My paternal lineage runs all the way back to Erik the Red, the first European to stumble upon the shores of North America. Even for a Viking, he was brutal and hotheaded. His clan exiled him from Norwegian soil for murdering too many of his kinsmen, so he gathered up a raiding party, sailed across the Atlantic, landed in a frozen wasteland, named it Greenland for some reason, and made war on the people he found there.
He was born Erik Thorvaldsson. The title “Red” came from his flame-colored hair, explosive temper, and penchant for bloodshed. You can draw a straight line down the family tree from him to Ulf Thorvaldsson, my father.
Perhaps all children see their parents as larger than life, but Pappa really was. Standing seven feet tall, he had a chest like a boulder and wore his hair and beard long, usually in intricate braids. He looked like a creature from the Old World, a hero or villain from the tales of the Vikings.
He looked like what he was. We lived on the outskirts of a small Iowa town, Pappa, Finn, and me. It was the end of the twentieth century, though I didn’t know it then.
My brother and I grew up placeless and timeless, cut off from the outside world. Our neighbors were prairie and pines. Our days consisted of archery and epic poetry.
Modern civilization was a strange fantasy that existed in books, on the other side of the TV screen, and, theoretically, beyond our fences. In that faraway realm, people spoke the wrong language, followed the wrong calendar, and prayed to the wrong gods. Finn and I lived almost entirely off the grid in a reality our father built for us.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
