Hvalsey church is surprisingly well-preserved today, surrounded by the tumbled stones of the settlers’ farms with the water stretching away in front. Exactly six hundred years to the day after the wedding, in September 2008, I was with a group of Viking scholars visiting the spot to mark this distant anniversary. In a curious and moving echo, we were accompanied by a descendant of the original couple. The clouds were low and grey, icebergs dotted the fjord, and on the way in a whale had surfaced close to the boat. It was a forbidding and lonely place, the ruined church roofless and open to a
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