A félag, or fellowship, was a Viking institution, and could be a band of warriors owing allegiance to a lord, bound by oaths of loyalty. Sworn enemies could suffer the dreaded blódörn, the “blood-eagle.” Snorri Sturluson, thirteenth-century biographer of the Norse kings, described how one victim had an eagle carved on his back by an enemy, who “stuck his sword into the body next to the spine, cut away all the ribs down to the loins, and dragged out his lungs.” The idea of a secret félag in medieval England is based on the antipathy of the English towards their Norman overlords, and on the Norse heritage which remained strong in parts of Britain where the Vikings had settled. One area where this influence was clearest was the western isles of Scotland, and today on the holy isle of Iona you can see the gravestones of Viking lords among the early Christian relics of the monastery.
The fascination of the Nazis with the Vikings is well known. The ultimate Nazi félag 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 Chichén Itzá, 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 Kællingekløften, “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 illfated 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 Vestribygδ, the “western settlement,” located some five hundred miles south of the Ilulissat icefjord.
However, the region of the icefjord and farther north, Norδrseta, 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 Leifsbúδir 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.
The only authenticated Norse artefact discovered in the Americas south of L’Anse aux Meadows is a worn silver coin excavated from an Indian site beside Penobscot Bay in Maine. It has been identified as a Norwegian coin of King Olaf, Harald Hardrada’s son and successor who had been with him in England in 1066, and it may date to the very year of the fictional voyage in this novel. No Viking coins have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows or in Greenland, and how this coin came to be lost almost a thousand miles beyond the farthest known Viking settlement is a mystery.
There is no evidence that seafarers from across the Atlantic reached the shores of the Yucatán in Mexico before the Spanish in the early sixteenth century.
However, the Maya prophet Chilam Balam, “Jaguar Prophet,” is said to have foretold the arrival of “bearded men, the men of the east.” The Books of Chilam Balam were mainly written down after the Spanish conquest, leading some to speculate that the prophecy was a later embellishment, but the possibility remains that it was genuine and based on a memory of foreigners who had arrived before the Spanish. Only one group of “bearded men, men of the east”
are known to have visited the New World before the fifteenth century, and they were the Norse; and the evidence suggests that Norse exploration west and south of Greenland reached its greatest extent during the eleventh century.
The fictional jungle temple with its wall-painting is based on a remarkable discovery in 1946 by two American adventurers in the Yucatán, at a place which became known as Bonampak, Maya for “painted walls.” Inside an overgrown corbelled building they found a narrative wall-painting of extraordinary power, showing a jungle battle, the torture and execution of prisoners and victory celebrations, including white-robed Maya ladies drawing blood from their own tongues. The painting dates from the height of the Maya period, about AD 800, but another painting, in the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, dates from the time when the Toltecs swept into power in the eleventh century. It shows canoe-borne Toltec warriors reconnoitering the Maya coast, a great pitched battle on land and the heart-sacrifice of the captured Maya leaders.
If you visit the ruins of Chichén Itzá today, you are likely to be told that the stories of human sacrifice were exaggerated by the Spanish or relate only to the Toltecs, not the Maya, whose descendants still occupy the Yucatán. You can reach your own conclusion at the Tzompantli, the Platform of the Skulls, where you can look past the sculpted rows of decapitated heads towards the sacrificial altar on the Temple of the Warriors and then gaze down the ceremonial way to the Sacred Cenote, the Well of Sacrifice. Many of the depictions of torture and execution in Maya and Aztec art pre-date the arrival of the Spanish, and the latest techniques of forensic science are, almost literally, adding flesh to the picture: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered that the floors of Aztec temples are soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
In the Yucatán, the most telling evidence comes from underwater archaeology.
The Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, dredged between 1904 and 1911 and excavated by divers in the 1960s, contained hundreds of human skeletons—
men, women and children—as well as a treasure trove of artefacts: gold discs, carved jade pendants, a human skull made into an incense burner, a sacrificial knife, numerous votive wooden figurines and other offerings. The story is similar at other cenotes in the Yucatán, including several in the ring of sinkholes that formed over a huge meteorite impact site close to the north coast. Many of these cenotes remain unexcavated and are vulnerable to looters. The fictional cenote in this book is based on my own experience exploring these sites, and especially diving in the spectacular caverns and passageways of Dos Ojos, “Bat Cave,” near the Maya coastal stronghold of Tulum.
The story of the last days of the Maya kings, almost two centuries after the Spanish conquest, is based on the account of Father Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola (Relation of two trips to Petén, made for the conversion of the heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches), who was eyewitness to this extraordinary scene beside the remote jungle lake of Petén in 1695 or 1696. A further fragment of this account came to light in the 1980s, and is quoted in Chapter 21. The true source of Maya gold, as described by Avendaño and found by archaeologists in the Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, remains a mystery.
The quote at the beginning of the book is from Josephus, Jewish War VII, 148–
62, translated from the Greek by H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press). Old French quoted in Chapter 2 is the actual inscription visible in the lower left-hand corner of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The Bible quote in Chapter 4 is an abridgement of Exodus 25: 31–40, King James Version. In Chapter 5, the two quotes from King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson, were translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Penguin, 1966). The poetry in Chapter 13 is from Morte d’Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92). In Chapter 15, the sentence in Old Norse describing Harald’s sea voyage is fictional, but the phrases that make it up are taken verbatim from the thirteenth century Eirik’s Saga, describing the Norse voyages to Vinland. The Old Norse phrase par liggr hann til ragnarøks, “there he lies until the end of the world,” comes from the poetic Edda (Gylfaginning 34) also by the prolific Snorri Sturluson, written down some time in the early thirteenth century.