The Sorrow Stone
This spring I was delightfully surprised to receive a book package from a fellow booklover in Australia. Kári Gíslason’s The Sorrow Stone (2022) has yet to be published in the US (except in ebook format) and is only available if purchased through Australian sources. I happily read this Australian publication thanks to my friend’s generosity while taking in the breathtaking beauty of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Sitting on the beach just outside of Kenai Fjords National Park, I found my surroundings ideal for reading about a brave woman as she makes her way across Iceland’s fjords and grapples with her past and future along the way.
The Sorrow Stone is a beautifully crafted historical fiction set in the 10th century. This novel adds to the growing body of historical fiction that builds on the stories of medieval Nordic culture and the settlement of Iceland. Reading The Sorrow Stone transports the reader back through the centuries to a time of cold and hardship when duty and its nasty sibling, revenge, impacted everyone, and when one woman is forced to face her past to save her future and that of her son’s. Told in first-person, jumping in time through memory, legend, and current action, The Sorrow Stone offers an alternative version of Icelandic legend by placing a woman at its center, as it investigates questions of duty, love, betrayal, forgiveness, and the fundamentally human drive to live.
The Sorrow Stone opens with Disa and her son, Sindri, as they flee into the night following a bloody scene. While they make their way across the fjords and away from the life behind them, Disa must face the darkness of her past and make her peace as they journey to her brother’s wife. Thus, a patchwork of memories become interwoven with Disa and Sindri’s perilous journey of escape and the reader, along with Sindri, attempt to make sense of all the choices and consequences that led mother and son to such a desperate place.
Like most historical fiction of this era, The Sorrow Stone punctuates just how difficult life was for characters like Disa. She is a headstrong woman who finds love at a young age only to learn that love leads to sorrow. And yet she persists. Disa’s perseverance in the face of so much betrayal and grief is a common thread among the many scraps of her story. That tapestry of experience and sorrow propel her away from her native Norway to Iceland. Gíslason’s novel, then, examines early Icelandic settlement and its culture as it unravels Disa’s tale.
This is novel that conveys readers back in time, through legend and history. Disa’s story weighs heavy and provides modern readers, particularly modern women, an entirely different set of perspectives through which to view love and survival. I found this story both beautiful and haunting as it explores the devastation that lay at the end of a road paved with revenge killings. It is certainly a cautionary tale. Perhaps, though, it is one that provides some glimmer of hope in the end with the subtle promise of a new generation’s survival and the suggestion that forgiveness might forever break that cycle.
Bibliography
Gíslason, Kári. The Sorrow Stone. University of Queensland Press: 2022.
