The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (14 page)

Vifil’s connections were not so good. His wife is not named in the sagas—she is clearly not a chieftain’s kinswoman. His two sons, Thorbjorn and Thorgeir, married sisters, the daughters of a prosperous farmer named Einar of Laugarbrekka (“Hot-Springs Slope”), who lived on the farthest western tip of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, right beneath the Snow Mountain’s Glacier. Neither of Vifil’s sons continued farming at Vifil’s Dale.

Hellisvellir, or “Fields by the Cave,” the farm where Gudrid was born, was the dowry of her mother, Hallveig. Gudrid’s Uncle Thorgeir and Aunt Arnora lived next door, taking over the main estate of Laugarbrekka after Einar’s death. Gudrid had a cousin there of about her own age, a girl named Yngvild, who would later marry a son of the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell.

Gudrid’s father was not happy at Hellisvellir. He was perhaps the younger brother, married to the younger sister and given the smaller farm. His wife seems to have died young—Gudrid was an only child, and she was raised next door at Arnarstapi by Orm and his wife. Besides, Thorbjorn and his brother did not always see eye to eye, especially when it came to Thorbjorn’s friendship with Eirik the Red.

Eirik the Red is the classic case of the independent farmer, the seeker of freedom whose “don’t tread on me” attitude gets him into trouble. He was quick-tempered and quick to draw steel, and seems to have had an inflated opinion of himself. He also seems to have been justified in thinking people were trampling on his rights.

He came to Iceland with his father “because of some killings,” and they set up a farm in the far northwest of the country, in one of the last areas to be settled. It was not the kind of place Eirik thought he deserved. When his father died, Eirik quickly looked for a way out. He married a widow’s daughter; his mother-in-law was the famously buxom Thorbjorg
Knarrarbringu,
or Ship-Breast, and when she remarried and moved south to the Dales, Eirik and his wife followed her.

Eirik’s new father-in-law was an important man, related by marriage to Olaf the Peacock, the strongest chieftain in the district. But for all his importance, he was not overly generous. He gave Eirik the Red a small plot of land at the northeast tip of a big lake. The site is pinched between the river and the mountain, hard up against the neighbor’s farm. Here at Eiriksstadir (“Eirik’s Homestead”), Leif Eiriksson, discoverer of Vinland, was born.

Eirik’s troubles start with a landslide. In the sagas, these are often blamed on witchcraft. We know now that when steep slopes are stripped of their trees and grass by grazing goats and sheep, they become unstable and landslides are more likely. Archaeologists working at Eiriksstadir have found signs of a landslide that destroyed Eirik’s house, forcing him to rebuild. But this was not the slide that led to his being ousted from the Dales. That particular landslide wiped out a neighbor’s farm (probably killing the neighbor). Another neighbor decided two of Eirik’s slaves were to blame, and so killed them. Someone who kills another man’s slaves had three years by law in which to pay for them, but Eirik retaliated by killing the neighbor and another man who stepped in to help. Influential men in the district then decided Eirik was a troublemaker. Eirik’s father-in-law did not intervene, despite his influence with Olaf the Peacock, and Eirik the Red was banished from the Dales.

He decided to move to an island in the fjord nearby, but it took him a while to find the right spot; meanwhile, the saga says, he lent his “bench boards”—another translator calls them “bedstead boards”—to a man named Thorgest the Old. When Eirik was ready to build his new house, Thorgest refused to return the boards. Eirik lost his temper. He rushed into Thorgest’s house, grabbed the boards, and rode off. Thorgest’s two sons went after him. Eirik killed them “and several other men.” After that, the two sides gathered their friends together into armed camps.

Thorgest the Old was married to the chieftain Thord Gellir’s daughter, so all the “influence, cunning, and power at arms” of the Hvamm clan fell in behind him.

Eirik had no chieftain on his side, unless we can count Gudrid’s father. For Thorbjorn, backing Eirik the Red was a bad move: Ranged against him were his own father-in-law, Einar of Laugarbrekka, and Einar’s two brothers, one of whom was related by marriage to Eirik’s enemy, Thorgest the Old. Even Thorbjorn’s brother sided with the enemy.

