Timeline in a Week: The Vinland Saga
- Thread starter Faeelin
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You can tell you’re approaching a 15th century village of the people of the Long House when, emerging through the woods, you see maize. Miles and miles of it, sprawling out from the village center. This village belongs to the Onondoga, but no matter. It may as well be one of the Seneca, or any of the other tribes. It has its women collecting the harvest, a wooden palisade.
And the hunters, wielding iron arrows, returning on horseback.
As they approach the village, they hear the sound of a hammer striking an anvil. The blacksmith is a prosperous man, wearing linen from Hope, even while at the forge. He has several horses; an unimaginable luxury two centuries ago, and even now a sign of excessive wealth.
There are those who say he is too big for station, that he desire to unseat the chief.
They are right.
The hunters stop outside of the blacksmith’s forge, and he puts down his hammer. “The hunt went well, I see,” he says with a grin. He waves, and his apprentice fetches cups of corn beer. As the three men drink from their fine clay mugs (another subtle sign of wealth), the blacksmith grins. “The skald arrived today.”
One of the hunters smiled. “The Great Father and his Son must be pleased with you, to have given you such fortune. What’s his name?”
“Her,” he said. “She is called Tekakwitha. A fair girl, actually. She’s from the Cayuga, originally”
One of the hunters made a face at the skald’s pretensions. Calling herself “one who struggles to find her way” was so typical of a skald. But it also suggested she’d travelled a fair bit among the greater towns. “Pretty, hm?”
“Well now,” said the blacksmith. “Praise no beer until it is drunk, and no hunt until it is done. Maybe she’ll be terrible. When I sent word to Sour Springs that I wanted to hire a skald, I thought we’d find someone more traditional.” Still, he had been the one to offer to host him. And he had been the one the skald had gone to.
Fortune did favor him, it seemed.
The feast had gone on for several hours now, and by now the crowd had grown subdued. The scald stood before the fire, and had finished a lighter story. ‘so you see, boasting does not make one great. It is one thing to find a fox. It is another to skin it!” The crowd hooted with laughter, and the skald waited for silence for continuing.
“But the night grows late, my friend, and it is time for an end to the night. But before we do, let us end with the beginning. I shall tell you of Hiawatha and Ragnar, and how they brought us together in the long house.”
The crowd grew silent, as the skald sang.
The Great Father, the mighty,
The Creator of the peoples,
Looked upon them with compassion,
With paternal love and pity;
Looked upon their wrath and wrangling,
But as quarrels among children.
I have given you lands to hunt in;
I have given you streams to fish in,
I have given you bear and bison,
I have given you roe and beaver.
Why then are you not contented?
Why then do you hunt each other?
The skald recited the tale, they all knew, of Ragnar’s stutter, until he met Hiawatha, who spoke for him; of his efforts to heal the sick; of his tales of the Great Father’s son, who died for them a world away. The skald’s words seem to be reflected in the fire, and it seemed like the smoke reflected it all, forming the shapes of the men they knew. More than one would swear he saw Ragnar sitting around a fire with Dekanawida, predicting the latter’s betrayal. And they saw in the smoke see a man nailed to a tree, left to die there.
The fire was low now, almost burnt out. But it flared to life with the as the speaker moved to Hiawatha’s journey to the Seneca village, to continue Ragnar’s work despite his teacher’s death.
And Hiawatha came to the Seneca,
sat before their village.
Why, do you not cry?
Where now is your Manitou?
We worship not Ragnar, for Ragnar is dead.
We worship the Great Spirit, who cannot die.
The skald told of Dekanawida’s tears, and the vision he saw for the Seneca:
Then a darker, drearier vision
Passed before me, vague and cloud-like;
I beheld our nation scattered,
Weakened, warring with each other.
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of autumn!
Hiawatha, pausing before replying, agreed that he has had that vision too, but that Ragnar’s vision can unite the peoples to avert bloodshed and war:
Let us bury the bloody hatchet,
Bury the dreadful club.
Let the war cry be forgotten,
And peace among the peoples.
The Father will gather up his harvest,
The Father is in his fields.
Let him harvest what he finds here;
And see what the land yields.
The skald finished, and there was silence. And then, slowly, applause, washing over the woman standing by the fire.
She left early the next morning, taking a gift from the blacksmith (and refusing, once again, to see the chief).
“Where will you go next?” the skald asked.
The woman looked into the distance, thoughtful. “It’s a long journey, but I may travel towards Hope. There have been tales that need telling. Manitou from across the sea, and warriors and traders with them. Tribes to the west, exhausting the buffalo and turning on farmers. Rumors of gold and silver, far to the south, traded up a great river to the west. Maybe I will hear something at the Thing.” She paused. “I think you will hear about them, eventually.
The blacksmith was silent for a moment. Something about her words brought to mind winter, images of storms and people trailing westward. “I am no warrior. I think they would rather hear such tales.”
