Blue-Shirt
stood tall and
black, like a crag.
His limbs were hairy and icy.
His beard was frost, and there was snow
on his shoulders. He was His own ice-mountain.
His mail-shirt bristled with ice-spears. He seemed
to embody everything heavy and hard and fixed, that even
human influences on global weather patterns in turn influence cultural and economic
patterns, creating a feedback loop, a "carbon time bomb" that alters nature while destroying this
round of civilization. If there is hope for future generations, it would take a stunning leap of consciousness
wind and sand must be weary in wearing away. His eyes burned horribly in His blackish
face, and He gnashed and gnashed His teeth. And no steam came from his breath, but only mist.

 

 

Bjarne Herjulfsson, Lief Eriksson, Erik the Red, Erik Blodøks (Erik Bloodaxe), to name a few, sailed through northern mists centuries before Sir Hugh Willoughby and sixty-four of his crew, marshalled a parade of Anglo frigates frozen by the tempests of arctic hagiography.

With glaciers melting, bodies rise to the surface, farting beyond where the North Wind originates; here, the Homeric hymns say, live the Hyperboreans, a fortunate people who reside in a sacred wood with a large round temple dedicated to the gases of sanguineous tales, inflated with a grotesque appetite for celebrity.

Windbreaker, a deflated sail;
battered hat hangs on a peg,
                                              a bowed head;
on a cold stove woolen hands hiss.

The grotesque body "is a body in the act of becoming.It is never finished, never completed;
it is continuously built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moveover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by
the world." M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA., 1968.

Eirik Blodøks was a Norwegian Viking King of the "Hårfagre" (Fair-Haired) royal lineage who ruled from 933 to 935. He was chronicled Icelander Snorri Sturlusson's Heimskringla.

W.T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt.
New York, 1990.

See, S. Cassidy, "Environment Changing Climate: 'Compost effect' may cause global warming to reach crisis point in 2050." The Independent , 01 September 2006

"In the saga we read that Bjarne Herjulfsson in the year 986, on his way to Greenland, went into fog and lost his direction. They turned south, sailing for two weeks with land on the port side of the ship before reaching the latitude of southern Greenland. Years later in Norway, Bjarne had to suffer a lot of teasing for being a coward because he did not go ashore in this new land. But in the year 999 Leif Eriksson was the one to continue." www.ips-lanetarium.org/ planetarian/articles/ viking/viking.html

On 10 May 1553, an expedition
of three ships led by Sir Hugh Willoughby, who had no prior nautical experience, left London. Caught in a storm, the ships were separated, and near Murmansk, Willloughy’s Bona Esparanza was trapped in the ice.The next year,
their corpses were found by Russian fishermen.