“Difficult paths, my lady?” he says.
She replies: “Only those onto which my love for you has driven me, and which have become more difficult than I can endure without losing my health and mind.”
“Strange paths, my lady,” says he, “yet stranger is your love for me, if it is true that you have been with child since Yule. The last time that I lay in your lap was the night before the head of my sworn brother Þorgeir appeared here by the homefield gate during haymaking. You would be near delivery now, if it was I who begot the burden you bear.”
“Day and night since I saw you playing on the ice,” says she, “and you came to us women and spoke to us, I have not lived a single moment without your image engraved in my mind. Every motion of yours has nourished me, and every minute when you were so distant that I was unable to hear the tread of your shoes was like black night to my heart. Yet the torment I suffered when you left me to go raiding with Þorgeir, and were confined in the prison of the evil woman who dwells in the Abyss, was far less painful than my sufferings over these past years, knowing you to be helplessly shackled in the fetters of my passion, bereft of your fate and your fame.”
He says: “Brynhildur Buðladóttir has stated that it is wiser not to put one’s trust in women, for they always break their vows, and no man shall ever be able to say truly whether a woman loves him wholeheartedly. All their oaths are vanity, hollow and pointless.”
She says: “We women dare least, since it is we who risk most, to love you heroes and skalds wholeheartedly, for when we least expect it you no longer sit at our knees, having gone off to far countries to win thrones for kings and accomplish exploits whose praise will be sung as long as the world lasts – and leaving us betrayed.”
Þormóður says: “It is a sign of my affection for you, my lady, that I turned aside from my path to glory and settled down to farming. Weighty ideals and words have been remote from me for some time, as well as exploits most worthy of verses. For I have loved you so dearly that I have striven not to involve myself in anything that might displease you. What is more, I felt that my regret would be unbearable if I were to forfeit, in any way, the blessings that you have given me, or to choose to pursue a different lot. You have also borne me daughters, which, I must admit, made me anxious at first, for I thought that if your love made me meek, theirs would make me weak. As it turned out, when they lay suckling at your breast and I watched their toes wiggle as they suckled, and later, when they smiled at me and reached out to me with their tiny hands and arms, dimples at every joint, it was as if, for a time, the power that conquers lands and laughs at its own death dozed in me – until I beheld the head of my sworn brother Þorgeir Hávarsson at my homefield gate.”
After conversing for quite a long time at daybreak, and saying all they feel they have to say, Þormóður and his wife fall silent and go to sleep.
Now the day draws nigh for Þórdís Kötludóttir to bear her child, and when the time comes, she delivers a boy, beautiful and fair of form, fiery-haired and squint-eyed. Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld comes to see the boy, and after looking him over for several long moments, greets him, bidding him welcome to rule lands, Iceland as well as Ireland, before reciting a verse on the greatest tidings in the world just then: that King Brian had fallen at Clontarf, yet had won the day. He laughs – and then leaves, without another word.
Women are appointed to tend to the boy.
Most sources say that that evening, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld went to bed like the rest of the household at Ögur. Yet after lying there for a time, until he felt that the others were asleep, their beds warm with the savor of restful dreams, he got up, slipped into his clothes, pulled on heavy shoes, tossed a thick cloak of homespun over his shoulders, then took his weapons and went out. Summer was drawing to a close and the night was dim, but the farmer knew all the stepping-stones over the farm’s creek, crossed them, and headed for the mountains.
In the morning, when folk woke at Ögur, their master was not in his bed, nor could he be found anywhere on the farm. The day passed without him returning, and no one knew what had become of him. More days passed, but nothing was heard of Farmer Þormóður. When they went to inspect his storehouse across the yard, however, they found Þorgeir Hávarsson’s skull on a shelf, polished with great art – it was the finest of treasures. Folk in Djúp were much amused by this head for a long time afterward, and a proper burial for it was constantly postponed. For three full generations, it remained part of the homestead at Ögur, but it was lost when all the buildings went up in flames toward the end of the days of the lawspeaker Markús Skeggjason.
