Viking Tunsind

The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast.

He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that … Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. — 'Your people, pillaging and marauding …'

Of course, I’ve always maintained that the Vikings have been misunderstood by history, W. says. They were a melancholy people, first and foremost, I’ve told him. A people of tungsing, of heavy-souledness, I’ve insisted.

The Vikings knew their time was over, I’ve told W. They knew that their Ragnarok was coming; that a new religion was coming that would sweep the old one away. It was because Christianity was coming to their northlands that they sailed to Holy Island and smashed the Abbey, I said to W. And it was a sense of their own posthumousness that drove them to pillage and maraud their way across Christian Europe.

And wasn’t it the same soul-heaviness which drove them to the New World, to settle in Newfoundland? Wasn’t it Viking heavy-souledness which led them southwards, down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico? They wanted to escape, I told W. To escape themselves! To leave themselves behind! that's why they founded Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa, and in pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies.