Where the Shadows Lie

by Michael Ridpath

  He tried to control his excitement. Could the saga be real? If it was, it would be one of the greatest finds in Icelandic literature. More than that, its discovery would reverberate around the world.

  He was quite certain that if it was genuine, it was previously unknown. There were no doubt plenty of minor sagas that Magnus had never heard of, but this was no minor saga. The Ring of Andvari, and the fact that the main character was Gaukur, the owner of Stöng, would have ensured that the story would have become widely known within Iceland and beyond. Magnus recognized a couple of the characters from his beloved Njáls Saga: Njáll himself and Ásgrímur Ellida-Grímsson.

  But was it genuine? It was difficult to be sure in translation, but the style looked authentic. Icelandic sagas had none of the poetic flourishes of medieval tales from the rest of Europe. At their best they were terse, precise and down to earth, more Hemingway than Tennyson. Unlike the rest of Europe, the ability to read in medieval Iceland was not confined to the clergy and books were not restricted to Latin. It was a nation of scattered farms, and there was a need for farmers isolated from village priests to be able to read the Bible for themselves and their households during the long winter nights. The sagas were historical novels written to be read by, not simply recited to, a mass audience.

  If the saga was real, Gaukur’s descendants had done a wonderful job of keeping it secret over the centuries. Until now, when a two-bit professor of Icelandic had taken it upon himself to show it to the wider world. Magnus had no doubt that this is what Agnar wanted to sell to Steve Jubb and the modern-day Isildur.

  The links to The Lord of the Rings in Gaukur’s Saga were obvious, much stronger than the Saga of the Volsungs. For one thing, the ‘magic’ of the ring was more powerful and more specific. Although there was nothing about invisibility, the ring took over the character of its keeper, corrupting him and causing him to betray or even kill his friends. And it extended his life. Ísildur’s quest to throw the ring into Mount Hekla had obvious parallels with Frodo’s quest to fling Sauron’s Ring into Mount Doom.

  The Lord of the Rings Internet chat rooms would be buzzing for years once they saw the saga. If they ever saw it. Perhaps the modern Isildur’s plan was to hoard it somewhere, his very own Viking booty.

  Magnus was not surprised he was prepared to pay so much.

  But this was an English translation. There must be an Icelandic original, or more likely a copy of it, from which Agnar had made his translation. Magnus was sure that Baldur would have noticed an original saga written on eight-hundred-year-old vellum, but he could easily have missed a modern-day Icelandic copy.

  While Árni finished reading the last few pages, Magnus searched through Agnar’s other papers.

  Nothing.

  ‘Perhaps it’s in Agnar’s office at the university?’ Árni suggested.

  ‘Or maybe someone else has it,’ said Magnus, thinking.

  He looked out of the window over the lake towards the low snow-topped mountains in the distance. Then it came to him.

  ‘Come on, Árni. Let’s get back to Reykjavík.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE GALLERY ON Skólavördustígur was only open for a couple of hours on Sundays and by the time Magnus and Árni got there it was closed. But, peering in through the window, Magnus could see a figure working at the desk at the back of the shop.

  He rapped on the glass door. Ingileif appeared, looking irritated. The irritation increased when she saw who it was. ‘We’re closed.’

  ‘We didn’t come here to buy anything,’ Magnus said. ‘We want to ask you some questions.’

  Ingileif saw the grim expression on his face and let them in. She led them back to her desk which was covered in number-strewn papers, weighted down with a calculator. They sat facing her.

  ‘You said your great-grandfather’s name was Ísildur?’ Magnus began.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And your father’s name was Ásgrímur?’

  Ingileif frowned, the nick appearing above her eyebrow. ‘Obviously. You know my name.’

  ‘Interesting names.’

  ‘Not especially,’ said Ingileif. ‘Apart from perhaps Ísildur, but we discussed that.’

  Magnus said nothing, let silence do its work. Ingileif began to blush.

