Wayward Heroes

by Halldor Laxness

  The Inuit do not live separately, but in hunting bands. These hunting bands travel south to the same hunting and fishing grounds each spring, pitching their tents in temporary camps and seldom lingering long in any one place, before returning north at the close of summer.

  The Norsemen made a point of attacking the Inuit wherever they found them, whether in groups of whose movements they had gotten news, or as isolated individuals. If they came across their huts or skin tents on an island or headland, they set these abodes aflame or destroyed them some other way and slaughtered every person they found. Due to the Norsemen’s having fair skin, colorless hair, and bright eyes, the Inuits lengthened the names they had given them to white or wan killermen, or pale mankillers.

  It so happened that after a group of Norsemen reduced one of the Inuit hunting camps to cold embers, killing anyone who had not hidden in clefts in the rocks, and wrecking their gear as best they could, they were hit by a fierce storm, so that their boat capsized off a headland – something that would never happen to the Inuit. As the Norsemen in Greenland were unable to swim, and thereby to save their lives, all on board perished except one man who had come from Iceland – the skald Þormóður Bessason. He happened to be a good swimmer, and managed to stay afloat until a wave washed him onto a bank of seaweed, where he had no other recourse but to shout for help. A short time later, the storm abated. The remainder of the hunting band that the Norsemen had raided now fled northward with some of their dogs to safer haunts, using boats of theirs the Norsemen had overlooked when they burned the camp. As the women rowed by the headland, they heard shouting from the bank of seaweed. There the Inuits found Skald Þormóður more dead than alive, freezing cold, drenched, and bedraggled, with his good leg now broken too. Since the Inuits have no sense of retribution, they rescued their enemy, Skald Þormóður, from death and set his broken leg, singing all the while. They gave him warm seal’s blood to drink, and to eat, fermented seabird, still feathered, and had their dogs sleep curled up against him. A number of corpses had been washed onto the seaweed – Þormóður’s fellows – so the Inuits put seal-blubber in their mouths and carried the bodies up onto the rocks. Although the kind-heartedness of these people outweighed their wisdom or learning, they were well aware of the danger they faced, having a pale mankiller in the midst of men, and despite his being sick and spent, they were fairly certain that as soon as he recovered, he would leap up and kill them. Every place that they stopped for the night, they had him lie down with the dogs, and those in charge of these animals watched over him. When night fell, however, the dogs barked noisily, and some bit fiercely – hardly pleasant company in those cheerless places. Þormóður realized that he had little choice but to go along with his hosts no matter how far astray they led him, rather than be left behind, alone, a helpless man more dead than alive in the middle of a wasteland. Summer was drawing to a close. The Inuits broke camp, loading all their belongings onto the women’s boats, including newborn infants and dogs, while any man capable of doing so paddled his own kayak. Quite often, the men rolled their kayaks over as a gesture of affection for the women, keeping them keel-up for long spells in a display of gallantry.

  Þormóður was astonished at the sluggish pace of these people on their long journey. They paid no heed to the hours, but just trundled along, like folk that sometimes appear in dreams: no one was in a hurry; nothing spurred them on. Þormóður’s spirit grew numb watching people drift along without any urgency, as if playing children’s games rather than attending to their needs. It was often near evening when they finally launched their boats and started out. They did, however, inch their way farther northward each day, putting ever more distance between themselves and the Norsemen. Yet their day’s navigation often amounted to no more than paddling round the tip of a headland to the next fjord – that was far enough – where the women would paddle to land and unload their belongings, along with their children, dogs, and Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld. They would then drag their boats ashore, pitch their tents, and prepare and eat their supper with great fuss, before lying down to sleep for the night. Or they would paddle up a fjord, close to shore, aiming for its head, but then land and settle down for the night after only a short distance. They always hugged the coastline, never venturing out into straits between headlands; and sailing was unknown to them. Upon reaching the head of a fjord after several days’ paddling, they would start paddling down the shore on the other side. If there was a promise of good prey, they would remain encamped for several days. At times they would drag or carry all their boats and all their belongings over an isthmus behind a peak to the next fjord. Women would pitch the tents in the camps, using their paddles as tent poles, while some of the men would go hunting foxes and hares in the surrounding area, or else try to track down musk-oxen; others would keep watch for sea-dwelling creatures: seals, whales, walruses, and bears. They stored caches of food in various places, and always left behind whale meat and seal meat in their camps as provisions for when they returned, or for other hunting bands, but took tusks and hides with them, as well as a large amount of blubber. Whenever they crossed paths with other hunting bands, they celebrated merrily, staying together for several days, boiling seal-blubber, feasting, and singing “ay” and “ee.”