39
GREENLAND, THEY say, boasted one of the most sparsely populated human communities in the world. Norsemen from Iceland inhabited that land for twelve generations until they all died out; the last survivor there, having breathed his last, fell flat on his face with no one else to bury him. This was nearly a century after the last ship traveled there.
When Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld came to Greenland in search of the slayers of his sworn brother Þorgeir Hávarsson, a colony of Norsemen had existed there for a generation. The land’s bounty then was much less depleted than later, and ships visited most years. The Norse colony was divided into what were called the Eastern and Western Settlements.
Sources state that when Þormóður reached the Eastern Settlement, he went to meet the greatest chieftain in the fjords there, a man called Þorgrímur Trölli – it being customary for newcomers to present themselves to the highest authority in the colony. The inhabitants there found it rather peculiar that a man of renown should have come from Iceland in the east, leaving behind his home and the bounty of Ísafjarðardjúp to step ashore at Brattahlíð like any other seaman, with no other belongings than the clothes on his back and his rather shoddy weapons, only in order to hunt down two paltry wretches who had drifted thither from Iceland a few months earlier – Butraldi Brúsason the Cow-sucker and his bosom pal Lúsoddi – but he declared that he would take no rest until he had killed those two scoundrels.
It is said that the Norsemen in Greenland were little given to fighting and killing, apart from when they undertook to slaughter the trolls that dwell near the boundaries of the world, and which they called skraelings. They felt that their own group was meager enough without killing each other, and they constantly feared being overwhelmed if the trolls decided to attack them in any large number.
Þorgrímur Trölli said that he was indeed the man best informed of people’s comings and goings in Greenland – with the exception of the bishop in Garðar – nor was it to be denied that two men from Iceland had turned up there. They were not particularly distinguished, but Chieftain Vermundur of Vatnsfjörður had provided them passage. “What we do not understand,” says he, “is that although these men appear quite unlikely to do us Greenlanders any excessive harm, they are hardly the type of champions or warriors that might justify a first-rate farmer to leave his homestead and happiness in Iceland to chase them all the way here.”
Þormóður replied: “Truly, I would have preferred to wreak vengeance on doughty men and heroes, or any man who might have struck down my brother in battle, and it is more tragic than words can express that measly rotters should have beheaded the warrior in his sleep. If, however, each and every man responded so leniently to his obligation to pursue justice for his brother, and upstanding men averted their eyes from enormities or injustice, unless these were perpetrated by respected, tax-paying landholders or other pillars of the community or prominent leaders, then malefactors and cowards would indeed hold their heads high in the North, leaving skalds without matter for their verses, and crofters and others of little means or backing without protection and security. Then rulers would be more like senseless beasts than men.”
Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld mingled little with the colonists in Greenland, and as a result, he received few invitations to the feasts of noteworthy men. Nor did he waste much effort on the summer tasks that are oblig
atory in Greenland, when men rise earlier and retire later to their beds, eking out hay with a scant supply of iron. Some folk there cut the grass with their knives or tear it out with their bare hands, while others keep nightly vigil over their small strips of grain, spreading homespun over the ears to protect them from frost. Still others drive fish into inlets and catch them in their hands, or batter seals with cudgels. When the work foremen asked Þormóður what tasks he would choose to do on Þorgrímur Trölli’s farm, he said that he had come to perform great exploits, not to bother about food. For this reason, he was greatly disliked by many of the inhabitants of the Eastern Settlement. The foremen informed him that it was the law in Greenland that he who refuses to work shall not eat, and that Greenland’s inhabitants were more used to providing themselves with sustenance than cultivating heroism or listening to doggerel. There was always a hint of animosity in people’s voices when they spoke to the skald, and few were willing to give him shelter.
