by Tim Severin
The death of their leader ended all resistance from Ospak’s gang. They lowered their weapons and began shouting out that they would leave the building if they were allowed to go unharmed. A moment later the double gates of the stockade were tugged open. Snorri, Sturla and the rest of us walked into the compound to find the bandits looking frightened and exhausted. Hrafn, Ospak and one other man were the only fatalities, but many of the defenders had minor wounds and bruises. Snorri kept his word and was remarkably lenient with their punishment. He held a brief court hearing on the spot, and in his capacity as the local godi condemned the worst culprits to exile. He did not have the power to exile them from Iceland, but he could forbid them to come ever again into Westfjords on pain of being prosecuted as full outlaws at the next Althing. The men were obliged to leave their weapons behind and quit the farm immediately, never to return. Snorri treated Ospak’s widow and son magnanimously. The widow, he said, had not had any choice in her husband’s behaviour, and though the son had fought in the defence of the farm, he was honour-bound to do so for his family’s reputation. He had not been involved in his father’s brigandage, and in consequence Snorri pronounced that the widow and son could continue in possession of the farm and its lands.
Thrand Stigandi stayed on at Snorri’s farm for several weeks after Ospak’s defeat at the battle of Bitra, as it came to be called, and there were many who came to congratulate him on his bravery and some, more discreetly, to thank him for interceding with Thor on behalf of the law-abiding people of the Westfjords. Snorri must have told Thrand about me and I was flattered when Thrand beckoned to me one evening as supper was being cleared from the table and led me to a quiet corner, where we could not be overheard. He sat down on a storage chest and said in his deep, husky voice, ‘Snorri tells me that sometimes you see things which others cannot see.’
‘Yes, occasionally,’ I replied, ‘but I don’t understand what I am seeing, and I never know when it will happen.’
‘Can you give me an example?’ he asked.
I thought of Snorri’s warning never to reveal dreams of death to anyone, but the events were in the past and Snorri had assured me that Thrand was seidr-skilled so I told him about my dream of the battle at Ospak’s farm, the owl-headed man, and the rest.
Thrand did not interrupt, and when I had finished my account, he said, ‘And how many days before the fight did you have this dream?’
‘Soon after your arrival here, on the night after you and Snorri spent so much time in Thor’s temple,’ I answered.
‘I wonder if you would have had the dream earlier, in the temple itself, if the conditions had been right,’ Thrand commented, almost speaking to himself. ‘Some seers are lucky. Dreams come to them so easily that they need only to withdraw to some quiet place, close their eyes and empty their minds, and the visions enter their consciousness. Others must get fuddled on strong drink, or chew strong weeds, or breathe the smoke of a sacred fire, or listen to sacred chants repeated over and over again until their spirit floats free from their body.’
He got up and went to where his sword and helmet were hanging from a peg on the wall. He brought them over and showed the flat of the sword’s blade to me. ‘What does that mean?’ he asked.
The runes were easy to decipher and simple. ‘Ulfbert made,’ I replied.
‘Now, what about this?’ he continued, holding out his antique helmet with its quaint eye protectors. He had turned the helmet upside down so I could see inside the metal bowl. From the centre, radiating down to each side, was incised a plain, thin cross, its arms ending in arrow heads which pointed back towards the intersection.
‘That’s the aegishjalmr,’ I said, ‘the helm of awe.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Thrand, ‘but what about the marks around the edge?’
I looked more closely. Around the inner rim of the helmet I could see a number of small scratches. They were badly worn, but they had been put there deliberately. Several of them I recognised immediately as rune staves in the futhark, but others were more difficult to decipher. I ran my finger round them, to feel their shapes, as Tyrkir had taught me. Several I identified as letters which Tyrkir had said were little used nowadays. In the end, I did manage to puzzle them out.
‘I don’t know what it means, but if I try to read out the message it would sound something like . . . a g mod den juthu pt fur . . . but I cannot be sure.’
