The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

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

  Nor was her reception at Karlsefni’s childhood home what she might have expected. Karlsefni’s haughty mother “would not have Gudrid in her house that first winter,” The Saga of Eirik the Red says. “In her opinion, Karlsefni had not married well.” Chances are that Gudrid’s questionable genealogy, particularly the captive status of her Scottish grandfather Vifil, played into the old lady’s pique. She undoubtedly pointed out the fact that Karlsefni could trace his lineage to an Irish king—this was the sort of thing women of the day were supposed to know.

  The other version of Gudrid’s saga simply states that Karlsefni laid up his ship for the winter and, next spring, bought the farm of Glaumbaer and put up a house. The fact that Karlsefni owned Reynines, one of the finest estates in Skagafjord, is not deemed worthy of mention in this saga, although the estate seems to have stayed in the family until it was given to the church in 1295 by Gudrid’s seven-greats granddaughter, Hallbera, who became abbess of the nunnery established there. The Saga of Eirik the Red may have been written for her.

  No one knows who lived in Glaumbaer after Gudrid’s day. Not until 1285 does it return to prominence, this time as the farm of an important chieftain not descended from Gudrid. This chieftain’s grandson, known as Glaumbaejar-Hrafn, was the leading figure in Skagafjord around 1315, according to historian Helgi Thorlaksson of the University of Iceland, who believes the second version of Gudrid’s saga was written down about then. He says, “It is tempting to see the reference in The Greenlanders’ Saga to Glaumbaer as an attempt to valorize the farm and flatter the residents.” He and most other historians prefer the view that Gudrid stayed at Reynines, which they see as the better farm.

  Which farm was better a thousand years ago, however, is hard to judge. The landscape is different now. The braided, glacial rivers have undoubtedly changed their courses over the millennium, and the coastline has been reconfigured. The first settlers may have sailed to Reynines; it and other farms named “-nes,” or peninsula, are now landlocked. They may have rowed or poled a boat almost to Glaumbaer: A farm between Reynines and Glaumbaer is called Marbaeli, which may mean “Edge of the Sea” (it could also mean “Place Where the Mares Lie Down”).

  By 1010, when Gudrid arrived in Skagafjord, the effects of overgrazing were being felt. Archaeologists have found many highland farms that were abandoned early, apparently due to erosion. Some lowland farms, on the other hand, were slowly being enriched. According to a study published by soil scientist Gretar Gudbergsson in 1996, since the Viking settlement began in 874, two feet of soil has been blown off the highlands and carried by the wind to the lowlands.

  This blanket of relocated soil hides a lot of history. An archaeologist like John Steinberg, who wants to map and measure all the Viking Age ruins in the valley, to see where power once lay and when the social structure changed, can’t simply walk over a farmer’s fields, as his counterparts do in Greenland, and look for house-shaped lumps—although that’s how archaeological surveys had been done here before. It works in Iceland’s highlands. There a trained eye can see the scars of old habitations just as easily as in Greenland; though, once found, those highland houses have few secrets left. “They’ve all been blown out,” John said. “It’s so eroded. There’s nothing that will tell us how this place operated. No artifacts, no hay, no tephra. Conversely in the lowlands you have all this soil. Combine that with the compression of turf architecture.... Turf is in fact mostly air. It’s like a down comforter, that tangle of roots. When you bury it, it gets smashed. Add wind blowing a lot of soil off the highlands and you can’t find a thing. It could be right out the window of your museum, and you won’t see it”—as the house he had found, Gudrid’s house, was outside the windows of the Skagafjord Folk Museum.

  In mid-July 2005, after ten days of dragging the ground-penetrating radar machine five miles a day back and forth across Glaumbaer’s field, John came to breakfast one morning with his laptop tucked under his arm. He poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned down to whisper to Antonio Gilman, a senior archaeologist from California State University, Northridge, “We’ve got it.” Antonio raised his eyebrows, and the two of them slunk off to a back corner of the breakfast room, as if they shared a great secret. Half a dozen crew members tailed them.

  “You need some imagination,” John whispered, as he showed Antonio the previous day’s ground-penetrating radar scans. Each scan was a map of the hayfield at a different depth. The top one showed the marks of the farmer’s plow, a straight line revealing where he had begun planting a different kind of grass. At deeper depths, intriguing lines and dots in various colors could be seen. John pointed out these, shapes and patterns as more of the crew crowded about. Two long parallel lines were outside walls, partly fallen in. Dots in a rough oblong could be stones around a longfire. “This is a pavement of some sort,” John pointed to a cluster of interlinked blobs outside the eastern wall. “This is probably the reflection of the entrance of the house. We’re not going to see these stones because we’re not going to go all the way down. We’re going to dig down just to the top of the walls.”

