The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (29 page)
Alas, Bishop Bjorn was not declared a saint. No “Life of Bjorn” remains. But some of the stories Brand collected, Olafur believes, made their way into
The Saga of the Greenlanders,
written early in the thirteenth century. The only copy we have dates from 1387. It is tucked into the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason in the splendid manuscript called
Flateyjarbók
or “Book of Flatey,” named for the Icelandic island on which it was treasured until 1647, when its owner gave it to the bishop of Skalholt. It is a very large manuscript made from 113 calfskins.
The Saga of the Greenlanders
takes up the skin of just one calf.
Later in the thirteenth century, it became fashionable in Europe to make saints of common people who had lived exemplary lives. A
Saga of Gudrid
might have been thought the perfect way to celebrate the founding of the nunnery at Reynines, Karlsefni’s childhood home, by Abbess Hallbera—yet another descendant of Gudrid—in 1295. Olafur Halldorsson believes that the abbess’s
Saga of Gudrid
has come down to us, in part or whole, as
The Saga of Eirik the Red.
It exists in two vellum manuscripts and the two versions differ slightly; both were copied from a now lost original. The earlier of the two,
Hauk’s Book,
was the work of Hauk Erlendsson, an adviser to the king of Norway, who spent two years, 1306 to 1308, in a monastery on the Icelandic island of Videy. Videy had a fine library, and Hauk read widely. As scholars did in those days, he copied what he read there and elsewhere to add to his own collection. The massive manuscript he compiled over the course of his reading life reveals an eclectic taste. Hauk copied a history of the Trojan War and the saga of how Christianity came to Iceland. He chose a saga about an Icelandic poet who died for love, and another about two blood-brothers who fell out over a woman. He includes the practical travel guide for pilgrims to Rome, written by the monk Nikulas. The prophecies of Merlin, King Arthur’s mage, are paired with the prophecy of Ragnarok, the doom of the gods. Isidore de Seville’s seventh-century encyclopedia of natural history,
Etymologiae
(which describes the Unipeds, a one-footed African tribe), is balanced by the
Algorismus,
the first mathematical text to use Arabic numerals.
Hauk’s book holds one of five known copies of
The Book of Settlements.
The version Hauk copied had been compiled largely by his grandfather and, according to his critics, Hauk therefore felt free to embellish it with additional tales he had heard or read. Hauk also embellished
The Saga of Eirik the Red.
As well as smoothing out the style, he added two short passages. He did not add the strange account of Karlsefni seeing one of Isidore de Seville’s Unipeds in the wilds of Vinland. Nor did he add the antiquarian description of the Greenland séance. These stories were already in the text he copied. Hauk’s additions are plain and apparently factual. One traces Karlsefni's genealogy back to King Kjarval of Ireland, on his mother’s side, and to the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Hairy-Breeks on his father’s, making Snorri, born in America, royal. The second new passage traces Snorri’s descendants through nine generations to Hauk Erlendsson himself.
For six hundred years, knowledge of the Vikings’ voyages to Vinland was preserved in these stories about Gudrid the Far-Traveler, passed down in one form or another by her descendants. Then it was almost lost. The bishop of Skalholt gave
The Book of Flatey
to the king of Denmark in 1656.
Hauk’s Book
and many other ancient manuscripts were considered worthless after printed books became available; they were torn to pieces and the stiff vellum was reused to make shoe soles, dress patterns, and bindings for newer books—one was even used to stiffen a bishop’s miter. Rescue came in the person of Arni Magnusson, a young man from the Dales in Iceland, where Unn the Deep-Minded had settled, who became a professor of history at the University of Copenhagen. In the early 1700s, while in Iceland calculating the tax value of the farms at the behest of Iceland’s Danish overlords, he picked up every scrap of manuscript he could find. These he reassembled, based on handwriting and other clues, into books: One sixty-page manuscript came from eight different farms. Of
Hauk’s Book,
Arni was able to find 282 pages out of an estimated 400-plus.
