The Skraeling
My folk, my family told in tales, were taller in those days:
when Odin won for men that magic mead of honeyed blood,
my ancestors were first in line to drink.
The skalds would sing of Ironmouth, who bit his shield in half,
and Sigurd Snake-Eye’s journey down the golden steppes of Rus
to Hellespont, where Miklagard was found.
Like Christians will, the Christians there from spices had made stink,
and reddled city streets with bodies, Latin, Byzantine.
Dane-axes flashing moonlight, leaving Christians on the ground,
my folk danced wild in wolfskins, drunk on stinking henbane wine.
I took the name of Skraeling when I donned the skins of seals;
but others in this cruel white land still call me “Kavdlunak”
when I am seen out hunting saddlebacks.
I do not miss the frozen tongues of others of my kind,
but my old metal knife has by now worn down to the hilt,
and I would hear a skald sing something old:
Of Lief the son of Erik Red, or Erik Bloody-Axe;
of journeys launched with dreams of gold on waves of rolling iron;
Of dwarfs and trolls in lands of burning heat and bitter cold;
of men who gave their bodies to the wolf, the bear, the lion.
The winters here were always worse than memories of youth,
but one day summer came and we could still walk out to sea.
Would we could work the same with loaves and fish:
They never sent a bishop in the centuries before
in payment for the unicorns we slaughtered for their horns.
Our flock was always deemed too lost to save:
No Vinland sand-grain, Viking-red, became one granted wish;
our words of worship never heard, and so our fortunes fade.
No frost-kissed rocks more to be dug to excavate a grave,
for I believe no gods could make that journey that we made.
Yet here we came, so here I lie: inside this sealskin tent,
come trailing summer seals, whose paths now always seem to stray;
my blubber-fire burns low in its bowled stone.
In dreams I walk the golden halls of ancient Miklagard:
but tapestries and statues there are only skins and ice;
the throne is carved from walrus ivory.
The guards, all native skraelings, hold harpoons of whalebone;
up above them sits the mighty Emperor of the Greeks:
No Christian man is this, I swear, my snow-blind eyes still see,
but the monstrous polar-bear that’s been tracking me for weeks.
NB: in medieval Greenland, “skraeling” was a Norse term for the native people;
“kavdlunak” was a native term for the Norse. Both words meant “foreigner”.
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