  “Don’t you want to dig all the way down and see Gudrid’s house?” I asked.

  “One morning I wake up and I want to excavate, the next morning I don’t,” he said. “Yesterday I wanted nothing more to do with this site, because it’s a saga site. It’s a huge responsibility with relatively little payoff for me in terms of my research interests. But it’s the first house we found. This is where we’ve tried out all our techniques. People have used them all before, but we’ve put them together into a package. The package is the key. The soil coring, the remote-sensing, and the ground-truthing,” by which he meant various forms of limited digging to test the truth of the remote-sensing maps. “I want to go with this to Sirri and Gudny and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to find,’ so they can say in their letters to the National Science Foundation, ‘John showed us the remote-sensing and then excavated, and he found exactly what the remote-sensing said he would.’”

  By 9:30 that morning, John was in Gudny Zoega’s laboratory in Saudarkrokur, having a second cup of coffee and going through the same picture show. He did not request her imagination.

  “The tops of the walls are where?” Gudny asked.

  John clicked through the sequence of scans to the one with the long parallel lines. “This is at 24 to 30 centimeters”—nine to 12 inches down.

  “And how deep down is your pavement?”

  John hedged. “Forty-six centimeters down is a conductive spot of the sort we normally associate with middens. I assume they’re rocks. They’re very strong reflectors. What I hope to find is an entrance. Isn’t that what’s usually associated with flagstones?”

  “I think it’s more important to see if these are turf walls or not,” Gudny said. She was not willing to grant that those blurry lines were the floor plan of a longhouse, much less one with a stone-paved patio at the door.

  John retreated. “I doubt that we’ll see this entrance.”

  Gudny nodded. “It’s too deep.”

  John said placatingly, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going after it, much as it would help us determine the structure.”

  “Then you’d be down to floor level, and you don’t want to do that,” Gudny agreed. If this was a house, floor level was where artifacts would be found, and everyone knew John’s track record with those. While using a motorized posthole digger to ground-truth his remote-sensing map of Reynines in 2002, John chewed a hole right through the floor of the medieval nunnery. In the resulting dirt pile, he found the broken bits of a Viking Age bone comb. Luckily, a conservator was able to piece it back together.

  “Congratulations! I’m glad the tækni is working.” Sirri took off her phone headset as John came into her office at Glaumbaer an hour later. She gave John her sunniest smile. “I hear you have something to show me.”

  John propped his laptop on the corner of her desk and started his show-and-tell for a third time, this time refe
rring to the possible pavement as “very flat reflectors in a matrix.”

  “Not stones?” Sirri asked.

  “Yes, stones in a pavement,” John said.

  “At the door,” Sirri mused. She pointed to a bright spot a stone’s throw east of the door. “I wonder if this is the midden.”

  “We’ve been thinking about that,” John said. “If you look at the old EM-31 data, you see it’s an area of high conductivity, which is consistent with a midden.”

  “I wonder, when we find the door, if it is the door, if it could lead us to different things,” Sirri said. She traced the line from the door to the midden. Looking over her shoulder, I followed an imaginary Gudrid tossing out her kitchen ash and garbage. What other paths could there be? To the barn, where Gudrid would have milked the cows in winter; to the hot spring, where she bathed and washed the family’s clothes; to the river, where she fetched drinking water.

  “This really looks like a good pavement,” John said. “It appears suddenly, deep down. Unfortunately, you’re not going to see it this year.”

  “No,” said Sirri, “but we have plenty of years.”

  It was time for Sirri’s brother to lift the turf off the hayfield so we could see if Gudrid’s walls were where the gadget claimed. But he was busy. John worked his impatience off by hauling the GPR machine over the lumpy, weedy, sloping terrain on top of the beautiful burned-birch roof at Stora Seyla, the buried Viking Age house that had convinced the Icelanders his technique worked. I was recruited to move one end of a 50-meter measuring tape every half meter; between times, I sat on a tussock and tried to imagine what it would have been like in this valley in Gudrid’s day: no car noises, no electric lines. I heard the faint whistle of a flying snipe, the squick, squick, squick of a redshank. Two ravens flew by making a racket. A dozen mares and foals grazed while two pintos squealed and played in a nearby field. Nothing else was moving in the landscape but a smattering of flies dancing on the breeze; no other noise but the grass blades whispering.