The Saga of Eirik the Red
was one story that survived.
Then came the Great Copenhagen Fire of 1728. Almost half the town burned, including the university. Arni and two other Icelanders saved the oldest manuscripts, including
Hauk’s Book.
The rest of Arni’s library was destroyed, as were all the saga manuscripts in the university’s main library. The fire died out before it reached the palace, and
The Book of Flatey,
in the king’s private library, was unharmed.
Legend has it that Columbus heard stories of Vinland before he sailed west in 1492, but the first serious attempts to locate the Viking colony began in the nineteenth century. The sagas containing the stories of Gudrid the Far-Traveler were then at the height of their popularity—they were translated into English more often than any other saga—due to the influence of such writers as Sir Walter Scott and the general romantic sense that “the old north was misty, mysterious, and sublime.” (Scott particularly liked the séance in Greenland, using it in his book
The Pirate
in 1821.) These new Vinland explorers, all men, did not think they were retracing the travels of Gudrid. They identified instead with Leif Eiriksson, son of the doughty Eirik the Red. But their search led directly to the discovery of the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows and to those three butternuts that sent Birgitta Wallace south to the Miramichi River and the probable heart of the Land of Wine. Because of the two Vinland Sagas, archaeologists have also looked for—and found—-Thjodhild’s church at Brattahlid; the two houses of Eirik the Red, in Iceland and Greenland; the farm of Sandnes, where Gudrid’s husband Thorstein died; and Gudrid’s own house at Glaumbaer.
Digging that summer at Glaumbaer, I didn’t find anything Gudrid had dropped. But as I explored the archaeology of Gudrid’s days, the economy of the farms where she lived, the technology of her time—how to make cheese, how to weave, how to sail a ship and build a wall—I learned new ways to tell Gudrid’s story, to pick up where the sagas leave off. Yet the last line of
The Saga of the Greenlanders
lingers in my mind. It sounds like Gudrid’s own voice, carrying across a thousand years:
But Karlsefni told the tale of these voyages better than anyone else
.
Among the many people I interviewed for this book, I am most indebted to John Steinberg, formerly of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now of the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. John not only admitted me onto his archaeological team for the summer 2005 field season at Glaumbær in Iceland, but arranged for me to meet many of the other scientists and scholars quoted in this book. I am grateful to Paul Durrenberger of Pennsylvania State University for introducing me to John, and to everyone on the SASS team for answering my questions and keeping me inspired: Hans Bernard, Doug Bolender, Tara Carter, Brian Damiata, Suzan Erem and her daughter Ayshe, Antonio Gilman, Dean Goodman, Linda Rehberger, Kent Schneider, John Schoenfelder, and Rita Shepard.
Sigríður (“Sirri”) Sigurðardóttir, curator of the Skagafjörður Folk Museum, meanwhile, kept me grounded in Icelandic history and led me to a deeper understanding of the farm of Glaumbaer. Grétar Guðbergsson and his wife Guðný, as well as the family at Syðra-Skörðugil, taught me how to read the landscape of Skagafjörður. I particularly thank Eyþór for catching the horse I lost in the mountains. In Reykjavík, my friends Guðbjörg Sigurðardóttir and Stefán Jónsson opened their house to me on many occasions, while Kristín Vogfjörð was always there when I needed help.
For making my exploration of Greenland possible, I am grateful to Kristjána Guðmundsdóttir and Jonathan Motzfeldt, my hosts in Nuuk; although their boat was not ready when I arrived, their extraordinary library made the wait profitable. Thanks to Magnús Jóhannsson and Anna María Ágústsdóttir of the Icelandic Soil Conservation Service for introducing me to Kristjána, as well as for sharing their knowledge of overgrazing and desertification. In South Greenland, Jacky Simoud was an excellent tour guide (who didn’t, in the end, “forget” me), while Ellen and Carl Frederiksen provided a beautiful place to stay on the edge of Brattahlíð and took time off from the lambing to explain how things were done.
