“The replica ships going to Vinland should not be based on Gokstad,” he continued. “They should be based on this knarr; on Skuldelev 1. Gokstad is a combined sailing and rowing vessel, for a large crew. Skuldelev 1 is definitely a cargo ship. There’s only a few oars for turning the ship in the wind or in harbor—it’s a pure sailing vessel. Six men, working day and night, could handle it. On the other hand, you could have any number of people on board. You could move a farm with livestock and goods.”
The knarr, as well as the other four Skuldelev ship types, Crumlin-Pedersen believes, developed after 900 out of the Gokstad style. “The development of cargo vessels seems to be a very late one in Scandinavia,” he explained. “They didn’t have proper cargo vessels until the tenth century. I think that’s because it was too dangerous to go out with a load of valuable cargo without a sufficient number of people to protect your goods. The Gokstad ship was capable of carrying eight to ten tons of cargo, but also a sufficient crew to defend it. Then in the tenth to eleventh centuries, we have the development of cargo ships and the transformation of warships into ships that could no longer carry cargo. I see that as a sign of royal control of the sea. It was one of the main jobs of the king: to keep trade safe.”
As the cargo ships got tubbier (and more practical), the warships got longer and sleeker and swifter, their design driven by fierce sporting competition among royal Viking crews. One of these late longships is eleven times longer than it is wide and made from enormous oak trees, each thin plank over 32 feet long. “For the really royal ships, the shipbuilder had access to trees no one else could touch,” Crumlin-Pedersen told me. “Such a ship as this is an amazing machine!” Racing it would have been the sporting experience of a lifetime.
Then there was the other side of the coin. Imagine the mood of the Viking who was kicked off the king’s royal team, or found himself on the losing side in one of the era’s many contests for the throne. A verse in one of the Icelandic sagas describes just such a fellow who, having lost a leg in battle, is leaving the sporting life behind. As Crumlin-Pedersen translates it, the fellow laments:
Once Wood-Leg was one among heroes
when he raced ahead in his swift vessel
in a cool sword-attack.
Now, fed up with life, a miserable One-Leg
is chugging along towards Iceland
in his deep-sea tramp.
“Chugging along” without any engine, at the mercy of the fickle wind—and we know almost nothing about how the Vikings rigged their ships and handled their sails.
Iceland was discovered when a Viking ship sailing west from Norway to the Faroe Islands was blown off course. Greenland was discovered when a Viking ship sailing west from Norway to Iceland was blown off course. Vinland was discovered when a Viking ship sailing west from Norway (or Iceland, in the other saga) to Greenland was blown off course. When the Gokstad replica, Gaia, tried to sail from Iceland to Greenland in 1991, it got blown so far off course the crew gave up and chugged along under diesel power for four days, sometimes using their own backup engine, at other times being towed by their chase boat. When Snorri, an unpowered replica of the Skuldelev knarr, tried to sail west from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to Vinland in 1998, adventure writer Hodding Carter and his crew waited five days until a gale blew itself out, then another day in fog waiting for the wind to return. Their westward run under an exhilarating breeze lasted 130 miles before they found themselves adrift with four holes in their stern, caused by a too-heavy rudder that pulled loose a crossbeam before it finally snapped. They patched the holes with tomato-can lids, and Coast Guard Canada sent an icebreaker to tow them back to Nuuk.
Except for the tomato-can lids and the Coast Guard, it was a fair copy of Gudrid’s second voyage. A year after Leif Eiriksson had plucked her off the wreck on the rock, she had married Leif’s younger brother, Thorstein. Borrowing a ship, the two picked a sturdy crew, packed up their belongings, and set off for the New World. Thorstein, it seems, did not have as much sailing experience as Leif. He made the mistake of setting his course due west, where he knew Vinland lay. According to The Saga of the Greenlanders, “They were tossed about at sea all summer and couldn’t tell where they were.” Just before winter set in, they found themselves at the mouth of the Lysufjord near Nuuk, a distance they could have rowed in six days in the Viking fishing boat I tried out on the Roskilde Fjord.
