by Tim Severin
The Norwegian king, Olaf, summoned Grettir to the palace to stand judgement, and I went with him, intending to act as a favourable witness. The hearing was held in the great hall of the royal residence and King Olaf himself conducted the enquiry with proper formality. He listened to the dead men’s father state his case, then asked our former companions to recount their version of that fateful evening. Finally he turned to Grettir to ask him what he had to say. Stubbornly Grettir remained silent, glowering at the king, and I felt it was left to me to speak up. So I repeated what Grettir had told me about the drunkards using burning firebrands as weapons. When I had finished, the king asked Grettir, ‘Do you have anything to add?’
‘The sots in the house were all alive when I left them,’ was his only comment.
King Olaf was fair-minded as well as patient. ‘All the evidence I have heard today is conjectural, as none of the participants survived except Grettir,’ he said, ‘and Grettir’s statement must be treated with caution as he is the defendant in this case. So it will be difficult to arrive at the truth. My own opinion is that Grettir is probably innocent of the charge of deliberate murder because he had no motive to set fire to the building.’
I was about to congratulate Grettir on the royal verdict, when King Olaf continued. ‘I have therefore decided that the best way to settle the matter is that Grettir Asmundarson submits himself to ordeal in my new church and in the presence of the faithful. The ordeal to be that of hot iron.’
I had completely forgotten that King Olaf never missed a chance to demonstrate the advantages of Christianity. A fervent believer in the White Christ, he wanted all his subjects to adopt the faith and follow Christian customs. Trial by ordeal was one of them. Of course, trials to test for guilt or innocence were also a part of the Old Ways, usually by armed combat, man to man, arranged between plaintiff and accused. But the Christians had come up with much more ingenious tests. They dropped the accused into narrow wells to see if the guilty sank or the innocent swam. They obliged others to pluck stones out of boiling water to observe whether the scald wounds then festered; or – as was proposed for Grettir – they made them hold a red-hot lump of iron and watched to see how far they could walk before their hands blistered mortally. And, for some curious reason, they thought it more authentic and righteous if the ordeals by steam and fire were conducted in a church.
A packed congregation assembled to witness Grettir’s test. Their expectant faces revealed how notorious my friend had already become. Apparently the stories of his exploits were common knowledge: how he had tackled a rogue bear and killed the animal single-handed, and – in an uncomfortable echo of his present situation – how he had locked a marauding gang of dangerous berserks into a wooden shed and burned the place down, killing them all. Now the audience turned up to see whether Grettir could endure the pain of holding a lump of scorching iron in the palms of his hands while he walked ten paces. I slipped quietly into the church ahead of Grettir, though I had no idea how I could help him. The best I could do, while the congregation chanted a prayer to their God, was to repeat over and over again a galdr verse I had learned long ago, the seventh of Odinn’s spells, which will quench a blazing fire.
Odinn heard my appeal, for when Grettir entered the church and began to walk up the aisle to where the priest and his assistant stood waiting by the brazier, a young man darted out from the congregation, and began to caper and dance beside Grettir. He was a fanatical Christian devotee. He was grimacing and shouting, waving his arms and cursing. Grettir was a vile heathen, the youth shouted, he should never be allowed inside a church or permitted to tread on sacred ground. Rolling his eyes and dribbling, he began to taunt Grettir, hurling a torrent of abuse until finally Grettir swung his arm and fetched his tormentor such a crack on the side of the head that the youth went spinning away, pitching face down in the aisle. The congregation gasped. They waited for the youth to get back to his feet, but he lay there motionless. Grettir said not a word, but stood patiently. Someone knelt down beside the lad and turned him over.
‘He’s dead’ he said, looking up. ‘His neck’s broken.’
There was an awful silence, then the priest raised his voice. ‘Violent death in God’s House! Murder in the face of our Lord!’ he screamed.
