Vinland (novel)

Vinland, published in 1992 by George Mackay Brown, is a historical novel set in the Orkney Islands in the early 11th century. It derives its name from a voyage the protagonist takes to that faraway land in the west.

Plot summary

The novel's progagonist is Ranald Sigmundson, an Orkneyman who journeys to Vinland as a youth, fights in the battle of Clontarf, and has other adventures. Later in life, Ranald tends his farm and warns his family and friends against becoming too involved in worldly affairs. The story's prose style is quite minimalistic and vivid, after the manner of an ancient Norse saga. It is, like much of Brown's other work, a revival of that literary form.

Written at a time when Brown's health was wavering, Vinland is a rare autobiographical insight into the author's thoughts about death. Like Ranald Sigmundsson, Brown converted to a Christian mentality. In the novel, Ranald yearns for a final voyage back to Vinland. However, the voyage is metaphorical: he dies on Easter Monday, and therefore his voyage is a spiritual rather than a physical one. What Vinland represents is echoed throughout Brown's work in his search for 'silence', that is, a sense for Christian peace, unity, meaning and order. He uses the Vikings' belief in fate (wyrd) as a backdrop to his message for Christian order. Ranald starts to despise the Viking way of life, and he soon turns very introspective and isolated, contemplating the meaning of life along emerging Christian principles. In short, his final voyage to the 'west' is a voyage to heaven, to an Eden – a harmonious world that was lost when the mythological representative of the apocalyptical hound Fenrir, Wolf, swings his axe and kills an Native American, destroying any hope of reconciliation.

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