The Ice-Shirt is a 1990 historical novel by American author William T. Vollmann. It is the first book in a seven-book series called Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes.

Fact, Fiction, Meta-fiction

The Ice-Shirt is set in the 10th century A.D. and chronicles the arrival of the Norse people in Greenland, Vinland, and the Arctic. The novel blends historical fiction, modern journalism, and the elaborate mythology of the peoples in question, which include Norse, Mi'kmaq, and Inuit. In addition to other Norse sagas such as the Heimskringla, the novel draws heavily from the Flateyjarbók, a 14th-century Icelandic manuscript (especially the Grœnlendinga saga), with particular focus on the character Freydís Eiríksdóttir.

Schema

In addition to the story itself, The Ice-Shirt comprises a preface, a foreword and afterword, glossaries (of characters; places; "dynasties, races and monsters"; and of primary texts), a chronology, and a list of secondary texts. Illustrations by the author (such as his drawings of Icelandic plants, his renderings of ancient maps, and a self-portrait) and free-ranging footnotes are interspersed throughout the book. The story proper is told in four parts (called movements) with a total of 25 chapters. The longest chapter has 26 subsections; the shortest chapters have only one. Vollmann uses nearly twenty of the subsections to talk about his own northland experiences in the late 1980s; three of these recount the northland experiences told to him by another traveler.

The Changers

Black Hands

Vinland

Freydis Eiriksdottir

Note: ** Late '80s "travelogue" subsections.