Eiriksdottir

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

At the heart of this complex and richly textured book is the experience
of life in Greenland around 1015. The main character, Freydis
Eiriksdottir, based on the half-sister of Leif the Lucky, is a strong,
intelligent, ambitious, and frustrated woman. She reacts to social and
economic pressures by pushing back, leading an expedition to her
brother’s outpost, Leifsbudir, hoping for wealth and status. Freydis
herself; her husband, Thorvard; Hauk the shipbuilder; Ulfar the literate
Christian thrall; and many others emerge as variously motivated,
credible individuals and members of a society. That society, which is
reconstructed with precise historical imagination, is as much the hero
as any of the human characters.

Freydis’s tale is told in a changeable narrative voice that freely
shifts focus and prose style, though its basis is a re-creation of the
narrator of the Icelandic sagas. Included as well are extracts from
Ulfar’s journal and poems written in an Icelandic style. As well, the
story goes beyond the point at which Freydis leaves Leifsbudir: her
later life is quickly described; after that, the tale loops back to her
erstwhile companions to fill in the fate of the Icelanders left at
Leifsbudir and, rather fantastically, Helgi Egilsson’s discovery of
paradise. This formally ambitious novel demands of its audience more
than one reading.