The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (9 page)

Examine, for instance, a more likable
skörungur:
Gudrun the Fair, heroine of
Laxdaela Saga.
Many of the male characters from
Njal’s Saga
—such as Hallgerd’s father and uncle—appear in
Laxdaela Saga,
recognizably themselves. Yet the female characters in this second saga are so strong and admirable that some readers suspect the story was written by a woman in response to
Njal’s Saga.
We read of Unn the Deep-Minded, who emigrated from Scotland with all her kin, claimed a chunk of land “as big as a man’s,” parceled it out to her followers, and lived out her life as a chieftain in all but name, marrying off her grandchildren to make alliances. There is Melkorka, sold as a slave to Hallgerd Long-Legs’s father, Hoskuld: Melkorka pretended to be a deaf-mute, revealing nothing. Not until she was caught speaking Irish to her son, Olaf the Peacock, did she admit she was the daughter of an Irish king. After her status as a princess came out, Hoskuld bought her a farm and set her up as an independent woman. Olaf married well and had five sons and three daughters. He offered to raise his half-brother’s son, Bolli, to mend fences in the family, and with that we come to the crux of the saga.

Bolli was handsome and talented—second only to Olaf's own son, Kjartan. The two boys were best friends. Both fell in love with Gudrun the Fair, who had already been widowed twice when she met them. Gudrun loved Kjartan. Like every Icelandic boy his age, he decided to go to Norway to make a name for himself, and asked her to wait the usual three years for him. She suggested he take her abroad instead. He refused. She refused to promise to wait. Three years passed, and he didn’t come home. But Bolli did, full of tales of the impression Kjartan had made on the king’s beautiful sister.

Bolli was not “full of lies and deceit,” like the man who tricked Oddny Island-Candle; his crime was more on the order of wishful thinking. Still, while Kjartan was “talking” with the king of Norway’s sister, Bolli wooed and wed Gudrun. Then Kjartan returned home. His sister counseled him to “do the right thing” and make peace with his friend and cousin Bolli. She introduced Kjartan to a fine woman of good family, and Kjartan was soon happily married.

Gudrun became insanely jealous. Sometimes she thought Bolli had tricked her into marrying him. Other times she believed Kjartan had spurned her and, when he had come home and made light of her marriage, had insulted her. And indeed, he did insult her after a golden headdress he had given his wife (a gift from the princess intended for Gudrun) was stolen. Kjartan gathered his men and surrounded Gudrun’s house, forcing everyone to go to the bathroom inside for several days with no indoor privy. Gudrun arranged his death and then deeply regretted it. As she told her son many years later, “I was worst to the one I loved best.” This is where she surpasses Hallgerd and becomes a heroine.

But for none of these deeds is Gudrun called a
skörungur.
That comes on the occasion of her fourth marriage. At the urging of her staunch supporter, the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, and with the agreement of her young sons, Gudrun betrothed herself to Thorkel Eyjolfsson, a wealthy trader and friend of the king of Norway. Gudrun had extensive landholdings and the backing of many men who had been loyal to her recently deceased father. Since her brothers were all exiled after killing Kjartan, Gudrun’s husband would wield the influence of a chieftain.

As a mark of her power in the relationship, Gudrun insisted on holding the wedding at her own farm, bearing the cost herself. Among the 160 wedding guests, however, her bridegroom Thorkel recognized a man who had killed one of his friends. Thorkel grabbed the criminal and was about to put him to death when Gudrun stood up from her place at the women’s table, brushed her fancy linen headdress out of her eyes, and called to her men, “Rescue my friend Gunnar and let nothing stand in your way!”

As the saga so nicely understates it, “Gudrun had a much bigger force. Things turned out differently than expected.”

Before anyone could draw a sword, Snorri of Helgafell turned to Thorkel and laughed. “Now you can see what a
skörungur
Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

What quality is Chieftain Snorri admiring? Translators from 1960 to 2002 have called Gudrun and her saga sisters “exceptional,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” “determined,” “forceful,” “capable,” “brave,” “of strong character,” “one to be reckoned with,” and a woman “with a will very much her own.” These are better than the nineteenth century’s “high-mettled” and “very stirring,” but they’re still not quite right.

