LAST PLACES: A Journey to the North <i> by Lawrence Millman (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 242 pp.) </i>

Lawrence Millman recounts his adventures as he traveled the old Viking route across the North Atlantic from Norway to Newfoundland. Setting out from Bergen, he passed through the Shetland Islands, the Faroes, set in at Iceland, Greenland and Labrador, finally arriving in Newfoundland.

Probably much like the Vikings, Millman strayed from his path whenever he sniffed a good story. A whale hunt in the Faroes is too much for him to resist. There are the inevitable dangers of primitive travel; On one expedition, Millman loses his way in an Icelandic lava field. He includes also the descriptions of curious native customs so indispensable to travel writing: In an Eskimo village, Millman mortally offends his host by refusing to sleep with the hostess. Along the way, Millman collects myths and folktales from the people he visits, which, interspersed with his descriptions of land that has remained unchanged for eons, lend his narrative a quality of suspension in time.

In addition to tales of traditional life, Millman regales the reader with his experiences of modern Nordic life. Recuperating in a Reykjavik Salvation Army hostel from a particularly strenuous adventure, Millman finds himself the center of a literary controversy during a weekend of heavy drinking. One Icelander professes his boozy love for the English language on account of three writers--Shakespeare, Poe and Ray Bradbury--and immediately begins slurring a quote from Henry V: “Pish for thee, Iceland dog! thou prick-ear’d cur of Iceland.” This escalates into full-scale warfare when another drinking companion defends the honor of the poet Tomas Gudmundsson against all comers. In this highly entertaining account, Millman makes the frozen North seem to burst with life and color.