Vinland

At first glance, this book is another of those telling the life-story from boyhood to old age (if he is the narrator) or death of some lad who, when the north was torn between its "pagan" past and its "Christian" future, sailed west with the Vikings and visited Iceland, Greenland and Vinland ... (for instance Tim Severin's Viking trilogy beginning with Odinn's Child, and Paul Watkins' Thunder God). But it is much more than that.

For a start, it is, I believe, the first of the sub-genre, apart from Henry Treece's classic Viking Saga – Viking's Dawn, The Road to Miklagard and Viking's Sunset (which, I notice to my shame, have not yet been reviewed on this site). And then it is securely based in the Orkneyinga Saga, the history of the Earls of Orkney; is in fact a "dramatisation" of a section of that history, from the death in battle in 1014 of Earl Sigurd (holding the magical Raven Banner: if it was held aloft they would be victorious, but whoever held it would die; after several men had been killed, no one else would hold hold it, so he had to hold it himself) to the death of Earl Thorfinn in 1064.

Mackay Brown seems to have lived through this period of Orkney's history, and the reader lives through it with him.

Our hero is Ranald Sigmundson, after stowing away on Leif Ericson's ship, lives for a while in Greenland and visits Vinland, then returns to Orkney worried about his old mother who must believe he has drowned, and there gets caught up in the farming life – and, briefly, politics, before becoming disillusioned with the earls and would-be earls and the factions and violence and lies – and spends the rest of his life resisting "the call of the sea" and dreaming of the voyages he made in his youth.

The word Vinland here becomes almost synonymous with Tir-nan-og, the Land of the Young, thye Celtic Elysium, set out in the sea, far away beyond the sunset, "where Ossian dwelt with Niamh for three hundred years before he remembered Erin and the Fenians".