What is it to be confident? Usually mythologies are based around what ‘confidence’ should mean. The Viking sea captains and jarls of the Orkneyninga Saga are a strong subject for a literature in which boys dream of the men they might become but adolescence was a fraught and painful thing for George Mackay Brown (GMB), … More The queer confidence of a shy man: George Mackay Brown (GMB) and his late novel ‘Vinland’, where “boys love to range freely in the country of their imagination, and there they are captains and jarls”.