Remembering an Old Story

I was about to go to bed, but I remembered an old story--one written in about 1000 AD, and one I read in the winter of 1973--in Old Norse, for a graduate linguistics class. I was supposed to get a Ph.D. and become a medievalist, and my teacher was supposed to get tenure. But I left scholarship behind, and the last I heard she is teacher in Hungary.

But the story! It had a grip on my mind. And I started writing it as I remembered--one loving detail after another. Authun is a young man in Iceland, and he goes to Greenland, spends all he has to buy a polar bear (nothing mentioned, as I recall, about the bear's behavior)...took the bear to Norway, told King Harald he intended to give the bear to Harald's enemy, King Svein of Denmark, which leads to this great line: King Harald, in a rage, says to Authun, "You must be a very lucky man to say you will honor my enemy, and yet live!"

At least that's what I think he said. I was in thrall to old recollection, and spent the better part of the night writing the story from memory, as a gift for my friends. Maybe someday it will be a book. Who knows? But the story! The way the story takes hold and won't let go. Twenty-five years in memory, and here it comes to mind in the winter of another century.

This makes me want to write what is in me. Who knows who may receive this gift?

Kim Stafford