“Now must we begin from the time when Karlsefni got ready his ship, and put to sea; he had a prosperous voyage, and came safe and sound to Norway…. And when Karlsefni was dead, took Gudrid the management of the house with her son Snorri, who was born in Vinland… and Karlsefni has accurately related to all men the occurrences on all these voyages, of which somewhat is now recited here.”
From the Greenland Saga
I’m so glad I went down the path of ‘The Truth is Stranger than Fiction’ in my writing. I mean, why create fictional characters for ghosts when I can use more fascinating historical people?
I added a Viking to my story because I had to develop a reason for how The Palantir got from Europe to the Americas. Of course, I’d heard of Eric the Red (settled Iceland) and Leif Erikson (settled Greenland and first European in the Americas) (note: the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red are the two primary sources for information on those early Viking explorers) but not Thorfinn Karlsefni. As I dug into his story, I found his history more interesting than either of his predecessors.
You’ve got to give credit to Eric the Red and Leif Erickson for exploring past the known boundaries of the world the Europeans knew, but Thorfinn took it one step further and lived in Canada for three years, almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus set sail. While there, he and his wife Gudrid had a son, Snorri, the first European descendent born in the Americas.
Based on Norse descriptions, some believe that Thorfinn went as far south as New York, but there are no Viking artifacts that far south. No one knows where his camp was in Canada, but the only known early Viking settlement in Canada is at L’Anse aux Meadows.
Besides figuring out who brought The Palantir to the Americas, I also had to come up with why. I didn’t think doing it for ‘Queen and Country’ was a good enough reason, so I looked around for an incentive. Then I happened to see this making of the +Vlfberht+ video and knew I had to include that sword, the most valuable weapon in Europe a thousand years ago.
One of the things I love about doing this type of research for my books is how much I learn in the process. Until I started digging into the history of the +VLFBERHT+ swords, I had no idea how far the Vikings roamed during their heyday. Nor was I aware of the technology and commerce involved in making them. I also got the benefit of learning a bunch of interesting side stories – like the Catholic Church being an arms dealer a long time ago and producing knockoffs to make money. It’s like I’ve said, truth is stranger than fiction.
The picture below is my conducting some of my own arms dealing. You have to know that I collect ‘weird stuff.’ The weirder, the better. My most gruesome item is a carved wooden skeleton from the Dominican Republic that is so scary that it took the shop owner years to sell it. I also have a bizarre three-headed carving from New Zealand, a voodoo-like letter opener from Peru, and so on. The axe below is from the Sacred Valley in Peru.
Comments