Customer Reviews

The Farfarers: Before the Norse

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although Farley Mowat's re-interpretation of threads of evidence from such varied literary sources as Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul," Tacitus's "Agricola," and the North Atlantic Viking sagas may never be confirmed by archaeologists, his retelling of those stories makes great reading.

The Farfarers tells the tale of the Albans. It follows their westward migration from their origin in Gaul, from which they are forced to retreat to Scotland by Caesar's armies, through their subsequent movement to the islands of the north Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland and finally the coast of North America as they seek both safety from Vikings and other pirates and more favorable hunting grounds for the walrus and seal.

Based upon the scant evidence that remains, the history the Mowat relates of the Albans' exploration and colonization of Iceland, Greenland, and the North American coast seems plausible enough. But even if the evidence ultimately does not support Mowat's conclusions, the story that he weaves is thought-provoking and I found myself fascinated by his interpretation of the events underlying The Greenlander's Saga and the Saga of Eric the Red.

The "historical" chapters in the book are interspersed with Mowat's fictional tales of Alban life. Although entertaining, I found that these fictional stories detracted from the flow of his "historical" account. I was much more interested in Mowat's detailing of the evidence that supports his historical reconstruction of the westward migration of these early Europeans.

Nevertheless, in this year of celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the discovery of America by Leif Ericson, The Farfarers makes especially appropriate reading. I highly recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in early northern European history, Vikings, or the discovery of North America.

I too had niggling doubts about the Norse being here "first." I am no scholar but I've read a few books over my 40 years. This book is excellent, the amount of research is phenomenal! Intriguing, refreshing, whimsical, and honest. I wish more historians would say "this is how I think it happened..." After all, there is no way any historian can know FOR SURE about anything. History is, as Voltaire said, a pack of tricks we plan upon the dead. I only knocked off a star because I hate having to go to the back of the book for footnotes.

Farley Mowat is no fan of Received Wisdom.

In 1963 when he published his classic Never Cry Wolf, *everyone* knew that wolves were dangerous, even depraved killers. If it is now widely known that wolves are *not* dangerous to man, that they typically live in close-knit family groups, that they are intelligent, personable animals, it is largely thanks to Mowat, who consented to be dropped, alone, into the Canadian wilds to spend a season in close proximity with wolves in their natural habitat (at a time when experts agreed that to do so meant certain death). Nearly single-handedly, he changed the way the world thought about a species alongside which man has lived for millennia.

Similarly, in 1965 [note, not 1990 as another reviewer here indicates], when he published Westviking, Mowat's examination of the evidence convinced a theretofore skeptical modern generation of the veracity of the Norse claim (in the Vinland Sagas) to have visited the North American continent.

However, his continued examination of the evidence over the subsequent thirty years -- both archeological and literary -- convinced him that the Vinland Sagas told only a *portion* of the story. And, indeed, after reading The Farfarers, I am convinced that once again, where Mowat has led, mainstream scholarship will duly follow, this time to the conclusion that the Greenland Norse did not blaze the trail to Vinland any more than their forebears had blazed the trail to Iceland; in both cases, they followed a pre-Celtic European people Mowat refers to, collectively, as the "Albans."

It should be obvious, since it is largely his own theory that he is debunking, but I should nevertheless note that Mowat is a fact-driven rather than a theory-driven thinker. That is, he did not first propose the idea that a farfaring culture existed, and then seek evidence which could be interpreted as supporting the theory; rather, he has spent years considering the evidence, identified the places where existing theories lacked plausibility, and constantly sought more adequate interpretation. In what follows I will summarize, but radically simplify, his observations.

The first piece of the puzzle, chronologically if not logically, is that early medieval and even ancient maps frequently place a roughly Iceland-shaped island called "Ultima Thule" in the right area of the North Atlantic to be Iceland. The implication is that the Europeans knew about Iceland from antiquity, long before the island's ninth-century settlement by Northmen. Indeed, given the evidence, it is strange that scholars and historians could ever have concluded otherwise. Such is the power of Received Wisdom. [Note that Mowat never claims that ancient and medieval Europeans were aware of North America, as another reviewer here indicates.]

