Over a thousand years ago (and five hundred years before Columbus), in the year 985 or 986, a young man called Bjarni Herjolfsson who’d been trying to sail from Iceland to Greenland, was driven south and west in a gale that lasted several days. When he eventually sighted land, it wasn’t the icy mountains of Greenland, but a strange wooded country with low hills.
Bjarni wasn’t interested in going ashore. He didn’t want to discover new lands; he wanted to get where he’d been going, so he and his men sailed northwards, hopping up the coast, and finally across what is now known as the Davis Strait to Greenland.
Fifteen years later, Leif Eiriksson of Greenland bought Bjarni’s ship (possibly on the principle that it had been there once and could find the way again) and set out to retrace Bjarni’s voyage in the opposite direction. He did so with spectacular success, naming three lands on his way south: Helluland, which means “Slab land”, a stony, glaciated landscape; Markland, or “Forest land”, a flat woody country; and finally a grassy, wooded peninsular where he and his men built houses and overwintered, naming the country Vinland for the grapes they said they found there. Later, more voyages were made by Leif ’s brother Thorvald, his sister Freydis, and his relative Thorfinn Karlsefni.
No one doubts now that Helluland, Markland and Vinland were parts of the north-eastern coast of America. The most likely candidates are Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland respectively. Traces of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland may actually be the place where Leif built his houses.
Two sagas, The Greenland Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga tell how Leif, Freydis and Thorfinn met “Skraelings”, a scornful and dismissive term used indiscriminately by the Norsemen for all the Native Americans they met, including the northern Inuit. Though some trading took place, relations were pretty unstable. Both sagas tell of battles between the Norse and the Skraelings. Partly these were due to misunderstandings, but some were triggered by murders. When Leif ’s brother Thorvald came across nine Skraelings asleep under their canoes, he and his men promptly killed eight of them. He paid the price for his aggressive behaviour. The ninth Skraeling escaped to raise the alarm. A fleet of canoes attacked, and Thorvald died from an arrow wound. Incidents like this go a long way towards explaining why the Norse never formed permanent settlements in Vinland. Their iron and steel weapons, such as swords, axes and spears might have given them an edge – literally – over the flint-tipped weapons of the indigenous peoples, but not that much of an edge. And there were far more Native Americans than there were Norsemen.
So who were these “Skraelings”? The Native American people of Newfoundland were named the Beothuk. It’s known that they painted their clothes and bodies with red ochre, because they thought of red as a sacred colour. (Their neighbours called them the Red People. Europeans would call them Red Indians.) The Beothuk saw off the Vikings, but not the later arrival of the French and the British, whose diseases and guns drove them to extinction. In 1829, the last of the Beothuk, a woman named Shaw-na-dith-it, died of tuberculosis in captivity. And with her died the last chance of learning the Beothuk’s language, beliefs and customs. Only a few scraps of information remain – nothing like enough to build a book upon.
So, since the Norsemen would certainly have explored beyond Newfoundland, I chose to base my account of Kwimu and his People not on the Beothuk, but on the Mi’kmaq people of New Brunswick – only a step further south – who still live in the land of their ancestors, and many of whose beliefs, customs and stories have either been documented or are a matter of living and proud tradition. To them I owe a debt of admiration – and my apologies for errors.
For those interested in geography, I’ve imagined that Gunnar and Thorolf built their houses somewhere along the north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, on the Gaspé Peninsula, between New Brunswick and Quebec. But I’ve not been too precise. And though most of the Native American references are to Mi’kmaq customs and lore, I have occasionally borrowed from their neighbours, the Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Montaignais and other Algonquian peoples. After all, the story is set at a time 500 years earlier than the French missionaries who, even as they set about trying to change them, wrote accounts of the manners, customs and beliefs of the Mi’kmaq people. I hope I will be forgiven a certain amount of imaginative licence.
I didn’t invent any of the magical creatures in Troll Blood. From the Nis to the jenu, they are my interpretations of creatures which have all been believed in by real people at some point in history. I wanted to write about the world in which such beliefs were possible – a world in which ordinary men and women co-existed with spirits and ghosts, both helpful and harmful. I’ve tried my best to imagine how the Norsemen and Kwimu’s People lived and thought. I did lots of research; I even had the tremendous fun of spending a week learning how to sail a reconstruction of a real Viking ship on a Danish fjord. But, at the end of the day, Troll Blood is fantasy, not history.
Six hundred years ago, the London printer William Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory’s story of King Arthur; Le Morte d’Arthur. I feel I can’t do better than to pass on Caxton’s warning to his readers:
“And for to pass the time, this book shall be pleasant to read in. But for to give faith and believe that all is true that is set herein, ye be at your liberty.”