Based on the evidence of other burials, under their wool gowns the women would have worn an ankle-length shift or chemise of finely pleated linen, pinned at the throat with a small bronze or silver brooch. Linen, being made of plant fibers, decays more readily than wool, and little of it remains. But traces of linen are often preserved pressed into the backs of brooches, where contact with the metal has protected them. Archaeologists have also deduced that the Oseberg queen wore a linen headdress—impressed into a clump of feathers on the bed was the shadow of a lacy, open weave. The linen could have been white and glossy; linen smoothers have been found in many other Norse women’s graves. Made by flattening a single fist-sized droplet of dark green glass, these smoothers were still used in Norway and Scotland in the nineteenth century instead of irons.
Some idea of the style of the gowns can also be learned from other finds. For many years, archaeologists thought a Viking woman’s wool overdress was always sleeveless, like a pinafore or jumper, the straps held up with two “tortoise” brooches. These brooches are the most common piece of jewelry in female graves throughout the Viking world, from Iceland to the Volga. They are found resting on the skeleton’s collarbones, not on the breasts—they were not nipple caps, like the bronze bustiers that costumers for Wagnerian operas favor. The brooches are oval, convex, intricately patterned, just like a small turtle’s shell. They were mass-produced, made of bronze using the lost-wax process (many broken clay molds have been found in Viking towns). For wealthier clients, the bronze was gilded, or etched with acid to make it silver-colored, or both. Silver wire was sometimes applied to highlight the pattern. “The overall appearance of these brooches must have been quite ‘baroque’ by modern standards,” says Michele Hayeur-Smith, who teaches “The Vikings and Their Art” at the Rhode Island School of Design. Gaudy gilded brooches “probably said a lot about the status, wealth, or family histories of the women who wore them.”
The Oseberg queen wears no oval brooches. They could have been taken by the robbers, but Anne Stine Ingstad thinks not—as if a grave robber today would cut off suit buttons. But if the queen didn’t wear a pinafore dress, what did she wear? Among the fabrics in the ship were scraps of tapestry. Many women are depicted, but only one is without a shawl concealing the details of her dress. She is large and prominent, leaning against a horse, and is dressed in what Ingstad considers queenly garb: “She is wearing a tight, full-length skirt. The upper body garment is another color, basically a faded red. This too is tight fitting, with long, tight sleeves. Around her waist she is wearing a wide, patterned belt. It is possible that we have here the Viking Age costume of the higher social classes. This costume seems strangely modern, but with a shawl over it, it would probably look just like the other costumes of these tapestries.”
Ingstad began studying the Oseberg fabrics in the 1970s. In 1979 archaeologists drained the harbor at Hedeby, a famous Viking market town from the early 800s. (After the Slavs destroyed Hedeby in 1066, the nearby city of Schleswig, Germany, was founded.) A crossroads of Danes, Frisians, Saxons, and Slavs, Hedeby is mentioned in many medieval travel accounts. In the early 1900s, archaeologists rediscovered its location; by the 1990s, with less than 5 percent of the town uncovered, the tally of artifacts was up to 340,000, not counting bones. In the mud of the harbor, the workers discovered bundles of torn-up clothing, well preserved by the water; they had apparently been used as rags for wrapping trade goods or for tarring ships. When pieced back together, the women’s garments seemed to justify Ingstad’s vision: They were tailored at the waist to emphasize the woman’s curves. Some were long-sleeved, with cuffs or plackets in a contrasting pattern or color. That some of these colors were bright—not the muted earth tones of natural wool—was discovered at York in England, when the Viking craftsmen’s quarters at Coppergate were excavated in the 1980s. Subjecting tiny samples of cloth to absorption spectrophotometry and thin-layer chromatography, Penelope Walton of the British company Textile Research Associates found that it had been dyed with the plants madder, woad, and weld to produce brilliant reds, greens, blues, yellows, and blacks. Analyzing cloth from other digs, Walton has found purples (made from lichens) and rich browns (from tannin; a pile of walnut shells excavated at Hedeby was probably meant for dye).
