Odinn's Child Read Free Page B

peoples in Permia, up in the frozen zones, was to tell me that the spirit of the dying bear transferred itself to me by a sort of spiritual migration at the moment of my birth. I was reluctant to believe it, of course, but the shaman affirmed it as fact and as a result treated me with respect bordering on awe because the Permians worship the bear as the most powerful spirit of all. Whatever the truth about the transmigration of souls, I was born with a minimum of fuss and commotion on a summer's day in the year my present colleagues, sitting so piously around me, would describe as the year of our Lord, 999.

    S HE CALLED ME Thorgils. It is a common enough Norse name and honours their favourite red-haired God. But then so do at least forty other boy's names from plain Thor through Thorstein to Thorvald, and half that number for girls, including my mother's own, Thorgunna. Perhaps Thorgils was her father's name. I simply have no idea, though later, when I wondered why she did not pick a more Irish-sounding name to honour her mother's people, I realised she was preparing me to grow up in my father's household. To live among the Norsemen with an Irish name would have led people to think that I was slave-born because there are many in Iceland and elsewhere whose Irish names, like Kormak and Njal, indicate that they are descended from Irish captives brought back when men went a-viking.

    Thorgunna gave me my Norse name in the formal manner with the sprinkling of water. It might surprise my Christian brethren here in the scriptorium to know that there is nothing new in their splashing drops of water on the infant's head at baptism. The pagan northmen do the same when they name a child and it would be interesting to ask my cleric neighbours whether this deed provides any salvation for the innocent infant soul, even when done by heathen custom.
    The year following my birth was the year that the Althing, the

    general assembly of Icelanders, chose to adopt Christianity as their religion, a decision which led to much dissension as I shall later have reason to describe. So, having been born on the cusp of the new millennium, I was named as a pagan at a time when the tide of the White Christ was beginning its inexorable rise. Like Cnut, the king in England whom I later served as an apprentice court poet, I soon knew that a rising tide is unstoppable, but I resolved that I would try to keep my head above it.

    My mother had no intention of keeping me around her a moment longer than necessary. She proceeded to carry out her plans with a massive certainty, even with a squawling baby in tow. The money that Leif had given her meant that she was able to pay for a wet nurse and, within three months of my birth, she began to look around for an opportunity to leave Birsay and move on to Iceland.
    She arrived in the early winter, and the trading ship which brought her dropped anchor off Snaefellsness, the long promontory which projects from Iceland's west coast. Most of the crew were from the Orkneys and Ireland and they had no particular family links among the Icelanders to determine their final port of call, so the crew decided to wait in the anchorage until news of their arrival had spread among the farmers of the region, then shift to the ripest harbour for trading to begin. Iceland has always been a country starved of foreign luxuries. There is not a single town or decent-sized village on the whole vast island, or a proper market. Its people are stock herders who set up their homesteads around the fringes of that rugged land wherever there was pasture for their cattle. In summer they send their herds inland to the high meadows, and in winter bring them back to their byres next to the house and feed them hay. Their own food is mostly gruel, sour milk and curds, with meat or fish or bird flesh when they can get it. It is a basic life. They dress in simple homespun clothes and, though they are excellent craftsmen, they lack the raw materials to