The Vinland Althing
A Novel of the Iron Trade

About this book:

Ten centuries after Leif Eriksson’s landfall, the Norse settlements of Vinland are dying—strangled by the Little Ice Age, a crumbling monopoly on brittle bog-iron, and a Lawspeaker who measures justice in tolls and tally-sticks. When a knarr materializes out of the western fog carrying cargo that rings like a bell and bears the claw-marks of no known smith, Einar Finnbogason smells the end of the world he knows. The metal comes from the Sweetwater Sea, three hundred leagues up the Great River, where the rock bleeds pure iron and the Innu grow fields of yellow corn that laugh at frost. Valbrand Thorvaldsson has brought forty tons of it, a crew of Greenlanders with axes turned forward, and a grin that says the old laws are already dead.

Caught between a bailiff desperate to seize the cargo, a Lawspeaker who owns the bogs, and a master-smith who weeps at the beauty of steel that doesn’t rot, Einar must decide whether to haul his leaking faering into a trade war that will redraw the map of the continent. From the salt-crusted skerries of the Strait of Belle Isle to the portages of the Saguenay and the copper shores of Michigami, *The Vinland Althing* is a saga of merchants and outlaws, smiths and skalds, where the edge of an axe is sharper than any law—and the next winter may bury them all.