The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

by The Far Traveler- Voyages of a Viking Woman (epub)

  This picture of Viking law is—like the description of Skallagrim’s settlement—a rationalization. Historians used to think that the laws, known from a medieval lawbook called Grágas (“Gray Goose”), were exempt from the problems of veracity that plague the sagas. Yet the first lawbook was not written until 1118, nearly two hundred years after the fact, and it no longer exists. The two manuscripts of Grágas that remain for us to read were penned in the late 1200s, after Iceland had become part of the kingdom of Norway. They differ greatly. No one knows why both are called “Gray Goose,” or what their purpose was. No one knows if they contain the actual laws of the land or, as Helgi Thorlaksson suggests, “simply learned reflections and speculations.” In Jon Vidar Sigurdsson’s view, Grágas is even less reliable than the sagas. The saga author, writing for the public, had to stay within the bounds of his listeners’ prior knowledge of his characters and his story. Writing for scholarly colleagues, the editor of Grágas was free to settle on “the simplest explanation,” the academic model.

  In this case, the model is wrong. Only 10 percent of the conflicts in the sagas are resolved by courts of law; 90 percent hang on negotiation. “Farmers who felt that their rights had been infringed usually asked their chieftain for support,” Jon writes. “The validity of the case or the underlying circumstances were of secondary importance; what mattered was the kind of support that could be mustered.” Or, as Paul Durrenberger says, what mattered was the chieftain’s “influence, cunning, and power at arms.”

  Paul argues that chieftains bought their influence, flattering and cajoling their neighbors with feasts and presents. Jon considers wealth just one of several important qualities. Without money a chieftain had no men, but a good chieftain was also “generous, helpful, and loyal,” as well as shrewd. He made strategic marriage alliances and supported his kin. He maintained peace among his own men. He could be either “aggressive, keen, bold, decisive, hard, and ambitious” or “peaceful, clever, good-natured, moderate, and unassuming”—both strategies worked, or at least, each worked sometimes. For the most obvious characteristic of a chieftaincy in the sagas, according to Jon, was that they “did not last for very long.” A chieftaincy was not a dynasty. A man could inherit, buy, or be given a chieftain’s ring, but that alone didn’t make him a chieftain.

  Nor were there just thirty-nine of them, as the academic model of Viking law would tell us. From the settlement of Iceland until the time of Gudrid’s death, about 1050, anyone could claim the title. One of the fifty or sixty chieftains that Jon suggests were knocking around Iceland in the late 900s could have been Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn Vifilsson, as The Saga of Eirik the Red claims. He just wasn’t a very successful chieftain, and he was, by the time the saga begins, an old man with money problems living in territory claimed by the young and aggressive Snorri of Helgafell. Although a chieftaincy was not defined geographically, no chieftain liked to have a rival on his doorstep.

  As The Saga of Eirik the Red tells us, Gudrid’s father refused to shore up his tottering chieftaincy by wedding his young daughter to a rich—but slave-born—merchant. His only other source of wealth, as for all Icelanders, was the hay that fed the sheep that provided the wool that Gudrid and the other women on the farm could spin and weave into homespun cloth, the only goods Icelanders had to trade with Norway. By 985, when Gudrid was born and Eirik the Red convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to sail off with him to start over in Greenland, many of the first settlers’ choices had already proved disastrous. Many farms had been abandoned; many settlers’ hopeful expectations had turned to dust. There’s no way to say if Gudrid’s father’s farm suffered from overgrazing a thousand years ago, but erosion is one possible explanation for his “money troubles.”

  As Icelandic historian Gunnar Karlsson writes, “Iceland may have been a good country for the first generations of Icelanders, but it was not equally good to all its children.”

  Gudrid’s family were among those for whom it was not so good.

  Some students of genealogy find it questionable that Gudrid could be the granddaughter of Vifil, the highborn captive from Scotland, as the sagas say. The problem is that this Vifil sailed in the ship built by Unn the Deep-Minded, while Karlsefni, Gudrid’s husband, is Unn’s great-great-great-great-grandson. That gives a difference of several generations between Gudrid’s and her husband’s ages. Yet it is possible. Unn was a grandmother when she sailed to Iceland, with two granddaughters of marriageable age. Her youngest grandchild, Olaf Feilan, may have been about five. If Vifil was Olaf Feilan’s age, there would be only two generations’ difference between Gudrid and Karlsefni. If Gudrid’s father and grandfather were in their fifties when their children were born, and Karlsefni's were in their twenties, the age difference is erased.

