The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (7 page)

Sirri took some cheese and crackers.
“Tækni
is good, if it works,” she said, and winked at Gudny and me.

“If I could hook it up to your monitor...,” John said, and Sirri directed him to the computer in the outer office.

I’d seen this movie before. It showed how ground-penetrating radar had located and mapped in colorful 3-D a first-century Roman marketplace and the Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. I excused myself and went to find a window facing east. The weather was astonishingly mild for Iceland in March, and Pastor Gisli, who preached in the Glaumbaer church and worked the farm, had turned out his sheep. They were grazing on top of Gudrid’s house and had cropped the brown grass quite short, but I saw no vague, humped shape of a tumbled longhouse rising from the field. The ground looked quite flat. The sheep milled around the metal hay feeders and the red hay wagon parked in the center of the field, just where Gudrid’s hearth should be.

Sirri came up behind me—the
tækni
was still not working. “There are a lot of elves here,” she said, looking over my shoulder, “and trolls, too.” She was testing me. Coming out of the blue, that comment would have sounded strange to someone unfamiliar with the Icelanders’ love of old stories.

“People always are asking, Do we believe in them?” She laughed. “I give them the benefit of the doubt. The stories are good. A good saga will never die.”

Karlsefni and Gudrid sailed to Iceland the next summer, home to his farm at Reynines. But his mother would not have Gudrid in her house that first winter. In her opinion, Karlsefni had not married well. Though later on she would learn how remarkable a woman Gudrid was...

—The Saga of Eirik the Red

J
OHN STEINBERG’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL CREW DESCENDED
on the Glaumbaer hayfield in early July 2005 and spent most of a week trying to make the new
tækni
—ground-penetrating radar—work.

The gadget, when it had arrived, looked like a baby-jogger. A sealed plastic box, 18 inches square and fluorescent orange, protected the electronics, which send pulses of microwaves into the ground and pick up their echoes. The box was fixed between two bicycle wheels. A sturdy frame provided a handle and supported the data recorder, its computer screen shielded from the sun (or more likely, here, the rain) by a blue canopy. Dean Goodman, a California-based computer scientist who had written GPR-Slice, the best software to interpret ground-penetrating radar data, had come to Iceland to show off its capabilities. His was the movie of Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. He had mapped tombs and castles in Japan, and Native American ruins from Louisiana to Martha’s Vineyard. He looked jaunty in a Greek fisherman’s cap, pushing the gizmo up and down the hayfield as if he were mowing the lawn. Problem was, haymaking hadn’t started yet in northern Iceland. The GPR jogger could hardly roll through the knee-high grass. John duct-taped a two-by-four to the front, and yoked himself up like an ox to assist. The grass was wet, and in short order he and Dean looked as though they had waded a stream.

Worse, the data was lousy. The wheels made too much noise, each bump across the lumpy ground registering as an electronic burp. So they shucked the wheels, set the orange box into a white plastic tub, duct-taped on the two-by-four, and let John play ox while Brian Damiata walked behind, working the data recorder. Until the data recorder was in his hands Brian—who is as quietly critical as John is exuberant—had been invisible. Suddenly he was in control. Although Dean objected that doing things Brian’s way would mean tons more work for only a tiny improvement in data quality, Brian could not be dissuaded. He was here to get good data, and he would get it if he had to walk this field day and night. And since darkness never really falls in high summer in Iceland, he could—and did.

Over the next two weeks, Brian and John made several discoveries—each at the cost of a five- to ten-mile hike back and forth across a hayfield. For instance, water off the tall grass, pooling in the white tub, caused the microwaves to “float,” scattering sideways instead of penetrating the ground. John discarded the tub and gave the orange box a more aerodynamic profile by duct-taping on two rounded “fenders” he had carved from a green plastic watering can with his utility knife. Even without the wheels, the box bumped and bounced too much. John duct-taped a soccer-ball-sized rock to its top to add weight. The antenna wasn’t shielded. If Brian’s knee hit the cable that tethered him to the orange box, as he walked behind John carrying the data recorder, the microwave receiver saw it as data. When the battery was changed the data recorder was prone to reprogramming itself to its standard settings—which were completely wrong for Iceland’s wet soils. To enter the data manually, Brian had to click “Enter” at every meter mark. But the buttons on the recorder were close together, and instead of “Enter,” his finger might hit “Stop.” Then they had to start the line over.

