THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA (1998)
by Stuart W. Mirsky

Reviewed by Patrick Killough



  I. REVIEW for http://www.barnesandnoble.com

 
Here is how your review will appear on the title page:

Reviewer: Patrick Killough (patrickkillough@charter.net), who is studying Norsemen in Scotland,

Date of Review: June 20, 2006,

Title of this review: A weighty tale for the young and the curious

Reviewer's Rating: FOUR STARS ( * * * *)

Stuart Mirsky's 1998 novel, THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA reads as smoothly as a good wine goes down. It is an especially good book for young readers because its vocabulary (like that of the Norse sagas to which it pays tribute) is simple, compact and repetitive. Children and teens who cherish tales of isolation and distance such as THE LORD OF THE RINGS, SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON and ROBINSON CRUSOE, will happily turn the pages of the story of 11th century Viking Sigtrygg Thorgilsson, fictional grandson of the great explorer Leif Eriksson.

Young Sigtrygg is more at home out on the ice hunting walrus and polar bears than he is visiting his noble kinsmen in a Norse farming settlement in Greenland. After becoming a virtual outlaw, he leads a handful of followers to his grandfather's old salt water camp in Vinland (now eastern Canada). He and they then interact far in the interior with stone age Skraelings (Amerindians) where he bests one of their regional kings. Returned to the coast, Sigtrygg finds that his faraway kinsmen and a boatload of Norwegians have taken possession of his holdings. Among them is a childhood sweetheart Thjodhild Gunnarsdottir. She wants to marry Sigtrygg. He is willing to marry her but not to give up his Skraeling wife, something Thjodhild will have no part of. In the end, the Norsemen kill off almost all their own heroes and the Skraelings drive the rest back beyond Greenland to Ireland and Norway. Thjoldhid bears a son (probably Sigtrygg's) but eventually becomes a melancholy nun in Iceland. Sigtrygg had refused to leave his Skraeling bride behind when given a chance to escape and was apparently killed. But perhaps he consented to serve the New World king who would have let him live and leave the land.

The book's handful of characters fatalistically but not always bravely strive for honor and fame, realizing that, in the end, all is chance. -OOO-

Also recommended: William Golding, THE LORD OF THE FLIES. Daniel DeFoe, ROBINSON CRUSOE. Robert L. Stevenson, TREASURE ISLAND. Sir Walter Scott. THE PIRATE.

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  II.  REVIEW for http://www.amazon.com

REVIEW TITLE: Unproblematic as boys adventure; defensible for adults, too, June 20, 2006

REVIEWER:    T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States)

RATING: FOUR STARS (* * * * )
  
Stuart Mirsky's 1998 historical novel, THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA, is an attractive book for children and young people who wish to probe North America's earliest known contacts with Europeans -- Norsemen -- in the 11th Century. It is the tale of a young, disinherited hero, Sigtrygg Thorgilsson, fictional grandson of the great explorer Leif Eriksson. He sails with companions to the maritime region of today's Canada, wages successful war with Skraelings (stone age Indians), loves and is loved by both a Skraeling and a Norse woman, proclaims himself King of Vinland and in the end is defeated by fate.

THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA is a very fine boys adventure book. But can the novel also be profitably read by today's adults, brought up on the complexities of Walter Scott, F.M. Dostoievsky, Henry James and Graham Greene?

Some problems for today's adult readers:

--the novel's length (637 pages) in proportion to its straightforward, not very complicated, linear plot;
--its narrator who is either embedded in King Sigtrygg's psyche or is rarely more than a few hundred feet away;
--the primitive, childish, plodding personalities and the motives of its leading characters and
--almost indiscernible Christian influences.

Some solutions:

--The author is a sophisticated student of history and literature. What he writes and how he writes is therefore deliberately chosen. A by-product of the novel's length is its pervasive sense that time moves very, very slowly in Norse Greenland and Vinland. One day is much like another. The sun is long in setting. Life can be very boring when one is not slaughtering large numbers of Skraelings or dueling with peers.

--Since the narrator is rarely more than a few feet from the hero, the reader is never given a God's eye "big picture" of history or of what is going on more broadly in the New World. Despite its length, THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA does not imitate Sir Walter Scott by providing loving, generous details of, e.g., navigation, flora and fauna, the feel of rivers, dress and on and on beyond what the plot strictly demands. There is vivid ad hoc description of storms and combat terrains, but it is not asides, sudden shifts from what is going on in one camp to another, analyses of character or digressions that make this tale so long. The author is making a point.

--There is no man or woman of great brilliance or insight among the cast of characters, no Alexander or Caesar. Not much book learning, either. Perhaps not even literacy a couple of centuries after Charlemagne. What wisdom and far-sightedness there is (and there is not an over-supply) comes solely from experience or perhaps from genetics and society as well. The oldest character, a one-eyed swordsman, is therefore the wisest; but even he mistakes his man at the end and allows himself to be treacherously speared in the back. Perhaps that is the way things really were in Vinland.

--Where is 11th Century Christianity? One "heroine" eventually becomes a nun on Iceland. There is talk of Christianity's monogamy being superior to Skraeling polygamy (but precious little resistance to local pagan custom by King Sigtrygg and his Norse followers). Could Christianity really have been so weak in the environment of a hero whose grandfather Leif was a Christian convert?

For every objection to this or that feature of the narrative, there is a plausible answer. Even for well read adults THE KING OF VINLAND'S SAGA can be gripping. Its slow pace, the basic denseness of all its characters, their primitive emotions, their pagan fatalism: all this is part of a bygone, barely researched world and its atmosphere which the author deliberately creates. The novel is provocative. It rewards reading and discussing.
-OOO-