Thrand looked thoughtful. ‘No more than half a dozen people in Iceland know how to read the archaic runes,’ he said. ‘That’s galdrastafir – rune spell. It was put there soon after the helmet was forged, and the staves make the helmet a talisman against harm to the wearer, as well as a physical protection. I would never exchange this antique helmet for a modern one. Who taught you the archaic runes?’
‘An old German, a metalsmith named Tyrkir, instructed me in how to read and cut rune staves while I was in Greenland.’
Thrand said solemnly, ‘The message you carve in runes is more important than just knowing what each stave represents. Quite a few people know how to carve their name, but only the initiated know the spells and charms and curses that can be written. Odinn showed rune writing to mankind and now it is merely a matter of passing the knowledge from one person to the next.’
He seemed to make up his mind about something, turned towards me and, speaking to me as if I was an adult and not a fourteen-year-old lad, he went on:
‘The greatest and most profound visions require pain and sacrifice. Odinn gave one of his eyes in order to drink from the fountain of Mimir and learn the secret wisdom which allows the Gods to survive. He also impaled himself on a spear and hung for nine days from Yggdrasil, the world tree, in order to learn the secret of the runes. Only through the sacrifice and pain could he open his mind and spirit to wisdom. That is one thing which distinguishes us from the Christians. They believe that the soul lives in the heart, but we hold that it resides in the mind, and that when the mind is set free the spirit also is liberated.’
Unwittingly I had allowed my rune literacy to impress Thrand in a way that was to have painful consequences. When he was ready to return to his own farm, he suggested to Snorri that I go with him and become his pupil in seidr skills. Snorri summoned me and, watching me with those quiet grey eyes, said, ‘Thrand has offered to take you on as a pupil. I believe that this is your chance to develop a talent that you were born with and which may yet compensate for the disadvantages you have already faced in your young life. For that reason I am closing my house to you and sending you away.’
Thus I began to appreciate how the acquisition of knowledge can mean pain and sacrifice, for I was heart-broken to be parted from my adored Hallbera. Years later, long after my departure from Snorri’s household, I learned that she married an eminently suitable husband, the son of a neighbouring landowner whose help Snorri needed at a session of the Althing. Her young man was ideal – respectable, well-connected, reliable. He was also decidedly dull. I am sure that Hallbera was very happy with him. The last I heard was that they had their own family of seven or eight children, lived on a well-run farm on the Westfjords, and were similarly looking for suitable matches for their numerous offspring. On the few occasions when I imagine myself as that young man Hallbera could have married, I wonder whether it was Hallbera’s wish to have a more settled future that made her marry her worthy husband, or whether once again it was Odinn’s intervention that led her family to judge me to be no more than a pleasant and temporary diversion for their fourth daughter.
THE SUMMER THAT I spent with Thrand at his farm in the uplands behind Laxadale was perhaps the most formative period of my life. Thrand lived by himself on a small homestead, no more than a single cabin with a barn nearby. His dwelling was sparsely furnished with only a couple of stools, a pair of wooden cots, his iron cooking pot and griddle – he did all his own cooking – and a few large storage chests, always kept locked. The walls of his cabin were bare except for several foreign-looking wall hangings with strange patterns, which I could
not decipher, and a row of pegs from which Thrand hung his weapons and various satchels and cloth bundles containing his seidr materials. The place was so orderly that it was stark, and this reflected the character of its owner. My teacher in seidr was reserved and self-controlled to the point of austerity and as a result he was very difficult to get to know. I am sure he never meant to seem unfriendly but if I plucked up enough courage to ask a question, the answer was sometimes so slow in coming that I feared he thought me stupid or that he had not heard the question. When the answer came – and it always did, though I might have to wait until the next day – it was terse, accurate and clear-cut. It was to take me a long time to grow fond of Thrand, but from the start I respected him.