As Ingstad saw in the Oseberg tapestry, most women wore a cloak or a shawl for warmth. But at Hedeby were also found bits of a long-sleeved, ankle-length coat made of loden twill, a heavy wool fulled with a hairy nap to repel rain. The coat was quilted with down and trimmed with embroidered ribbons. Other wool coats found elsewhere were lined and trimmed with fur—or fake fur, a wool cloth with lengths of unspun wool knotted into it, giving it the texture of a shag rug. The sagas make several mentions of rain-shedding cloaks made out of this shaggy cloth.
She would have had long hair, the Viking queen in the Oseberg ship, loosely knotted at the nape and falling in loops and coils, as do the images carved on the sleds. Silver amulets found elsewhere, of Valkyries or goddesses, show the same hairstyle.
And she would have worn at least one bead necklace. In nearly every Viking grave, male or female, rich or poor—except Oseberg—archaeologists have found beads. Amber beads were favored by Freyja, the goddess of love. (Amber commonly washed up on the shores of the Baltic Sea.) But most beads were glass. They came in blue, green, yellow, red, or clear, in multicolor stripes or the mosaic-like millefiori, made by twisting glass rods of different colors together and then slicing them. The glass itself may have been recycled from broken drinking vessels, a famous trade-good of the Rhineland. Small cubes of brightly colored glass covered with gold leaf have been found near Viking bead-making workshops (marked by tiny blobs and threads of glass around a hearth); these tesserae were originally meant for Italian church windows. Strung along with the glass beads are charms and pendants and often silver coins. One famous necklace found in a Viking grave beside the market town of Birka in Sweden has been called “a microcosm of the town's business interests.” Interspersed among its glass beads and circlets of silver wire are beads of rock crystal and the reddish gemstone carnelian; two pendants in the style of the Khazars, who lived along the Volga River; a fragment of an Arabian silver bowl; an English book-mount; two round pendants and a tiny silver chair (origin unknown); and a silver coin from the reign of Emperor Theophilus of Byzantium (829–842). Coins on other necklaces come from faraway Samarkand, Tashkent, and Baghdad, as well as from nearby Germany and England. It’s likely Queen Asa bore such sparkles on her neck, and the grave robbers relieved her of them. It’s likely, too, that the ironbound chest the robbers broke open was stuffed with silver coins, like the one Grettir the Strong fought the barrow-wight for.
Most Vikings didn’t get a send-off as lavish as Queen Asa’s, especially not those who went west. We find their graves not by poking into odd-shaped hills, but by chance. The only complete Viking cemetery in Iceland—with both Christians and pagans buried in the same area—was found in 2002 by a farmer with a backhoe.
Keldudalur, like many Icelandic farms these days, includes the tourist trade in its livelihood. It has thirty horses, fifty milk cows, ninety other cows, 160 sheep, and two summerhouses sleeping from fourteen guests (in beds) to thirty (on camping mattresses on the floor), breakfast optional. A “News” button on the farm’s home page leads to photos of prizewinning stallions and rams. There’s no mention that Keldudalur is also the site of a Viking Age graveyard, where one of the earliest Icelandic churches was built adjacent to an abandoned longhouse. It might seem tacky, since the church, graves, and longhouse are now under one of the guesthouses.
Digging the foundation for that house in August 2002, the farmer, Toti, saw a skull. By the time the third one rolled into his backhoe’s bucket he realized he had trouble.
Gudny Zoega, the archaeologist from the Glaumbaer museum, purses her lips and glares, just thinking about it. “The third skull, you know.” It was Gudny down on her knees in the mud that autumn, trying to prevent the skeletons from bei
ng further damaged by the elements. “It was raining, it was getting dark—it was not really ideal. We didn’t see much of anything related to the structure of the cemetery itself that year. We didn’t see the wall, or the church. It was a rescue operation. Unfortunately, that’s way too often the reason for excavating bones.”
She and her assistants dug thirty-four skeletons out of Keldudalur in two rainy weeks in 2002. They rescued an additional twenty, along with mapping the longhouse, church, and circular churchyard wall, in 2003, when Toti wanted to start landscaping around his new summerhouse.
“If you’re thinking of Gudrid and her time period,” Gudny told me, “these people would be her contemporaries.”