  The news that one group that had gone south and returned with Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld among their belongings aroused a great deal of curiosity in the hunting bands. Most men had never set eyes on a pale mankiller. Some asked what creature it was, and why it was being kept with the dogs. The others explained that Skald Þormóður belonged to a race of colorless Inuit who acknowledge no virtue but murder, and that pale killermen had come to their fishing grounds in the south and slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on, among them several men exceptionally skilled at driving their dogs and women expert at rendering blubber. All now praised their great fortune that the Moon Man and Mother of Sea Creatures had spared them from acquaintance with these pallid folk, apart from what their wise men might have related to them in song.

  Þormóður now lay by night with the dogs, here and there near the northern boundary of the world, where death dwells. His life was quite dismal, and the killers of the warrior Þorgeir Hávarsson were as far away from his weapons as ever. Again and again, his heart ached with a single longing: to survive until the day, which now seemed so far away, when he could stand before the mighty king whom Þorgeir had served and who now ruled the kingdom of Norway so honorably. Even if the vengeance that would make him worthy of coming before the king eluded him, he still yearned to extol such a king in verses that men would recall throughout the ages. And although he might never wreak his revenge, the skald hoped that in the eyes of the king, his journeying so far and so long to hunt down the warrior’s slayers might be sufficient redress for this failure.

  He tried to shut his ears to the relentless barking of the dogs during the night by exalting King Olaf in his mind, lauding him for his champions, and envisioning in his mind’s eye the moment when he, a skald, would arrive at the king’s hall and enter and bow to his lord. As he pondered these things, time passed and his broken leg healed, yet it was crooked and hardly fit for walking on, while the other one had been lame ever since rocks rained down on him on the mountainside at Ögur.

  After traveling northeastward for several weeks, the hunting band came to confined regions where glaciers descended to the sea between bare mountaintops. The weather worsened considerably and the group was often forced to wait for days, hindered by snowstorms, yet eventually they reached their home and dwellings: stone huts on promontories, some dome-shaped, others formed of whalebones with hides stretched over them. Awaiting them here were the stay-at-homes: old folk and children and a swarm of dogs. When they arrived, they hauled their boats ashore, greased them carefully and hung them on tall frames to keep the dogs from gnawing on them. Then they worked on patching up their dwellings and tents and sleds and other gear for the winter. It is the Inuits’ custom in winter, whe
n the weather allows, to drive their dogs in the moonlight over ice-covered fjords, far out to sea, to hunt seals – and here more than elsewhere, they feasted on seal and walrus. Some of them worked on covering the huts with seaweed, then with snow, while others hung their insides with hides and arranged cooking utensils and oil lamps in them, for there was no lack of fuel in blubber and oil. In that land the moon shines in winter, but not the sun, which is why the Inuits honor the Moon Man above all. Little by little, the light of the sun vanished, until finally, folk could see only the faint outline of their hands before their faces for an hour at midday. By that time, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld had earned the dogs’ trust, and those that had been fiercest toward him at first no longer seemed likely to tear him apart. At the same time, his esteem rose among the men. They made him foremost among those creatures, just one rank below the dogs’ respected keepers. They dressed him in good tunics and hose of sealskin and gave him hides to sleep on, and housed him in a shed reserved for pregnant bitches and sick old dogs that were so smart and faithful that no one had the heart to kill them. Snow shelters were built for healthy, vigorous dogs, or else they were left outside to be snowed over. The creatures were tied together with ropes of seaweed, these being the only ropes that they did not gnaw off. After snowstorms lasting several days, folk would have to dig their dogs out of the snow to feed them. The noble skald Þormóður, however, found his life tedious in the extreme, hearing nothing but the whine of the wind and the howling of the dogs and hardly ever seeing any daylight. He felt that he would have died and descended to Niflheimur had he not kept the glorious image of King Olaf Haraldsson, Þorgeir’s lord and that of both the sworn brothers, steadily in his mind’s eye, as well as his hope and dream of someday truly becoming one of the king’s men.