Through relentless inquiries about Butraldi and Lúsoddi, Þormóður discovered that the Greenlanders had soon grown tired of these two derelicts, and that they had been unable to settle down anywhere – indeed, they had been fonder of begging door to door than working for their living. In the spring, the leading men had had them removed to the Western Settlement, where life is tougher and beggars succumb faster than in the east. Once he had learnt all he could about his most pressing concern – revenging Þorgeir – Þormóður would change the subject and ask people if they knew where in Greenland might be found a woman greater than all others, who had been exiled here by Vermundur of Vatnsfjörður, along with a shaggy slave from Norway.
Þormóður has described how he lived with penury and sickness through his first winter in the Eastern Settlement in Greenland, and came to know the hardships that folk are forced to endure most winters in that land. Always, at the close of winter, there was a dearth of provisions, greatly reducing people’s access to the necessities of life. The cold bit painfully, there was little fuel, milch cows went dry for lack of hay in March, and scores of sheep froze to death as they grazed on frozen ground. The cattle had to be lifted to their feet in the byres. Folk there had nothing to eat but old curds when they could not catch any fish, and their fishing gear was poor and meager. Moreover, the sea ice reached all the way to shore, and they lacked the necessary clothing and equipment for traversing it to fish or hunt. There was often such a shortage of meal for bread and porridge that folk picked and ate various seeds and grains on hills and heaths in order to replenish their strength. Their richest fare was old seal meat, but it is dreary stuff when eaten dry. These winter deprivations made most people lean and sick, and many dropped dead along with their livestock during particularly bad years. Yule feasts were not held in Greenland, but instead, fervent vows were made to the blessed Nicholas of Bari, the saint in whom the Greenlanders put most faith after Þórr was gone. The church at Garðar had been consecrated to Nicholas by order of the Lord Pope.
In Greenland, the ice hardly ever breaks sooner than expected, emptying from the fjords and allowing sea voyages to resume, yet eventually it does happen. At the coming of spring, Þormóður took passage with some men removing to the Western Settlement. Usually, it was a six-day journey by six-oared boat between the two settlements in Greenland. This time, however, the men encountered headwinds and were tossed about for much of the summer between the mainland and the islands, forcing them to sustain themselves by fishing and hunting, before reaching the Western Settlement when the haymaking was nearly finished. Here there were fewer folk, and life was even harder than in the east. Bare cliffs jutted out into the sea and long fjords cut into glaciers, leaving no soft ground for a blade of grass to grow. The colonists here were in far greater need of blessed Nicholas of Bari than in the Eastern Settlement, and churches had been built to him beneath the glaciers at the behest of the venerable Lord Pope. When Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld inquired about Butraldi and his companion Lúsoddi, he was told that these vagrants had gone and joined the hunters who traveled to Northern Seat each spring to hunt walruses and whales – the tusks of these great fish being among the most valuable articles of trade known to the world, next to gold and ivory.
Northern Seat was the name given by the Greenlanders to the regions lying closest to Ginnungagap, the home of the frost giants, where there is nothing but ice and darkness. To those parts of Northern Seat nearest the Greenland colonies, it was a sea journey of five days short of a month. Men went there in spring and returned in the fall, while some remained up north over the winter, accumulating wealth, and some even longer – yet such expeditions were often fraught with hardship and peril. Many never returned from Northern Seat. Venturing thither was thought fit only for daredevils and the desperately poor. For those, however, who did manage to return from Northern Seat with the fruits of their venture, their advancement was practically assured.
