre of one ship’s crew by another – witnessed from a high point in the woods by two Native Americans who are very much NOT like the simplistic image in this sonnet by J C Squire.

But then I needed to know a lot about the world. Exactly where was the bay where this massacre happens? It couldn’t be Newfoundland for the rather terrible reason that the Native American people who most likely lived there when Leif Eirikson landed – the Beothuk – are now extinct: the last woman of the race died of tuberculosis in 1829, and with her was lost the last chance of learning more than a few scraps of knowledge about her people's language, beliefs and customs. So since the Norsemen surely explored further up the Gulf of St Lawrence, I decided to set my story in a little invented cove somewhere in the great Baie des Chaleurs on the Gaspe Peninsular in New Brunswick: and this made my fictional Native Americans ancestors of the Mi’kmaq. Here is my sketch map of the cove, vital to me for visualising the terrain.

Because the civilizations and societies of North America went largely undocumented by themselves – without complex writing systems there were no indigenous written histories - what we know of them tends to come from European travellers likely to misunderstand even if they were sympathetic, agents themselves of change and destruction. Moreover, there are no records at all of the customs and beliefs of the Native Americans at the time of the Norse arrivals. ( The Greenland Norse went there repeatedly for timber, but seemed otherwise not much interested.) The earliest accounts of Native life in the North-East woods are from missionaries, such as Fr Chrestien LeClerq’s ‘New Relation of Gaspesia’.  LeClerq was a Recollet priest who spent twelve years in the area from 1673 on, and learned the Mi’kmaq language. Luckily he was a young man, for his life was often tough. Here he describes a winter journey in January from Nipisiquit to Mizamichis: he and his companions get lost and it takes them ten days in all:

The night passed with new difficulties. A wind from the North-West, of an extraordinarily keen and penetrating coldness, well-nigh froze us, because we had not been able to find wood enough to keep us warm during the night; so that, in order not to die of cold in our camp, we left it before daylight, with suffering that cannot be imagined. I came near being swallowed up in a deep gulch which was covered with snow... scarcely was I a gun-shot from this precipice but, wishing to cross a little river, one of my snowshoes broke and I fell into the water up to my waist.

So – yes, I took personal accounts such as these, plus all kinds of other geographical and historical information about New Brunswick and its flora and its fauna, and the 17th and 18th century culture and customs of the Mi’qmaq - what did they wear? what did they eat? what were their houses like? what were their beliefs? - and then extrapolated backwards, very much as I’m currently extrapolating forwards in time, to create an authentic world for my historical fantasy. Here is a war-band, setting out in winter accompanied by my hero Peer and his young friend Ottar:

By dusk next day, the war party had covered half the distance to the shore. Sinumkwe called a halt in an open glade, a tilted clearing on a hill shoulder, facing east towards the sea. A wind sharp as a skinning knife sliced between the trees, ruffling the black fur of pines and spruce, moaning through the skeletal arms of oaks, chestnuts and maples.


Peer looked at the war band. Nearly fifty men had set out from the village for the two-day walk to the shore. All wore red on their faces. All were wrapped in thick clothes against the cold: double layers of beaver robes, long leggings and hide boots. All moved quickly and easily over the snow on wide flat snowshoes that they tied to their feet. 

"There's no shelter here," he said in a low voice to Ottar. ..."There soon will be," said Ottar confidently.  He kicked off one of his snowshoes and started using it as a shovel to scoop out a hollow from the snow.  ...All the men were digging shelters.  They broke branches from the fir trees and threw them in to layer the bottoms of the holes with a springy criss-cross.  Larger boughs partly roofed the shelters.  And soon, small fires were spiralling upwards.



A simple enough couple of paragraphs? Sure. But with a whole world of research behind them.



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Sailing with the Vikings - by Katherine Langrish

Sailing out from Roskilde town

 

In about 1030 AD, the people of Roskilde Fjord in Denmark deliberately sank five old ships to block two of the three navigable channels leading into the fjord. This meant the only remaining entrance could easily be controlled, and any ship wishing to come down the fjord to Roskilde town would be spotted, challenged, and perhaps charged a toll for use of the harbour and the chance to trade.  Handy for the townsfolk then – and handy now: for those five scuttled ships have been rediscovered, raised and preserved, and are now a major tourist attraction as well as offering invaluable insights into Viking ship construction.  As an amazing bonus, while digging the foundations for the new museum they discovered not one, but nine more Viking ships buried in the silt.  One of them is the very longest longship ever found – over 36 metres!

Replicas of those first five ships - the Skuldelev ships - have now been built, and it was on some of these that I was about to sail.

