<DIV>The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland ?and from there to the place they call ?Vinland the Good.? The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature.<p> As <b>William T. Vollmann</b> tells the converging stories of these two peoples?and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise?he creates a tour-de-force of ?speculative history,? a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past. </div>