The fascination of the Nazis with the Vikings is well known. The ultimate Nazi felag was the SS, complete with the infamous double-sig runic insignia. The mission of the SS became the subjugation of eastern Europe, of the lands once ruled by the Viking kings of Rus and Kiev, where the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen-some of their members locally recruited-included the murder of over a million Ukrainian Jews. The Einsatzgruppen “Operational Situation Report USSR No. 129a” quoted in Chapters 12 and 20, is a fictional addendum to true-life Report No. 129, with the wording changed only to include mention of the fictional Reksnys and his death toll. The Nazi atrocity in this novel is based on my visit to the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev, where thousands of Jewish families were stripped and shot, and on images and eyewitness accounts in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kiev. Today Babi Yar is a beautiful children’s park, surmounted by a giant stone sculpture of the menorah.
The SS Ahnenerbe, the “Department of Ancestral Heritage,” existed as described in this novel. In recent years, extraordinary new evidence has come to light concerning Ahnenerbe activities in the 1930s, including expeditions to South America and Tibet, where Nazi scientists carried out craniological measurements. They believed that remote populations might preserve evidence of an Aryan master race, one they associated with the legend of Atlantis and the bizarre Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory. Heinrich Himmler, architect of the SS, believed that the Aryan birthplace was Iceland, and Ahnenerbe expeditions were sent there in 1936 and 1938. The Ahnenerbe expedition to Ilulissat in this novel is fictional, as are its two members, but Greenland is only one step from Iceland, and Himmler would undoubtedly have been intrigued by the accounts of the famous Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen and his studies of Inuit culture.
The Ilulissat icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site along with L’Anse aux Meadows and Chichen Itza, may provide one of the clearest indications of global warming today, and has been extensively studied by glaciologists and climatologists. The ancient Inuit site of Sermermiut, “the place of the glacier people,” exists as described in this novel, along with K?llingekloften, “suicide gorge.” The description of the iceberg is based on my own experience at the Ilulissat icefjord and diving under ice in Canadian waters. Divers have entered natural fissures inside icebergs, and the technology exists for the kind of penetration described in this novel.
Timbers, textiles and gilded metal can survive almost indefinitely in ice. The idea that a Norse warrior might be preserved in this way came from the extraordinarily well-preserved bodies of two members of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1845, exhumed from permafrost on Beechey Island in 1984. For the Norse, ship burials were a well-established funerary rite. The burning of a ship is famously described by the tenth-century Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, who witnessed the funeral of a Rus chieftain on the river Volga in which a woman joined her lord on the pyre. Snorri Sturluson gives us another account in which a burning ship filled with weapons and bodies was cast out to sea after a battle, carrying with it the mortally wounded Viking lord who had supervised the construction of his own funerary pyre.
The image of the ship in the ice is drawn from the spectacular Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway, though Harald’s fictional ship would have been a more practical design. According to Snorri Sturluson, the two ships in which Harald escaped from Constantinople were “Varangian galleys,” oared longships (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 15). The best evidence for Viking ship types comes from almost exactly the date of the fictional voyage in this novel, from a group of vessels sunk in the 1070s near Skuldelev, in Denmark, to restrict the entrance to Roskilde Fjord. One was a robust, deep-hulled vessel suitable for open ocean sailing. The feasibility of Norse voyages to the Americas has been amply demonstrated by modern experiments, including the sailing of replica ships to L’Anse aux Meadows to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the arrival of Leif Eiriksson in the New World.
The northernmost Viking settlement in Greenland was Vestribyg?, the “western settlement,” located some five hundred miles south of the Ilulissat icefjord. However, the region of the icefjord and farther north, Nor?rseta, was frequented by the Norse and vital to their economy. The only runestone found in Greenland comes from the island of Kingigtorssuaq, almost four hundred miles north of the icefjord, and can be seen today in the museum at nearby Upernavik. It was placed in a cairn by three Norse adventurers-Erling, Bjarne and Eindride-probably in the early fourteenth century. My own explorations along this coast suggest that remote sites may contain further evidence of Norse activity. It is an extraordinary fact that Norse hunters in this extreme environment-seeking walrus ivory, whale, polar bear hides and narwhal tusk, the “unicorn horn” seen on medieval maps-helped to pay for the Crusades, through a tax imposed after the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar, “The Crusader,” established an episcopal see in Greenland in 1124. The Church exerted a tenacious hold over the Greenlanders, and the impossibility of paying Church taxes may well have been a factor in the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland by the fifteenth century.
There can be little doubt that Norse explorers sailed around Baffin Bay and into Lancaster Sound, the beginning of the Northwest Passage to the Beaufort Sea and the Pacific Ocean. A scattering of Norse artefacts has been found across the Canadian Arctic, some undoubtedly taken by Inuit from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland but others reflecting Norse contact and exploration. No Viking ship has yet been found in these waters, but an extraordinary discovery close to the polar ice cap may suggest a shipwreck. At tiny Scraeling Island, a barren rock off Ellesmere Island-some eight hundred miles north of Ilulissat-an Inuit site has yielded more than fifty Norse artefacts, including woollen cloth, fragments of chain mail, ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane, fragments of wooden barrel and a gaming piece. Radiocarbon analysis suggests a date towards the end of the Norse period in Greenland, similar to the Kingigtorssuaq runestone. A comparison can be made with Franklin’s overwintering site at Beechey Island during his attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1845. Despite the “Little Ice Age” of the medieval period, analysis of ice cores from Greenland suggests that there were warm spells-one in the early fourteenth century-when the waters between the islands of the Canadian Arctic may have been clear. The possibility must remain open that the Vikings discovered the Northwest Passage, backtracking along the route taken by the first Inuit hunters, and that the last Norse to abandon Greenland went this way.
What is certain is that the Vikings sailed over a thousand miles southwest from Greenland to establish the first known European settlement on the shores of North America, at a place they called Vinland-perhaps “Land of Meadows” rather than “Land of Vines,” as has commonly been assumed-almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Their main interest was probably timber, which was almost completely lacking in Greenland. The site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, identified by many as Leifsbu?ir in the Norse sagas, is one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time. “Great Sacred Isle” may have been a navigational way-marker-there are cairns on the mainland that may be Norse, and the story of the keel set up on the cape at Kjalarnes comes from Erik’s Saga-though no evidence has yet been found. Today the site at L’Anse aux Meadows is maintained by Parks Canada, and you can visit the reconstructed longhouse next to the site of three dwellings and a smithy excavated during the 1960s. The evidence indicates a short-lived settlement established about AD 1000. The story of Freydis and her murderous rampage comes from Erik’s Saga and the Greenlanders’ Saga, the two Viking written sources on Vinland, and it could be that the pall cast by this event dissuaded the Norse from continuing the settlement, along with the threat of attack from Scraelings-“wretches,” the native Indians-and the easier availability of timber along the coast of Labrador to the north.