Another sometime writer for juveniles from this period, Rudyard Kipling, also paid homage to the legends of Leif. In 1891, a few years before he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), Kipling published a story titled “The Finest Story in the World.”33 Its anonymous narrator is a writer acquainted with a Charlie Mears. Mears is a young London banker but with literary ambitions; when he has trouble with a story he is attempting to write, the narrator offers to hear it. The narrator thinks that the story fragment Mears presents him with is badly written but that when told out loud, the “notion” behind the story is really quite fine. As he relates his story, it becomes clear to the narrator that Mears, who has never been at sea, knows in astonishing detail about the daily life of an ancient Greek galley-slave; that indeed in a former life he must have been the very slave who features in his story. Moreover, when Mears says he (the slave) had also rowed to the Long and Wonderful Beaches, the narrator asks, “Furdurstrandi[r]?” realizing that Mears had gone to Wineland in America with Thorfin Karlsefne. Unfortunately, Mears has begun to read prodigiously and becomes more interested in quoting from Longfellow about Viking voyages than recounting his own firsthand experiences. On another occasion, however, he blurts out, “When they heard our bulls bellow the Skrrelings ran away.” The narrator muses:
Now it is written in the Saga of Eric the Red, or that of Thorfin Karlsefne, that nine hundred years ago when Karlsefne’s galleys came to Leif’s booths, which Leif had erected in the unknown land called Markland, which may or may not have been Rhode Island, the Skrrelings—and the Lord He knows who these may or may not have been—came to trade with the Vikings, and ran away because they were frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which Thorfin had brought with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know of that affair?
He concludes that Mears’s soul must have known “half a dozen several and separate existences spent on blue water in the morning of the world!” The narrator longs for an opportunity to transcribe an hour’s worth of Mears talking uninterrupted. As he muses about the possibilities, he is accosted by a young Bengali law student he knows, named Grish Chunder. He tells the Hindu about Mears’s case, knowing that Chunder will be familiar with the “remembering of previous experiences.” Grish tells him that Mears will soon begin to forget, especially once he meets a woman: “One kiss that he gives back again and remembers will cure all this nonsense.”
Mears visits the narrator and reads an awful poem he has composed, and will only impart a bit more of his Viking adventures. Without Mears’s full account, the narrator realizes any story he writes “would be nothing more than a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted piece of Wardour Street work at the end.” (It is interesting to note here that William Morris’s archaizing translations of Old Norse sagas and other ancient works were sometimes denigrated as “War-dour Street antiques,” after the Soho street where sham-antiques were sold.)34 On another occasion Mears tells some more about his adventures with the “red-haired man” (Thorfin), rowing for three days among floating ice. But the next time Mears visits, he has written a love poem and produces a photograph of a girl “with a curly head and a foolish slack mouth.” The narrator concludes, “Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.” The story plays cleverly with both the pretensions of bad, youthful writers and the longing for fame of more accomplished ones. Kipling himself of course hardly needed help in spinning a fine adventure yarn. For him, the voyage to Vinland serves as one of most wondrous adventures in history, if perhaps too remote a source for genuine rather than Wardour Street fiction. To emphasize this note of wonder, Kipling has Mears begin with the “Long and Wonderful Beaches” of Thorfinn’s discoveries rather than the Wineland of Leif. We can perhaps blame Mears’s scatteredness for conflating Markland (a forested area clearly north of Vinland, most likely in Labrador) with Leif’s booths, which “may or may not have been” in Rhode Island.
World History