I would never have made it to Greenland without the assistance of Matthew Driscoll and Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir of the Árni Magnússon Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and Kate Driscoll, my guide in Copenhagen.
Birgitta Wallace, now retired from Parks Canada, was extraordinarily gracious in agreeing to meet me at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and in showing me around the site that she had excavated since the 1970s. Parks Canada guide Clayton Colbourne happily told me tales of George Decker’s Indian Mounds, which Decker’s granddaughter Loretta, the park superintendent put into context.
For my understanding of Viking ships, I am indebted to Ole Crumlin-Pedersen of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, and to Arne Emil Christensen of the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy, Norway (whom I interviewed in 1984); to Anton Englar, skipper of Kraka Fyr, who let me row around Roskilde harbor; to Gunnar Marel Eggertsson, Ottar S. Bjørkedal, Eggert Sigþor Sigurðsson, Ríkarður Már Pétursson, and Odd Kvamme, whom I met on board Gaia in 1991; and especially to Úlfur Sigurmundsson, Trade Commissioner of Iceland, who let me take his place for a short cruise in Newport harbor.
I thank Else Østergård for alerting me to the existence of the Center for Textile Research, begun at the University of Copenhagen in 2005. Her book,
Woven into the Earth
(2004), is an extraordinary source of information on Viking textile production.
Meetings with Carol Clover in 1991, when she was interviewed for a radio series I produced at Pennsylvania State University, and with Jenny Jochens in 1994, when we both took a course in Icelandic sponsored by the Sigurður Nordal Institute in Reykjavík, shaped my understanding of the status of women in the sagas.
Other scientists and scholars who contributed their time and expertise to this book are:
In Iceland:
Agnar Helgason of DeCode Genetics, Reykjavík
Elsa Guðjónsson of the National Museum of Iceland (with whom I spoke in 1988)
Gísli Pálsson of the University of Iceland
Gísli Sigurðsson of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík
Guðmundur Ólafsson of the National Museum of Iceland
Guðný Zoëga of the Skagafjörður Folk Museum
Mjöll Snæsdóttir of the Icelandic Institute of Archaeology (FSÍ)
Orri Vésteinsson of the Icelandic Institute of Archaeology (FSÍ)
Ragnheiður Traustadóttir of the National Museum of Iceland
Sólborg Pálsdóttir of the Archaeological Heritage Agency of Iceland
In Greenland and Denmark:
Eva Andersson of the Center for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen
Jette Arneborg of the National Museum of Denmark
Linda Mårtensson of the Center for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen
Georg Nyegaard of the National Museum of Greenland
Finally, my thanks to my student, Daniel Saninski, who found Gudrid boring; to my teacher, Carey Eckhardt, who thought the Vinland Sagas were worth reading anyway; to my publisher, Rebecca Saletan, who organized my ideas about Gudrid and Glaumbaer; and to my editor, Stacia Decker, who found the hidden story.
[>]
—Viking longhouse:
To say that the house at Glaumbaer is both a Viking longhouse and Gudrid’s house, as I do, will strike some scholars as an oxymoron. They define “Viking” as “not Christian,” and Gudrid was. I use “Viking” to mean anyone living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age from 793 to 1066. In this I follow Gwyn Jones, who writes in his
History of the Vikings
(1968): “Harald Hardradi, who waged war from Asia Minor to Stamford Bridge for thirty-five years, was a viking; so was his father Sigurd Sow, who stayed at home and counted haystacks. Hastein, who led the Great Army of the Danes into England in the early 890s, was a viking; so was Ottar, who came peaceably to his lord king Alfred’s court with walrus tusks and lessons in northern geography. The men who destroyed churches in England, Ireland, and France were vikings; so were the woodcarvers of Oseberg and the metalworkers of Mammen. The men who said ‘With law shall the land be built up and with lawlessness wasted away’ were vikings; so were the practisers and curtailers of blood-feud, the profitmakers and those who robbed them of profit, the explorers and colonizers, the shapers of verse-forms and makers of legends. The kings and their counselors who brought the Scandinavian countries within the bounds of Christian Europe were vikings.”