He was a methodical teacher. Patiently he built on the foundation of the knowledge that Tyrkir and Thorvall had imparted. Sometimes he found it necessary to correct errors. My earlier mentors had occasionally muddled the roles of the Aesir, the family of Gods, and at other times I had misunderstood their lessons. So Thrand began by putting my chaotic knowledge in some sort of order and then went on to expand and deepen the details. I progressed from my basic knowledge of the main Gods and Goddesses of the Aesir and Vanir, and became aware of an entire pantheon, and this in addition to the Norns and light-elves and dark-elves and dwarves, and frost giants and the otherworld creatures and the roles they played in the ancient cosmology. ‘Everything interlocks,’ Thrand was fond of saying. ‘Think of the braiding roots of the World Tree, where one root tangles with another, and then reaches out to a third, and then doubles back and binds on itself, or the spreading branches above which do the same. Yet all the roots and branches have a function. They sustain Yggdrasil and they are Yggdrasil. This is how it is with ancient lore. If you have the foundation knowledge, you can follow the path of a single root or just one strand, or you can stand back and see the whole pattern.’
Committing the lore to memory was surprisingly easy. It seemed that every deed, every deity, every detail, had been set into a language that flowed and rippled seductively, or laid out in lists that marched to a steady beat. Even now, half a century later, I can count off all forty-eight names of Odinn – from Baleygr, Harbardr and Herblindi, to Herian, Hialmberi, Thekkr, Thriggi, Thundr, Unnr, Viudurr, Yrungr, and so forth. The ones that still make my heart beat faster when I hear them in my head are: Aldafadr, All-Father; Draugadrottin, Lord of the Dead; Grimnir, the Masked One; Farmognudr, Maker of Journeys and Gangleri, the Wanderer.
Tyrkir and Thorvall had told me the simple tales that illustrate the deeds of the Gods – that the earth quakes when Loki writhes in his bonds, that the gales arise from the flapping wings of the great eagle giant Hraesvelg, and that lightning is the flash of Mjollnir when Thor hurls his hammer. Now Thrand placed these tales in their wider context. He explained the relationship between deeds past and the events that still lie in the future, and how at their intersection lies what happens today. And always he emphasised that everything interweaves, so that while those who were gifted with second sight might look into the future, there was little we could do to avert what had been ordained by the Norns. Those three supernatural women hold the ultimate power, for they have decided the fate of every living creature and even of the Gods themselves.
‘The greater pattern cannot be altered,’ Thraud emphasised to me. ‘Even the Gods themselves know that they must inevitably face Ragnarok and the destruction of the world. With all their power they can only delay that fatal time, not avoid it. How much less can we, mere mortals, alter the web that the Norns have spun for us or the marks they have cut in the timber of our lives.’
Thrand was a firm believer in divination. If fate was set, then it could be revealed by skilled interpretation. He owned a casting set of rune blocks, carved from whalebone and yellow with age. He would spread out a white sheet and throw the blocks on the sheet like dice, then puzzle over the way the symbols fell, reading the message in their random patterns and then explaining their symbolism to me. Often the message was obscure, even more frequently it was contradictory. But that, as he explained to me, was in the nature of the runes themselves. Each owned two meanings, at the very least, and these meanings were opposites; whether they occurred in light or dark conjunctions determined which was the correct sense. I found it all very confusing, though I managed to grasp most of the basic principles.
Galdrastafir, the rune spells, were more straightforward and reminded me of the smith’s galdr that Tyrkir had taught me. Thrand would take practice pieces of timber and show me how to carve correctly the sequence of runes, dividing my lessons into categories: mind runes for bringing knowledge, sea runes for safe journeys, limb runes for healing, speech runes to fend off revenge, the helping runes for childbirth. ‘Don’t be surprised if they are ineffective sometimes,’ he warned me. ‘Odinn himself only learned eighteen rune spells when he was hanging on Yggdrasil, and we are presumptuous to think that we can achieve more.’ The accuracy of cutting was not all, he stressed. Every stave had its own spoken formula, which I had to recite as I made the mark, and Thrand made me repeat the formula until I was word-perfect. ‘Speak the words right,’ said Thrand, ‘and you will not have to resort to such tricks as rubbing the marks with your own blood to make the spell more potent. Leave such devices to those who are more interested in doing harm with the rune spells, not achieving good.’