Jenny Jochens turns
skörungur
into “manly,” and the best equivalent is indeed
man.
Imagine if the situation were reversed. Gudrun spotted the killer of her friend on Thorkels side of the hall. Thorkel had the bigger fighting force. Chieftain Snorri, eager to make peace and see the wedding proceed (and it does), stepped in, laughed, and said to Gudrun,
Now you can see what a man you’re marrying, when he gets the better of both of us.

A Viking’s character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to weak, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser or, in the Old Norse terms,
hvatur
to
blauður. Hvatur,
always a compliment, means “bold, active, vigorous.” It appears to be related to the verb
hvetja,
a cognomen for our verb “to whet”—to sharpen (a sword), to put a good, sharp
skör
(or edge) on it. Its opposite,
blauður,
always an insult, means “soft, weak.” It is, says the standard dictionary, “no doubt a variant of
blautur,”
which means “moist.” Hard, sharp, and vigorous versus soft, yielding, and moist. Think dirty and you’ve got it.

When Hallgerd Long-Legs called Njal “Old Beardless,” she was not saying he was funny-looking: She was saying he was
blauður
—weak, womanish, effeminate, cowardly, powerless, and craven. A loser.

And when Chieftain Snorri praised Gudrun the Fair as a
skörungur,
and a better one than both himself and Thorkel Eyjolfsson, he was locating her far out on the male end of the power spectrum. He was calling her a winner.

“This is a world,” says Carol Clover, “in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman.” There was only one standard, only one way to judge a person adequate or inadequate. “The frantic machismo” of the men in the Icelandic sagas, Clover concludes, suggests “a society in which being born male precisely did
not
confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.”

The women who are mentioned in the sagas, the ones who are admired as
skörungur,
are the ones who have acquired that distinction. And Gudrid the Far-Traveler is one of them.

One of the delights in reading the sagas comes from untangling the connections among them. Gudrid the Far-Traveler would have known Gudrun the Fair—they were born about five years apart, and Gudrid’s cousin Yngvild was married to a son of Chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, Gudrun the Fair’s adviser.

At about the time of Gudrid’s birth on the south side of Snow Mountain’s Glacier, Thurid was “talking” with Bjorn (to the dismay of her fat merchant husband) on the north side. Next door, the two witches were competing for the same young man. In the south of Iceland, Hallgerd Long-Legs had just refused Gunnar two locks of her hair to twist into a bowstring, consigning him to his death. Eirik the Red had been outlawed for killing a neighbor (although Gudrid’s father and Chieftain Snorri’s foster-brothers had tried to negotiate a settlement for him), and had set off to find Greenland. And the parents of Grettir the Strong had just wed.

Gudrid’s adventures—moving to Greenland, marrying twice, exploring the New World, and settling down to raise her sons at Glaumbaer in northern Iceland—took ten or twelve years, from the year 1000 to about 1012. Just before Gudrid arrived in Greenland, Leif Eiriksson was in the Hebrides, acting like a cad with pregnant Thorgunna. While Gudrid was in Vinland, Grettir the Strong was outlawed for the first time. The year Gudrid settled at Glaumbaer, Njal and Bergthora and all their sons were burned to death in their house.

The sagas are silent about Gudrid’s years at Glaumbaer. We don’t know when her husband Karlsefni died, only that Snorri, their son born in Vinland, was still young. But during the last few years of Snorri’s minority, Grettir the Strong found a haven in a cave on the lands of Bjorn, lover of Oddny Island-Candle. (Bjorn encouraged him to eat Oddny’s husband’s sheep.) And Gudrun the Fair married for the fourth time, proving herself a
skörungur
at her wedding.

What had Gudrid done to earn that title? The harrowing voyage to Greenland proved her spirit, and both Vinland sagas illustrate she had a mind of her own. The seance in
The Saga of Eirik the Red
is one example. Gudrid’s father denounced it as pagan nonsense, we’re told, and refused to stay in the house while the ritual was going on. Fifteen-year-old Gudrid did not leave with him. When she alone of the women in the house was found to know the ritual songs, learned as nursery rhymes from her foster-mother, she had second thoughts about playing so prominent a role. She was Christian, and it would be against her religion to sing them in this context. The wise woman in charge gave her another way of looking at her dilemma: It would be un-Christian of her to refuse. She said, “You could be some help to the people here. You’d be no worse a woman for that.” Gudrid thought about it and made up her mind, without consulting her father.