The definition of “longhouse” is also disputed. To Icelanders, “longhouse” is the translation for
skáli,
and can only be used to describe the earliest style of one-room Viking turf house. John Steinberg and I use “longhouse” more loosely, to include the later style of houses, such as those at Stong and L’Anse aux Meadows, in which additional rooms may branch ofF from the main
skáli.
[>]
—“Farm of Merry Noise”:
“Glaum” is a hard word to translate. It seems to describe classic Viking merrymaking—loud, drunken partying—with an emphasis on the noise, rather than the merriment. Yet it also can be translated as “joy” or “joyful noise,” without the Christian overtones of that phrase. A third, archaic meaning is “horse,” according to the Icelandic dictionary edited by Arni Bod-varsson (1983).
[>]
—delights in reading the sagas:
To untangle these connections, I collated six sagas:
Njal’s Saga, Laxdaela Saga, Eyrbyggja Saga, The Saga of the Greenlanders, The Saga of Eirik the Red,
and
Grettir's Saga.
Genealogies show that many of the main characters in these six sagas were related. They also overlap in time and space. Several editors have established chronologies for individual sagas; these depend on the reigns of the kings of Norway and England, who are characters in many tales, as well as on estimates of the age at which a woman could bear children. For example, the sagas say Greenland became Christian at the instigation of Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway from 995–1000, and that it was converted after Iceland, which became Christian in 999 or 1000. Gudrid’s arrival in Greenland is intertwined with the story of the conversion. Since she was of marriageable age then, I arbitrarily chose 985 as her birthdate.
[>]
—
Hellisvellir, or “Fields by the Cave”:
Although Gudrid’s father is known as Thorbjorn of Laugarbrekka, according to
The Saga of Eirik the Red,
he did not gain control of the estate when he married Hallveig, daughter of Einar of Laugarbrekka; he merely “acquired land at Hellisvellir in Laugarbrekka.” His brother Thorgeir, who married Hallveig’s sister Arnora, seems to have owned the rest of the estate, for it passes down to his daughter Yngvild, Gudrid’s cousin. According to
The Book of Settlements,
Yngvild married Thorstein, a son of the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell. In
Eyrbyggja Saga
,
Thorstein is said to live at Laugarbrekka.
[>]
—the classic case of the independent farmer:
The story of Eirik’s outlawing, as told in
The Saga of Eirik the Red
and in
The Saga of the Greenlanders,
both derive from the version in
The Book of Settlements.
A different version appears in
Eyrbyggja Saga.
Eirik’s relatives, and those of his enemy, also appear in
Gull-Thorir’s Saga, The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, Heidarviga Saga, The Saga of Bard Snaefellsass, Laxdaela Saga, Njal’s Saga,
and
Gisli’s Saga.
It is not immediately obvious from the saga accounts why Eirik was outnumbered. To tease out a reason, I drew a large chart, tracing out the marriage and kinship alliances on both sides. It turned into a tangle of asterisks and increasingly finer print; even with three colors of ink, it was hard to see who was related to whom. Yet Eirik’s line seemed the stronger. His wife, Thjodhild, is very well bred, with several important saga names in her genealogy.
Next I tried chronology. Thjodhild’s mother, Thorbjorg Ship-Breast, must have been the youngest of her siblings, for her brother-in-law, Gold-Thorir, was making waves in western Iceland before the year 930. The big names in 982 are Snorri of Helgafell, Illugi the Black, Thord Gellir of Hvamm, and Olaf the Peacock.
The chieftain Snorri of Helgafell was then nineteen, just coming into his power. Eirik has a very slight connection to Snorri: Through his wife he is distantly related to Thorbrand of Swan Fjord, whose four sons are Snorri’s foster-brothers. (How distantly? Her cousin’s son married the sister-in-law of Thorbrand’s wife.) Thorbrand’s sons are Eirik’s staunch supporters. Snorri will soon marry the daughter of Killer-Styr—another of Eirik the Red’s friends—but the saga treats it as a great triumph of Killer-Styr’s political skill simply to win Snorri’s promise not to meddle in Eirik’s case. Killer-Styr has no good reason to support Eirik the Red, and no one else in his large and aggressive family joins him.