The next piece of evidence that Iceland was inhabited when the Northmen arrived is a great example of Mowat's ingenious "common" sense. There are references in the Vinland sagas to small numbers of white-robed people who were on Iceland when the Northmen arrived; the saga-writers claimed that these people "went away," not wanting to share the island with the newcomers. Scholarship has, from the beginning, made two inquiry-framing assumptions: (i) since Iceland was theretofore unknown to Europe, either the prior inhabitants were Irish monks who had drifted to Iceland on coracles or they didn't exist at all, and (ii) either the saga explanation that the clerics didn't want to share their solitude with brash newcomers can be taken at face value or the handful of monastics were slaughtered out of hand. However, no combination of these assumptions was ever truly plausible; the Irish "green martyrs" did not wear white robes, and where did all the early settlers' slaves come from, whose existence is well-attested in the sagas? Mowat's answer is that Iceland was occupied not by a handful of male clerics but rather by a people he calls the Albans (white-wearing people), who, he argues, had fled to Iceland to escape the depredations of the Northmen in the first place. Once expressed, it seems obviously more plausible than any prior explanation, but over centuries of scholarship and speculation, no one ever saw past the blinders of history.

Of more interest to Americans, of course, is the question of what evidence there is that these "skrælings" preceded the Norse to North America. Here Mowat relies on his re-interpretation of new world archeological evidence, informed and educated (unlike the views of most academic archeologists) by years of experience as a sailor and as a wilderness survivor. Briefly, he shows that what has always been interpreted as the foundations of Norse-style turf houses is more plausibly interpreted as the stone foundation of an Alban-style "boat-house," in which an inverted skin-boat is incorporated into the architecture of a semi-temporary dwelling. In addition, he shows continuity of structure among tall cairns of stones found in the new world and in the North Atlantic, as well as discontinuity between the new world cairns and anything produced by the Inuit or other native American peoples.

In sum, Mowat has done it again. My only quibble with this book is that each chapter is accompanied by a section of speculative fiction, a sort of imagined history of the Alban people. Mowat may have felt inclusion of the fictional account provided an intuition-priming illustration of his ideas, but the lack of support for the kind of speculative detail he alludes to in the fiction sections nettled my scholarly sensibilities. However, this is a minor point, and does not detract from the overall magnificent effect of the whole.

In The Farfarers: Before The Norse, author and historian Farley Mowat asserts that an Indo-European people he calls "The Alban" preceded the Norse discovery of the North American continent by several centuries. The Alban were fleeing the Norse occupation of Scotland, as well as the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and in part, they were in search of walrus ivory as well. Throughout The Farfarers: Before The Norse, iconoclastic historian Mowat skillfully blends fictional vignettes of Alban life into a thoughtful, archaeological and historical records based scholarly reconstruction of a long-forgotten history of death-dealing warships, scanty food supplies, long cold journeys across the treacherous night sea into an unknown land. The Farfarers: Before The Norse is informative, challenging, controversial, entertaining, and thoroughly recommended reading!

As usual, Farley Mowat tells a great story.

The Farfarers are a mysterious seafaring people called "Albans". If Mowat is right, the Albans were not Celt, not Goth, but a much more ancient people inhabiting Europe, like the Basque.

Mowat connects Albans on the northwest coast of Europe to the Picts of Scotland and to the Jakatars of Newfoundland. The Albans were driven out of Europe by the Romans, north into the Hebrides, then west to North America by Viking raids. In this book, the Vikings are the bad guys.

There's a lot of speculation here, but it makes sense. Ancient cairns in northern Canada may well be markers left by the real first European discoverers of America.

