Meadowland Read Online Free PDF

that’d be no bad thing.
    Imagine people’s surprise, then, when the following summer Eirik sails back to Breidafjord (where, strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to set foot ever again, on pain of death), and announces that he’s found Gunnbjorn’s island. Furthermore, he says, it’s huge, and it’s the most wonderful country. The sea’s crawling with fish and seals, sky full of gulls, and the pasture’s so good that you ought to be able to keep your cattle out nine months of the year; in fact, Eirik says, it’s so rich and green, the only possible name for the place is Greenland.
    Of course, you’ve never been to Iceland, so you probably don’t appreciate how something like that would’ve sounded. Basically, Iceland is a few blades of grass between the volcanoes. I’m overstating it, of course, but a lot of it’s pretty rough, nothing but black shingle and rock, when it’s not buried deep in snow Part of the story, obviously, was that Eirik wanted to rub his enemies’ noses in it. They’d made him pack up and run for his life, and he’d gone and found this amazing paradise of green grass where a man’d hardly have to work at all if he didn’t want to. The other thing was, Eirik was recruiting. Sure, he didn’t want to live in a crowded place again, where you can’t stand on top of your own mountain without seeing at least one or two roofs in the distance; but he was realistic enough to know that if he wanted to make a go of settling in Greenland, he needed manpower. The difference would be, he figured, that if he founded a settlement and he was the boss and everybody accepted that and did as they were told, there wouldn’t be any reason for upsets and failings-out and all the rubbish he’d had to put up with all his life.
    Give him his due, Eirik was a persuasive man. Someone told me once that when he sailed back to Greenland the next summer, twenty-five ships went with him. Call that forty men to a ship, that’s close on a thousand people, and it’s news to me that there ever were more than a couple of thousand living out there on the middle-west coast, so they must’ve come from all over Iceland to join him. Not all of them made it, of course. Some of them came to harm - they ran into an earthquake under the sea, would you believe, which did for two or three ships and scared the shit out of the rest of them, and after that some of them thought better of it and turned back. But there were still close on six hundred people with him when he made landfall right down at the pointy end of Greenland.
    The strange thing about it is, Eirik was right. Not about the green grass and the fish and the gulls, of course; he was lying through his teeth about that. But it was true that once he’d settled in and the colony or settlement or whatever you want to call it had found its feet and sorted itself out, that was pretty well the end of Eirik’s troubles, at least as far as falling out with people was concerned. Eirik built himself a house and started farming, and pretty soon he had three big barns just to keep the hay in, so you can see he was doing all right. Better still, everybody who went with him seemed to have left their more boisterous habits behind in Iceland, because people managed to get on fairly well without quarrelling or killing each other, and I get the impression it was a good place to live, if you like quiet. Eirik’s wife had converted to the Faith - this was fifteen years or so before Iceland went over, so you can see she was ahead of her time and quite daring, even - and he didn’t seem to mind in the least; he even built her a little church so she could go and pray and say the holy Mass without disturbing anybody Shows you how thoughtful and considerate he could be, once he’d shaken off those bad-luck crows.
    Now, one of the people who went out with Fink was a miserable old bastard called Herjolf Bardason- ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s an interesting story. Goes to show, too,