Seaver, Kirsten A. The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca A.D. 1000-1500. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. In The Frozen Echo, Kristen Seaver reframes the experience of Greenlanders, said to have died of various calamities by the early sixteenth century. Instead of the traditional view of a pathetic group killed off by Nordic apathy, ecological changes, and the generally brutal environment, Seaver presents a savvy, tough, self-directing culture capable of adaptation and exploitation of natural, political, and financial resources. According to Seaver, this adaptive ability includes the probability of a self- conscious exodus to North America when the Greenlandic outpost was judged no longer desirable or profitable. This rehabilitated view of Greenlandic culture is offered obliquely through an interrelated set of stated purposes: illumination of post-Leif Eirikson Greenlandic exploration of North America, consideration of the Greenlandic disappearance in tandem with Transatlantic Discovery process, and sketching out North Atlantic routes of information exchange. Perhaps more importantly and ambitiously, Seaver cross-fertilizes Discovery and Greenland historical methodologies and languages. Seaver structures these intertwined threads into sections that can stand alone but contribute meaningfully to the gestalt. First is a discussion of the Nordic exploratory activities which resulted in the Greenland settlements. The second section, describing social conditions in Norse Greenland, is critical because it populates the stage with players who carve out households, farms, legal systems and churches in the harsh environment. They persist in the face of Norwegian apathy, and have a natural spatial aloofness (as individuals, communities and as an island) that limits the effects of disease. The Chapter on the Catholic church and trade shows the Greenlanders' ability to measure their own self-interest, whether by stiffing Rome or by developing export markets for quality goods. The latter sections of the book begin to stich together the histories of Transatlantic discovery and the souls on Greenland. In one particularly effective appendix, she collerates the overlap between North Atlantic trade and fishing and Cabotine expeditions.1 Seaver's strength is her startlingly comprehensive awareness and use of a wide range of sources, primary and secondary, in English and Scandanavian languages. Perhaps this kind of mastery of a country's historical sources is only possible with such a small subject as Greenland, but it is nonetheless impressive. Seaver as draws easily from modern biological and ecological sources as she does more traditional cartographic, epistolary, mythic and historiographical sources. She taps Scandanavian primary documents not often used by Transatlanic historians: Diplomatarium Islandicum and Norvegicum. Unfortunately, this mastery over the corpus of Greenlandic sources does not extend to the conclusions she draws from them. Although Seaver attempts a grand synthesis of all known knowledge of things Greenlandic, her conclusions are crippled by a priori assumptions her audience may not share. Perhaps as a function of her familiarity with translating and writing fiction, Seaver demonstrates a consistent and troubling willingness to portray how it simply "must have" been, according to "common sense." There is no other possible way to read this evidence: it is "unthinkable" that a boat's cargo might not match her supposition (152), there is "no doubt" that the free time of Greenlanders was passed in the manner Seaver describes (58), and, in one spectacularly cascading example, "Common sense nevertheless suggests that Leif must have sailed to both Norway and Iceland . . . to be as skilled a navigator and organizer as his voyage to Vinland shows he must have been (61)."2 Seaver's masterful familiarity with Greenlandic sources and modern evidence, is undermined by this insistence on defensively optimistic speculation. Her research may have better been displayed in an annotated bibliography, perhaps divided up into her present chapter divisions. In that setting her substantial translating and corroborating efforts might be better appreciated, instead of hidden by the determination to show the Norse Greenlanders in the most competent light possible. jason carr _______________________________ 1 This is similar in structure to the contemporary "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. 2 Emphasis added. In an unscientific sample of ten pages chosen randomly from the first half of this book, 50% of them had a "must have" supposition in the argument.. http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/transatlantic/