The further you delve into a discipline, the more specific your feelings—and not just your knowledge—become. You start to have very strong opinions about things that people outside the discipline cannot hope to fathom, and your love and your humour grows a little strange. So when Sarah Tolmie wrote “To deal with ghosts you must be a magician or a lawyer and Eyvind was neither.” It’s a good and funny line on its own, I laughed out loud and explained the whole thing to my husband, who unsurprisingly did not find it quite as compelling after a mini-lecture on the place of lawyers in Iceland with specific reference to Njal’s Saga.
I only studied the Icelandic sagas for a few years, but I do know enough to (a) love them intensely and (b) wish that there had been some about Icelanders venturing further East. We know that certain intrepid seafarers made it to Greenland and Vinland, and we have corresponding stories. We don’t, however, have stories to go with the runes found scored into the stone of the Hagia Sophia. We know Norse traders and fighters ventured very far across the world, Icelanders among them, but we don’t have sagas about the full range of their adventures.
All the Horses of Iceland attempts to fix that in its small but potent way. It tells the tale of Eyvind, who journeys to the steppes of Mongolia as a trader. He wants to enrich himself and do well for his country if he can, and so signs on with David, an experienced merchant who knows the lands and languages. We get insight into the major powers moving in the region without having to delve too much into politics, which I appreciate. It keeps the story focused and moving forward, even when Eyvind spends months more or less sitting still.
Eyvind becomes stuck in the steppes because of a curse, one that can only be broken by a foreigner. He has no reason to suspect he is that foreigner, except that the ghost of a powerful woman won’t leave him alone. Bortë, who died in childbirth, is too strong to be at peace. She will torment her entire clan until someone can find a novel solution, but Eyvind is not a magician. In fact, he hates ghosts. What can he offer?
A lot, as it turns out. Eyvind, steadfast in his traditional paganism, finds that his ways are wildly innovative to Bortë’s clan, and theirs to him. They have much more than goods to offer one another, and All the Horses of Iceland is able to subtly tie this to larger meditations on how strangers and outsiders sometimes have more access to the sacred than members of a tradition do. The world has always been porous, and religions and traditions always more flexible than doctrine suggests.
I love the way that Eyvind doesn’t get terribly excited about his magical ability to connect with Bortë or to fix her problem. He has some suggestions, he makes them known, and then he lets her people decide how to proceed. There is no desperation or drama, just as there was no particular acrimony or fanfare when Eyvind left his former crew and set out on his own. That stoicism is the bedrock of the sagas, and I’m glad that Tolmie was able to access it.
She also manages to walk that very fine line of magic that does not devolve into either spectacle or superstition. Eyvind’s experiences are eerie and astonishing, but always have a certain subtlety. This is true of the horses, and of the written document he receives as well. We forget, I think, in this world in which we read and write more than we farm, ride, fight, or trade, that literacy was so rare as to be inherently powerful. A priest Eyvind encounters fears a document written in an unfamiliar script because it seems more potently pagan to him, more than the pagan man standing in front of him.
Many of the characters remark on the magic of writing, and of literacy. I wish Tolmie had pushed this concept a little more and explored the nature and dangers of this power a little more. Still, it’s nice to consider the accessibility of magic as contrasted with magic that is innate or accidental. Eyvind has magic because he was ill as a child, and is now deaf in one ear. That ear can hear spirits, a power that he does not particularly like or want. But as for the magic of writing, Eyvind has chosen not to be literate because it doesn’t interest him.
SFF tends very often toward characters and plots about people with ultimate power. They have it, or they want it, or they’re trying to stop someone with it. I love that All the Horses of Iceland refuses that narrative. We hear rumour in Eyvind’s travels of a holy king and a vast war, but Eyvind wants no part of that, either. He just wants to avoid a fuss, buy some horses, and then go back home to sell them so he can have a comfortable life. This doesn’t mean his life is easy or unworthy; far from it. His journey is harrowing, filled with danger and death. There is also room in it for curiosity and for exchange.
That’s what the sagas are, in one sense. They’re stories not about kings or conquerors, but about lawyers, traders, fighters, and settlers. All of them come from a lonely, relatively poor island in the middle of nowhere, and they tell us the same thing All the Horses of Iceland is telling us: no story is small. No journey is unworthy. No exchange lacks value. Everything we do has consequences we cannot anticipate, and will survive us in strange ways.
All the Horses of Iceland is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of March 1st 2022.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island.
Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more.
All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland’s unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller.
