The Viking Age

The Viking Age appears in the novel less as a fully dated historical period than as a point of reference in stories about migration and settlement. Jorgen Knudsen places Norwegian arrivals in America in a long sequence reaching back to Leiv Eriksson, while the book’s other reflections on New York’s changing landscapes make the past feel layered rather than finished.## A historical benchmarkJorgen Knudsen describes the fifty-two Norwegians who sailed from Stavanger aboard the Restoration on July 5, 1825, as the first organized group of Norwegian immigrants to reach these shores since the Viking Age. Many were Quakers seeking religious freedom. The small sloop, fifty-four feet long and sixteen feet wide, took fourteen weeks to cross the Atlantic; the passengers arrived in the harbor on October 9, and no one died. Jorgen notes that a girl was born during the crossing, presenting the voyage as both an immigration story and a family beginning under difficult conditions.## From Norse voyages to settlementJorgen connects the 1825 voyage to Leiv Eriksson, whom he says reached these shores around the year one thousand. When Apollo Kagwa supplies the spelling “Leif Eriksson?”, Jorgen accepts the correction with uncertainty. The small exchange keeps the account conversational, while making clear that its historical claims are being told by Jorgen rather than offered as an impersonal chronology. He calls the Restoration the “Norwegian Mayflower,” giving the later voyage a familiar American frame even as he emphasizes its distinct route and passengers.## History embedded in placeThe Viking reference belongs to a broader pattern in which New York’s landscapes carry successive histories. In Queens, Jorgen begins further back still, describing the Laurentide ice sheet as the first immigrant: a glacier that reached the area, lay across what would become New York City, and eventually melted. He then recounts the Norwegian settlement: most of the Sloopers followed Lars Larsen’s family upstate to Orleans County, while Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter remained in Queens. Jorgen presents the land they inhabited as forest and farmland, later reshaped into parkland. The Viking Age thus marks one historical horizon within a story that runs from geological change through migration and urban development.## A revisable pastThe book also makes historical time visible through changed places. Apollo Kagwa sees Jamaica station as a renovated structure, with new platforms, elevators, escalators, and an AirTrain bridge, yet can still imagine the station and street level as they were in his memory of the 1980s. The past extends further back through the area’s earlier terrain and routes, and even through the discovery of mastodon remains near Baisley Pond. Elsewhere, North Brother Island’s successive uses—from a site for patients and veterans to a nesting place for black-crowned night herons, and then a refuge for women and children—show another landscape acquiring new inhabitants after older ones have gone. Against these layered changes, the Viking Age is not a self-contained episode; it is one of the pasts through which the novel measures how places and peoples are repeatedly displaced, remembered, and retold.