She is similarly strong-minded following the death of her husband Thorstein, Eirik the Red’s son, when, after a winter alone with an older, unmarried man, she emerged with her independence intact. For she was a good catch when Karlsefni came to Greenland the next autumn. The wealthy Icelandic trader was taken with her immediately and married her, with her consent, at Christmas. There’s no hint that Karlsefni had an eye for exploration before he met Gudrid, but he fell for her and let her talk him into sailing west. And it is Karlsefni’s mother—who initially thought her son had not married well—who finally labels Gudrid a
skörungur,
a very stirring woman: bravehearted, high-spirited, remarkable, capable, bold, a winner, a survivor.

One evening as Grettir was getting ready to go home, he saw fire blaze up from the end of the ness below Audun’s farm. Grettir asked what it could be....

“There’s a barrow there,” said Audun, “where Kar the Old was buried....”

“You were right to tell me,” said Grettir. “I’ll come in the morning, so have some tools ready....”

Grettir broke open the mound, though it took a great deal of effort. He did not let up until he struck wood. By then it was well on toward evening. He broke through the wood. Audun tried to stop him from going into the barrow. Grettir told him to hold the rope....

Grettir went into the mound. It was dark and the air was foul. He poked around to see how things were arranged. He found some horse bones, and then he bumped into a chair on which a man was seated. Gold and silver lay piled up there, and a chest full of silver was under the man’s feet. Grettir took the treasure and carried it to the rope. But before he could climb out of the barrow, he was seized fast. He dropped the treasure, and they grappled and wrestled with no holds barred ... but finally the barrow-wight fell backward with a great crash. Audun let go of the rope and ran away, certain that Grettir was dead. Grettir now took his sword
Jökulsnaut
and cut off the barrow-wight’s head. He set it by his buttocks. Then Grettir went to the rope with the treasure and ... climbed up hand over hand. He had tied the treasure to the rope, and drew it up after him.

—
Grettir's Saga

I
N
1995
I WAS ON THE ISLE OF LEWIS IN THE OUTER
Hebrides of Scotland, visiting an area that tradition links to Olaf the White, the Viking king of Dublin, whose failings as a war leader and a family man would shape Gudrid’s life. The windswept
machair,
a sandy, grassy mix of peat lands and sheep pasture, gave way on the west side of the island to buttressed cliffs and arcs of yellow beach. Small islands made a sheltered harbor big enough for a Viking fleet. A shallow river wound for a mile through tidal flats before reaching a gap between two headlands. The place was called Uig, from the Norse word for bay,
vík)
from which comes our word
Viking.

The Lewis chessmen, a cache of ninety-three late-Viking Age chess pieces exquisitely carved out of walrus ivory, had been found here in 1831 when a cow fell into a hole. A grave had eroded out of a sand dune nearby in 1979, providing a pair of spectacular gilded-bronze “tortoise” brooches—examples of the massive oval ornaments that Viking women used every day, like buckles or safety pins, to clasp the shoulder straps of their gowns. Six more Viking graves, adults and children, were found near Uig in the early 1990s.

One day, as I was walking back to my lodging across the sands beside the turquoise-colored tidal lagoon, I spotted two oddly shaped hills on a headland. I asked my host if anyone had excavated them. “A postdoc from Glasgow poked into one last summer. She found the prow of a ship.” He added immediately, “It’s just a modern wreck covered with sand.” I wished I were more like Grettir the Strong: I would have asked to borrow a shovel and a rope.

For to understand Gudrid’s desire to go to Vinland—why sailing west off the edge of the known world seemed to her a reasonable thing to do—we need to know first how and why her ancestors left their own homes in the late 800s and created a new society in Iceland. Some of the answers were here, on the Hebrides and across the rough waters of the Minch on mainland Scotland. According to the sagas, Unn the Deep-Minded—a Norse chieftain’s daughter, and the discarded second wife of Olaf the White, king of Dublin—set sail for Iceland from one of these coves. Gudrid would have known the story of Unn the Deep-Minded as thoroughly as her own genealogy, for in Unn’s ship, fleeing from Scotland, was a Gaelic boy, Vifil, who was Gudrid’s grandfather. All her life, she would have kept Unn in mind as an example, a paragon of women.