  42

  THUS DOES Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld spend his days in this place, plentifully fed with seal-blubber and blood and fermented seabird, which the Inuit eat with its feathers still on, and ptarmigan with its crop, but for quite some time he has little interaction with men – the Inuit being afraid that if he gets too close he will kill them, after the manner of his people. Despite the abundance of food, however, he is malnourished, and often ill. It so happens that one morning, in one of Greenland’s frequent cold winds, he wakes in the dog enclosure to find a father and his daughter sitting near his bed. They begin singing “ay” and “ee” and drumming. They have come to see how he is getting on, and offer him warm seal’s liver, which they consider a wonderful delicacy. Once this father and daughter have risked their lives singing for this mankiller and serving him these tidbits, and he has listened to their song and eaten the dainties, the attitude of the entire hunting band toward its guest changes significantly, and many that had paid him no more heed than a gust of wind cut slices of their food for him as a sign of goodwill, and even deign to look at him. In the evening he is brought to a hut shared by seven families – no less than thirty people dwell in it, night and day. There to greet him is the girl who had woken him that morning with delicacies and song. She welcomes him warmly and bids him sit and enjoy himself with the others. This girl is named Luka. They pass the evening with no small measure of singing and drumming. It appears as if the hunting band has forgotten the damage and injury done them previously by the pale man’s people, and when folk retire to their beds, Þormóður is not sent out to sleep with the dogs, but instead invited to snuggle into a wondrous skin sleeping bag, sewn shut and adorned with variously colored skin beads. Next, the maid Luka comes and slips into the bag with him. In Greenland, pretty young girls often use urine for washing their hair and other ablutions, and rub themselves thoroughly with unguents that the Norsemen might liken to whale oil. For now, however, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld hardly moves a muscle.

  The next evening, when the girl crawls into his sleeping bag again, he turns away without a word, and on the third evening, he spreads himself so wide that she has no room to slip in beside him. She goes and sits by the wall and cries, greatly astounding Þormóður. Other women come and try to comfort her, while the elders in charge of the drumming start singing “ay” and “ee” over and over, dramatically rocking forward and back, while some bow their heads to their knees as they sing. Their song’s subject is how a pale mankiller refuses the company of a human woman in his bed – how a pompous guest disdains a hunting band abounding in blubber. Bitter sorrow has come to afflict good men: “Ai-a, are you not filled with shame, when the gills quiver on a stranded sea trout that swam hale of late in the eddies, beating its tail, a-i-a, a-i-a?” All of those who had gone to sleep now rise from their beds and join in this song, with bitter and piteous wails. Finally, several men step forward and offer to lend the pale man their unbetrothed daughters for his nighttime company, if he prefers them to this one, and still others are willing to lend him their wives if they will consent, while Luka can have whatever man she chooses. When Þormóður glances over the other women, feeling fairly certain that they will not smell any different than the maid Luka and that he who will not share his bed with a woman in a hunting band will be sent off to the dogs and wake flea-bitten, he realizes that his best option is to accept his public obligations, and says, in the end, that the maid Luka should indeed come sleep with him in the sleeping bag that she herself had softened with her own teeth and adorned with precious beads. He admits that a girl with such an outstanding sleeping bag must indeed hold a high place in the hunting party. These declarations of his are rejoiced at by everyone there, and one and all exuberantly praise the man who made the moon his hunting camp, while some extol the one-handed Mother of Sea Creatures. The girl returns from the wall where she has been weeping, at first a bit bashful, wiping off tears with the back of her hand, thankful that he refused the offer of other women, yet still racked by sobs. Þormóður is moved by this girl who values her own happiness to the point of tears, in contrast to the dry-eyed women from whom he had parted, the most eminent in the North, who had tossed his life-egg between them like a toy at Hornbjarg. He says that it makes little difference what people call fragrance – what to one race is fragrance, is to another stench. “This girl shall indeed be my wife.”

