by Tim Severin
Thus my mother came to Frodriver under her own terms - as a working house guest, which was nothing unusual as everyone on an Icelandic farm is expected to help with the chores. Even Thurid would put off her fine clothes and pick up a hay rake with the rest of the labourers or go to the byres to milk the cattle, though this was more normally the work of thrallwomen and the wives of the poorer farmers, who hired out their labour. However, my mother was not expected to sleep in the main hall, where the majority of the farm workers settle down for the night among the bales of straw which serve as seats by day. My mother requested, and was given, a corner of the inner room, adjacent to the bedchamber where Thurid and her husband slept. When Thorgunna unpacked her large chest next day, Thurid, who had thought my mother wanted her own quiet corner so she could be alone with her baby, understood the real reason. My mother brought out from their wrappings a splendid pair of English-made sheets of linen, delicately embroidered with blue flowers, and matching pillow covers, also a magnificent quilt and a fine coverlet. She then asked Thurid if the farm carpenter could fashion a special bed with a high frame around it. When this was done Thorgunna produced a set of embroidered hangings to surround the bed, and even — wonders of wonders — a canopy to erect over the bed itself. A four-poster bed arrayed like this was something that Thurid had never seen before, and she was overwhelmed. She could not stop herself from asking my mother if perhaps, possibly, she would consider selling these magnificent furnishings. Once again my mother refused, this time even more bluntly, telling her hostess that she did not intend to sleep on straw. It was the last time Thurid ever asked Thorgunna to sell her anything, and Thurid had to be content, when Thorgunna was out working in the fields, with taking her visitors to give them surreptitious glances at these wonderful furnishings.
My mother, as I have indicated, had a predatory attitude towards the opposite sex. It was the story of Birsay all over again, or almost. At Frodriver she rapidly took a fancy to a much younger man, scarcely more than a boy. He was Kjartan, the son of one of the lesser farmers working for Thurid. Fourteen years old, he was physically well developed, particularly between the legs, and the lad was so embarrassed by Thorgunna's frequent advances that he would flee whenever she came close to him. In fact the neighbours spent a great deal of time speculating whether my mother had managed to seduce him, and they had a lot of fun chuckling over their comparisons of Thurid with her lover Bjorn, and Thorgunna in chase of young Kjartan. Perhaps because of their shared enthusiasm for sexual adventures, Thurid and Thorgunna eventually got along quite well. Certainly Thurid had no reason to complain of my mother's contribution to the farm's work. In the nearly two years that Thorgunna stayed at the Skattkaupandi farm, she regularly took her turn at the great loom at one end of the house where the women endlessly wove long strips of wadmal, the narrow woollen cloth which serves the Icelanders as everything from clothing to saddle blankets and the raw material for ships' sails when the strips are sewn side by side.
Thorgunna also pulled her weight — which was considerable — in the outside work, particularly when it came to haymaking. This is the crucial time in the Icelandic farming year, when the grass must be cut and turned and gathered and stacked for winter fodder for the animals, who will shortly be brought back from the outlying pastures where they have been spending the summer. My mother even had the carpenter make her own hay rake. It was longer, heavier and wider than most, and she would not let anyone else touch it.
Then came the day - it was late in heyannir, the haymaking season which occurs at the end of August in the second year of Thorgunna's stay — which the Frodriver people will never forget. The day was ideal for drying - hot with a light breeze. Thorodd mobilised the entire household, except for a few herders who were away looking after the sheep and cattle in the high pasture, to be out in the home meadow turning the hay. They were widely scattered, when just before noon the sky began to cloud over rapidly. It was a sinister sort of cloud — dark and ominous and heavy with rain. This cloud spread rapidly from the north-east and people began to glance up at it nervously, hoping that it would hold off and not spoil the haymaking. The cloud deepened and darkened until it was almost like night, and it was obvious that there would soon be a torrential downpour. Thorodd instructed the haymakers to stack their sections of hay to protect them from the rain, and was puzzled when Thorgunna ignored him. She seemed to be in a trance.