Illugi the Black at this time was newly married and throwing his weight around. He had just trounced Killer-Styr and his kinsmen in a dowry dispute; young Snorri had brought the two sides to a truce, rather to Illugi’s advantage, and Illugi had pledged Snorri his friendship. Illugi the Black did not take sides in Eirik’s quarrel, though if pressed he would have recalled his kinship, through his mother-in-law, to Thord Gellir. His father-in-law was that Asbjorn the Wealthy against whom Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn Vifilsson, held a grudge.
Thord Gellir’s power was waning (he may have already died; he fades out of the stories in the 970s), and his three sons were not living up to expectations. One, Eyjolf the Gray, had spent the last sixteen years hunting down Gisli the Outlaw—the chieftain Snorri’s uncle, but also the killer of Snorri’s father—and had just been repudiated by Snorri for setting on the man fifteen to one.
The bastard Olaf the Peacock, rather than any of Thord Gellir’s sons, was now the leader of the Dales. He was the only chieftain on whom Eirik had any claim—through his wife’s mothers second husband’s son or through Killer-Styr’s son’s father-in-law, who was Olaf’s half-brother—but since neither he nor any other chieftain took Eirik’s side, the Hvamm clan’s diminished power was enough to win the case and to outlaw Eirik from Iceland for three years.
[>]
—two households—around thirty people altogether:
The average size of a Viking household circa 1000 is hotly disputed by scholars. Thirty is the number of “friends”
The Saga of Eirik the Red
says went to Greenland with Gudrid’s father. Orm of Arnarstapi and his wife are the only ones named. In my reading of the sagas, as well as my discussions with archaeologists Birgitta Wallace, John Steinberg, and Mjoll Snaesdottir, I find thirty to be one large household or two smaller ones. In
Eyrbyggja Saga,
for example, we learn of a sickness that killed “more women than men.” In the translation by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards (1973), we read: “Six people died one after another, and the hauntings and night-walkings drove others away from the farm. There had been thirty servants there in the autumn, but eighteen of them died, five more ran away, and by mid-winter there were only seven of them left.” The word translated as “servants,” however, is
hjóna,
which means “the domestics, family, household,” according to the Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary. The dictionary notes that modern Icelandic distinguishes between
hjón
meaning “man and wife” and
hjú
meaning “servants,” but Old Norse doesn’t. So the thirty would have included the unmarried farmer and his mother, who kept house for him. Archaeologists trying to estimate the size of a Viking household from the sleeping area of their longhouses have come up with an estimate of twenty-five to thirty people for a large farm. Gunnar Karlsson in his
History of Iceland
(2000), however, notes that the population estimate of 40,000 for twelfth-century Iceland, which is widely quoted by archaeologists and which is based on a census recorded by Ari the Learned in
The Book of the Icelanders,
takes “the large households that are sometimes described in sagas to be either fictional or restricted to a small top layer of society”; it assumes, instead, that “the average household may not have numbered more than eight people: a couple, three children, one elder, and two farm-hands.”
[>]
—No further expeditions were sent: The Saga of the Greenlanders
tells of an expedition led by Leif Eiriksson’s bastard half-sister Freydis, whose two ships arrive in Vinland after Gudrid and Karlsefni (with only one ship in this version) have left. An argument arises, and Freydis has one entire ship’s crew put to death—she herself beheads the five women. I consider this episode fiction—the saga author’s attempt to fill in a gap and explain how a whole shipload of Vinland explorers from Greenland was lost. In this I follow Richard Perkins, who writes, “It seems to me unlikely that Freydis ever existed, let alone ever led an expedition to Vinland. ... I would suggest that Freydis is an entirely fictional figure, invented to act as a foil to the pious Gudrid.” He defends his argument by noting, among other things, that “Freydis’s descendants are obscure or nonexistent.” Even more telling is the lack of any revenge taken upon Freydis or her men, once they return to Greenland, for the killing of their countrymen.