  ‘Anyone in your family named Gaukur?’ he asked.

  Ingileif closed her eyes, exhaled and leaned backwards. Magnus waited.

  ‘You found the saga, then?’ she said.

  ‘Just Agnar’s translation. You should have known we would. Eventually.’

  ‘Actually, Gaukur is a name we tend to avoid in our family.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Why didn’t you tell us about it?’

  Ingileif put her head in her hands.

  Magnus waited.

  ‘Have you read it?’ she asked. ‘All the way through?’

  Magnus nodded.

  ‘Well, obviously I should have told you, I was stupid not to. But if you have read the saga, you might understand why I didn’t. It’s been in my family for generations and we have successfully kept it a secret.’

  ‘Until you tried to sell it.’

  Ingileif nodded. ‘Until I tried to sell it. Which is something I deeply regret now.’

  ‘You mean now that someone is dead?’

  Ingileif took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this saga was really kept a secret for all those years?’

  Ingileif nodded. ‘Almost. With one lapse a few hundred years ago. Until my father, knowledge of the saga had only been passed on from father to eldest son, or in a couple of instances, eldest daughter. My father decided to read it to all us children, something my grandfather was not very happy about. But we were all sworn to absolute secrecy.’

  ‘Do you still have the original?’

  ‘Unfortunately, it wore out. We only have scraps left, but an excellent copy was made in the seventeenth century. I made a copy of that myself for Agnar to translate; it will be in his papers somewhere.’

  ‘So, after all those centuries, why did you decide to sell it?’

  Ingileif sighed. ‘As you can imagine, people in my family have always been obsessed by the sagas, and by our saga in particular. Although my father became a doctor, he was the most obsessed of the lot. He was convinced that the ring mentioned in the saga still existed and he used to go on expeditions all around the valley of the River Thjórsá, which is where Gaukur’s farm was, to look for it. He never found it, of course, but that’s how he died. He fell off a cliff in bad weather.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus. And although Ingileif had lied to him, he was sorry.

  ‘That put the rest of us off Gaukur’s Saga. My brother, who until then had been brainwashed by Dad to a level of obsession that matched his, wanted nothing more to do with it. My sister was never very interested. I think my mother had always found the saga a little weird and held it responsible for Dad’s death. Of all of them, I was perhaps the least put off: I went on to study Icelandic at university. So when I found I needed money desperately, it seemed to me that I was the only one who would really care if we sold it.

  ‘The gallery is going bust. It is bust really. I need money badly – a lot of money. So when my mother died last year I spoke to my brother and my sister about selling the saga. Birna, my sister, couldn’t give a damn, but my brother Pétur argued against it. He said we were custodians of the saga, it wasn’t ours to sell. I was a bit surprised, but eventually Pétur relented as long as it could be sold privately, with a secrecy clause. I think he might have his own money problems. Everyone does these days.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He owns bars and clubs. Do you know Neon?’

  Magnus shook his head. Ingileif frowned at his ignorance. ‘It’s one of the most famous clubs in Reykjavík,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure it is. I haven’t been here very long,’ said Magnus.

  ‘I know it,’ Árni chipped in.

  ‘I could see you were a p
arty animal,’ Ingileif said.

  Now it was Árni’s turn to blush.

  ‘So, once you had decided to sell it, why did you approach Agnar?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘He taught me at university,’ Ingileif said. ‘And, as I told you, I knew him quite well. He was sleazy enough to agree to sell the saga on the quiet away from the Icelandic government, but he liked me well enough not to rip me off totally. And it turned out he knew just the right buyer. A wealthy American Lord of the Rings fan, who was willing to keep the purchase private.’

  ‘Lawrence Feldman? Steve Jubb?’

  ‘I didn’t know his name. You mentioned the name Steve Jubb before, didn’t you? But you said he was English.’

  ‘That’s why you said you had never heard of him?’