Then the rain started to pelt down and there was little point in staying outside, so Thorodd called in the workers for their midday break, to eat coarse bread and cheese in the main house. But Thorgunna again ignored Thorodd's instructions, nor did she pay any attention to the other workers as they trudged past her and back toward the farm. She kept on working, turning the hay with the wide slow powerful sweeps of her special rake. Thorodd called again, but it was as if Thorgunna was deaf. She kept working even as the rainstorm swept in, and everyone ran for shelter. It was a most unusual rainstorm. It fell on Frodriver, and only on Frodriver. All the other farms escaped the downpour and their hay was saved. But the Skattkaupandi farm was saturated. That in itself is not so strange. Any farmer has seen the same phenomenon when a summer cloudburst releases a torrent of rain which seems to drop vertically and strike just one small area. Then suddenly the rain ceases, the sun comes out and the ground begins to steam with the heat. But what was startling about the rainstorm at Frodriver was that it was not rain which fell from the cloud, but blood.
I know that sounds absurd. Yet it is no more fantastic than the contention that I have heard from apparently wise and learned men that fire and brimstone will pour from the sky in the great apocalypse. Certainly the people of Frodriver and the locality swear that the drops which hurtled from the sky were not rain, but dark red blood. It stained red the cut hay, it left pools of blood in the dips and hollows, and it drenched Thorgunna in blood. When she returned to the farmhouse, still as if in a daze and not saying a word, her clothes were saturated. When the garments were squeezed, blood ran out of them.
Thorodd asked her what was meant by the thunderstorm. Was it an omen? If so, of what? Thorgunna was slow in recovering from her confused state and did not reply. It seemed to Thorodd that she had been absent from her physical body and was not yet fully returned to it, and that something otherworldly was involved. His opinion was confirmed when the entire haymaking team went back into the field. The sun had re-emerged and the cut hay was steaming in the heat. All except one patch. It was the area where Thorgunna had been working. Here the hay still lay sodden, a dark blotch on the hillside, and though Thorgunna went back to work, turning the hay steadily, the workers noticed that the hay never dried out. It clung flat and damp on the ground, gave off a rank smell and the heavy handle of Thorgunna's hay rake stayed wet.
That evening Thorodd repeated his question. 'Was that strange thunderstorm an omen, Thorgunna?' he asked.
'Yes,' my mother replied. 'It was an omen for one of us.' 'Who is that?' asked Thorodd.
'For me,' came Thorgunna's calm reply. 'I expect I will shortly be leaving you.'
She went off to her splendid bed, walking stiffly as though her muscles were aching. In the morning she did not appear at breakfast to join the other workers before they returned to the haymaking, and Thorodd went to see her. He coughed discreetly outside the hanging drapes of the four-poster bed until Thorgunna called on him to enter. Immediately he noted that she was sweating heavily and her pillows were drenched. He began to make a few mumbled enquiries as to how she felt, but Thorgunna in her usual brusque fashion interrupted him.
'Please pay attention,' she said. 'I am not long for this world, and you are the only person around here who has the sense to carry out my last wishes. If you fail to do so, then you and your household will suffer.' Her voice was throaty and she was clearly finding it an effort to speak. 'When I die, as I soon will, you are to arrange for me to be buried at Skalhot, not here on this out-of-the-way farm. One day Skalhot will achieve renown. Just as important, I want you
to burn all my bedding; I repeat, all of it.'
Thorodd must have looked puzzled, for Thorgunna went on, 'I know that your wife would love to get her hands on it. She has been hankering after the sheets and pillows, and all the rest of it from the very first day I got here. But I repeat: burn all of it. Thurid can have my scarlet cloak - that too she has been coveting since I first arrived and it ought to keep her happy. As for the rest of my possessions you can sell off my clothes to those who want them, deduct my burial costs from the money, and give the rest of the money to the church, including this gold ring,' and she removed the gold ring which she had been wearing since the day she arrived and handed it to Thorodd.
A few days later she died. One of the house women drew back the curtain and found her sitting up in bed, her jaw hanging slack. It took three strong men to lift her corpse and carry it out to the shed, where she was wrapped in a shroud of unstitched linen, and the same carpenter who had made her special bed nailed together a coffin large enough to contain her body.
