The eyes, hazel, looking forward, have the quality of someone who has seen things, though what things specifically cannot be said.

He is recognizably a person.

He is not an abstraction or a type.

He had a face, and now we can see it.

But the gap remains.

Science can give him a face and a period in history, but not his name.

And that gap, between the extraordinary specificity of what can now be known about him and the fundamental unknowability of who he actually was, is what keeps the story alive.

He was born, probably, in the early eleventh century, into a world shaped by Danish kings and North Sea trade.