Grettir began to retreat slowly down the aisle towards the door. The people’s fear of him was so great that no one dared to move. Before Grettir reached the door King Olaf, who had been in the front of the church to witness the ordeal, intervened. He must have realised that his show of Christian justice was turning sour. ‘Grettir!’ he called, ‘no man is unlucky or as ill-fated as you. Your quick temper has destroyed your chance to prove your innocence or guilt. I hereby pronounce that you must leave this kingdom and return to your own country. In view of the provocation you have suffered, you will be permitted a grace period of six months. But you are never to return to Norway.’
FOR DAYS GRETTIR and I searched for a ship that would take us back to Tonsberg, where his brother Thorstein lived. But it was hard to find a captain who would accept us aboard. Seamen are more superstitious than most and Grettir was said to be the most luckless man alive. If he did not cause mischief himself, his misfortune would drag down those around him. Nor were his enemies satisfied with King Olaf’s verdict. Grettir and I were in a shoreside tavern, seated in a back room and whiling away one of those dark and dreary Norwegian winter afternoons when Thorir’s family decided to take their revenge. Five of them burst into the room, armed with spears and axes. Four of the attackers made straight for Grettir, while the fifth turned his attention on me. I was taken completely unawares – before I could get to my feet my attacker had struck me hard on the side of the head with the butt of his spear. I crashed backward from my seat, my head so filled with pain that I could hardly see. When my vision cleared, I saw that Grettir had picked up a bench and was using it as his weapon. His strength was prodigious. He handled the heavy bench as if it was a fighting staff, first sweeping the legs from under two of his assailants, and then bringing the heavy furniture down on the shoulder of a third with a massive thump. The man howled and clutched at his now useless arm. The fourth man, seeing his opening, rushed at Grettir from one side with an axe. Grettir dodged and, as the man overreached, my friend effortlessly plucked the weapon from his grasp. The balance of the contest changed in an instant. Seeing that Grettir was now armed and dangerous, the attackers jostled one another as they headed for the door. The man who had knocked me down raised his spear to skewer me. Compared with Grettir, I was a helpless target. In a flash Grettir turned and used his free hand to wrench the spear from my attacker, and he too ran out of the door and slammed it hard behind him.
‘Are you all right?’ Grettir asked as I struggled groggily to my feet. My head felt as if it was split.
‘Yes, I’ll be fine. Just give me a moment.’
I could hear our opponents just outside the door, shouting insults and calling out that they had not finished with us. Grettir cocked his head on one side to listen. I saw him heft the captured spear in one hand to find its balance point and draw back his arm in the throwing position. Then he hurled the spear straight at the door. His strength was so great that the weapon splintered right through the wood panel. I heard a yelp of pain. Moments later the attackers had gone.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for our friendship to bring you into danger,’ Grettir said to me quietly. ‘That was not your quarrel.’
‘What is friendship for if not to hold things in common, including another’s battles?’ I said. Despite my aching head, I felt a new self-confidence welling up within me. I knew that since Edgar’s death and my parting from Aelfgifu, I had been adrift, and that my day-to-day existence had been aimless. But now my life had taken a new shape: Grettir had acknowledged me as his friend.
EIGHT
‘IT’S THE STRENGTH in his arms that does it,’ said Thorstein Galleon to me two weeks later. Grettir and I had finally found a ship, an Icelandic vessel and at
a bandit’s price, to take us to Tonsberg, where the three of us – Thorstein, Grettir and I – were now seated in the kitchen at Thorstein’s farm. ‘Look here, see my arm.’ And Thorstein rolled back his sleeve. ‘People would say that I’m well muscled. But take a look at Grettir’s arms. They’re more like oxen’s hocks. And he’s got the strength in his chest and shoulders to back them up. We used to have contests when we were children, seeing who could pick up the heaviest stones or throw them the furthest. Grettir always won and by the time he was in his early teens people started taking bets on whether he could lift a particularly heavy boulder they selected. Yet to look at him you would never know how strong he is. Not until he takes off his tunic, that is. That is why people misjudge him so often. They get into a fight with him or an argument, and finish up the worse off. If Grettir was a big man, massive and fearsome to look at, he would not have half the trouble he seems to attract. People would steer clear.’
Grettir, as usual, was adding little to the conversation. He sat there, listening to his half-brother ramble on. I could see that there was considerable affection between them, though for the most part it was unspoken. We were lazing away the day, waiting for the captain who had brought us to decide whether he would risk sailing onward to Iceland. My friend had announced that he had decided to go home, even if it meant breaking the terms of his three-year exile. He had confided to me that although his sentence of lesser outlawry still had six months to run, as far as he was concerned the matter was over and done with. He felt he had spent enough time abroad to cancel the blood debt to the Icelandic family of the man he had killed. Now that I knew him better, I realised that his unfinished sentence had become an attraction rather than a deterrent. He was thinking he would gain fame – or notoriety – as the man brave enough to adjust his time of exile out of a sense of self-justice.
When Grettir told Thorstein of his decision to return home, his half-brother pondered the matter for several moments, then said in his deep rumbling voice, ‘I doubt that your father will be too pleased to see you, or even speak to you. But remember me to our mother and tell her that I am well and prospering here in Norway. Whatever happens, I want you to know that you can always count on my support. And if worst comes to worst, and you get yourself unjustly killed, I swear that I will hunt down the killer and avenge you. This I pledge.’
Though Grettir had promised our avaricious captain that he would double his usual fee for the passage to Iceland, the skipper had already delayed his departure three times, not because he was fearful of Grettir’s bad luck, but because he was uneasy about running into a late winter gale. He was mercenary but he was also a good seaman. Even now he was aboard his ship in the little creek close below Thorstein’s farm, gazing up anxiously at the sky, watching which way the clouds were going, and offering up prayers to Njord, God of the winds and waves. He knew that an open-sea crossing to Iceland was not something to undertake lightly at that time of year.
Sailors give nicknames to their ships. I have sailed on ‘Plunger’, which pitched badly in the waves; ‘Griper’ was almost impossible to sail close to the wind, and ‘The Sieve’ obviously needed constant bailing. The ship we now expected to carry us to Iceland was known to her crew as ‘The Clog’. The man who had built her many years earlier had intended a vessel nearly twice the size and he had constructed the fore part of the ship before realising that he was running out of funds. Iceland has no ship-building timber, and the wood for her vessels has to be imported from Norway. The price of timber soared that year, and ‘The Clog’s’ builder was already deep in debt. So he had truncated his ship, making her stern with whatever material he had left over. The result was that the bow of ‘The Clog’ was a fine, sea-kindly prow. But the stern was a sorry affair, stunted, clumsy and awkward. And it turned out to be nearly the death of us.
Her captain knew that he needed six days of settled weather to make his passage in ‘The Clog’, as she was such a slow and heavy sailer. ‘We could be lucky and have a week of favourable east winds at this season,’ he said, ‘but then again it can turn nasty in a few hours and we’d be in real trouble.’
Eventually his weather sense, or perhaps his enthusiasm for our passage money, persuaded him that the right moment had come and we set sail. At first everything went well. The east wind held and we plodded west, passing through an area where we saw many whales and knew we had cleared the rocks and cliffs of Farroes. Though I was a paying passenger, I took my turn to prepare meals on the flat hearth stone at the base of the mast, and I helped to handle sails, bail out the bilges, and generally showed willing. Grettir, by contrast, sank into one of his surly moods. He lay about the deck, wrapped in his cloak and picking the most sheltered spots, where he was in the way of the working crew. Even when it was obvious that he was a hindrance, he refused to shift, and the vessel’s regular eight-man crew were too frightened of his brawler’s reputation to kick him out of the way. Instead they glared at him, made loud remarks about lazy louts and generally worked themselves into a state of rightful indignation about his idleness. Grettir only sneered back at them and called them lubberly clowns, no better than seagoing serfs. Being Grettir’s friend and companion I was thoroughly embarrassed by his churlish behaviour, though I knew better than to interfere. Anything I said when he was in that sullen mood was likely to make him even more obstinate. So I put up with the scornful remarks of my shipmates when they enquired how I managed to maintain a friendship with such a boor. I held my tongue and remembered how, without Grettir’s intervention, I would probably have ended my life in a Nidaros tavern brawl.
‘The Clog’ trudged along. Despite her age, she was doing all that was asked of her thanks to the hard-working crew and the good weather. Unfortunately, though, the weather proved a cruel fraud. The same east wind which was pushing us along our route so satisfactorily, gradually grew in strength. At first no one complained. The increase in the wind was by small degrees and easily handled. The crew reduced sail and looked pleased. ‘The Clog’ was now moving through the water as fast as any of them could remember and in the right direction. In the evening the wind strength rose a little more. The sailors doubled the ropes which supported the single mast, lowered the mainyard a fraction, and checked that there was nothing loose on deck that might roll free and do damage. The younger mariners began to look slightly apprehensive. During the third night at sea we began to hear the telltale sound of the wind moaning in the rigging, a sign that ‘The Clog’ was coming under increasing stress. When dawn broke, the sea all around us was heaving in rank upon rank of great waves, their tops streaked with foam. Now the older members of the crew began to be concerned. They checked the bilges to see how much water was seeping through the hull’s seams. The ship was labouring, and if you listened closely you could hear the deep groans of the heavier timbers in contrast to the shrieking clamour of the wind. By noon the captain had ordered the crew to take down the mainsail entirely and rig a makeshift storm sail on a short spar just above deck level. This storm sail was no bigger than a man’s cloak, but by then the wind had risen to such strength that the tiny sail was enough to allow the helmsman to steer the ship. Only the captain himself and his most experienced crewman were at the rudder because each breaking wave was threatening to yaw the ship and send her out of control. In those vile conditions there was no question of trying to steer our intended course, nor of heaving to and waiting for the gale to blow itself out. ‘The Clog’ was too clumsy to ride the waves ahull. They would roll her. Our best tactic was to steer directly downwind, allowing the great waves to roll harmlessly under her.
This was when the original failure of her construction began to tell. A deep-sea merchant ship, properly built to our favoured Norse design, would have had a neat stern, so she rose effortlessly to the following waves, as a sea-kindly gull sits on the water. But ‘The Clog’s broad, ugly stern was too ungainly. She did not lift with the waves, but instead squatted down awkwardly and presented a bluff barrier to the force of the sea. And
the sea responded in anger. Wave after wave broke violently against that clumsy stern. We felt each impact shake the length of the little vessel. And the crest of every wave came rearing up and toppled onto the deck, washing forward and then cascading into the open hold. Even the least experienced seafarer would have seen the danger: if our vessel took on too much water, she would either founder from the added weight or the swirl of the water in the hold would make her dangerously unstable. Then she would simply roll over and die, taking all of us with her.
Without being told, our crew – myself included – bailed frantically, trying to return the sea water to where it belonged. It was back-breaking, endless labour. We were using wooden buckets, and they had to be hoisted up from the bilge by one man to a helper on deck, who then crossed to the lee rail, emptied the bucket over the side, lurched his way back across the heaving and slippery deck, and lowered back the bucket down to the man working in the bilge. It became a never-ending, desperate cycle as more and more water came gushing in over ‘The Clog’s’ ill-begotten stern. Our skipper did what he could to help. He steered the ship to each wave, trying to avoid the direct impact on the stern, and he ordered the now-useless mainsail to be rigged as a breakwater to divert the crests that leaped aboard. But the respite was only temporary. After a day of unremitting bailing, we could feel ‘The Clog’ beginning to lose the battle. Hour by hour she became more sluggish, and the man who stood in the bilge to bail was now up to his thighs in water. The previous day he had been able to see his knees. Our ship was slowly settling into her grave.