Thrand also had a warning. ‘If galdrastafir is done badly, it is likely to have the reverse effect from what was intended. That arises from the double and opposing nature of the runes, the dual nature of Odinn’s gift. Thus a healing rune meant to help cure an invalid will actually damage their health if incorrectly cut.’
Thrand, who was by nature an optimist, refused to teach me any curse runes. And, as a precaution, he insisted that at the end of every lesson we put all the practice rune staves into the fire and burn them to ashes, lest they fell into malevolent hands. On these occasions, as we watched the flames consume the wood, I noticed how Thrand stayed beside the dying fire, gazing into the embers. I had the impression that he was far away in his thoughts, in some foreign country, though he never talked about his past.
THIRTEEN
A HORSE FIGHT marked the end of my stay with Thrand. The match between the two stallions had been eagerly awaited in the district for several months, and Thrand and I went to see the spectacle. The fight, or hestavig, was held on neutral ground for the two stallions. To encourage them, a small herd of mares was penned in the paddock immediately next to the patch of bare ground where the two stallions would fight. Naturally a small crowd had gathered to place bets on the outcome. When we arrived, the owners of the stallions were standing facing each other, holding the halters. Both animals were already in a lather, squealing and lunging and rearing to get at one another. A visiting farmer – he had probably backed the animal to win – had boldly walked behind one of the stallions and was poking at his testicles with a short stick to enrage the animal still further, which led Thrand to comment to me, ‘He wouldn’t be doing that if he knew his lore. He could be making an enemy of Loki and that will bring bad fortune.’ I didn’t know whether Thrand was referring to the story in which the trickster God Loki changed himself into a mare to seduce a malignant giant in the shape of a huge stallion, or the comic scene in Valholl when Loki is given the task of amusing the visiting giantess Skadi. Loki strips off, then ties one end of a rope round the beard of a billy goat, and the other end round his testicles, and the pair tug one another back and forth across the hall, each squealing loudly until the normally morose giantess bursts into laughter.
There was a sudden shout from the crowd as the two stallions were given slack and immediately sprang forward to attack one another, teeth bared and snorting with aggression. Their squeals of anger rose to a frenzy as they clashed, rising up on their hind legs to lash out with their hooves, or twisting round with gaping jaws to try to inflict a crippling neck bite. When all eyes were on the contest, I felt a discreet tug on my sleeve and turned to s
ee a soberly dressed man I did not recognise. He nodded for me to follow him, and we walked a short distance to one side of the crowd, which was cheering as the two stallions began to draw blood. “Kari sent me with a message,’ said the unknown visitor. ‘He plans to go to Orkney, and has arranged to board a ship leaving from Eyrar two weeks from today. He says that if you want, you can travel with him. If you do decide to make the journey, you are to find your way to Eyrar and ask for the ship of Kolbein the Black. He’s an Orkney man himself and an old friend of Kari’s.’
I had heard nothing from Kari since the day at the Althing when he had refused to accept the godi’s proposed settlement with the Burners. But plenty of rumours had reached me. It seemed that, as soon as the Althing ended, Kari launched himself on a personal and deadly campaign of revenge. He intercepted a party of Burners and their friends as they rode home from the Althing and challenged them to fight. They took on the challenge because Kari had only a single companion, a man named Thorgeir, and the Burners were eight in number. But Kari and Thorgeir had fought so skilfully that three of the Burners were killed and the remainder fled in panic. The leader of the Burners, Flosi, again offered to settle the blood feud and pay a heavy compensation for Burned Njal’s death. But Kari was not to be placated. He persuaded his colleague Thorgeir to accept the settlement, saying that Thorgeir was not directly concerned in the blood feud, but that he, Kari, was a long way from settling the debt of honour that he owed to his dead family.