Few authors match Mowat's finesse at merging history and fiction. An offshoot from his earlier work on the Vikings, this book displaces the Norsemen as the earliest European colonists of North America. Mowat's expressive talents are given free rein to question consensus history and propose a new thesis - even before the Norsemen, Scottish exiles reached this continent long ago. Mowat is quick to assert his ideas are speculative. He offers good evidence that he's seen directly or researched. The force of his narrative skills submerge that disclaimer almost to obscurity as he presents a mixture of fact and fantasy throughout this book. It's a rewarding read, and the validity of his conjecture may be deferred until you close the final page.

Mowat's speculation on Scot explorers reaching the New World begins with a stone ruin in the Canadian Arctic. The unusual shape indicates the roofing material was a large boat. Houses of this oblong form can still be found in the outer islands of Scotland. As Mowat notes, the technique is testimony to efficient use and durability of the materials. The early people of Western Europe and the British Isles built long-lasting boats using a strong wood frame and easily replaceable skins. Strong and seaworthy, they put to sea in these boats for distant voyages. More distant, in Mowat's view, than we've previously conceived.

He proposes that settlements dotted the Eastern Arctic and along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The communities were founded by the descendents of the "valuta men" who first sought walrus tusks. The ivory was valuable and found ready markets. But the walrus herds died out or moved elsewhere. Meanwhile, population shifts in Europe put pressure on the home communities of these voyagers. They were driven to Northern Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and, finally, the Canadian shores. When they went, stone beacons for both sea and land navigation were erected to become their legacy in the New World. All these events pre-dated the legenday Leif Ericson's "discovery" of Vinland in the 11th Century.

Whatever the validity of Mowat's assertions, and he puts them forward vigorously, the story he tells merits further attention. Weaving a fictional account of the voyagers' lives and motivations through the historical text is a novel approach. With Mowat, the technique is superbly successful. If the book only forces further research by unpredjudiced investigators, it will have been worth the writing. It is clearly worth the reading.

Reaching farther and farther back into history is a risky thing to do, but Mowat does it with intelligence, convincing evidence and obvious love for his subject. We may never know who these people were, but that they were there is hard to argue. I enjoyed his little vignettes of imagined life at the time, and especially his rather epic-echoing compound words ("first-footers," for example). For anyone whose attention was caught by the ice facts in "Smilla's Sense of Snow," or the thrills and chills of Heaney's new translation of "Beowulf," this is the next book for you. I also appreciated his interest in the history of many of the words he uses in an effort to give some voice to a people whose language is not known. The mists of time have cleared just a little.

I loved this book. It opened up new ways of thinking for me and really captured my imagination. The northland is always of interest to me, and this account of centuries of settlement and exploration is fascinating. He fills in the spaces of history in a very imaginative and believable way.

In Farley Mowat's "The Farfarers; Before the Norse", he poses an interesting theory that the Norse were not the first Europeans to land in North America. The first and last parts of the book are good, with some compelling evidence to support Mowat's idea that ancient "Albans" (people from the Hebrides/north of Scotland) made it to Iceland, Greenland, and Northeast Canada hundreds of years before the Norse. This evidence includes stone watchtowers (cairns) and primary source material from other Europeans. Unfortunately, the middle of the book gets bogged down (it took me over a month to get through it, mostly due to lack of interest) with the gradual migration of the Albans to Scotland and the northern islands. It's very confusing and unfocused from what I thought was the point of the book. Focus on the subject is the main problem for the entire work, and although some of the digressions are interesting, they dilute the main point. There's good material for a smaller book -- and a smaller book should have been written.

Farley Mowat has out-done himself with this great work. I am not sure how long it took him to labor over this work, but his extensive research and writing style is much appreciated. I tip my hat to him on his portrayal of the Norse as the bloodthirsty settlers they were. Many historians I have read somewhat candy coat the truth. His writing style is outstanding with speculative fiction intermingled with historical fact and this work is refreshing.