“Maybe,” replied the woman, unusually grim faced, “but when do warriors only get to hear them?”
Three days after the woman left, the skald the blacksmith hired arrived in the village.
Three years after the woman left, the blacksmith, Onontio Ericsson, became chief of the village.
Ten years after the woman left, the blacksmith died in the first wave of plagues that accompanied the Vinlandic Exchange. The woman, passing through the village, paused to remember him, but did not stay.
There were other tales to tell, by that point.
And the hunters, wielding iron arrows, returning on horseback.
As they approach the village, they hear the sound of a hammer striking an anvil. The blacksmith is a prosperous man, wearing linen from Hope, even while at the forge. He has several horses; an unimaginable luxury two centuries ago, and even now a sign of excessive wealth.
There are those who say he is too big for station, that he desire to unseat the chief.
They are right.
The hunters stop outside of the blacksmith’s forge, and he puts down his hammer. “The hunt went well, I see,” he says with a grin. He waves, and his apprentice fetches cups of corn beer. As the three men drink from their fine clay mugs (another subtle sign of wealth), the blacksmith grins. “The skald arrived today.”
One of the hunters smiled. “The Great Father and his Son must be pleased with you, to have given you such fortune. What’s his name?”
“Her,” he said. “She is called Tekakwitha. A fair girl, actually. She’s from the Cayuga, originally”
One of the hunters made a face at the skald’s pretensions. Calling herself “one who struggles to find her way” was so typical of a skald. But it also suggested she’d travelled a fair bit among the greater towns. “Pretty, hm?”
“Well now,” said the blacksmith. “Praise no beer until it is drunk, and no hunt until it is done. Maybe she’ll be terrible. When I sent word to Sour Springs that I wanted to hire a skald, I thought we’d find someone more traditional.” Still, he had been the one to offer to host him. And he had been the one the skald had gone to.
Fortune did favor him, it seemed.
The feast had gone on for several hours now, and by now the crowd had grown subdued. The scald stood before the fire, and had finished a lighter story. ‘so you see, boasting does not make one great. It is one thing to find a fox. It is another to skin it!” The crowd hooted with laughter, and the skald waited for silence for continuing.
“But the night grows late, my friend, and it is time for an end to the night. But before we do, let us end with the beginning. I shall tell you of Hiawatha and Ragnar, and how they brought us together in the long house.”
The crowd grew silent, as the skald sang.
The Great Father, the mighty,
The Creator of the peoples,
Looked upon them with compassion,
With paternal love and pity;
Looked upon their wrath and wrangling,
But as quarrels among children.
I have given you lands to hunt in;
I have given you streams to fish in,
I have given you bear and bison,
I have given you roe and beaver.
Why then are you not contented?
Why then do you hunt each other?
The skald recited the tale, they all knew, of Ragnar’s stutter, until he met Hiawatha, who spoke for him; of his efforts to heal the sick; of his tales of the Great Father’s son, who died for them a world away. The skald’s words seem to be reflected in the fire, and it seemed like the smoke reflected it all, forming the shapes of the men they knew. More than one would swear he saw Ragnar sitting around a fire with Dekanawida, predicting the latter’s betrayal. And they saw in the smoke see a man nailed to a tree, left to die there.
The fire was low now, almost burnt out. But it flared to life with the as the speaker moved to Hiawatha’s journey to the Seneca village, to continue Ragnar’s work despite his teacher’s death.
And Hiawatha came to the Seneca,
sat before their village.
Why, do you not cry?
Where now is your Manitou?
We worship not Ragnar, for Ragnar is dead.
We worship the Great Spirit, who cannot die.
The skald told of Dekanawida’s tears, and the vision he saw for the Seneca:
Then a darker, drearier vision
Passed before me, vague and cloud-like;
I beheld our nation scattered,
Weakened, warring with each other.
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of autumn!
Hiawatha, pausing before replying, agreed that he has had that vision too, but that Ragnar’s vision can unite the peoples to avert bloodshed and war:
Let us bury the bloody hatchet,
Bury the dreadful club.
Let the war cry be forgotten,
And peace among the peoples.
The Father will gather up his harvest,
The Father is in his fields.
Let him harvest what he finds here;
And see what the land yields.
The skald finished, and there was silence. And then, slowly, applause, washing over the woman standing by the fire.
She left early the next morning, taking a gift from the blacksmith (and refusing, once again, to see the chief).
“Where will you go next?” the skald asked.
The woman looked into the distance, thoughtful. “It’s a long journey, but I may travel towards Hope. There have been tales that need telling. Manitou from across the sea, and warriors and traders with them. Tribes to the west, exhausting the buffalo and turning on farmers. Rumors of gold and silver, far to the south, traded up a great river to the west. Maybe I will hear something at the Thing.” She paused. “I think you will hear about them, eventually.
The blacksmith was silent for a moment. Something about her words brought to mind winter, images of storms and people trailing westward. “I am no warrior. I think they would rather hear such tales.”