  Assuming Vifil was a tot when Unn took him along, what was his status? Some translators call him a slave, but it’s clear that he and his sons didn’t think of themselves like the poor folk at Sveigakot, stranded and struggling. What slave would challenge his owner, saying, “Why didn’t you give me a farm, like everyone else?” as Vifil challenged Unn, some years after they had arrived in Iceland? And what slave owner would then give that arrogant upstart a whole valley, as Unn did? When Vifil’s son, Thorbjorn, was considering the marriage offer for Gudrid made by the rich young merchant, Einar of the fancy clothes, he said to his friend Orm, “To think that I would marry my daughter to the son of a slave!” It was apparently a sore point with Thorbjorn.

  Vifil may instead have been a royal hostage. When Unn’s son Thorstein the Red was setting himself up as king of Scotland, he needed to guarantee the loyalty of the Scottish aristocracy. Throughout the Middle Ages, a common way to ensure loyalty was to take prisoner a nobleman’s young son, and to tie the boy’s life to his father’s good behavior. Young Vifil’s life was forfeit when Thorstein was betrayed and killed by the Scots, but Unn instead took him with her when she fled. It’s likely he married late; it was difficult to start a farm from scratch when you had no assets but a sense of your own importance. Unn might have rented him a cow and some sheep, so he could build up his herd. He would have turned to her for help if his hay crop was scanty, and her grandson Olaf Feilan, when he became a chieftain, could count on his sword.

  The relationship was reciprocal, though, and it seems Olaf Feilan—or Thord Gellir, the next chieftain at Hvamm—let Vifil down. The Book of Settlements tells us that after Vifil settled in Vifil’s Dale, he quarreled with another of Unn’s shipmates, Hord, who had been granted Hord’s Dale, the seaward end of Vifil’s Dale. Doubtless it was a border dispute. We know who won by the nickname given Hord’s son—Asbjorn the Wealthy—and by the fact that this Asbjorn married Thord Gellir’s sister-in-law, while his daughter married the rising young chieftain Illugi the Black. Asbjorn was not only wealthy, he was well connected.

  Vifil’s connections were not so good. His wife is not named in the sagas—she is clearly not a chieftain’s kinswoman. His two sons, Thorbjorn and Thorgeir, married sisters, the daughters of a prosperous farmer named Einar of Laugarbrekka (“Hot-Springs Slope”), who lived on the farthest western tip of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, right beneath the Snow Mountain’s Glacier. Neither of Vifil’s sons continued farming at Vifil’s Dale.

  Hellisvellir, or “Fields by the Cave,” the farm where Gudrid was born, was the dowry of her mother, Hallveig. Gudrid’s Uncle Thorgeir and Aunt Arnora lived next door, taking over the main estate of Laugarbrekka after Einar’s death. Gudrid had a cousin there of about her own age, a girl named Yngvild, who would later marry a son of the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell.

  Gudrid’s father was not happy at Hellisvellir. He was perhaps the younger brother, married to the younger sister and given the smaller farm. His wife seems to have died young—Gudrid was an only child, and she was raised next door at Arnarstapi by Orm and his wife. Besides, Thorbjorn and his brother did not always see eye to eye, especially when it came to Thorbjorn’s friendship with Eirik the Red.

/>   Eirik the Red is the classic case of the independent farmer, the seeker of freedom whose “don’t tread on me” attitude gets him into trouble. He was quick-tempered and quick to draw steel, and seems to have had an inflated opinion of himself. He also seems to have been justified in thinking people were trampling on his rights.

  He came to Iceland with his father “because of some killings,” and they set up a farm in the far northwest of the country, in one of the last areas to be settled. It was not the kind of place Eirik thought he deserved. When his father died, Eirik quickly looked for a way out. He married a widow’s daughter; his mother-in-law was the famously buxom Thorbjorg Knarrarbringu, or Ship-Breast, and when she remarried and moved south to the Dales, Eirik and his wife followed her.