A better sailor would have known that in these high, cold oceans, the westerly winds are strongest and stormiest to the south; they diminish the farther north you sail. By sailing west, Thorstein was hazarding a gale—frequent and violent off these coasts. Crumlin-Pedersen’s colleague Max Vinner, from the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, found himself in the same situation in 1984, sailing Saga Siglar. The winds were hurricane force, the waves 30 to 40 feet high. The knarr could not “heave to,” reducing sail and turning into the wind like a decked sailing ship: She would take on too much water. But running before the storm was also chancy. If she went too fast, the ship would surf, rising out of the water until the keel and rudder lost their grip on the waves. “Then the very worst can happen,” writes Vinner. The ship can sail down. “The ship can plunge sideways from a wave-top down into the valley in front, and then be filled with water by the wave from which it has fallen.” To slow their speed, Vinner and the Saga Siglar crew first tried to “goosewing” the sail, tying up the center of the broad square of wool so that only two small triangles could catch the wind. That failing, they took the sail down altogether. Under a bare pole, Saga Siglar scudded before the wind for ten hours at an average speed of 8.4 knots—as opposed to the 7.5-knot average (and 10.7 maximum) that Gunnar Marel Eggertsson held Gaia to during what he thought was a fast two-and-a-half-day sail between the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Saga Siglar, writes Vinner, “was a beautifully safe ship.... She carried her sail well, rose well to the waves, and her movements were easy. Above all, however, she was dry.” Even running from the hurricane, she took on no more water “than the crew could manage to pump out again.” In case anyone objected that Vikings didn’t have pumps, he added, “A frightened man with a bailer is quicker than even the best pump.” Yet in 1992, off the coast of Spain, this beautifully safe ship sank.
Gudrid’s ship did not sink. But when the wind let them go, the saga says, no one on board knew where they were. They had been blown off course.
To Viking poets, the wind was the neigher, the wailer, the whistler, the coldly dressed, the roaring traveler, the squally one, the wolf of the sail, the waverer, the never silent. The sky was the weaver of winds. The sea was the ring of the island, the house of sands and seaweeds and skerries, land of fish, land of ice, and land of sailing wind. The best ship imaginable, owned by the god Odin, caught a fair wind whenever its sail was hoisted. (It could also be folded up and kept in the god’s pocket for convenience.) Being blown off course was so common that the Vikings had a word for it: hafvilla, literally “bewildered by the sea,” or as we might say today, “at sea.” But being blown off course presupposes the Vikings could set a course. How, without a compass or a clock, did Thorstein and Gudrid ever expect to know where they were?
To sail safely down the coast of Norway, according to Arne Emil Christensen, you needed only to recall your fairy tales. “The landmarks, mainly characteristic mountains,” he writes, “are featured in fairy tales that explain them as petrified trolls and giants, who in the old days had their quarrels and friendships. The stories told on board not only passed the time but instructed young crewmen in the art of navigation: Such tales helped the sailors remember the landmarks.”
Between Norway and Greenland, landmarks are scant. A manuscript written by an Icelander who traveled frequently to Norway in the 1300s describes the voyage from Hennoya, on the coast north of Bergen, to Hvarf, the southernmost tip of Greenland (the name means “Turning Point”), in this way: “Hvarf is reached by sailing due west from Hennoya in Norway, and then one will have sailed to the north of Shetland so that it can
only be seen if there is good visibility at sea, and to the south of the Faroes, so that the sea is halfway up the slopes, and to the south of Iceland so that they can see its birds and whales.”
Islands, mountains, birds, and whales. As Christensen writes, “No mention of tools used for navigation can be found in the text; apparently the sailor had to learn how to use nature as a guide.” Islands are often topped by banks of cumulus clouds. Mountains are magnified by mirages, common in the far north where the sea is coldest. Auks and gannets fly up to a hundred miles out to sea each morning; if they have fish in their beaks, you can follow them back to land, for they are returning to feed their nestlings. Whales of some kinds, like humpbacks, haunt the shallower water close to land; others stay in the deeps.
The sun and the stars were also a sailor’s guides. The North Star, Polaris, was named by the Vikings Leiðarstjarna, “the leading star.” The low northern sun was the Vikings’ only clock. At home on the farms, they would mark time by the sun’s position above certain mountain peaks. At sea, the height of the sun at noon and the length of the day compared to home told them their latitude, how far north or south they had drifted. When Bjarni Herjolfsson got blown off course on his way from Iceland to Greenland—the voyage on which, according to The Saga of the Greenlanders, he spotted Vinland before Leif Eiriksson did—he rejoiced when the sun finally came out so he could “get his bearings.”
