The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (27 page)

According to DuBois, the elements of the world equal to humans are the ones that mattered most in Gudrid’s time. People then, DuBois writes, “had a vast array of equals—human, nearhuman, and nonhuman, mobile and immobile, visible and invisible—with which they shared and competed on a daily basis.” Among them were the dwellers in the mounds: the elves, the land spirits, the Hidden Folk. Mountains were declared “holy” and were not to be climbed by the unwashed, though beneath them the illustrious dead could be buried. Guardian spirits lived in caves and stones. “Some women are so unwise and blind about their needs,” wrote a medieval Christian author, “that they take their food and bring it out to heaps of stones and mountain caves and consecrate it to the spirits of the land and thereafter they eat it in order to make the spirits of the land friendly and in order to have more luck with their farming than before.”

In two sagas of the conversion to Christianity, the first missionary to come to Iceland, a Saxon bishop named Fridrek, made a bargain with a farmer: If Bishop Fridrek could drive the farm’s “steward” from his stone, the farmer would agree to be baptized. This steward, the farmer said, was a good friend: He protected the cattle and gave helpful advice. The bishop advanced on the stone. He sprinkled it with holy water while singing psalms. That night the steward appeared to the farmer in a dream and cried: “Ill have you done to let that awful man pour boiling water into my house, so that it scorches my children. Oh, how hard it is to hear the screeches of my little ones!” He begged and threatened for two more nights, but the farmer held to his bargain with the bishop to see who proved more powerful, the elf or Christ. After the third night, the stone broke apart, and the steward was heard from no more. The farmer was baptized, believing that his new invisible friend, Christ, was stronger than his old one.

It was their belief in holy mountains, sacred groves, and inhabited stones that made the concept of pilgrimage so appealing to the Vikings (besides the fact that it was so similar to “going a-viking”). The holy city, the saint’s shrine, were understood in terms of the steward’s stone: a place inhabited by the new stronger “friend.” At home, traditional holy places were resanctified by the addition of a cross or the mere blessing of a bishop. Gudmundur the Good, bishop in the twelfth century, erected a cross in a field. According to his saga: “People go there as they do to holy places and burn lights before the cross outside just as they would inside a church, even if the weather is bad.” The reverse had happened in the early days of Iceland’s settlement. When Unn the Deep-Minded and her Christian crew came to Iceland from the Hebrides, they marked their land-claim with a cross on a hill. There Unn prayed. Later, according to
The Book
of Settlements,
“her kinsmen worshipped these hills.” They built a pagan temple there, in which their chieftains were sanctified, and “believed they would go into the hills when they died.”

The pagan belief in fortune-telling was also neatly co-opted into the Christian worldview, with soothsaying becoming a talent of Christian saints. Olaf Tryggvason, the missionary king of Norway credited with converting Iceland and Greenland, was baptized by such a one. When Olaf asked the hermit how he knew so much about the future, the hermit replied that the god of Christian men told him whatever he wanted to know.

In the old days, a person in difficulty would naturally turn, not to a bishop or holy hermit, but to a witch like Ongul’s foster-mother. The sagas name seventy-eight witches, half of them male and half female. They are sometimes portrayed as good and useful neighbors, sometimes as wicked and hateful interlopers (who nonetheless had their supporters). One saga explains: “As Christianity was new to the country and had not fully taken hold, many people considered it an advantage that a person was skilled in magic.”

A witch was a “fence rider,” one who straddled the barrier between the fields and the wild lands, civilization and chaos, natural and supernatural, good and evil. (Over time, the fence turned into the broomstick on which our cartoon witches ride.) A saga witch could bring snow or fog to hide a hunted man. She could change the course of a river. In famine, she could fill a bay with fish or summon a whale. She could turn herself (or someone she loved) into a goat, a boar, a spindle stick, a walrus, a bear, or a bull’s-hide bag filled with water. She could provide a shirt no sword could pierce and a helmet of invisibility. She could find a lost horse or family heirloom.