Arriving at Roskilde one hot June evening in 2005, we walked down through the town, past the great cathedral where no less than 28 of the Kings of Denmark lie buried, across the slanting cobbled square, and downhill under cool trees to the broad fjord.

A little Viking fishing boat rowing home

The sun was low, descending with stately reluctance – it wouldn’t set properly till eleven o’clock or later.  The western sky was full of colours, reflected in the fjord: stripes of tangerine, purple and blue.  And there they were, outlined against the sky: the tall masts and upcurved prows and sterns of four Viking ships, tethered to the jetty.  We walked past staring at them greedily: the two longships, Helge Ask and Sea Stallion of Glendalough; the fishing vessel, Kraka Fyr, the cargo ship, Roar Ege.  And then we saw a square sail, black against the sunset.  Another Viking vessel sailing towards Roskilde harbour, just as it would have done over a thousand years ago…and two swans swam across its path, like little Viking ships themselves, proud prows uplifted.

I was there because I was in the middle of writing the third and final book of a series of historical fantasies about the Viking era  - 'West of the Moon' - and in this volume, ‘Troll Blood’, I wanted to take my characters across the Atlantic to the shores of ‘Vinland’ – the far-distant northeast coast of America – just as Leif the Lucky, the son of Eirik the Red, had done over a thousand years ago. 

And, no matter how much research you do in libraries, no matter how many books you read, there’s nothing to beat hands-on personal experience.  With huge excitement I’d found out that the Viking Ship Museum here at Roskilde ran a week-long sailing course in which I could learn a great deal about how to handle those great square-rigged sails, and all sorts of general things about how it really felt to be on the sea in a Viking age ship. 

 

Well, I learned a lot.  Here are some of my hastily scribbled notes:

The sail towers over the boat – how big it is! – seems to cut off the sky and a large part of the horizon. 

The chuckle and truckle of water running along the sides and under the bottom boards.  Jellyfish pass by the end of my oar – ghostly circles in the dark water, frilled, pulsating.

I feel the wind coming towards us even while we’re still moving forwards, sailing close to the wind.

Soren helps me steer between the shoals

It’s really hard work on the sheets when we change the tack, wrestling in these yards of struggling, flapping sail – the ropes are harsh and soft at the same time, dark horsehair, softish but prickly to the hand.  We yank and yank again, and the rope comes in through the hole in the gunwale, soaking wet, scattering spray like a dog shaking its coat.  

Hauling away

The boat heels, but nothing like so far as a modern yacht.  To change tack, the opposite lower leading corner of the sail changes and is fastened close to the bow to the ‘tack stick’.

Søren tells how his grandfather thought nothing of sailing thirty miles up and down the fjord to market, or of wheeling a barrow of live fish to Copenhagen and returning in a day

I learned how the mast could be taken down (unstepped) in a couple of minutes by flipping up the ‘shroud nails’; how a longship on a raid might cross the sea in three days rowing continuously: if one bench at a time rested, little speed was lost, so the resting period would ‘roll’ down the ship in a relay so the rowers could relax, drink, and answer calls of nature in turn.  And I learned that the round shields (so often depicted in overlapping rows along the ships’ sides) would only be hung out in an actual battle, ‘to cower behind’, said our skipper Søren, with a laugh.  ‘You can’t sail or row,’ he added, ‘with the shields in the way.’

Of course, most of the technical stuff never made it into the book; but I came away with confidence to write more truly, more realistically, about my characters’ voyage – even though they were headed out into the wild Atlantic, and I’d been sailing and rowing only in the fjord (although when the wind got up, we fairly flew over the choppy water!).  Who says research is dull?  We were there over midsummer.  On St John’s Eve, we camped in a hayfield with the boats on the shore below, ate barbecued fresh salmon, and watched the bonfires being lit along the fjord, and later the fireworks competing with a full, yellow moon. 

One of the things I liked best about being on our ship was the feeling of camaraderie amongst the crew, and the way, when things got lazy and the wind was blowing, those of us not needed to handle sails could lie back, relax, and tell stories, jokes and tall tales.  Those Viking sailors must have done just the same thing.  

You can come and see me at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Sunday October 16th, where Kevin Crossley-Holland and I will be talking about our Viking books. And do visit my own blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, where, in keeping with this post, I'm running a series on Mystical Voyages in fact and fiction.

Torture as Entertainment by Katherine Langrish

I wasn't going to write about this at all.  I was going to write a post about sailing reproduction Viking ships on the sunny waters of Roskilde fjord one happy midsummer a couple of years back.

But then, reading the Guardian newspaper for Saturday 20th August, I came across a review of an audio book, and changed my mind: so the viking ships post will have to wait till next time.

