During one long, lonely
February, I sat by my big picture window, day after day, hour after excruciating
hour, watching rain pour down from the sky and feeding my insatiable infant son. I survived the ordeal, but only thanks
to The Greenlanders. The Greenlanders is Jane Smiley's 584-page
novel about the mysterious demise of the Norse Greenland colony. In the light shed by Ms. Smiley's
considerable insight, though, that demise becomes considerably less mysterious
and considerably more inevitable.
More rooted in human ignorance and blindness and cruelty than the
historians could ever surmise, much less portray. Was it somehow perverse of me to become so absorbed in this tragic
reconstruction of a failed human endeavor at the very time that I should have been celebrating the miraculous
beginnings of my own little human endeavor? Maybe so. But I
chalked it up to my northern temperament: had Ingmar Bergman ever been required to nurse a baby, he probably
would have found himself reading The
Greenlanders, too.
Several years later I
came across a new translation of some of the Icelandic sagas with a forward by
Jane Smiley, and, feeling a connection both to her and to my Scandinavian
roots, I picked it up. Right away,
I was captivated. The characters
were flesh-and-blood, eating, sleeping, thinking, planning, sentient beings,
just like we are, but almost in the manner of humanoids from one of Star Trek's
alien worlds, their motives occasionally wouldn't quite add up, or their
actions would sometimes seem a bit "off." You see, the sagas were written in Iceland about 800 years
ago and set 200 years earlier than that.
Light-years away from our world.
And the sagas are sparse in style; many things are unstated, left between
the lines. A contemporary reader
would have understood, but the modern reader is left to rely upon her own
interpretive abilities and her own detective work. And, indeed, after some investigating, many of the
characters did become understandable to me, and even admirable – even those
whom we modern folk might characterize as petty, vindictive, cruel or just
plain disgusting!
That volume of stories reinvigorated
a connection with the people that I only half jokingly call "my Viking
ancestors." This connection is,
to me, a very tangible thing, and I treasure it. When I'm at home in Sweden I can stand by the graves of my
people going back to Viking times and then some. I've always wanted to know them, but is that even remotely
possible?
I continued my detective
work, reading Old Norse classics like Snorri's Heimskringla and the Poetic
Edda, along with books on Norse religion, law and society. By far the most inspirational work of
modern scholarship that I came across was Neil S. Price's The Viking Way: Religion
and War in Iron Age Scandinavia.
Price challenges us to allow those ancient people their peculiarities,
to allow them their profound differences from us, to allow them their own
stories. Captain Kirk would be proud! Of course, it's easy to
honor the prime directive when you know that Scotty can beam you up at any
time. But how did things work on
the ground? Human and animal
sacrifice, piracy, evil sorcery, killings for vengeance or just plain
provocation: few stories end – or begin
- without blood spillage. At the
same time, though, those people were dependent upon each other and they lived
at close quarters: warriors and
traders, farmers and kings, Christians and heathens, slaves and priestesses. The Viking Age was a productive age of
travel and trade, of human craft and expression of all sorts, and its society
had a moral equilibrium, one that nurtured it and fueled it and, indeed, drove
it, at high-speed, for several centuries. What was it all about?
Characters started coming
to me, and that's when The Bear-Wife
began. It is set in a transitional
time, at the meeting between the old beliefs and Christianity, the old
political order and the new medieval kingdoms. It is set in a transitional place, where the rocky Swedish
west coast, the open farmland of the south and the forestland of the interior
come together. And it is set
amidst the most significant transitional condition of all: life itself, which
the Norse saw as a state of constant becoming.
Where then, is home - the
state of physical and spiritual rest?
That is what The Bear-Wife
seeks to explore.
The main characters are
Geerta, the orphaned daughter of a trader, raised in a heathen household by a
Christian servant woman; Magnus, a young Viking warrior groping to understand
the spiritual aspect of his vocation; Ragnar, his father, anxious about the
plight of his prosperous estate and his chiefdom as he confronts his son's indifference
and his own mortality; Fardan, an English missionary priest who struggles to
advance his faith in a sometimes hostile setting; and Svanhild, a sorceress and
former war-maiden who struggles with the absence of her husband and the uncomfortable
nature of her role in society, which is to serve as an intermediary between the
human and spirit worlds. And then,
of course, there's the bear.
Geerta and Magnus, cast
out from their respective worlds, meet at the threshold of the bear's den, a
place where death and birth are merged, and where the very human concerns of finding
one's place and of fulfilling one's role can begin to be sorted out. Together they restore the bear to his
rightful place and in doing so are ultimately able to assume their own "rightful
places."
Of course, my characters
also operate amidst external events - some historical, some fictional, and some
that were hatched in my mind to address the mysterious archaeology of the
fictional Ragnar's district. I
hope that my characters are not only true to the world-view(s) of the time and
place in which they lived, but are also in some way illustrative of a universal
human desire to go home in both a physical and spiritual sense, to be at peace
with one's duties and one's fate.