The dispute was heard at the local spring assembly in about 982. Knowing he was overmatched, Eirik readied his ship and hid it in a tiny bay, deep within the many islands in the fjord. Outlawed for three years by the law court, he fled just ahead of his pursuers. (An outlaw could legally be killed if he was caught.) Gudrid’s father escorted him out of the fjord in his own ship, as did his other supporters. Eirik promised to return the favor if they were ever in need of his help. He set his course west, away from Iceland, toward a mountainous land that had been glimpsed in the fog by another mariner—the land Eirik would name Greenland. With him sailed any possibility Gudrid’s father had of becoming a true chieftain.

It’s no surprise that Thorbjorn and his daughter ended up in Greenland, too. The only puzzle is why Thorbjorn waited so long to follow his friend. Likely it was because of Gudrid. She was probably born in 985, the year Eirik the Red returned from exile, bragging about vast green pastures up for grabs. His salesmanship convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to try to colonize this new world. Only fourteen ships, carrying three to four hundred people, made it there safely. Some ships were lost at sea—a poem from the period makes reference to a
hafgerðing,
an ocean “fence” described in one medieval sailors’ manual as looking
as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean had been collected into three heaps out of which three billows are formed. These hedge in the entire sea, so that no opening can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble
steep, overhanging cliffs.
Modern observers attribute these terrifying waves to an earthquake or the eruption of an undersea volcano. A few ships in Eirik’s flotilla escaped this catastrophe by turning back to Iceland. Their reports of the journey would have convinced Gudrid’s father—or mother, if she had survived childbirth—that the trip was too risky for an infant. It would be fifteen more years before Thorbjorn, embittered and impoverished, miffed that a slave-born boy considered himself Gudrid’s match, would assuage his honor by emigrating to Greenland.

At their heart, Eirik the Red’s troubles were not about honor, but about house building. After spending a few days learning about turf houses with Sirri Sigurdardottir at Glaumbaer and Gudmundur Olafsson at Iceland’s National Museum, I better understood how much time and effort Eirik had spent clearing the land and building his house—two houses, since the first was damaged by a landslide—at Eiriksstadir, only to be kicked out of the Dales. And I could guess how frustrated he was, after having put considerable thought into where to build his house on the island he had purchased, when his house building was short-circuited by the man he’d trusted with his “bench boards.”

As curator of the Skagafjord Folk Museum, for nearly twenty years Sirri Sigurdardottir has been responsible for keeping the turf roof and walls of the circa 1750 farmhouse on the Glaumbaer grounds in good repair. June 2005 was unusually sunny and pleasant for Iceland, and Sirri spent much of the month on the roof with a garden hose praying for the weather to return to normal. “It was like a nightmare to keep the grass green on the roof,” she said. A sunburned roof will crack, letting the next rainfall trickle down into the wall. A wet wall will eventually freeze, buckle, and have to be replaced, which means tearing the whole thing down to the layer of foundation stones and starting over again. Or walking away and rebuilding elsewhere.

Northern Iceland has quite a collection of slumped and crumpled, roofless turf ruins. Here and there a turf farmhouse is in better repair, crammed with tools and old toys, or turned into a sheep barn. There used to be many, many more: Before concrete was introduced in the 1940s, the most common house was owner-built of turf. Traditionally, a turf house was patched, rebuilt, expanded, and renewed, the new parts erected on top of, or adjoining, the old, sometimes changing the footprint every few years. Today there are only four men in Iceland who have lived in a turf house they had made.

In the 1990s, Sirri and her assistants took a camera and interviewed the oldsters on each farm. “We went through all of Skagafjord to learn where they got the turf, what kind it was, and how the timber frame was built. Most of these houses are gone now,” she said. It was the same method Arne Emil Christensen had used on the coast of Norway to learn how Viking ships were built
while there is still time.
If the tools are the same, the technique must be the same.

Sirri and her brother went out into the bogs with the old men and their turf-cutting tools and tried it. “They use a spade and a short-handled scythe. It’s difficult, let me tell you,” Sirri said.

Just how difficult I heard from a friend who had helped build a turf house as a boy. “First you cut off the top layer using a shovel or a curved peat knife. The better turf is at a certain depth,” he had said. “You need a sharp thin blade and a very firm grip. You use the weight of your body, plant your feet to press with your leg muscles, and saw into the ground—it’s like cutting bread.”