  ‘I hadn’t heard the name before. But I admit I wasn’t very helpful. I was desperately trying to keep the saga secret. As soon as I had told Agnar about it, I had second thoughts. I even told him that I wanted to take it off the market and keep it in the family.’ She pursed her lips. ‘He told me that it was too late. He knew all about it, and unless I went through with the sale, he would tell.’

  ‘He blackmailed you?’ Magnus said.

  ‘I suppose you could call it that. I deserved it. And it worked. I thought it would be better all round to sell the saga secretly and split the proceeds between Pétur, Birna and myself, than allow Agnar to broadcast its existence to the whole world.’

  ‘How much did he say it would bring?’

  ‘He was in the process of negotiating the price. He said it would be millions. Of dollars.’

  Magnus took a deep breath. ‘And where is this saga now?’

  ‘In the gallery safe.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  Magnus and Árni followed her through to a store cupboard at the back of the shop. On the floor was a combination safe. Ingileif twiddled the knobs. She pulled out a leather-bound volume, and placed it on the desk.

  ‘This is the seventeenth-century copy, the earliest complete copy.’ She opened up the book at a random page. The pages were paper, covered in a neat black handwriting, clear and easy to read. ‘You know when you asked me whether the saga had been kept a secret, I said there was one lapse?’

  Magnus nodded.

  ‘Well, this was copied from an earlier version that was bought from one of my ancestors by Árni Magnússon, the great saga collector. The rest of the family was furious that he had sold it. Árni Magnússon took it with all the others to Copenhagen, and it was one of those that was destroyed in the terrible fire of 1728, before it was catalogued. There is only one mention of Gaukur’s Saga in existence today, to our knowledge, with no details as to what it contains. The majority of the collection went up in smoke, especially the paper copies. Within the family, we believe there was a reason the fire started.’

  ‘Arson? Someone wanted to destroy it?’

  Ingileif shook her head. ‘That’s not what they meant, although knowing how obsessive my family were, I wouldn’t have been surprised. No it was more bad luck, fate, call it what you will.’

  ‘The power of the ring,’ said Árni.

  ‘Now you are beginning to sound like my father,’ said Ingileif. ‘But when Agnar was murdered, I couldn’t help seeing the parallels.’ She turned back to the safe. ‘And then there is this. The original, or what’s left of it.’

  She carefully extracted a large old envelope, lay it on the desk, and slipped out two layers of stiff card, between which, separated by tissue paper, were perhaps half a dozen sheets of brown vellum. She pulled back the tissue so that they could see one of the sheets closely.

  It was faded, torn at the edges, and covered in black writing. This was surprisingly clear: the initial letters of chapters were decorated in fading blues and reds. Magnus could make out the word ‘Ísildur’.

  ‘Amazing,’ Magnus said. And indeed it was. Any doubts he had had about the authenticity of the translation he had read in Agnar’s summer house were dispelled. He had gawped at the old sagas in the Árni Magnússon exhibition, but he had never seen one this close. He couldn’t resist reaching out with his fingertip to touch it.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Ingileif said, a note of pride in her voice.

  ‘Do you know who wrote it?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘We think it was someone called Ísildur Gunnarsson,’ Ingileif said. ‘One of Gaukur’s descendants, of course. We think he lived in the late thirteenth century, right when most of the major sagas were written.’

  ‘But if this was such a great family secret, how did Tolkien ever see it?’ Magnus asked. ‘I mean, the links to the Lord of the Rings are so strong, it can’t just be coincidence. He must have read it.’

  Ingileif hesitated. ‘Wait a minute.’ She returned to the safe, and returned a moment later.

  She placed a small, yellowing envelope on the desk in front of Magnus.

  ‘May I look?’

  Ingileif nodded.

  Magnus carefully pulled out a single sheet of paper, folded once.

  Magnus unfolded it and read:

  20 Northmoor Road

  Oxford

  9 March 1938

  My dear Ísildarson

  Thank you so much for sending me the copy of Gaukur’s Saga, which I have read with great pleasure. It is almost fifteen years now, but I remember very clearly that meeting of the Viking Club in the college bar at Leeds when you told me something of the saga, although I had no idea that the saga itself would prove to be such a wonderful story. I look back on those evenings fondly – a repertoire of Old Icelandic drinking songs is something that no student of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English should be without!

  I am very glad you enjoyed the book I sent you. I have recently begun a second story about Hobbits set in Middle Earth, and I have written the first chapter, entitled ‘A long-expected party’, with which I am very pleased. But I expect that this book will be a much darker work than the first, more grown up, and I have been searching for a means of linking the two stories. I think perhaps you might have given me that link.

  Please forgive me if I borrow some of the ideas from your saga. I can promise absolutely that I will continue to respect your family’s wish that the saga itself should remain secret, as it has done for so many hundreds of years. If you do object, please let me know.

  I will return the copy of the saga to you next week.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  J.R.R. Tolkien

  Magnus’s heart was pounding. The letter would double the value of the saga, treble it. It was an astounding discovery, the key to what had become one of the most pervasive legends of the twentieth century.

  A wealthy Lord of the Rings fan would pay a fortune for the two documents.

  Or kill for them.

  Magnus had read the first two chapters of The Lord of the Rings only the night before. The first was indeed ‘A Long-Expected Party’, which celebrated Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday, a jolly affair full of hobbits and food and fireworks at the end of which Bilbo put on his magic ring and disappeared. In the second, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the wizard Gandalf returned to lecture Bilbo’s nephew Frodo on the strange and evil powers of the ring, and to give him the task of destroying it in the Crack of Doom.

  It was clear that between the first and the second chapters lay Gaukur’s Saga.

  ‘Can I see?’ said Árni.

  Magnus exhaled – he hadn’t even realized he had been holding his breath. He handed the letter to him.

  ‘You showed this to Agnar?’

  Ingileif nodded. ‘I let him have it for a few days. He wanted anything I could find to authenticate the saga. He was pleased with this. He was convinced it would help us get a better price.’

  ‘I’ll bet he was. So Högni Ísildarson was your grandfather?’

  ‘That’s right. His father, Ísildur, founded a furniture store in Reykjavík at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, many Icelanders travelled
abroad to study, and in 1923 Högni went to England, to Leeds University, where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien.

  ‘Tolkien made a big impression on my grandfather, he inspired him. I remember him telling me about him.’ Ingileif smiled. ‘Tolkien wasn’t really that much older than my grandfather, only in his early thirties, but apparently he had an old-fashioned air about him. As if he lived in a time before industrialization, before big cities and smoke and machine guns. They corresponded on and off for as long as Tolkien was alive. My grandfather even arranged for one of his nieces to work for Tolkien in Oxford as a nanny.’

  ‘It would have been a good thing all around if you had shown me this the last time I was here,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Ingileif. ‘And I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t really good enough.’ Magnus looked straight at her. ‘Do you have any idea why Agnar was killed?’

  This time she held his gaze. ‘No. I told myself that all this was irrelevant to his death, which is why I had no need to tell you about it, and I know of no connection.’ She sighed. ‘It’s not my job to guess, but doesn’t it seem likely that these people you were talking about thought that they could get hold of the saga without paying Agnar?’

  ‘Unless you killed him,’ Magnus said.

  ‘And why would I do that?’ She returned his gaze defiantly.

  ‘To shut him up. You told me yourself that you wanted to withdraw the sale of the saga and he threatened to tell the world about it.’

  ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t kill him for that reason. I wouldn’t kill anyone for any reason,’ Ingileif said.

  Magnus stared hard. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MAGNUS LET THE hundred and twenty pages of Gaukur’s Saga fall on to Baldur’s desk with a thump.

  ‘What’s this?’ Baldur asked, glaring at Magnus.