Beyond the Northlands by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough

On the crackling brown pages of saga manuscripts, trolls, dragons, and outlandish tribes jostle for position with explorers, traders, and kings.

What emerges from these tales is a mixture of realism and fantasy, quasi-historical adventures, and exotic wonder-tales that rocket far beyond the horizon of reality. But the depiction of the Viking world in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas goes far beyond historical facts. Beyond the Northlands explores this world through the stories that the Vikings told about themselves in their sagas. The Norsemen travelled to all corners of the medieval world and beyond north to the wastelands of arctic Scandinavia, south to the politically turbulent heartlands of medieval Christendom, west across the wild seas to Greenland and the fringes of the North American continent, and east down the Russian waterways trading silver, skins, and slaves. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-ships transported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades.

The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story.

In the dying days of the eighth century, the Vikings erupted onto the international stage with brutal raids and slaughter.

Mind you, she notes, get the weather wrong and you can be stranded with nothing much to eat except leftover pickles. In Greenland she explored the country on a pony so blue-eyed that it was called “he whose eyes pop out of his head when he sees a beautiful woman walking past” (it comes out shorter in Inuit), and she went skinny-dipping in a sheltered fjord, observing that coastal Greenland lives up to its name during its short summers. At the extreme northeastern tip of Norway she ate cloudberries and was inducted into the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society of Hammerfest, which knights its new members with the penis bone of a walrus. She seems, moreover, to have had a good time tracing the steps of Viking voyagers. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough’s “Beyond the Northlands” admirably and originally breaks free of both sets and bursts into the wide field of Old Norse life and literature beyond the classics. Photo: Getty Imagesīooks about Vikings are riddled with stereotypes, the old and popular ones about horned helmets and Valkyries, the modern academic ones about peaceful traders and urban developers. A replica of a Viking ship in Scotland’s Shetland Islands.

Beyond the Northlands by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough