“There’s no point thinking like that,” Mom said. “The planks don’t separate your knarr from the sea; they connect her to it. You could make a ship out of plate steel and she could still never be stronger than the sea. But make her light and flexible, and she’ll ride the waves instead of fighting them.”
“What if she’s driven up against the rocks?”
“You didn’t design her to do that, did you? You designed her to sail.”
“But ships do wreck Mom.” Light, flexible, beautiful ships came flying over the sea only to be torn to pieces by the brutal shore.
“An unlucky wind, an unluck shore, an unlucky iceberg, anything can sink. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how she sails.”
From Welwyn Wilton Katz’s Out of the Dark (recommended by arthurslade). Which draws upon the Vinland sagas, and also upon the new world Viking settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.
The actual Vinland sagas are strange texts, episodic, more like a string of hastily constructed short stories than anything else. I didn’t find them all that compelling when I read them this summer, in spite of the North American link–but Katz takes bits and pieces out of those sagas and makes the story of Viking traders trying to build a life in the new world pretty compelling after all. And I find myself wanting to visit L’Anse aux Meadows now.
I’ve found three young adult/middle grade books based on Icelandic sagas so far: Out of the Dark (Vinland sagas), The Loki Wolf (Grettir), and Hush (Laxdæla). Anyone know of any others? (In English or in any other language.)