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many Norwegians were doing at that time, and for a while he got on quite nicely in Hauksdal, which is good country, and good people live there. But a couple of bad men, real troublemakers, tried to push Eirik around, and after he’d killed them their relatives kicked up a hell of a fuss - that’s next of kin for you, pathetically narrow-minded - so he had to clear out of Hauksdal and move to Breidafjord. By this time he was sick to death of trouble, and he figured it’d be a good idea to stay clear of other people as far as possible - if there weren’t any people about for him to kill, he’d be far less likely to kill anybody, and that’d be just fine. So he built a farm on Oxen Island, which is a pretty remote place. Also, he went out of his way to be sociable and pleasant to the few neighbours he had. He even lent one of them his bench-boards- Sorry, I forgot. Bench-boards are pretty carved panels that you dowel onto the fronts of your benches. You must have benches, even in Constantinople. For sitting on. All right; back home we build our houses long and low, with one big room where everybody sits around in the evenings and in winter when it’s too cold and dark to go out. I’m forgetting, you don’t have cold in these parts, not cold cold, but you’ll just have to use your imagination. Anyhow, there’s one big long room, and usually one or two smaller rooms leading off it, for the head of the family to sleep in, and storerooms and so on. In the main hall there’s usually long benches running the length of the room, and if you’re reasonably well-set and a bit of a show-off, you stick on these carved panels-You get the idea, I’m sure.
    Anyway, Red Eirik had a fine set of bench-boards which he’d brought with him from Norway, and, trying to be sociable, he lent them to a neighbour for some special occasion, and the neighbour was a miserable bugger and wouldn’t give them back. This led to words, words led to other stuff, and pretty soon, Eirik had the deceased’s family snapping round his heels yet again and found himself in need of somewhere else to live.
    By now, he was more or less at the end of his rope. All the bad stuff in his life, he decided, was because of other people - because, left to himself, he was just a peaceful, harmless farmer who wouldn’t hurt a mouse - and the only course left open for him was to up sticks and go where there weren’t any other people at all.
    A tall order, that; but as luck would have it, he remembered a story he’d heard about some man called Gunnbjorn Ulfson who’d been blown off course trying to reach Iceland, a hundred years or so earlier, and ended up on some island nobody had ever been to before. Now Gunnbjorn just wanted to get to Iceland, he wasn’t interested in exploring, so he turned round and sailed back the way he’d come - his luck was in and he made it home. He told people about his adventure, naturally, but even the people who believed him weren’t particularly interested. As time went on, what Gunnbjorn had said about where these islands were and how you got there started to rust away a bit, so to speak, and by the time the story reached Eirik it was all thin and flaky Never mind: if Gunnbjorn was telling the truth, this island of his was completely empty, and that was just the sort of place Eirik was after. He packed up as much stuff as he could fit on board a knoerr - there I go again: that’s our word for the deep, chubby ships we use for going to places and carrying stuff about, as opposed to your slim, thoroughbred warship, which is your quintessential rich man’s toy and not really much good for anything useful. Anyhow, he took along all his farm workers and some neighbours who’d got into trouble for being on his side, pointed his ship in the general direction of where he thought Gunnbjorn’s islands might possibly be, and set off. Everybody reckoned that was the last anyone’d ever see of Red Fink, and the general view was that