Sirri agreed. “You have to know how to do it. You need to have good iron edges on your tools—you can’t cut turf with a wooden spade. This could be a problem. There wasn’t much iron in the old days, and you had to take care of it. So when they cut turf, they cut as little as possible and thought carefully about how to cut it.”

They also thought carefully about what kind of turf to cut, Sirri continued. “The best turf is called
reiðingur.
A
reiðingur
is a packsaddle, but also what you make one out of. We used the best turf, with the thickest root system, to make pads for the horses. And we used it as a mattress for beds. It’s very soft.”

To find
reiðingur
turf, you tramp along the edges of a bog, just beyond where the grasses give way to sedges, looking for the little white flowers of the bogbean plant. It flowers only if its roots are soaked. “The best turf was always in the water. When you dig it up, it runs with water. When it dries, it is all roots. No earth at all. No sand, no dirt. It’s good for saddles—you cut it on the horse so it’s the best shape for that horse when it dries. It fits perfect.”

But while the old men all agreed that
reiðingur
was the “best” turf, they didn’t use it for walls. They backed off from the bogbean a couple of paces, and cut building blocks from the firmer grass-and-sedge margin.

“Reiðingur
is so wet you can’t build the walls high,” Sirri explained. “In a wall, it compresses every year more and more, and the roof comes down with it. It stops on the wooden frame. If you don’t do anything about it, the frame will cut through the turf. It’s good to have a little bit of clay in the turf because when it dries, it becomes a block, almost a stone. But not too much clay, or it will destroy the root system as it dries. When you cut turf in a bog, you cut living roots. They die in the walls, and too much clay makes the roots rot, then the wall breaks. So how to choose the perfect turf for the wall is not how you choose the perfect turf for the horse.”

Sometimes there simply wasn’t time to be so choosy—such as when half of your house had disappeared under a landslide. A block of turf needs three weeks to a month to dry out properly, and house building or repair was always on the to-do list beneath making hay. It was an eve-of-winter chore. “If you’re in a hurry,” said Sirri, “you pick the turf you have. You just do it. If you’re lucky it will last for decades. Or if not, just for two years.”

The shape of the blocks you cut also depended, to some extent, on time. The best walls are made of
klömbrahnaus,
“clubshaped hunks.” One end is fat (called the neck), the other is thin and tapered (the tail). “The tail goes inside the wall, and you see the neck,” Sirri explained. Each hunk is about a foot in length—but the wall is three to six feet deep. You built an inside stack of turfs and an outside stack, and filled in between with rubble. Old turf—the torn-down wall—was often used, along with gravel, clay, or dirt. You packed the rubble down firmly, “trampling it with a horse or a heavy man.” Sirri said, “When you can’t see the sign of your foot, it’s done.” Every few courses, a long straight piece of turf would be placed lengthwise across the rubble, to tie the two stacks together.

The faces of a wall built this way have a distinctive herringbone pattern. “It’s good-looking and it’s very strong. If the weather is not very wet, you have walls like that standing for eighty to a hundred years,” Sirri said, “and I know much older walls made this way. Gudny saw
klömbra
in the walls of the longhouse that was found in Keldudalur, under the churchyard, so we know the people of Gudrid’s time knew this technique.”

Lazy housebuilders, or those in a rush, however, didn’t always use it. They cut the simpler, diamond-shaped
snidda,
without the lagging tail. “If you weren’t too clever with building, it was easier,” Sirri said.
“Klömbra
is bigger and it’s
very
heavy.
Snidda
is much easier to carry about. But the turf that’s fastest to cut and easiest to build from is also the one that falls down first.”

Finding, cutting, drying, and stacking the turf was only half the work of building a Viking longhouse—and not even the half that determined how big a house you would have. “When you start to build a house,” Sirri told me, “you first look at the timber you have.”

Although it looked like a low green hill—a hobbit hole—a Viking house was actually a wooden house tucked inside a man-made mound. The turf walls blocked the wind and kept in the warmth, but what held up the roof was a post-and-beam wood frame. The inside walls and ceiling were also wooden, the thick paneling sometimes intricately carved. A house in
Laxdaela Saga
had “glorious sagas carved on the wallboards and the rafters. They were so well done that people thought the hall looked more splendid when the tapestries were not hung up.” The householder, Olaf the Peacock, had cut the wood he needed in the king of Norway’s forests.