And how do you walk in a straight line for a hundred meters, the length of a football field? First we marked opposite sides of the field with colored plastic survey flags spaced a meter apart. Then we advanced a hundred-meter measuring tape from flag to flag, meter by meter across the field, as a guideline. On calm days, after the hay was cut, two of us—one on each end of the tape—could handle it and have ample time to count the horses grazing along the river or the round bales accumulating in the neighbors’ hayfields, to admire the dramatic sky over the glacier-carved mountains, or to watch a pair of swans drive two interlopers away from their nest by the brook. On the day the wind hit gale force, it took six of us, staggered along the guideline, to pull the tape out taut and keep it more-or-less straight, holding it down with our toes.

By the end of the first week, John decided the crew needed an excursion. After supper we would go to Grettir’s Bath, a hot spring beside the ocean a half-hour’s drive north, walled up for bathing since saga times. The name honored Grettir the Strong, a saga character renowned for his superhuman strength and his fear of the dark, a killer and a troublemaker who lived as an outlaw for nearly twenty years, hunted from place to place until he came to Drangey, a grass-topped rock in the middle of the inlet that gave the valley of Skagafjord (“Bay of the Headlands”) its name. Tall, lone, and visible for hundreds of miles, this island had been a crucial resource for the local farmers in Viking days. They trapped seabirds and gathered eggs on its sheer cliffs, and hoisted sheep to its top to graze the rich grass there. When Grettir hauled up the rope ladder and declared the island his own, he was in essence raiding their pantry. All the farmers along the fjord could see the smoke of his cooking fire and know Grettir was feasting on
their
meat.

The story of Grettir’s Bath begins on a night when the outlaw’s fire went out. Grettir, who was built like a bull seal, determined to swim to the mainland to fetch live coals. The distance is four miles. The temperature of the sea is a few degrees above freezing. (Lately it’s become fashionable for extreme swimmers, in wet suits and Vaseline, to try to match Grettir’s feat; Sirri at Glaumbaer has lost track of how many have tried it, but she assured me that none had drowned.)

John Steinberg, who wanted his crew to get the full Icelandic experience from their visit to the hot spring, opened a translation of
Grettir's Saga
and began reading:

He swam strongly, and made Reykjanes by sunset. He walked up to the farm at Reykir and took a bath, for he was feeling very cold. He basked in the warm pool for a good part of the night, and then he went into the hall. It was very hot there, for a fire had been burning earlier, and the room had not cooled off. Grettir was exhausted and fell fast asleep; he lay there until the following day.

Late in the morning the household got up, and the first people to go into the room were two women, a maidservant and the farmer’s daughter. Grettir was asleep, and his cover had rolled off down to the floor. The women saw and recognized who he was. The maidservant said, “What do you know, dear, here is Grettir Asmundarson, and lying there stark naked. He is certainly big enough in the chest, but it seems to me very odd how small he is farther down. That part of him isn’t up to the rest of him.”

The farmer's daughter said, “Why do you keep running off at the mouth like that, you silly little fool? Keep quiet!”

“I can’t keep quiet about this, dear,” said the maid, “since I never would have believed it, even if someone had told me.”

She kept going over and peeping at him, and then running back to the farmer’s daughter and bursting out laughing. Grettir heard what she was saying, and when she ran across the room again he seized her....

The saga proceeds with a pair of dirty poems that Grettir composed on the spur of the moment—puns on swords being prominent—and a cheerful rape scene that had the male scientists howling with laughter while the women snickered and looked at each other askance. When things quieted down, someone asked, Was this scene typical of the sagas?

Love scenes there are in plenty—enough that historian Jenny Jochens needed a dozen pages of her book,
Women in Old Norse Society
, to explain how a woman became pregnant. First the man “placed her on his lap ... and talked with her so all could see it,” talk that was visible as kisses and caresses. Then he might stretch out with his head in her lap and let her pick lice out of his hair. (Another sure sign of love is a woman offering to sew a man’s wide shirtsleeves tight around his wrists, a daily task before buttons became common.) After a bit he might take her by the hand and lead her to a more private spot; an illegitimate baby was variously called a “forest child,” a “corner child,” and a “cowbarn child.” There, says Jochens, the Vikings assumed the missionary position, the man “romping on” the woman’s belly. For married couples such scenes take place in the crowded
skáli,
the main room of the longhouse, where the whole household slept on the wide benches that lined the walls on either side of the longfire and could listen in while spouses who were at odds “settled the matter between them as though nothing has happened.” High-class couples like Gudrid and Karlsefni might have plank walls and a door separating their sleeping space from that of their farmhands and family, but for most couples, the only privacy in a longhouse was provided by the dark.

