MDDM Ch. 62 Stig

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Thu Jul 11 17:51:14 CDT 2002


Doug:
>> but Pynchon also seems to suggest that
>> Stig may be descended from those who brought murder and slavery to America,
>> who broke the native magic
>
jbor
>The reason I don't think this interpretation works is that the reference to
>the American continent's "own ancient Days" implies a time *before* the
>arrival of the Icelanders/Vikings, who are the subjects of some of the songs
>in the Elder Edda, which is the manuscript Stig is referring to. I think
>that Stig, like Capt. Zhang at 615-6, is referring to the "murder, slavery,
>and the poor fragments of a Magic irreparably broken" which these earlier
>Northerners witnessed and told tales about, i.e. warring tribes of
>Indigenous North Americans. However, I'd want to confirm this with someone
>who is more familiar with Old Icelandic literature than I am.


Just curious, but why the need to go outside of M&D to guide this
interpretation?


In Stig's tale, his use of the phrase "own Ancient days" is ambiguous -- it
can be read as a time before visitation by the first Northmen when murder
and slavery already existed and magic was already broken, or as a time long
ago when the first Northmen came and brought murder and slavery and broke
the old Magic.    Likewise, "that the 'new' Continent Europeans found" is
ambiguous -- are those Europeans the Europeans who came to America in the
15th century, or those who came to America in centuries earlier, in the
11th century?

If you need to go to the historical record to decide which reading to
choose, then you seem to be doing what you said wasn't kosher in the
discussion about Washington. Not that there's anything particularly wrong
with such inconsistency, but it is interesting to watch you apply different
interpretative criteria for yourself and others.


jbor:
>>>All you did was to bring in stuff from outside the text, like that 1796
>>>letter, and other historical judgements, in order to support an argument
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0207&msg=68248&sort=date




Vinland
the wooded land in North America that was visited and named by Leif
Eriksson about the year AD 1000. Its exact location is not known, but it
was probably somewhere along the Atlantic coastline of what is now eastern
or northeastern Canada.

The most detailed information about the Vikings' visits to Vinland is
contained in two Norse sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of
Erik the Red. These two accounts differ somewhat. According to the
Greenlanders' Saga, Bjarni Herjulfsson became the first European to sight
mainland America when his Greenland-bound ship was blown westward off
course about 986. He apparently sailed along the Atlantic coastline of
eastern Canada and then returned to Greenland. About 1000 a crew of 35 men
led by Leif Eriksson set out to try to find the land accidentally sighted
by Bjarni. (The Saga of Erik the Red presents Leif himself as the first to
sight Vinland.) Leif's expedition came first to an icy, barren land which
they called Helluland ("Flat-Stone Land"); sailing southward, they
encountered a flat, wooded land which they named Markland ("Wood Land").
Again they set sail southward, and the warmer, wooded area that they found
they named Vinland. There they built some houses and explored the region
before returning to Greenland. In 1003 Leif's brother Thorvald led an
expedition to Vinland and spent two years there. In 1004 (or 1010,
according to other historians) Thorfinn Karlsefni, encouraged by Thorvald's
reports of grapes growing wild in Vinland, led a colonizing expedition of
about 130 people (or 65, according to one saga) to Vinland. By the time
they had stayed there three years, the colonists' trade with the local
Indians had turned to mutual warfare, and so the colonists gave up and
returned to Greenland. About 1013 Erik the Red's daughter Freydis led an
unsuccessful expedition to Vinland and soon afterward returned to
Greenland. So ended the Norse visits to the Americas as far as the
historical record is concerned.

The Norsemen's name for the land they discovered, Vinland, means "Wine
Land." Thorfinn reported that he found "wine berries" growing there, and
these were later interpreted to mean grapes, though the Norsemen referred
to any berry as a "wine berry," and it is probable that they had actually
come upon cranberries. This fruit evidently proved disappointing to
Thorfinn's colonists, for when they became disgruntled during the third
year of the colonizing expedition, they made a grievance out of not having
seen much of the wine banquets that had been promised them.

Nevertheless, the Vinland name was retained by the Scandinavians, and it
was as a wine land that the North American continent entered the literature
of continental Europe, almost certainly first in 1075 through the History
of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam, head of the cathedral
school of Bremen (see Adam of Bremen ). Adam mentioned Vinland on the
authority of King Sweyn II Estridsen of Denmark, who told of Iceland,
Greenland, and other lands of the northern Atlantic known to the
Scandinavians. Adam says of King Sweyn: "He spoke also of yet another
island of the many found in that ocean. It is called Vinland because vines
producing excellent wines grow there."

In the 1960s Helge Ingstad adopted the view of the Swedish philologist Sven
Söderberg that Vinland did not mean "wine land" but rather "grassland" or
"grazing land." Ingstad discovered in 1963 the remains of house sites and
other artifacts of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, at the
northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Dating techniques have conclusively
proved that the remains date from about 1000 AD-i.e., the time of the
Norsemen's reputed visits. Further evidence of Viking exploration came in
1965, when the Yale University Press published a medieval map showing the
outlines of continental Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, the latter
being described in a notation on the map as "Island of Vinland, discovered
by Bjarni and Leif in company." The authenticity of this map, however, has
been sharply debated.



To cite this page:
"Vinland" Encyclopædia Britannica
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=77420>
[Accessed July 11, 2002].




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