The Ice-Shirt

"William T. Vollmann, who wrote this book in 1990, planned to write a seven-novel series exploring the history of North America through mythological and historical themes, but I don’t think they were all written. The Ice-Shirt is a remarkable book because it blends Norse mythological history and the story of the settlement of North America from Greenland by Scandinavians, particularly focusing on a woman called Freydis, who is the illegitimate daughter of Erik the Red. She is contrasted in the novel with Gudrid, who is the wife of the main settler, Thorfinn Karlsefni. Gudrid is a virtuous, kind, clever, likeable woman, while Freydis has already trekked to the north of Greenland and pledged her allegiance to a demonic power who lives there. He’s an embodiment of the biggest mountain in Greenland, the power of ice, the power of the freezing cold which strangles all kinds of fertility. When Freydis goes to Vinland, she sees it as her mission to bring that cold with her, to destroy the paradise that is North America, where the climate is always temperate, where there is food everywhere, animals, plants, the vines for which Vinland is named. There, she finds the Native American figure of evil. Vollman makes use of three different mythologies: the Greenlandic Inuit mythology, Norse mythology, and Mi’kmaq belief, which is the Native American group who were living there. Freydis triumphs by bringing the cold to North America, the settlement fails for various reasons, and she goes home again and lives in Greenland with nothing to show for anything. Gudrid returns to Iceland and has many descendants and a much better future. This is all interspersed with Vollmann’s travel diary of visiting Iceland, Greenland, Baffin Island and Newfoundland in the summer of 1987 and talking about the ways in which he interacts with the various people still living there. Vollmann yokes together a grand mythological retelling of various myths across the pan-Arctic world, plus the history of the failed settlement, plus his own experiences of what it’s like to be in those regions now. The whole thing is mesmerising, in the way he switches between material that he takes from the historical or quasi-historical Norse sagas and his vision of the underworld, which is absolutely terrifying when Freydis goes into it, and also the ice and glaciers of the real world. Even though Freydis can’t quite see what it is that she’s letting herself in for, there’s a sense that the spirit of cold and darkness is not evil. It’s just a necessary part of existence that there will always be winter as against summer, there is always cold as against warmth, there is ice as against fire. But humans inevitably bring their own passions and selfishness. Freydis’s lust for personal wealth and power is a hugely destructive impulse, the feeling that she should get everything but everybody else should have nothing. Increasingly, there is a shift away from the 19th-century admiration of the Norse gods as being brave and wise and noble, the gods worshipped by our ancestors. In some of the rewriting, particularly by women, the gods are thought of as power-crazy, as tyrannical, as being ready to do anything in order to preserve their power. At least in a couple of retellings we have a psychologically well-observed process of how Loki starts off as a bit playful, maybe a bit anarchic, a free spirit who gradually — through the actions of the gods — becomes more and more alienated, until he goes over to the side of the giants. The question as to whether that would always have happened, which Norse myth seems to propose that it would, as opposed to did the gods make Loki into Loki, is one of the questions of ethics that tends to come out in some of the retellings. I loved reading any kind of mythology when I was a kid. Then when I was 18, I ended up going to work in Norway, in a hotel on the Sognefjord for a few months. There I met some Icelanders for the first time, and I became quite interested in Iceland as a place. I became very fond of Norway, and I went back to work there for later summers when I was a student. Once I was at university, I discovered I could study Old Norse as part of the English degree there, and I realised that it was the mythology that I had loved when I was a kid that I could now study in the original language. In Voluspa , the seeress’ prophecy, the survivors of Ragnarok, the second generation of gods, creep out from the conflagration, and they find lying in the grass the golden gaming pieces that were lost at the very beginning of the world. It is a suggestion of circularity, that everything is going to start again. In Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology book, he has the gods set up the gaming board and put the pieces on and they start to play exactly the same game over again, so everything is going to recur. I prefer the idea that they find what was lost and they value it and they don’t start playing the same old game again — that they’ve learned something from the experience. That moment in Voluspa is my absolute favourite."