“Maybe,” replied the woman, unusually grim faced, “but when do warriors only get to hear them?”
Three days after the woman left, the skald the blacksmith hired arrived in the village.
Three years after the woman left, the blacksmith, Onontio Ericsson, became chief of the village.
Ten years after the woman left, the blacksmith died in the first wave of plagues that accompanied the Vinlandic Exchange. The woman, passing through the village, paused to remember him, but did not stay.
There were other tales to tell, by that point.
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Hrm.... How much of a presence would the colonization have to have for contact to be called the Vinland Exchange?
Very interesting.
Very interesting.
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So, you finally decided to give it a try. I'm looking forward for the rest of the TL.
BTW, can we have any hope that "To Set a Country Free" will be continued?
Ugh, yes, it will be. Martha Washington's involvement in the Whig Opposition keeps teasing me.
But I'm on vacation on a beach, and I thought that something fairly self-contained would be easier. Next post, today or tomorrow, will be about the Things of Vinland, then the priest-kings of the Mississippi, who trade iron objects up and down the river (and are toying with writing by 1400), and finally the mounted invasion of MesoAmerica by the Uto-Aztec people known as "Those Who Always Fight."
Among the Icelanders there is no king, but only law.-Adam of Bremen (11th Century)
Then the decree to submit and pay tribute was sent to Vinland on the advice of the Cardinal William of Sabina, since he called it beyond belief that the land was not subject to a king, as were all the others in the world.-The Saga of king Hakon Hakonarson (13th Century)[1]
Then the decree to submit and pay tribute was sent to Vinland on the advice of the Cardinal William of Sabina, since he called it beyond belief that the land was not subject to a king, as were all the others in the world.-The Saga of king Hakon Hakonarson (13th Century)[1]
The early history of Vinland, compared to the history of the Norse Scandinavian states, could not be more stark. Instead of monarchies, there were freeholding farmers; instead of bloody civil wars, there were epic sagas about lawsuits and dispute resolution through the mediations of third parties. Vinlandic society was so loosely organized that it is unclear whether it’s proper to refer to a Vinlandic Republic for centuries, with most historians preferring the term “Commonwealth,” to reflect a sociey loosely knit together.
Like in Iceland, Vinlandic society during the first few centuries was divided between thingmenn (small time farmers), and the godhor, literally "big men". Godhors functioned as leaders for a band of farmers, serving a range of roles. Godhors took an active role in the transfer of property and gift-giving, holding feasts in return for support. Given the limited state of the period, and the fact that the frontier was available, there was, initially, a fairly limited set of official taxes from godhor. In addition to the thing-travel-tax (Thingfarkaup), which taxed farmers who did not attend a Thing, Vinland implemented a war tax in the 1040s, which required Thingmen who did not go to war to pay taxes to their Godhor if he did.
A Godhor also had the ability to exploit merchants through his control over the price of wares within his district. For instance, Godhor had the right to set prices on wares that foreign merchants brought to Vinland, and, starting in the 1120s, on certain goods that were transported through Vinland directly (such as high quality cloth). But these taxes were mostly minor. The real value of the Godhor was their ability to act as advocates before the Things.
The settlements of Vinland varied, with some regions (such as Newfoundland) consisting of spread out farmsteads, while others, typically along the frontier, consisting of walled settlements along navigable rivers or the coast. But there was a fairly common governing pattern for Vinland, a regional assembly (the Varthing) which met in May and August of each year. At these assemblies cases were tried by the region’s free men, and by the mid 12th century there were dozens of these Varthings across Vinland. Above the Varthing was the Althing, which met once a year in Hope, the heart of Vinland. [2] The Althing’s influence declined as time went on and Norse settlements spread along the coast and down the Saint Lawrence, but it remained a major part of Vinlandic culture, for it functioned not just as the legislature for the Commonwealth as a whole, but also as the ultimate court of appeals. [3]
The Godhor's main role, and main source of their benefits, was to act as advocates on behalf of their Thingmenn. [4] While all Thingmenn could go before a Thing, the Godhor's name and power carried weight, and they could perssure their Thingmenn, who were, ultimately, armed warriors, into following them.
But the Godhor were not despots. Farmers could choose to follow different Godhor, and if a man became prosperous, through trade, or building a new estate, he could become a Godhor as well. And more than one Godhor, in the early 12th century, was a former outlaw who made earned their prosperity by acting as traders or negotiators among the Native Americans they lived with.
Which brings us to the tale of the founding of Brew House...
[1] Both quotes are from OTL, although the second referred to Iceland, not Vinland.
[2] This is also from OTL Iceland.
[3] Centuries later, law students will kill themselves to get a clerkship on the Vinland Circuit.
[4] The next post will explore this in more depth, but this description of Godhors explains in part why the Norse are able to get along with Native Americans better than OTL's Europeans.