They Came On Viking Ships (20 page)

This story is based on real events, told in the ‘Gräenlendinga Saga’ and ‘Eirik’s (Erik) Saga’, about two hundred years after they happened. When the sagas contradict each other I’ve chosen bits from each. In other places I have simplified events.

Perhaps no one in history has ever been described in two such different ways as Freydis Eriksdöttir. In one saga Freydis is a dutiful, courageous wife—I didn’t make up the scene where she charges the Skraelings, nine months’ pregnant and sword in hand. In the other saga she is a villain, killing five women with an axe. I have assumed that both stories have some grain of truth.

We shall never know what Freydis Ericsdöttir was really like. There is no doubt she was an extraordinary woman. I suspect she has been lost to history mostly because the later male writers didn’t know what to make of her.

Thorvard, Leif the Lucky and Erik the Red (or Eirik Raudi) were real people too, and the places they travelled to also exist. Hikki and Hekja are mentioned in the sagas as two Scottish runners who were taken on
Leif’s first voyage to Vinland, but nothing else is known about them. I have placed them on Freydis’ voyage instead. Finnbogi too was a real person but there is no reason to think he was a villian. I may have done a brave adventurer a real injustice.

No one is sure where Vinland is. Viking long house remains have been found at
L’Anse aux Meadows
on the Newfoundland coast. But the coast there doesn’t fit the detailed descriptions of Vinland in the saga, and wild grapes don’t grow there. The grapes may have been other berries that could be made into wine—or maybe Leif Erikson was boasting about the lushness of the new land, just as his father had called his icy wastes Greenland.

But it is likely that the long house remains are from another Greenlander voyage, and Vinland is further south where wild grapes do grow and the winters are milder than in Newfoundland. Or maybe the weather was very much warmer for a brief period in the years when the Vikings travelled up and down the coast of what is now Canada and the United States, and the land was very different.

I have tried to keep the Vinland in this book close to the description in the sagas, rather than place it at any known bit of land today. The ‘Skraelings’ are based on descriptions in the sagas and also from accounts of 15th and 16th century European explorers. However, cultures—and areas occupied by various Native American nations—would have varied enormously between about 1000 AD, when Vinland was ‘discovered’, and the 15th century, and almost certainly changed even more in the next five hundred years as well.

And if I have only come within whistling distance of the truth, perhaps I have done no worse than the saga singers, all those centuries ago.

Dates
No one knows exactly when Leif Eriksson and the others went to Vinland. It may have been anywhere from 987 to 1011 AD. Our only information comes from the ‘sagas’, which were written as entertainment rather than as an exact history (and were almost certainly rewritten for political and religious purposes too), and like the other information in them their dates can be contradictory. But very roughly:

• 982 AD: Erik and his followers are outlawed for three years in Iceland. Erik had already been outlawed in Norway.
  
• 986 AD: Erik leads twenty-five ships of immigrants to Greenland. Fourteen ships reach the new land, with 400 colonists. The other boats sink or turn back.
  
• 1000 AD: Leif ‘The Lucky’ Eriksson travels to Vinland, stays the winter and returns again a year later.
  
• About 1002 AD: Freydis Eriksdöttir leads an expedition to Vinland to trade or colonise, or is a member of another expedition with her husband Thorvard and Erik’s son, Thorvald. The expedition returns a year or three years later, though in one version Freydis stays behind.
  

Jackie French
’s writing career spans 15 years, 39 wombats, 120 books for kids and adults, 15 languages, various awards, radio shows, newspaper and magazine columns, theories of pest and weed ecology and 28 shredded-back doormats. The doormats are the victims of the wombats, who require constant appeasement in the form of carrots, rolled oats and wombat nuts, which is one of the reasons for her prolific output: it pays the carrot bills.

Jackie’s love of history began as a child and has been the inspiration for the series of books that began with
Somewhere Around the Corner, Daughter of the Regiment, Soldier on the Hill, The White Ship, Valley of Gold and Tom Appleby, Convict Boy.
Jackie feels that the past was not only a fascinating adventure, but also holds the clues to understanding our own time.

Jackie’s most recent awards include the 2000 Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers for the critically acclaimed,
Hitler’s Daughter
, which also won the 2002 UK Wow! Award for the most inspiring children’s book of the year; the 2002 Aurealis Award for Younger Readers for
Café on Callisto; ACT Book of the Year for In the Blood; and for Diary of a Wombat
with Bruce Whatley, the Children’s Book Council Honour Book, NSW Koala Award for Best Picture Book, Nielsen Book Data / ABA Book of the Year Award, the Cuffie Award for favourite picture book (USA) and the American Literary Association (ALA) for notable children’s book, among other awards.

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6. My Gran the Gorilla (January 2006)

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Tom Appleby, Convict Boy

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