  Eirik’s new father-in-law was an important man, related by marriage to Olaf the Peacock, the strongest chieftain in the district. But for all his importance, he was not overly generous. He gave Eirik the Red a small plot of land at the northeast tip of a big lake. The site is pinched between the river and the mountain, hard up against the neighbor’s farm. Here at Eiriksstadir (“Eirik’s Homestead”), Leif Eiriksson, discoverer of Vinland, was born.

  Eirik’s troubles start with a landslide. In the sagas, these are often blamed on witchcraft. We know now that when steep slopes are stripped of their trees and grass by grazing goats and sheep, they become unstable and landslides are more likely. Archaeologists working at Eiriksstadir have found signs of a landslide that destroyed Eirik’s house, forcing him to rebuild. But this was not the slide that led to his being ousted from the Dales. That particular landslide wiped out a neighbor’s farm (probably killing the neighbor). Another neighbor decided two of Eirik’s slaves were to blame, and so killed them. Someone who kills another man’s slaves had three years by law in which to pay for them, but Eirik retaliated by killing the neighbor and another man who stepped in to help. Influential men in the district then decided Eirik was a troublemaker. Eirik’s father-in-law did not intervene, despite his influence with Olaf the Peacock, and Eirik the Red was banished from the Dales.

  He decided to move to an island in the fjord nearby, but it took him a while to find the right spot; meanwhile, the saga says, he lent his “bench boards”—another translator calls them “bedstead boards”—to a man named Thorgest the Old. When Eirik was ready to build his new house, Thorgest refused to return the boards. Eirik lost his temper. He rushed into Thorgest’s house, grabbed the boards, and rode off. Thorgest’s two sons went after him. Eirik killed them “and several other men.” After that, the two sides gathered their friends together into armed camps.

  Thorgest the Old was married to the chieftain Thord Gellir’s daughter, so all the “influence, cunning, and power at arms” of the Hvamm clan fell in behind him.

  Eirik had no chieftain on his side, unless we can count Gudrid’s father. For Thorbjorn, backing Eirik the Red was a bad move: Ranged against him were his own father-in-law, Einar of Laugarbrekka, and Einar’s two brothers, one of whom was related by marriage to Eirik’s enemy, Thorgest the Old. Even Thorbjorn’s brother sided with the enemy.

  The dispute was heard at the local spring assembly in about 982. Knowing he was overmatched, Eirik readied his ship and hid it in a tiny bay, deep within the many islands in the fjord. Outlawed for three years by the law court, he fled just ahead of his pursuers. (An outlaw could legally be killed if he was caught.) Gudrid’s father escorted him out of the fjord in his own ship, as did his other supporters. Eirik promised to return the favor if they were ever in need of his help. He set his course west, away from Iceland, toward a mountainous land that had been glimpsed in the fog by another mariner—the land Eirik would name Greenland. With him sailed any possibility Gudrid’s father had of becoming a true chieftain.

  It’s no surprise that Thorbjorn and his daughter ended up in Greenland, too. The only puzzle is why Thorbjorn waited so long to follow his friend. Likely it was because of Gudrid. She was probably born in 985, the year Eirik the Red returned from exile, bragging about vast green pastures up for grabs. His salesmanship convinced twenty-five shiploads of Icelanders to try to colonize this new world. Only fourteen ships, carrying three to four hundred people, made it there safely. Some ships were lost at sea—a poem from the period makes reference to a hafgerðing, an ocean “fence” described in one medieval sailors’ manual as looking as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean had been collected into three heaps out of which three billows are formed. These hedge in the entire sea, so that no opening can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep, overhanging cliffs. Modern observers attribute these terrifying waves to an earthquake or the eruption of an undersea volcano. A few ships in Eirik’s flotilla escaped this catastrophe by turning back to Iceland. Their reports of the journey would have convinced Gudrid’s father—or mother, if she had survived childbirth—that the trip was too risky for an infant. It would be fifteen more years before Thorbjorn, embittered and impoverished, miffed that a slave-born boy considered himself Gudrid’s match, would assuage his honor by emigrating to Greenland.

