The Vikings adapt to the island environment
The Vikings, who had been accustomed to the frigid climate of their native Norway, nevertheless adapted quickly to their new environment. Himmelsk's unvarying tropical temperature of 80 degrees, a balmy ocean breeze that made it seem cooler, and a bountiful supply of fruits, fish and plantains (similar to bananas) to satisfy their appetites, Himmelsk did indeed seem heaven sent. Realizing that it was Sigrid who had insisted on the long voyage that brought the Vikings to their new Valhalla, the island residents guiltily approached Prince Knut--now elevated to king--and asked that a new seeress be named. The king settled on Sigrid's daughter, Ingrid, who assumed the divine mantle of her mother.
The building of the lighthouse
Within a few years, a Norwegian-style village emerged on the Himmelsk shoreline, dominated by a five-story stave birthday cake-shaped castle which would remain the home of the Blodoks monarchy for many centuries. Next to the castle, on a small piece of land that jutted out into the ocean, the people of Himmelsk built a narrow, round building of stone several stories high. In the top story they built a fire in tribute to Odin for having saved them in their long journey and to help guide the Viking ships back to their island home from fishing trips. For several hundred years, life on Himmelsk was peaceful and uneventful. As the years passed, traditional Norwegian clothing, which utilized an abundance of furs to provide warmth in Norway's cold climate, gave way to a more practical attire of tapa cloth made by pounding the bark of the mulberry.
Earthquakes!
Despite repeated earthquakes of moderate nature, the Vikings approached life with enthusiasm and optimism, content that the isle that had been given to them would remain theirs forever.
It was Ingrid (all succeeding seeresses carried the name of the island's original Ingrid) who first pointed out the obvious fact that their island kingdom was shrinking. The waters of the Pacific were either rising or the island was sinking, she observed, and she added an ominous prediction that if present conditions continued, someday there would be none of the island left above water. Modern scientists believe Ingrid was correct in her predictions of pending calamity, theorizing that the volcano upon which the island's coral lid rested was collapsing and ultimately would pull the island down to the ocean floor.
The island floats free
A series of intense earthquakes seems to have solved the sinking problem. Following one vigorous shake, the island began to rise to its former shoreline and remained there for several decades. Himmelsk's natives credited Odin with again having come to their rescue. Modern geologists suggest, however, that the coral lid on the underwater volcano had been shaken free from the volcano during the earthquakes and that gases emitted by the volcano had somehow been captured amid the empty chambers in the coral skeletons that comprised the lid and thus served as a kind of massive flotation devise for the island. Himmelsk was now independent of the volcano which had created it and the isle bobbed about unconstrained on the Pacific waters.
Ingrid, awakened one night by a sense of dread and an inner feeling that the island still remained too near the parent volcano, the next day asked the king to order the Viking ships be attached to the shoreline palm trees by long copra ropes made from coconut shells. When that was accomplished, the King ordered the ships set to sea. Thus, the island, pulled by the flotilla of ships serving as towboats, began to move quietly from the spot where it had formerly been located.
Preparation for the great tsunami
For months Himmelsk was towed in the northeasterly direction that Ingrid decreed, hundreds of nautical miles from where it originally had been positioned. Then late one night, as Ingrid was preparing for sleep, a premonition of doom enveloped her and she envisioned a huge wave engulfing the island. The next morning she requested the king order the Viking ships to again be brought on land and, with the king's permission, ordered all the people to strap themselves to the island's multitudinous palm trees, the better to withstand the approaching storm, she reasoned.
Ingrid was indeed inspired for later that night the skies became bright and far off in the distance came a loud roar as the volcano that had served as Himmelsk's mother came awake with an earsplitting explosion, tossing molten lava high into the sky and creating an immense wave of gigantic proportions that moved out from the volcano in a ring. As the waters below Himmelsk rose, hot, scalding rain and embers poured down from the skies, searing the ground and setting the village and the Viking ships afire. Had not the natives been strapped to the coconut palms, whose collective umbrella of leaves protected them from the downpour, the people of Himmelsk would have all perished.
Himmelsk is swept to the North American continent
Scientists conjecture that a tsunami, of historic proportions, hit the buoyant island and pushed it to the wave's crest, where it rapidly traveled across the Pacific, riding the vertex as the wave untypical increased in size as it moved out. When the tsunami, now thousands of feet high, arrived at the west coast of North America, it swept far inland, inundating the shoreline and pushing ever deeper across deserts and deep basins until it ran into the formidable fortress we now know as the Markagunt Plateau, some 400 miles inland and more than 7,000 feet high.
Unable to bridge the Markagunt, the tsunami began to slowly retreat, in the process gently depositing the island of Himmelsk on a western plateau in what is now southern Utah before withdrawing back to the original Pacific shoreline. Tradition says the island was deposited on April 1, coincidentally the same day of the year when the Vikings first settled on their Pacific island. The year was 1167 A.D. Odin, the islanders believed, had miraculously delivered the island people to safety once again.