It also challenges the ethics and narrow-mindedness of white Christian-centered colonization.
In the 14th Century, some three hundred years after Erik the Red established it, the Western Settlement of Greenland boasts a few thousand hearty souls, farmers and hunters spread out in shoreline settlements along a dozen fjords. Some claim kinship with Erik and his famous son, Leif. Others are descendants of Norwegians, Danes and Icelandic folks who emigrated there in a later era. They all call themselves Greenlanders.
Smiley tells this saga as though she were an Old Norse storyteller. While the story centers around Asgeir Gunnarsson, his son Gunnar, daughter Margret and their families, the narrative encompasses dozens of other families and individuals. Prior to chapter one, Smiley provides us with a three-page list of characters, noting their lineage by location: Gunnars Stead, Ketils Stead, Solar Fell, the Gardar folks (the central town where the priests live) with separate lists of the Icelandic and Norwegian visitors.
She also includes two double-page maps to help us navigate.
Admittedly, this dense 558-page novel seems daunting at first with unfamiliar names, locations and even the old style of storytelling. But Smiley lays down a welcoming rhythm and syntax. She is great at rounding back again and again to the key characters and places, imparting an easily-absorbed familiarity.
'Come sit by the fire and let me tell you a tale of old,' she seems to say.
The story becomes compelling within the first fifty pages. Asgeir is too proud for his own good, carrying a grudge against the folks at Ketils Stead which borders Gunnars Stead. He's also a demanding father. After his wife dies, his young daughter Margret is tasked with caring for her infant brother Gunnar. She doesn't shirk from the task but neither is she happy. Until . . .
Until a colorfully dressed Norwegian named Skuli arrives on a ship, accompanying the new priests and representatives of the throne and Bishopric in Norway. For the first time in her life, Margret stares daily at her reflection in a pail of water and begins to add color to her drab everyday dress. She begins to meet Skuli in the meadow above their farmstead.
"He turned toward her, and at first his face had no expression, and then she saw his jaw drop and his eyes widen into perfect admiration and surprise, such as had never seen on his or any face before in her life, and at the same time she knew this as sin and vanity she also fell into the terror never seeing such a look on his face again."
For the sake of the family farmstead, Margret had been pushed into marrying Olaf, a big hardworking taciturn man. Though they'd never even shared the same bedcloset, Margret is declared an adulteress when her brother and Olaf discover her with Skuli.
The aftermath of this shatters Margret's life, but she continues to be an imporant part of the story. Through her keen eyes, we witness the harsh reality of Greenlanders' lives. We find that they are as challenged by their narrow religious beliefs as they are by surviving the long frigid winters.
As we get to know other families at the other farmsteads, we also get to know the clergy. Most of them live in Gardar but most travel when they can to the remote corners of the Western Settlement, trying to reinforce God-fearing Christian dictates into the Greenlanders.
The clerics cow them into believing that their fates are in God's hands. If their summer crops are poor, half their lambs don't survive in the
spring or fifty people die of starvation during a long brutal winter, it must be due to their sinful ways, or their ungenerous tithing.
In truth, the priests don't want to be there and offer no help in Greenlanders day-to-day survival. The priest Sira Jon bemoans his fate, "For I am humiliated to be here, at Gardar, when I should be at Nidaros or even Paris, I have been trained for that, not this. . . . The result is that the stony gloom of Gardar and its turf smell seem paltry to me, a shame to God and His Son, this crude altar and these ragged tapestries."
All Greenlanders take notice of the people they call 'the skraelings' (Inuits). While some fear them, most admire their hunting skills, their freedom and their resilience to the long dark winters. While Greenlanders gather annually for mass slaughter of seals and walruses during the spring and herd reindeer off cliffs in the fall, much of their meat, furs and oil is lost or spoiled in storage. The skraelings hunt only when they need food. They're capable of capturing a whale with just their skin boats and spears, but they do so only when the seals have migrated too far away. During the winter they travel with the reindeer and cull the herd only as needed.
Margret spots the long-lost son of an old dear friend. "Indeed, there were skraelings upon Einars Fjord, numbers of them in their skin boats, and they were fat and prosperous, and it seems to me that I saw Surd Kolsson among them, and he was tall and sturdy and had two wives."
The overriding theme of this novel is about trust. Trust in an elusive God vs trust in the natural world.
"Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, the He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end."
"Others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting . . .some learned that a man's luck and his might are his only god, as folk once thought in the ancient days."
In an annual gathering known as 'The Thing', Greenlanders state their grievances, making a case against a neighbor who kill their cow, or against a man who used sorcery to seduce a woman. Throughout the narrative, punishments grow harsher and more erratic. A man is burned to death for casting a spell, another is outlawed from the settlement, many hoping he'll freeze to death in the coming winter. At first everyone surrendered their weapons at the beginning of The Thing. Later everyone showed up armed and ready to strike.
When Gunnar speaks of his own (and the community's) moral unravelling, he speaks like a tragic character in a Shakespearean play:
"When I dealt Bjorn Gollason his death blow, it seemed to me that I had done a little thing, for it passed in a moment. My passion ran on beyond it, and was unfulfilled. Now it still seems to me a little thing, but a little thing like a snag, upon which my robe has caught. But instead of disentangling myself from this little snag, every thought and every movement nets me more and more tightly to it, so that sooner or later I will be strangled upon it."
As a consummate storyteller, Smiley brings us around to the theme of God and nature over and over again, rounding the stories of each fjord and farmstead into a collective conscience that goes from stalwart and hopeful to desperate and unkind.
Later, an old man, Gunnar comes to another realization: "Sometimes, out of doors, looking at the dark faces of the mountains looming over the blue fjords and the green strips of pasture, he considered Erik the Red who held onto his faith in the old god until death, and it seemed to him that such events as had overtaken the Greenlanders would hardly have surprised him."
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