[The Ice-shirt] Book

How skewed a vision of distance you can develop from looking at our standardized world maps. Geography is such a malleable, unfathomable thing. I can take a beach ball globe of the world, deflate it and make all of the continents touch and overlap and commune with one another. I can spin it around and pick any dot and call it the Centre of the Universe, erase all the political lines we've scarred the landscape with and focus on the dreamy blue of the sea.

Who says the ancient peoples were isolated from one another? There are so many islands in the Northern reaches of the Atlantic, with vulnerable human beings plying the unmarked and stormy way from one to the next in frangible wooden ships.
There were islands as numerous as stars, so that men went dreaming from archipelago to constellation, wind-blown and wave-tossed to flowery little coasts where they were deafened by the booming of waterfalls that no one had ever heard before. One thousand years ago, these wooden playthings were swept far off course and driven to the unknown coasts of a landmass formerly known as Vinland, not once but twice in a decade. Suddenly the distance between two continents is foreshortened and the "discovery" of the Americas in 1492 hardly seems impressive. Greenland was settled, but gradually creeping frost and frigid relations led to its abandonment by white folk. We have records of all these long-ago voyages in medieval saga literature, a window into the lives of those first adventurers. William the Blind draws on The Sagas of the Icelanders to revisit this violent age, when so many men were burnt in their sleep, and weaves in elements of Inuit lore and his own travels to the Arctic. Shunted abruptly to the present time, we look at the same places through the lens of today, but are they really the same? Greenland is colder and bereft of driftwood, rivers braid and change course incessantly, and glaciers bear down on mountains at formidably slow speeds. By revisiting these places, the impermanence of our short human lives is brought into sharp relief.

The meeting of two peoples: the Norsemen (Icelanders, Greenlanders... it is difficult to pin a nationality on people that flit across the map, then as now) and the First Peoples, the Inuit, the Skraeling. William the Blind blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, bringing paint and colour to the lives of historical figures who really did walk this earth. Is it his use of primary sources that makes this story uneven? We are always telling this story from a white person's perspective, and I was hungry for a deeper plunge into the Inuit or Micmac experience of this first encounter, but such is not Vollmann's project. Alas, saga literature is vast and reams have been written about these characters, a mound of riches for Vollmann to excavate. By comparison, much of Inuit lore remains oral history, and the cultural recollection of these millennium-old happenings is scant at best. Another way of knowing the past, insofar as it is possible, is through its material record - and clothing is a recurrent motif. How can we know anything of history that is not superficial? Does clothing really define a person, in the way the bear-kings channelled the power of the beast by donning their bear-shirts?
I know the robes better than the people, for I have seen photographs of the clothing excavated from the frozen graves at Herjolfsness. But oh, William the Blind, how you drew me in with your worlds of ice. The story came alive for me when Freydis and her wicked heart scaled the craggy heights of Blue-Shirt. The terrifying truth behind the failure of that first settlement, its vivid other-worldliness, the inner frost that chills the core of this novel - my words cannot do justice to the artistic genius behind this first Dream.
Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?