These otherworldly talents, too, were translated into the Christian world. Christ could raise the dead, turn water into wine, calm the storm, and feed the multitude. The early Christians highlighted not only Christ’s miracles, but those of His followers as a way to prove God’s might and His concern for His creation. Bishops of Iceland would become famous for ending a long winter or a drought, providing a calm breeze so young boys could sail home safely, turning aside a flood-swollen river to save a farmhouse, and causing a midwinter thaw so bodies could be buried properly at church. They found lost things, treated frostbite, cough, insomnia, and toothache, lessened womens labor pains, and healed crippled or broken limbs. One priest was said to be able to turn a bone into a horse that could carry a rider over the sea. Another had a whistle that could call up troops of demon workers to fetch in the hay before it was ruined by the rain.

The magical stones and potions and amulets a witch might have pressed on a client were replaced with saints’ relics and holy water and all sorts of crosses, from silver pendants to two sticks tied with yarn. Even the story of a saint could be potent. In a small manuscript book of the saga of St. Margaret, the letters have been almost rubbed away on some pages. Such books were held against the legs of a woman in labor to ease her pains. The magical pagan songs that Gudrid sang so beautifully to call the spirits in Greenland, and the elaborate ritual surrounding the seance—the seer’s jeweled blue dress and white catskin gloves, her cushion of hen’s feathers, her meal of animal hearts—were replaced by equally beautiful and elaborate Christian prayers and rituals. The farmer who made the bargain with Bishop Fridrek had had no interest in Christianity—no desire to evict the farm’s steward from his stone—until he witnessed a mass:

But when he heard the ringing of bells and the fair song of priests, and smelled the sweet fragrance of incense, and saw the bishop clothed with splendid vestments, and ... the fair shining of wax tapers ... then all this pleased him rather well.

It was easy for the Norse to put a Christian gloss on their old ways. In the saga of the Christian king Hakon the Good, who ruled Norway in the mid-900s, the king is at a pagan feast held by some rebellious nobles, and the sacred ale has just been brought out.

When the first cup was poured, Sigurd the Jarl spoke before it and blessed it in honor of Odin and drank to the king from the horn. The king took it and made the sign of the Cross over it. Then Kar of Gryting said: “Why does the king do that? Will he still not sacrifice?” Sigurd the Jarl answered: “The king does as all do who trust in their might and main; he blesses the cup in honor of Thor. He made the sign of Thor’s hammer over it before he drank.”

What’s important here is not that the T-shape of Thor’s hammer looked like the sign of the cross, but the similarity of the beliefs and rituals of the cults on a deeper level. Writes DuBois: “The shared assumptions reflect a tradition of comparison, in which the Christian Lord appears at first as just one more deity of the sky, vying with the others for the best of adherents.”

Christian doctrine does not allow for any other gods. Christ cannot be “just one more deity.” Yet both archaeology and history imply that the Viking world failed to grasp this essential tenet of the new religion for at least a hundred years, well after Gudrid’s death. Burial customs changed very slowly, with Thor’s hammers and Christian crosses sometimes found in the same grave. Thor and his hammer appear on a Swedish baptismal font, alongside Christ and the cross. A jewelry mold found in Denmark could simultaneously cast a cross and a hammer. In one of the earliest Christian Norse poems, dated to circa 1000, Christ sits beside the Well of Weird next to the three pagan goddesses of Fate. The names of the days of the week were not changed in Icelandic until the 1100s—and were never changed in English: We still honor the gods Tyr (Tuesday), Odin (or Wodan, Wednesday), and Thor (Thursday), and the goddess Frigg (Friday).

Nor was the Christ who came to the Vikings the suffering, broken, abandoned,
blauður
Christ of Good Friday. He was the glorious, invincible,
hvatur
Christ of the Last Judgment, separating the righteous from the damned. He was the Christ in the letters of St. Paul, the “young hero” and “victor over evil.” He was, in fact, “virtually a picture of Thor under the name of Christ,” as one scholar writes. Crucifixes made in the newly converted North never show the dying, human Christ, but always Christ Triumphant, standing bolt upright, his feet on a footrest, his head held high and his expression regal, wearing a crown of gold, not thorns. In Old Norse poetry, he is called “creator of heaven and earth, of angels and the sun, ruler of the world.” He is “king of the heavens and the sun and angels and Jerusalem and Jordan and Greece, master of apostles and saints.” Wrote the poet Markus, “Alone the ruler of men, Christ can control all things.” Said his colleague Eilif Kulnasvein, “The sun’s king alone is finer than all other true glory.”

