One thing that bugged me about The Saga of the Greenlanders was that they didn’t really take time to describe the natives that they met. To me, this was odd because I’m sure the natives looked different than anyone they’d seen before, with different dress and customs. If I were on that same exploration trip, that would’ve definitely been something I’d noted, along with all the different landscape and perhaps animals (aside from the fact that there were grapes and trees). Another thing with the natives—one asked Gudrid her name, and apparently already spoke her language…this makes no sense unless Vikings had already visited before and taught them English, which doesn’t seem likely; or the event never happened. A final observation on the native encounters is that Thorstein and others die of a sickness, p.644. I wonder what this sickness could have been, if it was some sort of scurvy from the voyage or a different sickness the natives had been immune to and transferred to them.
I also noticed that Thorstein wanted to tell Gudrid her fate before she died. It seems awfully specific, which made me wonder if that event actually took place in that amount of detail, or if that was something interjected by the author when the story was finally written down.
Finally, I was astonished by Freydis’ actions. This was total female manipulation to get her own way, threatening her husband for divorce (something not previously mentioned, either)! She even went overboard and killed the women of the party as well. The next page mentions torture to get information out of people, a casually-mentioned but exciting element to the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment