by Tim Severin
Gudrid was travelling with her husband, the merchant Thorir, known as the Easterner, just at the time my mother at Frodriver was looking for someone to take her small child off to Greenland as she had long ago promised my father. And perhaps, too, my mother had a premonition of her own death. Thorir was pioneering a regular trading run between Iceland and Greenland, so when his ship called in at Snaefellsness Thorgunna put her request to Gudrid, and it was Gudrid who agreed to take me to my father.
Thorir’s merchant ship was not one of the longships which have entered the sinister folklore of sheltered priests. The longships are warships, expensive to build, not particularly seaworthy and unsuitable for trading. At twenty paces’ length, a longship offers barely four or five paces in the beam and, being like a shallow dish amidships, has little room for cargo. Worse, from a merchant’s point of view, she needs a large crew to handle her under oars and even when she is sailing – which is how any sensible mariner makes progress – a longship must have a lively crew because these vessels have a treacherous habit of suddenly running themselves under or capsizing when under press of sail. Nor was Thorir’s vessel one of those dumpy little coasters that farmers use when they creep round the Icelandic shore in fair weather, or to go out to the islands where they graze their sheep and cattle. His ship was a knorr, a well-found, full-bellied ship which is the most advanced of our deep-sea trading designs. She can carry a dozen cattle in pens in the central hold, has a single mast rigged with a broad rectangular sail of wadmal, and can cross from Iceland to Greenland in six dogur – a day’s sailing – the standard length by which such voyages are calculated (Adam in Bremen might have difficulty in translating that distance onto a map, if that is what he proposes to do). Her chief cargo on that particular voyage was not cattle, but Norwegian timber. And that cargo of timber was about to save our lives.
Any sensible person who embarks on the voyage from Iceland to Greenland keeps the fate of the second settlement fleet in mind. Seventeen ships set out, nearly all of them knorrs. Less than half the ships managed to reach their destination. The others were either beaten back by adverse winds and limped into Iceland, or were simply lost at sea and no one ever heard of them again. As an experienced mariner, Thorir knew the risks better than most. The open water between Iceland and Greenland can be horrendous in bad weather, when a fierce gale from the south kicks up mountainous seas over the current that runs against it. Even the stoutest vessel can be overwhelmed in these conditions, and although the knorr is the most seaworthy ship that floats, she is just as much a plaything of the elements as any other vessel. Caught in heavy weather, a knorr has a fair chance of survival, but the crew must forget any idea of keeping a course. They spend their time frantically baling out the water that breaks aboard the ship, stopping leaks in the hull if they can, and preventing the cargo from being tossed about and bursting the planks, while the helmsmen struggle to keep the vessel at the safest angle to the advancing waves. If a storm continues for three or four days, the ship is often blown so far off course that no one has any idea of where they are, and it is a matter of guessing the most likely direction of land, then sailing there to try to identify the place.
Thorir had talked with men who had already sailed between Iceland and Greenland, so he knew the safest, shortest route. He had been advised to keep the tall white peak of Snaefellsjokul directly astern for as long as it was visible. If he was fortunate, he would see the high mountains of Greenland ahead before Snaefellsjokul had dipped below the horizon behind him. At worst he had only one or two days of open ocean between the landmarks until he had Greenland’s huge white mass of ice in plain view and could steer larboard to skirt the southern tip of that huge and forbidding land. Then he planned to head north along the coast until he would arrive at Brattahlid, the centre of Greenland’s most prosperous settlement and home of Erik the Red.
Thorir’s knorr was well handled. She crossed the open straits and when she came in sight of Greenland’s southern cape, it seemed that the ocean crossing had gone flawlessly. The vessel turned the southern cape and was heading for the fjord at Brattahlid, when as luck would have it she encountered a thick, clammy fog. Now a normal fog is associated with calm seas, perhaps a low swell. When the wind begins to blow, it clears away the fog. But a Greenland fog is different. Off Greenland there can be a dense fog and a full gale at the same time, and the fog stays impenetrable and dangerously confusing while the battering wind drives a vessel off course. This is what put paid to Thorir’s ship. Running before the gale in bad visibility, trying to follow the coast, indeed almost within sight of Brattahlid if the weather had been kinder, the heavily laden knorr ran onto a reef with a crunching impact. She slid up on the rocks of a small skerry or chain of islands, the bottom tore out of her, and she was wrecked. Had the cargo been anything other than timber she would have filled and sunk. But the wedged mass of planks and logs turned her into a makeshift life raft. Her crew and passengers, sixteen including myself, were lucky to escape with their lives. As the waves eased, they scrambled up through the surf and spray and onto the skerry, with the shattered remnants of the knorr lurching and grinding on the rocks behind them until the tide dropped and the hulk lay stuck in an untidy heap. The castaways cautiously waded back aboard to retrieve planks and spars and enough wadmal to rig a scrap of tent. They collected some cooking utensils and food, and made a rough camp on a patch of windswept turf. With enough fresh water saved from the ship to last them several days, and a good chance of collecting rainfall later, they knew they would not die of thirst or hunger. But that was the limit of their hopes. They had been wrecked in one of the emptiest parts of the known world (indeed I wonder if Adam of Bremen knows about it at all) and their chances of rescue, as opposed to mere survival, were very bleak.
They were saved by a man’s phenomenally keen eyesight.
Even now I can write this with a sense of pride because the man who possessed that remarkable eyesight was my father, Leif. I used to boast about it when I was a child, saying that I had inherited that gift of acute vision from him – as opposed to the second sight, which I possess through my mother and about which I am far more reticent. But to explain how that remarkable rescue took place, I need to go back briefly to a voyage fourteen years earlier which had gone astray in another of those typical Greenland fog-cum-gales.
On that occasion a navigator named Bjarni Herjolfsson had overshot his destination at Brattahlid, and after several days in poor visibility and strong winds he was in that anxious condition the Norse sailors call hafvilla – he had lost his way at sea. When the fog lifted he saw a broad, rocky coastline ahead of him. It was well wooded but deserted and completely unfamiliar. Bjarni had kept track of his knorr’s gyrations in the storm. He made a shrewd guess as to which way Greenland lay, put his ship about and after sailing along the unknown coast for several dogr eventually came back to Brattahlid, bringing news of those alluring woodlands. About the time my mother was thinking of sending me to my father, Leif had decided to sail to that unknown land and explore. Believing in the sea tradition that a vessel which had already brought her crew safely home would do so again, he purchased Bjarni’s ship for the voyage.
By a remarkable coincidence he was on his way back from that trip even as Thorir’s knorr shattered on the skerry. He was at the helm, battling a headwind and steering so hard on the wind that one of his crew, drenched by the resulting spray, complained, ‘Can’t we steer more broad?’ Leif was peering ahead for his first glimpse of the Greenland coastline. ‘There’s a current from the north setting us more southerly than I like,’ he replied. ‘We’ll keep this course for a little longer. We can ease the sheets once we are closer to land.’
Some time later another crew member called out a warning that he could see skerries ahead. ‘I know,’ Leif replied, relying on that phenomenal eyesight. ‘I’ve been watching them for a while now and there seems to be something on one of the islands.’ The rest of his crew, who had been curled up on deck to keep ou
t of the wind, scrambled to their feet and peered forward. They could see the low black humps of the islands, but no one else could make out the tiny dark patch that my father could already discern. It was the roof of our makeshift shelter. My father, as I have said, was a hard man to dissuade, and the crew knew better than to try to make him alter course. So the ship headed onwards towards the skerry, and half an hour later everyone aboard could make out the little band of castaways, standing up and waving scraps of cloth tied to sticks. To them it seemed a miracle, and if the story was not told to me hundreds of times when I was growing up in Brattahlid, I would scarcely believe the coincidence – a shipwreck in the path of a vessel commanded by a man with remarkable eyesight and sailing on a track not used for fourteen years. It was this good fortune which earned Leif his nickname ‘Heppni’, the ‘Lucky’, though it was really the sixteen castaways who were the lucky ones.
Expertly Leif brought his vessel into the lee of the skerry, dropped anchor and launched the small rowboat from the deck. The man who jumped into the little boat to help row was to have a significant part in my later life – Tyrkir the German – and I think it was because he was my rescuer that Tyrkir kept such a close eye on me as I grew up. Tyrkir was to become my first, and in some ways most important, tutor in the Old Ways, and it was under Tyrkir’s guidance that I made my first steps along the path that would eventually lead me to my devotion to Odinn the All-Father. But I will come to that later.
‘Who are you and where are you from?’ Leif shouted as he and Tyrkir rowed closer to the bedraggled band of castaways standing on the edge of the rocks. They backed water with the oars, keeping a safe distance. The last thing my father wanted was to take aboard a band of desperate ruffians who, having lost their ship, might seize his own.
‘We’re from Norway, out of Iceland, and were headed for Brattahlid when we ran on this reef,’ Thorir called back. ‘My name is Thorir and I’m the captain as well as the owner. I am a peaceful trader.’ Tyrkir and Leif relaxed. Thorir’s name was known and he was considered to be an honest man.
‘Then I invite you to my ship,’ called Leif, ‘and afterwards to my home, where you will be taken good care of.’ He and Tyrkir spun the little rowing boat around and brought her stern first toward the rocks. The first person to scramble aboard was Gudrid and tucked under one arm was the two-year-old boy child she had promised Thorgunna she would deliver to his father. So it happened that Leif the Lucky unwittingly rescued his own illegitimate son.
FOUR
LEIF’S WIFE, GYDA, was not at all pleased to learn that the toddler Thorgils, saved from the sea, was the result of a brief affair between her husband and some middle-aged Orcadian woman. She refused to take me under her roof. She already had the example of her father-in-law’s bastard child as a warning. My aunt Freydis, then in her late teens, was the illegitimate daughter of Erik and lived with the Erikssons. She was an evil-tempered troublemaker who, as it turned out, was to play a gruesome part in my story, though at the time she seemed to be no more than a quarrelsome and vindictive young woman always quarrelling with her relations. As Gyda did not want another cuckoo in her house, she arranged to have me fostered out, a real fostering this time. And this is how I came to spend my childhood not with my father but with Gudrid, who lived nearby. Gudrid, I suppose, felt responsible for me as she had brought me to Greenland in the first place. Also, I believe, she was a little lonely because soon after her arrival in Greenland she lost her husband, Thorir. He was in Eriksfjord for only a few weeks after his rescue before he went down with a severe fever. The illness must have arrived with his ship because Thorir and most of his crew were the first to begin coughing, spitting blood, and having bouts of dizziness. By the time the illness had run its course, eighteen people had died, among them Thorir and – finally – that old warhorse, my grandfather Erik the Red.
The gossips said that Gudrid took me in as a substitute for the child her body had failed to give her when she was Thorir’s woman. I suspect these critics were jealous and only looking for a flaw to compensate for Gudrid’s astonishing good looks – she possessed a loveliness of the type that endures throughout a woman’s life. I remember her as having a pale translucent skin, long blonde hair, and grey eyes in a face of perfect, gentle symmetry with a well-defined nose over a delicious-looking mouth and a chin that had just the suggestion of a dimple exactly in the middle of it. At any rate I am sure that the young widow Gudrid would have taken me in even if she had children of her own. She was one of the kindest women imaginable. She was always ready to give help, whether bringing food to a sick neighbour, loaning out kitchen utensils to someone planning a feast and then doing half the cooking herself, or scolding children who were behaving as bullies and comforting their victims. Everyone in Brattahlid had a high opinion of her and I worshipped her. Never having known my real mother, I accepted Gudrid in that vital role as entirely normal, and I suspect that Gudrid made a far better job of it than gruff Thorgunna would have done. Gudrid seemed to have endless patience when it came to dealing with children. I and the other dozen or so youngsters of the same age made Gudrid’s house the centre of our universe. When we played in the meadows or scrambled along the beach looking for fish and skipping stones on the cold water of the fjord, we usually finished by saying, ‘Race you to Gudrid’s!’ and would go pelting across the rough ground like hares, bursting in through the side door which led to the kitchen, and arriving in a great clatter. Gudrid would wait till the last of us had arrived, then haul down a great pitcher of sour milk and pour out our drinks as we perched on the tall wooden benches.
