The Ice-Shirt

Book excerpt: A majestic fictional evocation of the Norse arrival in the New World, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call "Vinland the Good." The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples--and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise--he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.