To the Vikings, the Hebrides were the
Hafborðey
, the “Islands on the Edge of the Sea,” or they were the Southern Isles, being south of Shetland and the Orkneys on the direct sea route from Norway to Ireland. That voyage took about a month, with an island rest-stop each evening. Well before 841, when the Norse established a trading post at Dublin, the route had become routine, and the havens along the way were in friendly hands, known by Norse names. No one knows if the first Norse settlers married into native families, or found no one there, or drove them out: The Viking homesites that have been excavated in this part of the world show signs of all three approaches. In Orkney, archaeologists found a Viking building that had been erected on top of an earlier Gaelic house, but the artifacts inside—particularly a distinctive style of bone dress pin—remained Gaelic. In Caithness, on the Scottish mainland, there is no sign of any settlement for a century before the Vikings came. But in Uist, everything Gaelic was destroyed when the Norse arrived—evidence, said the archaeologists, “as conclusively in favor of conquest as we are ever likely to get.”

Anthropologist Agnar Helgason, on the other hand, finds “conquest” more likely closer to Norway—in Orkney—than as far south as Uist. Agnar, whom I met at DeCode Genetics in Reykjavik, compared the genes of modern people living in Scandinavia and the British Isles with those from the Shetlands, Orkneys, Hebrides, and Iceland. He found DNA markers, harmless mutations, that labeled a person “Norse” or “Gaelic.” Tracking these markers in the mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to daughter) and in the Y chromosome (father to son), he could tell from which side, sword or distaff, the mutations had come. Men and women in the Orkney Islands, he found, are 30 percent Norse. In the Hebrides, the men are 22 percent Norse, but the women are only 11 percent Norse. The Orkney Islands, Agnar concludes, were settled by Viking families. In the Southern Isles, Viking men at loose ends took Gaelic mates.

Whether or not the women were willing, the genes
cannot
say, but once the Vikings were in the islands, we can assume they acted as they had in Norway. They were loyal to their king and considered anything in another kingdom fair game. Given that the coast of Norway alone had seven or eight “kingdoms” in the 700s, that made for some fairly loose rules.
Strandhögg
—literally “beach strike”—was a common practice: A party of Norsemen would row over to the next fjord, run their lapstrake boats up onto the beach, round up the cattle, slaughter them, load the boat, and row home. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it in his classic
History of the Vikings,
“Robbing your richer neighbors was a simple way of redressing the injustices of nature.”

Sometimes these raids had aims other than cattle. Jones tells the story of Gudrod the Hunting King, who took a fancy to Asa, the daughter of another king in Norway. When his suit was refused, Gudrod gathered his men, descended on the kingdom, killed Asa’s father and brother, and “carried her off with much booty.” He then made her his queen. When their son was a year old, Queen Asa took her revenge: She furnished a servant boy with a weapon. “King Gudrod perished of a spear-thrust one dark evening,” writes Jones, “gross and full of beer.” The queen was not punished. Her son ruled both kingdoms in his time, and
his
son, Harald Fine-Hair, unified all of Norway’s many kingdoms into one—his—and curtailed the local practice of
strandhögg.

Conveniently, Norse shipwrights had by then solved the puzzle of how to make their light and efficient rowing boats carry a sail. With a wider beam, a deeper keel, and more draft, these first true Viking ships were carrying parties of Norsemen to
strandhögg
on farther shores. In Queen Asa’s day, they made their infamous raids on the monasteries of Lindisfarne in northeastern England and the Holy Island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. They sacked churches in Wales, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. In 789 they were at Portland on the south coast of England. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 792 says that “seagoing pagans with roaming ships” were harassing Kent, by the Straits of Dover. Vikings were plundering towns in France, Germany, and along the shores of the Baltic Sea in the early 800s, especially after the death of Charlemagne in 814, which left a power vacuum. By midcentury they had sacked Paris, Rouen, and Hamburg. They sailed south to Islamic Spain and sacked Seville (unwisely), then did the same to the Mediterranean port of Luna, which they mistook for Rome. They established bases in Russia along the routes to Constantinople (which they also attacked) and Baghdad.

They fought just as much among themselves. Vikings from Norway raided the shores of Denmark, and vice versa, while in the 850s, the “Black” Vikings drove the “White” Vikings out of Ireland (only to be evicted by that Olaf the White, king of Dublin, who married Unn the Deep-Minded).