[>]
—half a mark of gold:
According to Bruce Gelsinger’s
Icelandic Enterprise
(1981), half a mark of gold was equal to at least 1,500 yards of homespun cloth. Yet in
Egil’s Saga,
King Aethelstan of England gave Egil two gold arm-rings, each weighing half a mark, and a good cloak in reward for a poem. Olaf the Saint, who reigned from 1014 to 1030, fixed the landing tax at half a mark, or four ounces, of silver; before that, according to Ari the Learned in
The Book of the Icelanders
, it fluctuated between four and five ounces. In the 1200s, a mark of gold was worth eight times as much as a mark of silver.
[>]
—the cousin, Amor Old-Woman’s-Nose:
Karlsefni had many relatives in Skagafjord who could have provided him with horses. I chose Arnor not only because of his wonderful nickname, but because he lived closest to the harbor at Kolkuos. It is hard to tell if he was still active in 1010. In one saga, he is called the most important leader in the north in 981; another finds him still feuding in 1030. He does appear to have a close connection to Gudrid’s family, however. His son Asbjorn marries Ingunn, the daughter of Gudrid’s cousin Yngvild of Laugarbrekka. The descendants of Asbjorn and Ingunn—known as the Asbirnings—are the most powerful family in Skagafjord in the years 1180 to 1245. During this same time, Gudrid’s great-great-grandson Brand Saemundarson was bishop of Holar (1163 to 1201) and was possibly compiling Gudrid’s saga.
[>]
—the Vikings’ ell:
A modern dictionary will give a length of 45 inches for an ell, but the word has been used for various lengths over the centuries. The original ell, or as the Cleasby-Vigfusson
Icelandic-English Dictionary
calls it the “primitive ell,” was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. This ell, of about 18 inches or half a yard, was used in Iceland until the 1200s. The Cleasby-Vigfusson entry for
alin
reads: “About this year, by a law of bishop Paul, the ell was doubled into a
stika,
a stika being precisely = 2 ells = an English ell of that time. To prevent the use of bad measure, a just and lawful stika (yard) was marked on the walls of the churches.”
[>]
—Gudrid came to Rome:
The sagas do not say when Gudrid took her pilgrimage, only that it was shortly after Snorri married. My estimate that she left Iceland after 1025 and returned before 1030 is based on Snorri’s expected age at marriage and on the political situation in Europe, particularly in Norway and Rome. Snorri was born in approximately 1005. Olaf the Saint, who ruled Norway from 1014 to 1030, encouraged pilgrimages; in the period 1025 to 1027 he was courting the Icelanders and would likely have helped Gudrid sail from his kingdom to Denmark. Although King Knut of Denmark and England was trying to overthrow Olaf, not until 1028 did it become open war. Knut also encouraged pilgrimages, going so far as to negotiate reduced tolls in central Europe for pilgrims from his kingdoms. The next interlude of peace in Norway was not until the reign of Magnus the Good (1035 to 1047), when Gudrid would be fifty and Snorri thirty. In addition, I would hope that Gudrid saw Rome during Pope John XIX’s reign, from 1024 to 1032. The pope who ruled after him, from 1032 to 1045, was the infamous Benedict IX, considered “a disgrace to the Chair of Peter,” who sold the papacy so that he could marry. Between 1045 and 1049, seven popes (one is called an antipope) fought for the chair, as political factions within Europe struggled for control of the Church. If she had seen Rome while it was a battleground, I do not think the experience would have strengthened Gudrid’s faith or inspired her to become a nun. Finally, it is logical to assume that huge numbers of well-armed travelers would be taking the various Pilgrim Ways to Rome for the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1027, making that time the safest for a woman from Iceland to travel.