  And time passes.

  Upon coming from the Norse settlements to this remote place, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld was astonished to discover such a great discrepancy: whereas in the settlements, men were sorely oppressed by crop failures, hunger, and distress, deadly illness, and loss of livestock, here, north of the very limits of human life, there was a glut of amenities: tools and equipment, dwellings and boats, clothing and shoes, bountiful food, and an endless supply of fuel for lamps and fires. The Norsemen in the south had had little to sing about, and their skalds were dull and inept, while here, all the songs were long, and everyone was a skald. When one person started singing a song, the entire hunting band joined in and did not stop until the next morning. In the Western Settlement, the Norsemen were in constant peril from the weather both at sea and on land, but here in the north, the cruel winters, with their never-ending blizzards and deadly frosts, flung no such javelins at people. The Inuits sat round their soapstone kettles, never more content than when their dwellings were completely snowed over, leaving not a trace of them on the snowfields beneath the helm of the moon, apart from when doughty men were forced now and then to dig their way up through the roofs to make holes for the smoke. Their lamps burned brightly night and day, and the dwellings of the Inuits were always so warm beneath the snowbanks that they all spent their days naked, apart from little strips of hide around their loins. Each of them had his own chores: some did the cooking and cleaning, some carved stone and made vessels, while others fashioned harpoons and other spears from bone, though they did not use sharp-edged iron tools to craft these things – instead, they scraped bone with harder bone. To fasten different pieces together, they had thongs instead of nails. Some softened skins for clothing with mallets and scrapers, or with their teeth, while women sewed bird skins into undergarments, using whale si
new for thread and hares’ teeth for needles. Moreover, there were men who worked steadily at cold-hammering native iron – but no one in this place coveted renown in arms or glory as a lord of men. Þormóður mingled freely with these people, who were more peaceable and concordant than any other race – so much so that there was no conflict between them, and each and every one was a pillar of support for his neighbor, and nothing caused apprehension but a man who took no companion. They lived happily and prosperously in a land where Norsemen had experienced nothing but hardship and death, and had mastered every skill needed in that land to partake of and rejoice in the bounties of life. They had been granted all the good fortune that flows from blubber, which is far more trustworthy and benevolent than anything gold can give. This peculiar guest of theirs, however, actually thought little about all this, when he finally found himself living among people who had become, in their own country, true creators of their own good fortune. At times, when Þormóður wished to try his hand at a particular task, he found he had no knack for any of the tools or equipment used by these people in their crafts and other arts, despite his having been considered masterful in all such things back in the days when he dwelled in Djúp. He was as good at learning their language as a dog is at distinguishing the sounds of human speech. When these people gathered in a circle to sing their songs, with everyone joining in, he, the skald, shut his ears to their song as tightly as he could. The subjects of the songs of these people, who had never accomplished a deed of renown as far as anyone knew, he found quite trivial, and to him, it was simply idiotic that they had never once given a thought to the honor to be gained in declaring allegiance to a magnificent emperor or king or other lord who had covered himself in glory by means of victorious battles or grand conquests, or by maintaining a retinue of champions and skalds. It was bewildering to him how this Greenlandic rabble completely lacked any eminent men who were capable of taking advantage of those beneath them. He himself stated that when he was living among those people, his mind returned to the same thought, night and day – that it was an utter disgrace that freeborn heroes and skalds, as well as their kings, should lack the vigor necessary to wipe out such a stupid and loathsome race.