Brattahlid was, for a child, an idyllic spot. The settlement lies at the head of a long fjord reaching deep inland. Erik had chosen the site on his first visit and chosen shrewdly. The length of the fjord offers protection from the cold foggy weather outside, and it is the most sheltered and fertile place to set up a farm in the area, if not the whole of Greenland. The anchorage is safe and the beach rises to low, undulating meadowland dotted with clumps of dwarf willow and birch. Here Erik and his followers built their turf-roofed houses on the drier hillocks, fenced in the home paddocks, and generally established replicas of their former farms in Iceland. There are no more than three or four hundred Greenlanders, and so there is plenty of room for all those who are hardy enough to settle there. Life is even simpler than in Iceland. At the onset of winter we brought the cattle in from the meadowland and kept them indoors, feeding them the hay we had prepared in the summer. We ourselves existed on sour milk, dried fish, smoked or salted meat and whatever else we had managed to preserve from the summer months. As a result everything carried a rancid flavour, particularly the lumps of whale and shark meat we buried in earth pits for storage, then dug up, semi-putrid. The long, idle, dark hours were spent with story-telling, sleeping, doing odd repair jobs, playing backgammon and other games. In Greenland we still played the older version of chess – a single king in the centre of the board with his troops arranged against a crowd of opponents who were spread around the edge. Not until I returned as a youth to Iceland did I see the two-king style of chess, and I had to learn the rules all over again.
Every youngster, almost from the time he or she could walk, helped with day-to-day work and it made us feel valued. On land we graduated from running errands and cleaning out the byres to learning how to skin and butcher the beasts and salt down the meat. On water we began by baling out the bilges of the small rowing boats, then we were allowed to bait fishing lines and help haul nets, until finally we were handling the sails and pulling on an oar as the boats were rowed back to the landing place. We had very little schooling, though Erik’s widow, Thjodhild, did attempt to teach us our alphabet and some rudimentary writing. We were not enthusiastic pupils. Thjodhild’s character was embittered by a long-running disagreement with her husband. What irked her was that Erik had refused to become a Christian and this had set an example to many of his followers. Thjodhild was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic converts to
the creed of the White Christ, and she was one of those querulous Christians who was always seeking to impose her beliefs on the rest of the community. But Erik was a dyed-in-the-wool pagan, and the more she nagged at him, the more stubborn he became. He had not left Iceland, he said, to bring with him in his baggage the newfangled religion. He had offered a sacrifice to Thor before he sailed to Greenland and, in return, Thor had looked after the colony very well. Erik told his wife in no uncertain terms that he was not about to abandon the Old Gods and the Old Ways. Eventually matters became so bad between the two of them that Thjodhild announced she would have as little as possible to do with him. They still had to live under the same roof, but she had a Christian chapel built for herself, very prominently, on a hillock near the farm just where Erik was sure to see it every time he left his front door. However, Erik refused to let his wife have much timber for the structure so the chapel remained a tiny building, no more than a couple of arm spans wide in any direction. It was the first Christian church in Greenland, and so small that no more than eight people could fit inside at once. We children called it the White Rabbit Hutch for the White Christ.