Gudny, whose speciality is forensic anthropology, would spend the next several years learning what secrets they had to tell, for the level of preservation of these bones—even those of infants—was excellent. All had been buried before 1300; most were found under the shiny white tephra layer from the eruption of the volcano Hekla in 1104. By the style of burial, almost all were Christian. They were buried in coffins in neat rows around the foundation of a small wooden chapel: men to the south, women to the north, infants tucked up right beneath the eaves of the church. None had grave goods.
A nearby hill contained three or four pagan graves. The backhoe had ruined the most complete, an old woman buried with her horse and greyhound. “We got her skull and some bones from the excavator,” Gudny said. To learn if she was related to those buried as Christians, Gudny has sent teeth from several skeletons off to a DNA lab.
The other pagan graves had been damaged much earlier. One was missing all but the heel bones. “You had the grave, nicely shaped, with a couple of beads in it and some horse bones, but only the heel bones of the skeleton.” The rest may have been moved into the churchyard when the Icelanders converted.
Another skeleton lay in an intriguing—and eerie—position: the skull next to the pelvis. Placing the head beside the buttocks is the traditional way to incapacitate a witch, or, as Grettir’s fight with the barrow-wight shows, to keep a ghost you’ve just robbed from coming after you. Resting on the skeleton was a delicate dragon-shaped bone pin.
This pin and three glass beads are all the grave goods Gudny found at Keldudalur. From the evidence of its 300-plus other pagan burials, Iceland never had a queenly burial like that at Oseberg. According to Laxdaela Saga, Unn the Deep-Minded was buried in a ship beneath a mound with “a load of treasure.” The more no-nonsense Book of Settlements, however, claims that Unn was “a devout Christian” and was buried at the high-tide line because “she didn’t wish to lie in unconsecrated ground.” Either way, we haven’t found her grave. The four ship burials found in Iceland so far were not dragonships but rowboats. Instead of richly carved sleighs to carry them to the Otherworld, most Icelanders had only their saddle horse, with their dog for a guide. The most lavish Icelandic burial was that of the merchant wife at Kornsa with her set of copper scales and her six-sided bronze bell, identical to bells from Viking graves in England and Scotland. A typical Viking woman’s burial, re-created under glass in the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik, is pathetically poor. A bronze trinket at her throat. A serviceable straight pin to close her cloak. Some scraps of iron that might have been a knife, and three large clamshells that she may have used as spoons.
Given the simple way they buried their dead, Orri Vesteinsson of the Archaeological Institute of Iceland concludes that the country’s founders had nothing to lose in pulling up stakes and moving to an empty land. The saga accounts give some sense of this. They tell of families like Unn the Deep-Minded’s, stranded in a hostile land, or warriors who found themselves on the losing side of a battle with Harald Fine-Hair or another ambitious king. Some had time to sell their land for silver, to fill their ships with buckets and looms and frying pans, to gather their livestock and children and friends, their servants and slaves, and to set a course for the west. Others were overseas when their Norwegian estates were confiscated.
The idea in the sagas that Iceland’s settlers were Norwegian noblemen—while not wholly wishful thinking, given the cost of such a venture—is not backed up by archaeology. Archaeologists have found little of the “imposing architecture, artwork and expensive consumables, rich burials, and evidence of large-scale planning” that Orri suggests they should if Iceland’s settlers had wealth or power. Queen Asa’s lifestyle was simply not possible in Iceland, where there was no timber to manufacture her ship and sleds and furniture and household goods. Nor could the Icelanders make even the simplest type of bronze tortoise brooch to fasten a womans pinafore dress. Assuming the craftsmen had a source of bronze (from old or stolen jewelry, perhaps; there is no tin or copper in Iceland), they still needed the materials to make molds and crucibles: clay, beeswax, and sand, peat, or manure. In Iceland you could count on the sand, peat, and manure, but the clay won’t stick together to make a jewelry mold. Beeswax also had to be imported: There are no honeybees in Iceland. Having to import even the simplest materials meant that the finest craftsman could hardly have turned a profit.
The witness of the graves agrees. “In Norway,” says Orri, “tools are frequently found in graves, while in Iceland they are as good as unknown. This suggests that specialized craftsmen could not make a living in Iceland in significant numbers, which in turn suggests that their patrons, the aristocrats, were absent as well.”