How precise these bearings were is a mystery. Based on the boyhood recollections of a modern Icelandic sailor, one expert suggests that the Vikings simply used a clenched fist at arm’s length to measure the sun’s height. “According to my own observations,” he writes, “a clenched fist with raised thumb is equivalent to about 15 degrees of elevation. The thumb thus represents 7 degrees, and each of the other fingers 2 degrees.” Comparing this reading to the sun’s elevation at home at noon gives “a fair indication” of the latitude.
Numerous scholars have championed navigational devices that improve on the precision of the fist. Half of a wooden disk with notches along its rounded edge, found on a Viking farm in Greenland, has been identified as half of a bearing-dial. With a vertical pin in its center, it works something like a sundial, the pin’s shadow telling the time of day or, depending on the dial’s markings, the sun’s direction. Other archaeological scraps have been tentatively identified as bits of an astrolabe or a quadrant, instruments that measure the altitude of the sun and stars. Arab astronomers in Spain were familiar with both well before the year 1000. Gerbert of Aurillac, who reigned as Pope Sylvester II from 999 to 1003, studied mathematics in Spain and wrote a treatise on the astrolabe; a few years later, the German monk Hermann of Reichenau wrote up detailed instructions on how to make one. The quadrant is described in an Icelandic manuscript written late in the thirteenth century, although no saga sea-tale mentions one being used. A “solar stone” that is mentioned in the sagas has been identified as a mineral, Icelandic feldspar, that polarizes light, showing the direction of the sun even if it is hidden by the horizon or clouds. But modern experiments show it works only if the sky is clear at an angle of 90 degrees away from the sun. “When this is the case,” writes another expert, “it is easy enough to find the direction to the sun, for example by setting a knife-blade on a fingernail.”
This, essentially, is the problem with all of these tools: They work only when the sun or stars are out. In the Land of the Midnight Sun, Polaris is not often seen during the summer sailing season. In the Ocean Called Dark, neither is the sun.
The Ocean Called Dark is the name Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070, gave the seas around Greenland. That “numbing ocean’s dark mist, which could hardly be penetrated with the eye,” marked “the darksome bounds of a failing world,” he wrote, based on tales he had heard in the court of the king of Denmark. Modern writers describe the frequent Greenlandic fogs in much the same way. American anthropologist Frederica DeLaguna, sailing the Greenland coast in the summer of 1929, writes, “We journeyed that day surrounded by mist and snow and rain. I could not believe that there was land near us.” Newspaperman J. R. L. Anderson, who traced the Vikings’ voyage in a modern sailing yacht in 1967, was lost in fog west of Greenland from June 14 to June 20. “We lived mostly by our ears in a sightless cold world,” he writes.
Psychologically, those days of fog were the most trying of the whole voyage. A gale is a fine, dramatic thing; you may be battered and hard pressed, even in real danger, but the force and fury of the wind and sea at least lift the spirit—you are fighting something you can see to fight. Ice had been perilous and often frightening, but it had been beautiful and interesting, too. Fog has the vindictiveness of the secret poisoner—the strongest man cannnot fight fog, because he does not know what he has to fight. After twenty-four hours of fog you feel that you have sailed somehow beyond the rim of the human world, to a light-less Hades from which there is no escape.
The arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the fog off Greenland “preternaturally dense,” explaining that such fog is common “where warm and cold waters sort of brush against each other, particularly if the cold waters contain fragments of ice,” which is the case year-round along Greenland’s east coast, thanks to the East Greenland Polar Current. During the summer sailing season, the current carries masses of ice—“monstrous great islands of ice,” as the English explorer Martin Frobisher described them in 1576—down the east coast, flips them around Hvarf, and sends them north, up the west coast almost as far as Nuuk, where a “relatively warm” current keeps the coast ice-free by shunting the bergs west, toward Vinland. According to a modern-day “field guide to icebergs,” 40,000 icebergs the size of a 15-story building break off from Greenland’s glaciers each year. Of these, 1 to 2 percent—400 to 800 bergs—reach Vinland. Uncountable numbers of “bergy bits” (as big as a house) and “growlers” (a grand piano or a small car) travel with them. The combination of fog and ice can be deadly to a thin-hulled wooden ship.