The column is headed 'Sue Arnold's Choice'.   As you probably know, Sue Arnold regularly reviews audio books for the Guardian, and I often read and enjoy her recommendations, but I guess Jove nods, we all have off days, and this one stopped me in my tracks.  You can find it online here, but I'm going to quote from it anyway.

'Pirates!' by Roy McMillan is an audio book for children which Sue Arnold describes as 'an entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia'.  So far, so good: and I was particularly interested to see that the book follows its subject matter right into modern times.  I used to work for Lloyd's Register of Shipping and know full well that pirates have never gone away, and certainly no longer present themselves in 18th century costumes complete with tricorn hats, parrots, cutlasses and seaboots.  (A costume which has a lot to answer for: take away the parrot and add a black mask and a horse and you have a highwayman, another stereotype of the imaginary long-lost romantic past.)

Real pirates are not and never were romantic, and neither were highwaymen, in spite of the myth of the handsome beribboned rascal who kisses the lady's hand before demanding her diamonds.  There's room in fiction, I guess, for romantic rascals: but that's because it's fiction. With another hat on, I spoke recently at the Mervyn Peake Centenary Conference at the University of Chichester on Peake's classic picture book about pirates: 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'.  Here is Captain Slaughterboard in all his sleazy glory: a comically terrifying character in the tradition of Long John Silver and Captain Hook.  Pirates in children's fiction are almost pure fantasy: as mythical as unicorns. 

History, however, presents the naked facts.  And the naked facts are often extremely unpleasant.  Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with telling children about the nasty things which have been done in the world: but I do have a problem with nastiness which is presented as entertainment.

Time for that quote:  Sue Arnold writes:

"Punctuating the biographies [of famous pirates] are ... graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed 'Gruesome Alert', which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for example, one pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money.  The  unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could only walk on all fours.  Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish."

I'm sorry?  Kids will ENJOY hearing this?

You know, some of them actually may.  The ones without much imagination, and the ones who haven't noticed or bothered to think about the fact that the book follows pirates right up to the present day, and that perhaps torture isn't some quaint old-worlde custom after all.  But I thought books were supposed to broaden our imaginations so that we are more capable of empathy, and I thought history might be a way of making us think more wisely about the present - rather than a lurid chamber-of-horrors freak-show.

My quarrel is not with Roy McMillan's book, which I haven't listened to - it may be well and sensitively written, and the subtitle which the author apparently employs, 'Gruesome Alert', may be genuinely intended to warn rather than to amplify.  My quarrel is with the careless tone of the reviewer.

"Kids are tough" says Sue Arnold.  Well, some of them are and some of them aren't, and parents know pretty well what their own offspring can stand; and what is likely to produce the tap on the bedroom door at midnight and the shivering cry of 'I can't get to sleep - I can't stop thinking about [insert horror of choice]' - so it's a bit silly to name-call those parents who do decide this is all a bit too strong, as 'PC'. 
The world is full of horrors and always has been, we know.  I don't in the least mind children hearing about them - at the appropriate age - as long as the adults who convey this information don't present it as fun stuff.  (Those jolly old pirates, eh? What they got up to!)

My elder daughter studied GCSE history about five years ago, and one of the topics was 'Victorian Crime and Punishment'.  Part of the course involved a close study of the Jack the Ripper murders - including photographs of the victims - for no good reason that I could see (since the Ripper was never caught and therefore never punished) other than its sensation value: educators clearly thought the subject would liven up potentially dull lessons.  My daughter and a good portion of her classmates found it very disturbing, especially as her (female) history teacher appeared to enjoy the topic in a way which was quite out of sympathy with her class.  Indeed, this woman told them with regret she was unable to show them more graphic photos, since when she had done so with the previous year's class, a girl had fainted.

Unlike their teacher, my sixteen year old daughter and her friends understood they were looking at pictures of real people - real women and girls, some maybe not much older than themselves - who had lived hard lives and known terror and pain and early death.  They had been real, not some stop on an East End Jack-the-Ripper tourist trail. 

"Kids are tough".  Let's be sure this doesn't mean, "Kids are insensitive, unimaginative and callous. They need strong meat, even carrion: they won't appreciate anything better."  Let's be sure we don't apply lower standards to children's history books, sensationalising them because we think children won't read them otherwise (and people say "it doesn't matter what they read so long as they're reading" - a statement quite as idiotic as "it doesn't matter what they eat so long as they're eating"). 

And let's agree that just because something happened in the past, doesn't make it entertainment.

See Katherine Langrish at the Cheltenham Festival, Sunday October 16th at 5.00pm, talking with Kevin Crossley-Holland about her book West of the Moon.