Who were these people, then, who founded Iceland? When anthropologist Agnar Helgason traced the ancestry of modern Icelanders through their DNA, he found that the men were 80 percent Scandinavian, but the women were 62 percent from the British Isles.
“How do you come to a situation where you end up with this discrepancy? You get people going from Scandinavia to the British Isles, raiding, then trading, then settling,” Agnar said. “These were younger sons, men who had nothing to lose and something to gain from going into uncertainty rather than staying at home. Usually it’s difficult for young males to convince females to accompany them into uncertainty.”
Irish and English sources, such as the annals kept by clerks in monasteries, corroborate the saga tales of fighting in the British Isles at the time Iceland was discovered. Vikings fought on both sides of these battles in the isles, and those on the losing side—whether native-born or Norse—had no choice but to flee. “One of them was Unn the Deep-Minded,” Agnar said. “Stories of individuals like her are illustrating the pattern going on. Probably many other people had the same experience.” For her father’s misdeeds, Norway was closed to her. Through her husband’s and son’s failed ambitions, Ireland and Scotland were no longer safe. Unn needed to find a new haven.
“Iceland got the chancers, the losers,” Agnar told me. “Going to Iceland was no package tour. It was not easy to go to a place with no infrastructure and where you had to start from scratch. The idea that they were chieftains who were miffed—that idea is wrong. There may have been some chieftains, but they were chieftains who were in trouble.”
Chapter 5: The Land-Taking
With her to Iceland came many high-born men who had been captured by the Vikings. One of them was named Vifil. He had been taken captive in the Western Isles and was a so-called bondsman until Unn released him. When Unn gave farm sites to her ship’s crew, Vifil asked why she didn’t set him up with a farm like the other men. Unn answered that it didn’t make any difference. He would be thought a man of quality wherever he lived. Still, she gave him Vifil’s Dale.
—The Saga of Eirik the Red
THE DALES, UNN THE DEEP-MINDED’S LAND-CLAIM IN Iceland, looks today much like the Hebridean bay where the chessmen were found and where I wanted to poke into those oddly shaped hills: open moorlands, high, rounded hills, rivers tumbling to a fjord with a sandy shore. Only on some days can you see a distant ice cap. Hvamm, the farm Unn kept for herself, means “Grassy Hollow,” and grass is the dominant theme—a windswept grass like the machair, thin and barely holding back the sand, interwoven with heather and blueber
ry shrub, sandwort and sedges, cinquefoil and creeping willow. Nearby are places with Icelandic names that mean “hot springs,” “grain fields,” “wooded mountain above the dark river,” and “wooded mountain above the river through the hay meadows” (these last two names derive from Gaelic), as well as “salmon river,” “fish lakes,” and “ptarmigan hill”; “sheep hill,” “horse lake,” and “swine valley”—which gives you some idea of what Unn and her people had on their minds. They were Vikings, but first of all they were farmers. In their boats they brought not only bedsteads, swords, and treasure chests, but sheep, cows, horses, goats, pigs, hens, geese, dogs, cats, mice, lice, fleas, beetles, and seeds of barley and flax. Archaeologists have found signs of all these in the detritus of a Viking Age house.
They have also learned, by counting and comparing the various pollen grains found in different depths of bog soil, how these Viking farmers transformed the landscape, trying to turn a wilderness into the dairy farms of home. The sagas hint at this transformation. Ingimund the Old, for instance, spent the first winter in a place he named “Willow Valley,” but decided it was “a poor exchange for Norway.” Next summer he packed the family up and set off on horseback. Just as they reached a rushing glacial river, his wife suggested they make a stop. “I’m not feeling well,” she said, in classic saga understatement, and promptly gave birth to a girl. Ingimund named the spot after his new daughter. Exploring the river valley, he saw “fine land with good grass and woods. It was lovely to behold.” He built his house on the edge of Smithy Lake—though deficient in many things, Iceland did, at least, have bog iron, lumps of ore found in stream banks and turf bogs and raked up from lake bottoms that could be worked into scythes and swords, given sufficient wood to make charcoal. Says the saga, “The richness of the land in those days can be seen from this: The sheep could fend for themselves outside all year. Also, some of Ingimund's pigs disappeared and were not found until the following fall. By then there were a hundred of them.”
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