The story of sailing in Greenland waters, writes Jens Rosing, former director of Greenland’s National Museum, “is the story of long cold watches, fogs, shining days when everything shimmers in the light, terrifying storms, and undercurrents so strong that the ice, against all reason, moves up against even the most powerful storm winds.... The Icelandic sagas and annals speak time and time again of the wrecks of Greenland ships, of ships that vanished with man and mouse.” The sagas tell much the same story, missing only the ice, of all the seas Gudrid sailed.
To protect themselves from such catastrophes, the Vikings had no Coast Guard. They had no chase boats, no winches, no diesel backup engines. They didn’t even have a friendly Eskimo in a kayak, as the artist Rockwell Kent did when his yacht wrecked off the coast of Greenland in 1929, to paddle home and radio for backup. All they had was magic. In The Saga of the Volsungs is a sailor’s verse:
Wave runes shall you make
If you desire to ward
Your sail-steeds on the sound.
On the stem shall they be cut
And on the steering blade
And burn them on the oar.
No broad breaker will fall
Nor waves of blue,
And you will come safe from the sea.
In a Viking longhouse in Greenland, dating from the days of Gudrid, archaeologists in the 1950s found a wooden rod covered with runes. On one side is the futhark, or complete runic alphabet—what one rune specialist called “the most powerful magic factor to defend and protect one.” On the other side is a verse, carved in precise runes that are easily read—yet remain mysterious. On the sea, sea, sea, where the gods sit—or watch, or lie in wait—it begins, and then its meaning grows unclear. One specialist thinks it’s a riddle about a mirage. Another thinks it’s a joke. The most persuasive reading makes it a prayer, or an epitaph: Bibrau is the maiden who sits in the blue. “Bibrau,” similar to the Icelandic word for mirage, is otherwise unknown as a name. “The maiden” could be a goddess, the Virgin Mary, or an ordinary girl. “Th
e blue” could mean the sea, or the sky (the giant from whose skull the gods fashioned the heavens was called “The Blue One”). Yet On the sea, sea, sea, where the gods sit sounds so melancholy that this rune stick brings to my mind a similar stick, found in an otherwise-empty coffin in a Viking cemetery: This woman, whose name was Gudveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea. Perhaps the same was the fate of Bibrau, whose lover was so poetic.
But it was not the fate of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. In spite of being shipwrecked and blown off course, she did not die at sea. Instead she was twice saved to sail again, as soon as she could, west, away from Greenland, away from Iceland, away from Norway and her trees, west off the edge of the known world, into the blue.
Chapter 2: Ransacking the Past
As they were looking through Einar’s wares, a woman passed by the open doorway. “Who is that beautiful woman?” asked Einar. “I have never seen her here before.”
“That is my foster-daughter, Gudrid,” replied Orm. “Her father is Thorbjorn of Laugarbrekka.”
“She’d make me an excellent wife,” said Einar. “Has she had any offers?”
“Indeed she has, my friend,” replied Orm. “She’s not to be had just for the asking.”
—The Saga of Eirik the Red
THE OTHER VERSION OF GUDRID’S STORY BEGINS NOT with a shipwreck but with this glimpse of Gudrid through a young man’s eyes. Here is the scene: On the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting from the west coast of Iceland sat a small Viking longhouse. Turf-clad, except for one wooden door, the house looked like a low hill in the jewel-green field. A turf wall encircled it, keeping the horses from grazing in the manured homefield. Toward the sea, the land dropped off into ragged cliffs alive with nesting seabirds. Seals sunned on the seaside rocks. A knarr and a six-oared fishing boat, both clinker-built and tarred black, lay beached in a tiny harbor of black sand. Behind the turf house rose a pyramidal black hill, then the clean white flank of the glacier called Snaefellsjokull, “Snow Mountain’s Glacier.” Beneath the glacier hid a volcano, known to the inhabitants of the house only from a pleasant side effect: Water hot enough for washing bubbled up from the ground not far away.
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