The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 27
Born Grim, son of Thrain Otterson of Falconess, near the Fort of Hurdles (modern Dublin: as Peregrine once joked with me when I told him of Skallagrim Strider, this was another tale of blarney and lost opportunities, of men making a success in order to make a grand failure), he was called “Skalla,” meaning bald, because of his early loss of hair, and he was called “Strider” because of his luck (the crucial concept to the Norse, all-telling) as a navigator in the storms of the Irish Sea and English Channel.
Skallagrim Strider was the grandson of the notorious Otter Black-Nose, whose assassination was avenged by his brother, Eyvind Fast-Sailer, who was then forced to flee Ireland for Ice land to escape vengeful factions. In time, Skallagrim Strider’s good luck attracted the King of Ireland’s greedy attention, and, getting the bad luck that goes hand in hand with the good, Skallagrim Strider was forced to flee Ireland. He too found refuge in Iceland, which was then still a young colony filled with political and fratricidal refugees from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Lapland, Normandy, and other Norse kingdoms washed by the North Sea.
Skallagrim Strider settled with the wealthy descendants of Eyvind Fast-Sailer, by then called the Men of Red River, in western Iceland. Skallagrim Strider was adopted by Eyvind Fast-Sailer’s eldest son, Alfstan the Peacock, whose own son had been killed in a duel at twelve. At Alfstan the Peacock’s direction, Skallagrim Strider married a wealthy widow, Dotta Long-Hands, from Laxriverdale in northwestern Iceland. He soon became a bountiful farmer and serious poet, as well as continuing to enhance his reputation as a wild outlaw, going off once a year (“going viking”) in summer, after the common law assembly, the Althing, to plunder his old enemies in Ireland.
After several years, it was revealed that Dotta Long-Hands loved another man (there were actually two contradictory saga fragments, one saying that she loved her own brother, another saying that she spurned her husband because she could not accommodate him physically in the sex act). Skallagrim Strider acted ruthlessly. He left her bed, made her a prisoner of the farm. He remained away on summer adventures for longer periods. He broadcast her infamy, boasted how he would not take another wife until Dotta Long-Hands begged his mercy. She was a bright, vindictive woman. She convinced her family to carry her back to Laxriverdale, which they did, in secret and with full knowledge of the risk.
To avenge this humiliation, Skallagrim Strider conducted himself with cold logic. First, at the Althing, he demanded huge reparations in gold from Dotta Long-Hands’ family, knowing they would not and could not oblige him. With the false pretense of not being able to obtain justice peacefully, Skallagrim Strider then led his forty best men to Laxriverdale one spring and murdered Dotta Long-Hands and her entire family, more than four-score people. He also killed the livestock, burned the fields, poisoned the wells. Even for a Viking raid it was a ghastly act of vengeance.
The lawgivers at the Althing, pressed by an outraged Christian faction, ruled that Skallagrim Strider and his men be banished forever, forfeiting all their lands and claims.
One account, another saga fragment, indicates that Skallagrim Strider and his best men took to their best longship, a “wave-cutter,” and sailed to a small settlement in eastern Greenland, which they were soon forced to leave because of more mischief with a prominent settler’s wife. They then sailed southwest to the fledgling settlement of Vinland (somewhere on the North American continent), where they lived for many years, peacefully if disconsolately, among the Skralings, or wretches, who were actually the North American Indians. Growing infirm and melancholy, Skallagrim Strider and his remnant took to their wave-cutter one last time and sailed south, to the sun, where the Skneling legends had told them that there were calm seas and rich lands and warmth for their old bodies. Skallagrim Strider thus disappeared from the sagas.
There is a map fragment, however, from a sultan’s library in Istanbul, that dates from Byzantium and the Great City. It was signed “Men of Red River.” How it came to Istanbul cannot be known with certainty, though it is possible that Islamic traders from as far east as the Philippine Islands and as far south as Madagascar could have carried it to the Great City to trade with the wealthy court scholars. The map fragment shows a sailing course from “Vinland” into the “Sea of Sun.” The course touches on “Sandland” and “Boneland” and “Serpentland.” It ends in what is called “Nightland,” which is also called, in a rune poem at the edge of the map fragment, “the wall of blizzards and behemoths.” Of course, without longitude or latitude markings (since the Norse sailed dead reckoning, perhaps assisted by noontime and North Star sightings), the map’s geography is not truly decipherable.
The poem on the edge of the fragment, however, introduces a whole new concept to the saga—the hint of an apotheosis. The poem seems to say that the legend of Skallagrim Strider and the Men of Red River ended in the south, where Skallagrim Strider was crowned the King of the South by the animals living there. His children were said to be half man and half beast.
I recited the tale slowly to Mother. I finished, “And his sons still reign there.”
“No! No!” called Mother again. She grabbed the staff from the hag (who was Astra, Mother’s mentor) and raised it over my head. With a grunt, she dropped it on me. I was knocked sideways. I rolled over, sat up, the room spinning. Mother clubbed me again. I fended it off the third time, grabbed the staff from her hands, and flung it off the deck.
“His sons do not rule there! You are his only heir!” called