  At their heart, Eirik the Red’s troubles were not about honor, but about house building. After spending a few days learning about turf houses with Sirri Sigurdardottir at Glaumbaer and Gudmundur Olafsson at Iceland’s National Museum, I better understood how much time and effort Eirik had spent clearing the land and building his house—two houses, since the first was damaged by a landslide—at Eiriksstadir, only to be kicked out of the Dales. And I could guess how frustrated he was, after having put considerable thought into where to build his house on the island he had purchased, when his house building was short-circuited by the man he’d trusted with his “bench boards.”

  As curator of the Skagafjord Folk Museum, for nearly twenty years Sirri Sigurdardottir has been responsible for keeping the turf roof and walls of the circa 1750 farmhouse on the Glaumbaer grounds in good repair. June 2005 was unusually sunny and pleasant for Iceland, and Sirri spent much of the month on the roof with a garden hose praying for the weather to return to normal. “It was like a nightmare to keep the grass green on the roof,” she said. A sunburned roof will crack, letting the next rainfall trickle down into the wall. A wet wall will eventually freeze, buckle, and have to be replaced, which means tearing the whole thing down to the layer of foundation stones and starting over again. Or walking away and rebuilding elsewhere.

  Northern Iceland has quite a collection of slumped and crumpled, roofless turf ruins. Here and there a turf farmhouse is in better repair, crammed with tools and old toys, or turned into a sheep barn. There used to be many, many more: Before concrete was introduced in the 1940s, the most common house was owner-built of turf. Traditionally, a turf house was patched, rebuilt, expanded, and renewed, the new parts erected on top of, or adjoining, the old, sometimes changing the footprint every few years. Today there are only four men in Iceland who have lived in a turf house they had made.

  In the 1990s, Sirri and her assistants took a camera and interviewed the oldsters on each farm. “We went through all of Skagafjord to learn where they got the turf, what kind it was, and how the timber frame was built. Most of these houses are gone now,” she said. It was the same method Arne Emil Christensen had used on the coast of Norway to learn how Viking ships were built while there is still time. If the tools are the same, the technique must be the same.

  Sirri and her brother went out into the bogs with the old men and their turf-cutting tools and tried it. “They use a spade and a short-handled scythe. It’s difficult, let me tell you,” Sirri said.

  Just how difficult I heard from a friend who had helped build a turf house as a boy. “First you cut off the top layer using a shovel or a curved peat knife. The better turf is at a certain depth,” he had said. “You need a sharp thin blade and a very firm grip. You use the weight of your body, plant your feet to press with your leg muscles, and saw into the ground—it’s like cutting bread.”

  Sirri agreed. “You
have to know how to do it. You need to have good iron edges on your tools—you can’t cut turf with a wooden spade. This could be a problem. There wasn’t much iron in the old days, and you had to take care of it. So when they cut turf, they cut as little as possible and thought carefully about how to cut it.”

  They also thought carefully about what kind of turf to cut, Sirri continued. “The best turf is called reiðingur. A reiðingur is a packsaddle, but also what you make one out of. We used the best turf, with the thickest root system, to make pads for the horses. And we used it as a mattress for beds. It’s very soft.”

  To find reiðingur turf, you tramp along the edges of a bog, just beyond where the grasses give way to sedges, looking for the little white flowers of the bogbean plant. It flowers only if its roots are soaked. “The best turf was always in the water. When you dig it up, it runs with water. When it dries, it is all roots. No earth at all. No sand, no dirt. It’s good for saddles—you cut it on the horse so it’s the best shape for that horse when it dries. It fits perfect.”

  But while the old men all agreed that reiðingur was the “best” turf, they didn’t use it for walls. They backed off from the bogbean a couple of paces, and cut building blocks from the firmer grass-and-sedge margin.

  “Reiðingur is so wet you can’t build the walls high,” Sirri explained. “In a wall, it compresses every year more and more, and the roof comes down with it. It stops on the wooden frame. If you don’t do anything about it, the frame will cut through the turf. It’s good to have a little bit of clay in the turf because when it dries, it becomes a block, almost a stone. But not too much clay, or it will destroy the root system as it dries. When you cut turf in a bog, you cut living roots. They die in the walls, and too much clay makes the roots rot, then the wall breaks. So how to choose the perfect turf for the wall is not how you choose the perfect turf for the horse.”