SOURCE: "Access to Eden," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4665, August 28, 1992, p. 18.

In the following review, Wawn remarks favorably on the imagery employed in Vinland.

[Vinland] is a strange and striking saga-novel by an Orcadian who long ago earned an honoured place on the runic roll of those post-medieval writers who have sought to recreate and respond to the world of the ancient Viking north. George Mackay Brown writes of feeling like "Aladdin in the enchanted cave", as he surveyed the huge deposits of Norse-related narrative over which his imagination could range. It seems an appropriate image, much favoured by early nineteenth-century Scandinavian writers as they discovered the genie within the long neglected lamp of Eddic poem and saga. Some of the accumulated textual tarnish was polished off by the great Arnamagnæan Commission series of editions, each with a facing-page Latin translation, which reached out to educated...