Secrets of Labrador

Lara was there a few minutes early: the clock tower in the town center had not yet rung six o'clock when I heard the sharp clang of the knocker. Moments later, I was leading her into my humble little chalet's cozy sitting room. She wore rather inconspicuous casual clothes—black jeans, grey sneakers and a simple blue shirt atop a white blouse. Her hair was not braided, but bound into a simple and practical ponytail.

Without much pomp, I pointed her toward the sofa and drew her attention to a kettle on the table. She quietly enjoyed the black tea for a few moments and looked out through the window at the relentless night rain.

Despite of all the usual commercially influenced stories which portrayed her as crass and ruthless, Lara was altogether not at all unpleasant. She was just terrible at small talk, which could occasionally be misinterpreted as arrogance, for those who would never progress past the shallow topics.

"So," she said after we updated each other on the main news since the previous Winter when we had last met, "you already know what brought me here."

Of course I knew. Even if she had not told me many times before when we were arranging her visit, I would have easily guessed her quest to be related to the new revelations about the Naskapi.

Sitting in my favorite armchair facing Lara, I took a glass of whisky from the mantlepiece. "I will tell you what I know, but first—just for my curiosity—how did you find out about the Naskapi? It was you who approached me first."

"More mundane than you would think, really," she said shrugging her shoulders, surprised by the question. "Almost all was based on rumors in the archaeological circles. I say 'almost', because a little, very little, came from subtle hints in the Norman legends."

It took me several seconds to understand the connection, and I slapped my forehead. "Oh, of course! It actually makes sense. It all does."

She was intrigued by my reaction. "What do you mean?"

"You see," I explained, "my sources are mostly Icelandic in origin: complex threads of their ancient sagas interwoven in a somewhat consistent tapestry. Not the Hyperboreal theory, mind you, but the truly Icelandic matter, which..."

"...shares the same Viking roots with the first settlers of Normandy," Lara confidently completed the sentence.

"Yes! That's a clear link. I will have to explore that route a bit."

"All right—but what did you learn so far?"

I anticipated the question, so I took a notebook I had ready on a shelf, and spread the bookmarked page on the table for Lara.

"See here: there are seventy-six references to the far eastern lands in the collected sagas. Some are clearly fanciful and are simply used as means of sending a character on a long, difficult voyage. But others are more coherent, more structured, and simply sound as if they refer to a specific, real place."

I let Lara comprehend the diagram. "Indeed," she said at last. "But what made you think they all, or most, refer to the same real place related to the Naskapi?"

"These references are not copied here in full length: it would take too much space. But I read them all, and they mention various main landmarks with remarkable consistency. See—I enumerated them here below."

I flipped the page and showed another diagram to my reputable guest.

"Here, then, is another list, showing all the landmarks mentioned in the legends of the Naskapi, at least legends that survived. At first glance, there are no exact matches. But then..."

"Right," Lara's quick wits spotted the connections easily. "Some are suspiciously similar."

"Are they not? The great triangle and the divine spire. Then, the notched bay and the gulf within the gulf. This is perhaps the clearest one: the wavy forest and the dark sea woods. Given the exaggerations commonly found in the ancient legends, along with the elapsed time that distorted the descriptions throughout the generations, these matches are not half bad."

"This is an excellent find," she said with suppressed excitement. "I am somewhat surprised no etnologist or historian has spotted this yet."

"Do not forget that the systematic study of the Naskapi legends is a very recent thing. It was only three or four years ago when McFerell and Black published their first works, and it took them until last Summer to systematize it all."

Lara asked, "how many matches did you find altogether?"

"Four likely ones, and additional two that are at least worth considering. As soon as I compiled this short list, I procured as precise maps of the areas historically inhabited by the Naskapi as I could, and looked for the actual landmarks they could represent."

"How could you be so sure they were not in Eastern Iceland?"

"Because an entire army of historians already did the same, never found any matches there, and assumed the landmarks were purely fictional. But no one had looked for them in the lands of the Naskapi, namely, Labrador."

Lara smiled at me. "And you found them."

"Strictly scientifically speaking, that is a matter of interpretation. Perhaps I found them because I was specifically looking for them."

I asked Lara to join me at the dining table where I unrolled a large map of Labrador, and pointed to several places I had circled with a red marker.

"The four likely and two possible matches are all shown here. I obtained some aerial and satellite photographs too. In any case, it may well be that the both folklores refer to these exact features. It is, however, a big supposition, because the landscape must have looked differently that long ago."

She just nodded, quietly sipping her tea and absorbing the information.

"Now for the key point which is, I admit, pure speculation. For one reason or another, it is not mentioned in the Naskapi legends, but the Icelandic sagas occasionally do refer to a mythical location of Gatnamot. Have you heard of it?"

Her brown eyes narrowed. "Gatnamot? It sounds vaguely familiar. Was it the underground temple?"

I smiled at her. "Yes, the mysterious secret place visited by the most distinguished warriors, where they supposedly temporarily gain superhuman powers required for an upcoming battle. In the sagas, unsurprisingly, these powers often turn out to be the key element overturning a defeat into victory. And even though Gatnamot appears across multiple sagas, its exact location is never described in any. Neither is it linked to any such landmark."

"Which, obviously, did not dissuade you," she said with some humor in her voice.

"It would have, were it not for another set of hints provided in the sagas. It has to do with the distances. Distances between locations linked to known landmarks and Gatnamot. Those I collected on this page in my notebook. See here: in this instance, the brave soldier Ketill walks two days and two nights from the spire to Gatnamot, and then takes one more day to reach the coast. In another example, the swordsmith Einar rides his trusty horse from the great bay to Gatnamot, passing over some hills on his way, and reaches it after three days. There are five such examples in the sagas."

I took a pencil and continued, "assuming all these timings are correct, and combining them with estimated speeds of walking at day, at night, riding a horse over hills, and so on, it is possible to find a patch of land which roughly satisfies all five examples from the sagas. It is here," and with those words I used my pencil to indicate a spot some ninety kilometers inland from Labrador's northeast coast.

Lara looked at the map for a moment, and then turned toward me. "But surely, it cannot be such a precise point," she said slowly. "Due to tolerances in the speed estimations, and probably imprecise legends."

She was right. "True: this is just the center of the resulting area. It is actually a rough circle of some ten, perhaps fifteen kilometers in diameter," I said.

She nodded, immersed in thought. "You narrowed it down remarkably, but it is still about a hundred square kilometers of land. Not something one can search easily, especially if having no hints of what one is actually looking for."

It was my turn to smile. "I anticipated your question in advance, and gave it some thought in the meantime. The situation is not as bad as it seems, because a great majority of those hundred square kilometers can be eliminated right away."

"How?" she asked, with undeniable sparkle in her eyes.

I took a precise satellite photo of the area in question from my notebook. "As you see, the area is full of tiny lakes. If Gatnamot was on the surface, it would have been discovered centuries ago. Therefore, if underground, as the sagas sometimes vaguely indicate as well, it would either have to be at a safe distance from any lakes in order to prevent flooding due to porous soil, or on a slightly raised surface. This reasoning alone eliminates at least three quarters of the possible area."

"And probably we can narrow it down a little further," she continued. "Whether they built a temple or a barn, people of the era naturally prioritized locations in vicinity of rivers. There is a river in the area, and the best bet would be to start searching around it."

"That's a good point," I admitted.

Her gaze was still on the map, but I was sure her thoughts were already deep into preparations for the journey to Labrador.