The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland--and from there to the place they call "Vinland the Good." The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples--and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise--he creates a tour-de-force of "speculative history," a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new and utterly original vision of our continent and its past.
Record details
ISBN:9780140131963
ISBN:0140131965
Physical Description:print 415 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Publisher:New York, NY : Viking, 1990.
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographic references.
Formatted Contents Note:
Ice-text: the Book of Flatey (1382) -- The Ice-shirt -- I The changers -- II Black hands -- III Vinland -- IV Freydis Eiriksdottir -- In the ice (1532-1931) -- Glossaries, chronology, sources.