The Importance of a Belt Buckle

I write this leading on somewhat from my earlier article “Bringing the Vikings to Life”, as I wish to talk about the experience I have had in injecting detail and description to my writings. Now, firstly my background as a writer is as a game designer, writing either fiction based on a world that I particularly liked or later on writing the script for the adventure itself, either as background lore, quest detail or interactions between the players and the denizens of the land.

Part of this has meant my developing style is very blunt and concise, with a heady amount of action driving the plot forward. Working in such a visual medium as this, it was usually better to leave the optical features to the artists, because as they say, a picture tells a thousand words. Now, that I am writing a book it has come about from frequent critiques that I need to add more detail and atmosphere to the text, as I can no longer rely on the visual feedback from the graphics.

My experiences of this have been widespread, ranging from finding certain aspects really interesting (the weather and environment in particular) and therefore easier to write about. For some reason I find it very easily to properly visualise and then put into words a description of weather and its effects, be it bright sunlight on a mid-summers eve to a blizzard in the middle of winter, however detail of the land is rather more difficult. This is part of the reason for my attempts to get as much visual feedback on the Greenlandic terrain, which led to my discovery of the real Hvalsey in the article mentioned above.

Then there is the part of descriptive text which I find near impossible, and this most likely stems from my own (very) casual attitude to the subject, and that is clothing. I realise that what people wear can be as important to their overall characterisation as their actions, but I find it nearly impossible to connect the two. Does it really matter if Gorran wears a blue tunic or a green one? What about Thorvald’s trousers today? Is it enough that I simply dress up the characters in personality and then let the reader imagine for themselves what exactly it is they wear. I hope so, because this is what I intend to do.

This leads very nicely on to my final point, the nature of novel writing is a very different beast to master compared with script or lore scribbling, and it requires different skills and techniques to pull off; but should I really mould my entire writing style to suit this, or would my book come out as stronger if I write along my strengths rather than weaknesses? Perhaps I should start to concentrate more on Leif’s voyage of discovery and worry less about the shape of Erik’s belt buckles...

Bringing the Vikings to life!

Location of "Hvalsey" the capital of Viking Greenland

Ok, maybe not quite to life, but I am writing this literally jumping with excitement at the wonders of technology. Now, my friends are well aware that I have been utilising a little trick to write about the wonders of the land in which my Vikings lived, namely in the section on Norway I used Google Street View to jump on the Norwegian roads and actually wander around what I was trying to talk about, getting some really nice descriptions going about the landscape through which they wandered, and the obstacles they had to face. Had I not been able to do this I would have had to splash out several hundred pounds to travel to Bergen and Trondheim proper in order to get a real feel of the land, the Norwegian landscape being so exotic and different to anything I have myself experienced.

Having found this little treasure trove I began to try the same technique on Greenland, but much to my annoyance the people at Google have not yet mapped out the roads there, and as such there is no Street View; the entire map in fact feels decidedly empty (take a look yourself, Greenland is just a white shape on the map). I then began to look up flights to Greenland, planning to do a little research and was shocked at the price (the cheapest was something like £1300). Despairing I began to search all over the place for pictures of the region and found several good ones, but they tended to focus on one thing in particular (most often being Thjodhilde’s little church) and lacked any real details of what the land looked like, and the impact of the background. Now, a good photographer would never just take a picture of a grassy meadow, or of a rocky beach (unless they happen to live in Brighton, in which case those stone seem to be a focal point!), simply because they are boring. To an author however, who lives on the little detail this was a massive setback, as I simply couldn’t envision the settlement of Hvalsey in my mind.

All this changed with a little more exploration, on a whim I decided to pinpoint the exact location of Hvalsey in Greenland, so that I could at least say the size of the fjord on the slopes of which their settlement was built when I had a major breakthrough. Just because Street View didn’t work, did not mean that Google Earth failed entirely, we still have the satellite images. Now I am not one of those people who perused the service at its inception trying to find conspiracy buildings arranged to look like a swastika, nor did I try to find area 51, in fact the only thing I did look at was the massive bomber graveyard in America just because that sounded so cool. I didn’t realise you could zoom, and it would actually zoom in and give you highly detailed shots, I had been expecting just increasingly pixelated shots in which the sea began to look like the mountains which rose of out it.

Eiriksfjord, on the banks of which Erik built his home.

With some searching I found the Inuit (and as such modern Greenlandic) names of the various settlements, eventually discovering that “Qassiarsuk” was the nearest modern settlement to Hvalsey. A little more searching and I found it on Google maps. Great, I had the basic details of the land now, it was a relatively green patch of the normally icy Greenland, with a massive fjord feeding into it through a series of islands. So far so good, this was pretty much what I had expected.

I zoomed in; is that a path? It was. I went in closer, are those ruins? No, they were just sheep. Disappointing, still this was pretty cool so I followed the road, they tend to go somewhere right?

Then, suddenly like a flash I noticed something I recognised from the photo’s I had found earlier, it was a stone wall with what looked to be a grass roof. Could it possibly be? Perhaps.

Then I saw next to it a smaller structure housed within a small wooden fence. I had found it, there was Brattahlid, the home of Erik the Red staring right up at me from the computer screen. Oh the wonders of modern technology!

The circular structure is the wooden fence, at the centre of which is Thjodhilde's church. Right above that is Brattahlid, home of Erik the Red!

 With many, many thanks to the enterprising people at Google!