The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollmann

The question of who was going to put on what shirt had not been decided; indeed, it remained to answer the more elementary question of which shirts, once put on, could come off; and, more elementary still, of which shirts there were to make.  So the dressmakers were busy drawing and cutting.  Many were measured for bear-shirts; a few, like Freydis Eiriksdaughter, chose the Ice-Shirt and became coldly great.  In Norway, Gunhild's successor King Olaf made many black shirts with crosses on them.  As for the Skraelings, they continued to wear the shirts of beasts, fishes, and stars.

William T. Vollmann's novel The Ice-Shirt is the third of his Seven Dreams series, about the interactions between European colonists and Native Americans, that I have read, and the third book I took with me to Newfoundland.  It's a little bit more tangential to that island than The Bird Artist and The Shipping News: Up at Newfoundland's northernmost tip lies L'Anse aux Meadows, North America's only confirmed site of Viking settlement.  Going there is like confronting a history on a scale that is rare on this continent, going back a thousand years--although that's only true, as Vollmann surely knows, if you ignore Native American sites that are both plentiful and older.  Researchers believe that Newfoundland and points further south, perhaps reaching even into the Carolinas along the Atlantic coast, represent the area that Norse texts like The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red identify as Vinland, a utopia-like land full of wild grapes and no frost.  The Ice-Shirt is Vollmann's account of how, exactly, utopia came to be not so utopian.

The book's first half retools several of the legends that appear in those sagas, as well as the Icelandic Eddas.  They're about Eirik the Red and his son Leif, but also legendary kings going back to the second century B.C.E.  In Vollmann's account, the ancient Norse kings used to have the power of transformation, changing themselves in to bears to ravage their enemies, usually with the assistance of bear-shirts.  (In Norse, this word is familiar: berserk, as in to go berserk.)  But at the time of Leif's adventure in North America, this ability has largely been lost, hidden by kings wary of their own offspring, and symbolically replaced a Christianized Norway and King Olaf's missionary zeal.  The exploration and settling of North America becomes a substitute for the transformation of the bear-shirts; the Norse can no longer transform themselves but they can work a kind of magic transformation on this land.  Like in his other novels, Vollmann employs a chameleonic prose that imitates his source material; here it's the winding sentences of Norse legend with their characteristic "kennings": compound metaphors, like "swan-field" for the sea or "corpse-snake" for a sword.

Vollmann pairs the Viking legends with those of native Inuit and Mi'kmaq peoples, often about transformation themselves, including the story of Younger Brother and Elder Brother who are transformed into woman and man, and then the sun and the moon.  The Vikings call the natives Skraelings, and though their interactions between natives and explorers are fewer here than in Argall or The Rifles, reading The Ice-Shirt is a comparatively interesting experience because the narrative distance between us and the Vikings is not so different from the distance between us and the Skraelings.  The identification between Vollmann and the doomed English captain John Franklin in The Rifles is so strong that their identities begin to bleed together.  In Argall, it's difficult not to feel identification, and accompanying guilt, with the English explorers who brutalize Pocahontas.  But in The Ice-Shirt, the Vikings and Skraelings seen more similar to each other than either does to us.  That distance removes a layer of complexity for the modern Anglo reader, I think, and allows us to see the interactions between natives and Europeans with relative disinterestedness.

On the other hand, the novel gives a frightening and brutal representation of colonialism in the character of Freydis Eiriksdottir.  Freydis, Erik the Red's bastard daughter, appears in the sagas as a courageous woman who helps defeat the Skraelings.  Here, she is something much more sinister and fascinating: a greedy woman who pledges her loyalty to Blue-Shirt, the evil spirit embodied in the ice-sheet that covers Greenland.  "Blue-shirt," like the bear-shirts and various other shirts throughout the novel, is a symbol of transformation, and Freydis' quest is two-fold: to drain Vinland of whatever resources it has to enrich herself, and to bring frost to the frostless land.  Freydis acts out of greed, but her greed is self-replicating, and becomes a kind of pointless malevolence that demonstrates the viciousness and waste of the colonialist.  This exchange, between Freydis and the Mi'kmaq god Kluskap, shows how that works:

He said, "what do you really want?"

"I want to be rich," Freydis said.

"Well, here you are in My country.  Everyone who comes here is rich.  Some of my people say you Jenuaq are rich already.  They don't mind it, but they know what you're doing here.  Your ship is full of timber and grape-vines.  Your men have all the game they want, because they leave good buck-deer rotting for Skofte Carrion-Crow.  I've seen that.  We don't do that here.  Your husband is happy trading milk for skins -- that was a good idea of yours, Freydis Eiriksdaughter! -- and Gudrid and Karslefni have found a place to live, where the berries are as many as stars, and the fish are as many as hairs on your head.  Of course my People are angry about the man you killed, but I can smooth that out with them if you pay compensation.  What more do you want?"

Sullenly, Freydis dug her heel into the sand.  "I want everything," she said.

Wanting to the point of destruction: destruction of land, destruction of strangers, destruction of self.  That's the mindset of the European colonialist, at least at its most extreme, in miniature.  It's certainly recognizable in the rapaciousness of the title governor in Argall.  Freydis gives Vollmann the opportunity to write about this impulse in the language of myth, a vernacular that we have in many ways lost.  The stories of the berserkers are interesting, but it's not until the novel focuses in on Freydis that it really becomes powerful, or engaging.

Like those other novels, Vollmann intersperses the historical-mythological narrative with flashes of the present day.  He's deeply concerned with the way that the colonizing interactions of the past remain present in the culture and landscape of the present.  Here, that means brief narratives of Vollmann's travels to Greenland's capital Nuuk, as well as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.  I didn't think these parts were as effective as in The Rifles, where Vollmann seems to collapse the border between the past and present by literally becoming Captain Franklin.  In a way, The Ice-Shirt seems to be groping around for the method he invents for that later novel.

I didn't get to start The Ice-Shirt until I got back from Newfoundland, but it was an interesting way or reflecting on the trip.  Vollmann, playing fast and loose with geography, uses Nova Scotia and the coast further south to represent the Vinland-that-was, while Newfoundland--naturally colder and less forested--represents the corrupted Vinland of the present.  That didn't exactly square with my impression of the island's beauty or wonder, but I get it.  I did enjoy seeing a recognizable set of sea arches become an enormous human skull:

Then, walking south across the point, she came to a beach where boulders formed themselves into double arches, like the eye-sockets of a skull, through which the milk-grey sea gazed mildly, while the forehead was flat and green-grown, and though the skull had no mouth the teeth were scattered thickly about: -- smooth pebbles, black, orange, red and white.  Because this was a prodigy, Freydis considered that Blue-Shirt had heard her prayer.  She bowed again, and a cloud-shadow came to the edge of the ocean.  (In those days, as I have said, the shape-changers were dying out, but it was still possible to do quite a bit with prayer.) -- The place is still there today; it is called "The Arches."

See the skull?  No?  Well, look harder, maybe.  As Vollmann would tell you, the past is always present.