One Icelander whom Bishop Fridrek tried to convert declined, saying he would hold to the beliefs of his foster-father who “believed in the one who made the sun and ruled all things.”

The bishop answered, “I offer you the same faith.”

What the sagas call the Change of Ways came to Iceland in the year 1000, while Gudrid was on her way to Greenland. The island was converted by parliamentary decree, with the Althing essentially blackmailed by the crusading King Olaf Tryggvason, who held many Icelanders and their precious ships captive in Norway until the outcome satisfied him. All Icelanders were to be baptized, but sacrificing to the old gods was not outlawed—if it was kept quiet.

Many of the Vikings’ most ingrained values did not need to be Christianized. Men were praised for being peaceable, popular, and calm. They strove to be generous, hospitable, faithful, healthy, clean living, and tolerant. Among the advice in the pre-Christian poem
Hávamál,
or “Words of the High One” (the “high one” being the god Odin), are these stanzas:

Mock not the traveler met on the road,
Nor maliciously laugh at the guest:
Scoff not at guests nor to the gate chase them,
But relieve the lonely and wretched.

Never laugh at the old when they offer counsel,
Often their words are wise:
From shrivelled skin, from scraggy things
That hang among the hides
And move amid the guts,
Clear words often come.

With a good woman, if you wish to enjoy
Her words and her good-will,
Pledge her fairly and be faithful to it:
Enjoy the good you are given.

These things are thought the best:
Fire, the sight of the sun,
Good-health with the gift to keep it,
And a life that avoids vice.

As Russian saga scholar M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij complains, “What is taken for a Christian trait in the family sagas is usually ‘Christian’ only in the sense that it continued to exist after the introduction of Christianity.”

The Change of Ways wrought no huge upheaval in society. Those who had been in power, remained in power. As Gunnar Karlsson puts it in
The History of Iceland,
the chieftains “just changed gods but went on with their social roles as far as they possibly could.” The chieftains built churches as a mark of status. According to one saga, a chieftain could take as many of his followers with him to Heaven as could fit in his church. The chieftains declared themselves “priests”—rather like the pope, with no Church training (though when such training became available in the 1100s, they took it). Trade in wine and wax candles probably increased. According to Icelandic historian Helgi Thorlaksson, not until the 1100s did the Icelanders all learn to say the Lord’s Prayer, cross themselves properly, and act “with reverence” in church. As late as 1150, the archbishop in Norway was still putting pressure on the Icelanders to “sanctify” marriage, by condemning out-of-wedlock births, the keeping of mistresses, and divorce—all ways to rein in that “aggressive authority” by which women in the sagas pursued their sex lives.

“It has been argued that Christianity was a disaster for women,” writes Anne-Sofie Graslund, an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In the old days, women were at the heart of the rituals. Housewives took the offerings to the “heaps of stones and mountain caves” and asked the spirits of the land to bless the farm. Women saw into the future, healed the sick with charms and potions, and prepared the sacred ale for feast days. Two women in
The Book of Settlements
are named
gyðja,
“priestess,” though we do not know what their role entailed. Christianity, by contrast, has no goddess, and the Church is headed by men. When the Christian Church became fully established in the 1100s, these housewives and priestesses were shut out of the spiritual life, while wise women like Ongul’s foster-mother were declared “of little use” and told to abandon their witchcraft. Many episodes in the sagas support this view; archaeology seems to show, instead, that women of Gudrid’s day saw Christianity not as a threat to their social status, but as an attractive set of beliefs. After examining runestones and burials throughout the Viking world, Graslund believes that Viking women were the first converts.

During the time Gudrid was a nun, Christianity, Graslund says, was a religion of joy and sisterhood. Rather than limiting women’s sexual or spiritual power, it enhanced their sense of worth. “Christ made no distinction between men and women,” Graslund says. “His attitude toward women meant nothing less than a revolution.” No longer was a woman’s worth, high or low, defined by marriage or childbearing. Abandoned, orphaned, barren, kinless, a woman still owned a soul and a place in the world: She had rights from birth to death. A Christian father could not decide to set his baby girl outdoors to die. (Exposure had always killed more girls than boys in Viking Iceland, in spite of womens high status.) Shortly after the conversion, this practice, along with the eating of horsemeat (an essential part of pagan ritual), was declared taboo.