Thorodd genuinely tried to carry out Thorgunna's last wishes. He had the bed frame knocked apart, and the pieces and the mattress and all the furnishings carried out to the yard. The carpenter took an axe to the bed frame and its four posts and made kindling, and the bonfire was ready. At that point Thurid intervened. She told her husband that it was a wanton waste to destroy such beautiful items, which could never be replaced. There would never be another chance to acquire such exotic goods. Thorodd reminded her of Thorgunna's express last wishes, but Thurid sulked, then threw her arms around him and wheedled. Eventually the poor man compromised. The eiderdown and pillows and the coverlet would be thrown on the flames; she could keep the rest.
Thurid did not lose a second in seizing the sheets and hangings and the embroidered canopy, and rushed them into the house. When she came back out, Thorodd had already left the yard and was walking away across the fields, so Thurid darted over to the fire and managed to salvage the coverlet before it was scorched, though it was some time before she dared to produce it before her husband.
Up to this point there seems to be an explanation for what happened in the events leading up to my mother's sudden death, including the red rain: she had caught a bad chill when she stayed out in the thunderstorm, then failed to change into dry clothes, and the chill developed into a mortal fever. Her insistence that her bedding was burned may have been because she feared that she had caught some sort of a plague and — if she had the medical knowledge that I was later to find among the priests and brithemain in Ireland — it was normal practice to burn the bedclothes of the deceased to prevent the illness spreading. As for the red rain, I observed when I was in the lands of the Byzantine emperor how on certain days the raindrops had a pinkish tinge and contained so many grains of fine sand that if you turned your face to the sky and opened your mouth the rain drops tasted gritty and did not slake your thirst. Or again, when I was employed at Knut's court in London, a south wind once brought a red rain which left red splotches on the ground like dried blood, as if the sky had spat from bleeding gums. Also I have heard how, in countries where the earth belches fire and smoke, there can be a red rain from the sky — and, Adam of Bremen should note, there are places in Iceland where holes and cracks in the ground vomit fire and smoke and steam, and even exude a bright crimson sludge. Yet the people of Frodriver will swear on any oath, whether Christian or pagan, that genuine blood, not tinted water, fell on them from the sky that day. They also affirm that in some mysterious way Thorgunna and the red rain were linked. My mother came from the Orcades, they point out, and as far as the Icelanders are concerned any woman who comes from there — in particular one as mysterious and taciturn as my mother — is likely to be a volva. And what is a volva? It is a witch.
Perhaps witch is not quite the right word. Neither Saxon English nor Latin nor the Norman's French, the three languages most used here in the scriptorium, convey the precise meaning of the word volva as the pagan Norse use it. Latin comes closest, with the notion of the Sibyl who can look into the future, or a seeress in English. Yet neither of these terms entirely encompasses what a volva is. A volva is a woman who practises seidr, the rite of magic. She knows incantation, divination, mysticism, trance — all of these things and more, and builds up a relationship with the supernatural. There are men who practise seidr, the seidrmanna, but there are not nearly so many men as there are women who have the knowledge and the art, and for the men the word magician would apply. When a volva or seidrman is about to die, there are signs and portents, and the red rain at Frodriver is a surer sign that my mother had seidr powers than any silly stories about love potions she used on my father.
And this is confirmed by what happened next.
Early the following morning my mother's coffin was lashed to the pack saddle on the back of the biggest horse in Thorodd's stables, and a little procession set out for Skalhot, where my mother had asked to be buried. Thorodd stayed behind on the farm as he had to oversee the rest of the haymaking, but he sent four of the farm labourers to manage the pack train. They took the usual route southward over the moorland. The going was quite easy as the moor was dried out at the end of summer and the usually boggy patches could carry the weight of the horses, so they made good progress. The only delays were caused when my mother's coffin kept slipping sideways and threatening to tumble to the ground. A coffin is an awkward load to attach to a pack saddle. If slung on one side like an enormous wooden pannier, you need a counterweight on the opposite side of the horse to keep the load in balance. The men did not have a sufficiently heavy counterweight to balance my mother's coffin, and in the first half-hour the saddle itself kept slipping sideways, forcing the escort to tighten the girth straps until the poor pack horse could scarcely breathe. In desperation the men were on the point of hauling my mother's body out of its wooden box and draping it sideways across the pack saddle in its shroud, as it should have been in the first place. But they were far too fearful. They were already muttering amongst themselves that Thorgunna was a volva who would come to haunt them if they disturbed her. So they kept on as best they could, stopping every so often to tighten the lashings, and at noontime shifted the coffin to one of the spare pack horses as the first animal was on the point of collapse.