What is striking about the love scenes in the sagas is how often sex is proposed by the woman—and not exclusively to her husband. Grettir’s rape scene—the only one I can remember in the forty major sagas—is so out of the norm that a later poem lampoons him by claiming, in some four hundred lines, that he had sex not only with girls, widows, and “everyone’s wives,” but with farmers’ sons, deacons, courtiers, abbots, abbesses, cows, and calves. In fact, the “maiden in distress” is notably missing in the Icelandic sagas. Instead we meet, as scholar Carol Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, puts it, “women who prosecute their lives in general, and their sex lives in particular, with a kind of aggressive authority unexpected in a woman and unparalleled in any other European literature.”

Four or five years before Gudrid was born, says one saga, there lived on the north side of Snow Mountain’s Glacier two middle-aged widows who were competing for the favors of the same young man. This fellow, Gunnlaug, had “a lust for learning.” From his father’s farm under the glacier, he would ride to visit Geirrid at Mavahlid, the seaside estate she shared with her grown son and his wife. Halfway, he would stop at the hut of the second widow, Katla, to pick up his friend, her son Odd. On the way home, Katla always invited Gunnlaug to stay the night, but he always declined.

“So,” said Katla one day, “you’re off to Mavahlid again to pat the old hag on the belly.”

Gunnlaug laughed. “Are you so young that you can make fun of Geirrid’s age?”

“That may be so, but she’s not the only woman around here who knows a thing or two.”

That night, as Gunnlaug was getting ready to leave Mavahlid, Geirrid said, “There are too many sea spirits on the loose tonight, and you have an unlucky look about you. You should stay the night with me.”

Gunnlaug said no thanks, and he and Odd rode off.

Katla had already gone to bed when they reached her hut. “Ask Gunnlaug to stay tonight,” she said, as her son Odd came inside.

“He insists on going home, Mother,” said Odd.

“Then let him get what’s coming to him.”

Late that night, Gunnlaug’s father found him lying outside the family house, unconscious. He was scratched all over, the flesh ripped to the bone. People said he had been “witch-ridden.”

In the same saga, we meet Gunnlaug’s stepmother, Thurid, who was just as lusty as the two old witches. Gunnlaug disappears from the story after this night (although we’re told his wounds did heal), and his father was killed quarreling with the people of Mavahlid, leaving behind a very young widow. Thurid quickly got married again, at the insistence of her brother Snorri, the chieftain of Helgafell. But her fat merchant husband soon had complaints. A young buck named Bjorn, who lived on the south side of the glacier, had begun coming by unusually often, and “people said he and Thurid were fooling around.” Anyone who has read Jenny Jochens’s description of sex in the Viking Age would agree. Thurid and Bjorn sat close together and “talked,” while Thurid’s husband made it a practice to interrupt his farmwork frequently to come inside and check on them.

Once, though, he left them alone all day.

“Take care on your way home, Bjorn,” Thurid warned. “I think my husband means to put a stop to your visits. He’s probably lying in wait for you on the path, and I don’t think he intends to fight fair.”

Bjorn was indeed ambushed on his way through the mountains. Outnumbered five to one, he managed to kill two of his attackers, and the others fled. He limped home, badly wounded, and his father patched him up. At the next assembly, Bjorn was banished from Iceland for three years for killing the two men. He joined the most famous band of Vikings, the Jomsvikings, and made a name for himself plundering the rim of the Baltic Sea.

Meanwhile, Thurid gave birth to a son.

When Bjorn returned from his Viking voyage, he saw mother and son at a fair and remarked to a friend of his, “The boy looks exactly like me. Too bad he doesn’t know who his father is.”

“Stay away from her,” said his friend. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I know it is. But my heart says otherwise.”

Thurid apparently agreed, for she and Bjorn picked up where they’d left off. And although her husband didn’t like it a bit, the saga says, he couldn’t do much about it, since Bjorn had such a reputation now as a fighter.

Another woman who found herself married to the wrong man is Oddny Eykindill (her nickname means “Island-Candle,” as in “Light of the Land”). Oddny’s childhood sweetheart is also named Bjorn. He and Oddny were betrothed, but like most Icelandic boys in the Viking Age, Bjorn wanted to go off to Norway first to make a name for himself. She agreed to wait three years for him—four if he sent word.

At eighteen, Bjorn took Norway by storm. Another Icelander at the king’s court, a thirty-three-year-old poet named Thord, became jealous. He buddied up to Bjorn, got him drunk, and heard all about Oddny Island-Candle. That summer Thord sailed home and rode to see Oddny. He delivered a message and a gold ring from Bjorn, then added—falsely—that Bjorn thought she should marry Thord if Bjorn didn’t come home. The next year, word came that Bjorn was wounded in a duel; Thord put it about that Bjorn was dead. Oddny insisted on waiting the full four years, but Bjorn didn’t come home. By the time he had recovered enough to travel, the last ship of the year had sailed. When he heard, later, that Oddny had married Thord, he decided not to go home at all.