That we can distinguish the Norwegians from the Danes from the Swedes (in order to say who gets credit for founding Dublin or Kiev or Normandy) in all this sacking is a fallacy, given the medieval penchant for using the names interchangeably. Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070, for instance, states helpfully: “The Danes and the Swedes, whom we call Norsemen...” That the monks throughout the Western world were chanting
a furore Normannorum
,
libera nos Domine
(“From the fury of the Norsemen, deliver us, O Lord!”) is equally a myth. The closest thing any manuscript expert has found—and they’ve looked most diligently—is
ab incursione alienigenarum, libera nos Domine
(“From the invasion of foreigners, deliver us, O Lord!”)

Even the famous entry in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
about the destruction of Lindisfarne in 793 never names names. It reads:

In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria and sadly affrighted the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine followed soon upon these signs, and a little after that in the same year on the ides of June the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.

That this entry, and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
itself, is universally classified as “history” and therefore more true—in spite of its fiery dragons—than such “literary sources” as the Icelandic sagas is a debate I won’t get into here. But the Vikings’ reputation in the modern mind as paragons of brutality does need some qualifying. They may have been the Terror from the North, but there were many terrors in those days, both heathen and Christian, foreign and native. The Hungarian invaders of Germany, Adam of Bremen writes, “were burning churches, butchering priests before the altars, and with impunity were slaying clerics and laymen indiscriminately or leading them into captivity.” The Irish Annals record at least thirty attacks on churches before the first Viking sailed “west over sea” from Norway; in 807 a fight between the monks of Cloufert and those of Cork ended in “an innumerable slaughter of the ecclesiastical men and superiors of Cork.” In 878, Pope John VIII excommunicated Count Bernard II of Toulouse for ravaging church property.

Nor were the Vikings unbeatable war machines. Caught off guard, they suffered from the same brutal treatment as did their victims. That unwise sacking of Seville? When the Muslims retook the city, they hanged all their prisoners, two hundred Norsemen, from palm trees. When the Vikings harried the coastline by Constantinople, the emperor sent Greek fireships to meet them. As Luidprand of Cremona wrote in the mid-900s, “The Greeks began to fling their fire around, and the Rusi”—yet another medieval name for Vikings—

seeing the flames threw themselves in haste from their ships, preferring to be drowned in the water than burned alive. Some sank to the bottom under the weight of their cuirasses and helmets ... some caught fire even as they swam among the billows; not a man that day escaped save those who managed to reach the shore.... These were all beheaded.

In England, in 794, just a year after the raid on Lindisfarne, the Vikings had a stunning failure. They attacked the monastery of Tynemouth, but, says Simeon of Durham:

St. Cuthbert did not allow them to depart unpunished; for their chief was there put to death by the cruel Angles, and a short time afterward a violent storm shattered, destroyed, and broke up their vessels, and the sea swallowed up very many of them; some, however, were cast ashore and speedily slain without mercy.

The English had no compunction about killing Norse women and children, either. In 1002, shortly after paying a Viking horde 24,000 pounds of silver in so-called Danegeld (essentially a bribe to go away), King Aethelred II issued an edict that every Dane in the country was to be rounded up and killed on St. Brice’s Day (November 13). Historians have had some trouble believing that a civilized Christian king would define “Dane” to mean every man, woman, or child, craftsman or noble, merchant or homesteader, especially since by 1002 the Danes and all other Vikings were officially Christian. But in a royal charter issued a few years later, King Aethelred promises to pay for the rebuilding of the church in Oxford, England, which was burned by citizens pursuing Danes who “were to be destroyed by a most just extermination” and, “striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ.”

Among the murdered, according to the much later history of William of Malmesbury, was Gunnhild, the sister of King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark, and her son, “a youth of amiable disposition,” whom she watched die “transfixed with four spears.” Though modern historians doubt William’s account, it does seem as though Svein wanted revenge: He sent his army to ravage England during the next ten summers. In 1009 Oxford was leveled. By 1013 Svein was king of England. In 1018, when his son Knut the Great was proclaimed king of England and Denmark, the peace treaty was signed in Oxford. Knut ruled England until 1042, and there was only one other truly English king (Edward the Confessor) between him and the Norman Conquest in 1066. In the two battles that year that defined the future of England—at Stamford Bridge between Harald Hard-Rule of Norway and Harold Godwinsson of England, and at Hastings between Harold Godwinsson and William the Bastard (later known as William the Conqueror) of Normandy—both sides in each battle could claim Norse ancestry.