As the makeshift cortege climbed onto the higher ground, the weather got worse. It became squally with showers of rain and sleet, and by the time they reached the ford on the Nordur River the water was rising and the ford was deep. They waded across cautiously and late in the afternoon reached a small farm at a place called Nether Ness. At this point the man in charge, a steady farm worker called Hrolf, decided that it would be wise to call a halt for the day. Ahead lay the ford across the Hvit River, and Hrolf did not fancy trying to cross it in the dark, especially if the water was running high. He asked the farmer if they could stay the night. The farmer said they could bed down in the main hall, but it was late and as he had had no warning of their arrival, he would not be able to feed them. It was a churlish reply, but the Frodriver men were glad to get some sort of shelter even if they went to sleep hungry. So they unloaded my mother's coffin, stored it in an outhouse, fed and watered their horses and put them in a paddock near the farm, and brought their saddle bags into the hall.
The household settled down for the night, and the travellers were making themselves reasonably comfortable among the straw bales, which served as seats running the length of the main hall, when an odd sound was heard. It came from the larder. Going to investigate, one of the farm servants found my mother, stark naked, standing in the larder, preparing a meal. The unfortunate servant was too shocked even to scream. She rushed to the bed closet, where the farmer and his wife were just dropping off to sleep, and blurted out that she had seen a burly nude woman, her skin a deathly white, standing in the larder and reaching to take bread from the shelves, with a full pitcher of milk already beside her on the work table. The farmer's wife went to see, and there indeed was Thorgunna, calmly slicing thin str
ips off a leg of dried lamb, and arranging the slices on a wooden board. The farmer's wife did not know what to do. She had never met my mother, so did not recognise her, and she was utterly at a loss at this strange apparition. At this stage the corpse-bearers from Frodriver, awakened by the commotion, appeared. They, of course, recognised Thorgunna at once, or so they later claimed. Hrolf whispered to the farmer's wife that the apparition was Thorgunna's fetch or spirit, and it would be dangerous to interfere. He suggested that the farmer's wife should clear off the main dining table so that Thorgunna could set the table. Then the farmer himself invited the men to sit and take their missing evening meal. As soon as they had sat themselves at the farm table, Thorgunna in her usual taciturn way served them, placing down the food without a word and walking ponderously out of the room. She then vanished.
The Frodriver men remained at the table, taking care to make the sign of the cross over the food, and ate their delayed supper while the farmer hurriedly found some holy water and began sprinkling it in every corner of the building. Nothing was too much trouble for the farmer's wife now. She gave the travellers dry clothes and hung up their wet ones to dry, brought out blankets and pillows so they could sleep more comfortably and generally made as much fuss of them as possible.
Was the apparition of Thorgunna an elaborate hoax? Did the supperless Frodriver men arrange for someone to play the part of Thorgunna? It was dark and gloomy in the farm building, and the candles were not lit until after Thorgunna had served the meal and withdrawn, so a substitution and a bit of play-acting might just have succeeded. The nudity was a nice touch as most people are too shy to look closely at someone stark naked. On the other hand, who did the Frodriver men persuade to act the role of Thorgunna? A local farm woman would have been recognised at once, and the band of corpse-bearers were all male. Yet it is suspicious that her apparition was such a bonus for the corpse-bearers on the rest of their journey to Skalholt, where they delivered the coffin to the Christian priest at the brand-new church there, and handed over the money from Thorgunna's bequest. They lost no opportunity to recount the strange events of their evening at Nether Ness, and every farm they passed invited them in for a meal, for beer, for shelter if they needed it.
