[In the following review, Wawn remarks favorably on the imagery employed in Vinland.]

[Vinland] is a strange and striking saga-novel by an Orcadian who long ago earned an honoured place on the runic roll of those post-medieval writers who have sought to recreate and respond to the world of the ancient Viking north. George Mackay Brown writes of feeling like "Aladdin in the enchanted cave", as he surveyed the huge deposits of Norse-related narrative over which his imagination could range. It seems an appropriate image, much favoured by early nineteenth-century Scandinavian writers as they discovered the genie within the long neglected lamp of Eddic poem and saga. Some of the accumulated textual tarnish was polished off by the great Arnamagnæan Commission series of editions, each with a facing-page Latin translation, which reached out to educated readers throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. British Icelandophiles, among them Sir Walter Scott, began to acquire these volumes; his splendid Orcadian novel The Pirate draws heavily on the painstakingly accumulated Icelandic holdings in his Abbotsford library.

The sagas used by Scott are among the identifiable impulses behind Mackay Brown's novel: Brennu-Njáls saga, Orkneyinga saga, the so-called Vinland sagas. The contrasting voices of the medieval Celtic lyric and Hans Christian Andersen also seem to catch the ear. The sour-spirited critic may grumble about inadequately assimilated sources. The specialist reader is much more likely to enjoy identifying the provenance of the oneliners, the gnomic saws, the motifs and the incidents with which the narrative is flecked; there is a convincing sense that the novelist has husbanded the material shrewdly and made it securely his own. The general reader will find many other features by which to be challenged, intrigued and moved, as the narrative pursues its laconic way in sinewy language and syntax which seeks constantly to challenge stale colloquial expectation.

At first sight, Vinland seems taken up with moods, gestures and epiphanies; it does not signal excitedly when important ideas appear in its narrative. Thus, at one level, we follow the fortunes of Ranald the hero, as he moves determinedly but uncertainly from a sea-roving youth, through agrarian middle age and on to visionary and rheumatic senility. We register, too, the narrative fate of other young men, "splits" of the protagonist, who were either less fortunate or more rebellious—as when Ranald the dutiful son fathers Einhof the runaway heir. Gradually, a pattern of ideas—of themes and variations—emerges. Ranald roves the seas between Greenland, Vinland, Iceland and Orkney, but the dilemmas of Viking life follow him like porpoises. For all the novel's gloomy sense of fate's tight fist, the North Atlantic hero has endlessly to exercise his (all too) free will in making hard choices: heroic enterprise or agrarian domesticity, lobster-fishing or learning Latin, ship or farmhouse, crew or family. He might also decide between the conflicting wishes of father and mother and loyalty to foreign king or to homeland—a fraught choice in a homeland in which "there are always two earls, sometimes three". Are the prizes worth the prices? Is civilization really just like old age; that is, tolerable only when you consider the alternative? It is no wonder that many a grizzled Orcadian soul took refuge in the strong libations supplied by Ord, the surly malt-maker of Papa Stronsay.

As Viking society struggles on stubbornly and unstably through days of fair and foul, feast and famine, the narrative generates consolatory images of permanence—poetry, memory, and religion. Poetry—a vision of the "Fatal Sisters"—is as powerful now in Mackay Brown's Orcadian vision as it formerly was with Scott, Thomas Gray, and on back via Torfæus's Orcades to the great Battle of Clontarf poem in Njáls saga. Indeed, as this seven-hundred-year span of literary continuity proves, poetry can offer permanence. Hence the novel's investigation of the creative processes of its poets; there are some half-a-dozen arresting poems among the sections of taut and gritty semi-alliterative prose.

While poems can outlive the poet, Ranald's dreams and memories go to the ship-shaped stone chapel of death with him. At least such visions had helped to make endurable the thistle-strewn path through old age. Ranald's youthful voyage to Vinland provided a crucial imaginative reference point for the rest of his life. In his dotage, he still ponders distractedly but obsessively the possibility of having a boat built which might take him back to make his peace with that wondrous land of grape and butter-nut. Vinland was an Edenic world, an earthly emanation of some divine harmony; and it was tainted by Viking man—by accident and fear as much as by malevolence.

Earthly access to true paradise is available to Ranald through the sacramental system of the Christian church, towards whose witness he turns with ever increasing intensity in his last isolated and ascetic years. For some Victorian recreators of the North—Sir George Dasent, for instance—the Christian religion in medieval Scandinavia had been a baleful authoritarian influence on the democratic, muscular-pagan world of the Viking sea-pirate. The new faith had led people to sit down and think, rather than go out and do; this was not the way to win—or retain—an empire. Mackay Brown's novel is more sympathetic. Its Christian vision is powerful, but its voice is not that of medieval Christendom. Both faith and language are rooted in the strakes and thwarts and wave-crests of the real boats of real sailors.

It is with such images that the book ends—and it is in this sensibility that the linguistic as well as the spiritual heart of the book lies. The author has clearly relished looting the neglected granaries of language, for the seductive delights of chidden dogs, unthonged bags, unbunged casks, slugabeds, gluttings, reeks of scorchings, crepitations of cinders, word-storms, boat-nousts, dottled farmers, blackavizedruffians, and the rest. Philology and literary creativity are thus fruitfully united by Northern enthusiasms.