Tales were told that due north of Northern Seat were to be found the abodes of the troll-races and sorcerers that the Greenland colonists called skraelings, after the way they wrapped themselves in scrappy, tattery skins and furs the likes of which Norsemen were ashamed to wear. The Norsemen refused to consider skraelings as human and declared them unfit to live, calling it a mockery of human beings for monsters to take on their form, with eyes and noses and other human features. Each summer, this foul rabble, as the Greenlanders called the skraelings, migrated overland to the east, where they would pitch their tents on islands and skerries and hunt whales and other great fish. Whenever the skraelings were sighted on land, the Norse chieftains sent out a call to arms and sallied out to kill them. The Norsemen soon learned that the skraelings’ sorcery was so potent that they were never in mortal peril on sea or land. To them, every sort of weather was fair, and they were never more entertained than during the tempests that froze the life out of Norsemen or drowned them. These folk always had an abundance of food, in both good and bad years, and their bodies wobbled with fat. They feasted joyously while everything undertaken by the Norsemen – reputed to be wise, industrious husbandmen – went amiss, their colonies under constant threat of hunger and want, their crops failing and their livestock perishing, their children dying in the womb. When the sky darkened with piercing winds, heavy snowstorms, and harsh frosts, the troll-folk were settled snugly in their castles of ice, entertaining themselves by singing the Hymn of the Moon Man backwards and forwards, night and day, and not giving a hoot whether the storms went on for days or blew over. The Norsemen, on the other hand, found it particularly bizarre that this race had no weapons and no knowledge of the arts of manslaughter and murder, and let themselves be chopped up like brushwood and their dwellings be set on fire when their sorcery was powerless to save their lives.
When Þormóður heard the news that Þorgeir Hávarsson’s slayers had eluded him once more, he realized that it would now be more difficult than ever to catch them. Knowing that he no longer had a chance to go north that summer, he changed his tune and finally began asking whether anyone had heard of a woman bigger and stronger than any other in the Western Settlement, yet more supple and pleasant in games of love, and who had traveled from the Vestfirðir to Greenland at the order of Chieftain Vermundur. The Greenlanders replied that they were unaware of a woman as distinguished as the one Þormóður described, but that there was an old woman from Iceland dwelling with a crooked, frowning fellow as her servant on a headland near the seal breeding grounds, where she rendered whale blubber into oil that was to be paid as an annual tribute to the bishop of Garðar. This woman had a stranger name than most, for she was called Sigurfljóð, and her servant she called Master Loðinn, yet more often, Slave Loðinn. These two could not be said to be overflowing with beauty and grace.
For days and weeks, Þormóður continues to wander around Ánavík in the Western Settlement, despondent and helpless. As before, better-off men give him a rather chilly reception, if any at all. Worse still, he has been sick for the longest time, from lack of care and eat
ing execrable food. Very often he loses himself in thought, brooding on things hidden from others, and putting off going to the headland to visit the woman said to be living there. Every day he takes long walks by the sea, stopping to sit on rocks on the shore and watching the seals that bear their pups on the skerries, or trying to augur the future from seabirds’ cries. Every day he notices smoke ascending from the rocks at the far end of the headland across the fjord. Every day he walks a bit farther up the fjord than on the previous one, before turning back. One morning he sets out early, and reaches the fjord’s head near midday. There a crofter gives him goat’s milk to drink, and he sits on the hayfield wall for a long time, pondering over which side of the fjord he should walk down. In the end, he decides to walk down the fjord’s far shore, in the cold shadow of the glacier, and sets out toward the headland, more distractedly than determinedly. When he reaches the tip of the headland near evening, the sun is shining in his face. White smoke appears against the sky beneath the sun, and the wind carries the stench of whale oil to his nostrils. At that point, he resolves not to turn back.
A man is sitting among bare rocks by a stone hearth, with two kettles over the fire. In one he is rendering liver, and in the other, blubber, feeding the fire with seaweed and driftwood. This old fellow has not groomed his beard or hair for many years, but his eyes, keen as a hawk’s, can be seen gleaming beneath his extremely shaggy brows. A large, finely-made knife, smeared with blood and blubber, lies on one of the hearthstones.
Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld greets the man at the hearth, unfastens his own sword and lays it on the hearthstone nearest him, and then lies back on the rocks, winded from his walk. The man does not look up from his oil.
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