  To the east, across the river, rose a line of pink mountains, all but one flat on top as if sliced off with a knife, and nearly snowless in July. Behind me, a rugged triangle marked the route south across Iceland, between the great glaciers to Thingvellir, where the Althing, the yearly assembly of chieftains, was held. West were more smooth, rounded mountains; the valley here was wide. There were no trees from one mountain range to the next, only a few bushes around the summerhouses at the bend where the river curled east. From mountain to mountain, I saw hayfields divided by drainage ditches and the wall-like mounds of dirt that demarcated them. In Gudrid’s day, those dry, firm, tractor-ready fields would have been wet hay meadows, and the round bales, wrapped in white plastic, ranked beside each farmhouse would have been turf-covered haystacks.

  On a bright, breezy, warm July day like this one, Gudrid would have been raking hay to dry it. I remembered the sound of an old man cutting hay at Glaumbaer the weekend before, during the museum’s Haymaking Day. His scythe went snick, snick through the grass, tack, tock when he whetted the blade. Sirri went before him with a sprinkler: You didn’t make hay while the sun shines in old Iceland; the grass cut more easily if it was wet. You hauled it, wet, up from the meadows to the house on horseback. Then, on a sunny day (and you hoped one came quickly, so not too much hay would rot), you spread it in the fenced-in homefield and raked it until it was dry. That was women’s work. Gudrid would have gotten sunburned that day.

  Two days later, the turf-cutters still hadn’t come. With a couple of spades and some volunteers, John’s colleague Douglas Bolender “de-turfed” a small square to see how deep the tops of the walls really were. Surprisingly, they were right below the grass roots. Doug had aimed the hole for a trench dug in 2002, so through the test square ran a straight canal of disturbed soil, a uniform brown with the texture of a well-raked flower bed; at the edges, landscape cloth peeked out. A turf wall showed up on either side of the trench as a line of hard-packed and mottled earth. Swirls and blotches of rust-red and black, caused by rotted grass, was the “turf signature,” Doug explained. A stretch of fallen snidda wall also appeared in the section, the cracks between the diamond-shaped turves marked by a lacy pattern of shiny white tephra from the 1104 eruption of Mount Hekla.

  Then the turf-cutters, two young men trained by Sirri’s brother, appeared one Sunday and worked all day and night—they had to catch a plane to Copenhagen at 4:00 Monday morning. They cut the turf into 20-inch squares and stacked it into a three-foot-high wall running along the west side of the field, as if to hide our excavation from the tourists at the museum. They’d gotten a little sloppy after midnight, so the north end of the site was bumpier and rougher than the south, with deep ruts and tire tracks from a little tractor they’d used to move the pallets of turf. At 9:00 A.M. Doug passed out flat-bladed shovels and we got to work. Our job was to scrape the top three inches of dirt—or however much it took to reach the white 1104 tephra layer—off the 130-by-65-foot area above the longhouse. We used our shovels like spatulas to lift off a half-inch of dirt at a time and toss it ahead of us. If you hit the 1104 layer, the shovel would glide as if it were greased and the upper strata would just flake off.

  Though it was sunny, the wind was fierce and cold; we worked in sweaters and rain jackets. The shoveling made itself felt in the shoulders right away. We were lined up like a chain gang, going west to east, all trying to keep pace with Doug, who scraped like a maniac. We had five shovels and seven people, so one person ran the wheelbarrow and another used a metal dustpan to scoop the loose dirt into buckets. We finished the rough north end just as the wind picked up and, without discussing it, turned and started working in a north-south direction, our backs to the wind. At lunchtime the wind whipped up to gale force—it would blow the buckets away unless they had two scoopfuls of earth in them. We were all covered with fine dirt by then, with black grit in our eyes. Everyone was painfully polite, saying “thank you” each time someone dumped a bucket or brought over the wheelbarrow.

  By the afternoon, my blistered hands had lost the feel for the tephra layer and in the low sun’s glare I could not see the color changes in the soil that Doug had pointed out. I traded my shovel for the dustpan and tried to carry the buckets to the dirt pile without straining my back.

  When we left at 5:00 P.M., Doug could trace out half of the walls by the soil color alone. I could see small stretches of wall if he pointed at them. The different textures of dirt and turf had dried differently after we exposed them, and if I stood off to the side and looked north-to-south along the east wall, one part was distinctly redder and swirled with orange, yellow, gold, and black. Another patch of fallen wall looked like white fish scales on a reddish background.

  After one final five-mile run with the ground-penetrating radar machine over the deturfed field, we traded our shovels for masons’ trowels, triangular, flat-bladed steel tools that a brick mason would use to scoop and spread mortar. (Archaeologists prefer those made by the Iowa-based Marshalltown Company because they take a good edge with a whetstone.) The weather turned hot and dry and the wind stilled. Stripped to a T-shirt and jeans, I crouched on my knees, scraping not a half-inch at a time, but a teaspoonful, the trowel like an extension of my index finger. The task was to define the width of the walls, see where they were standing and where they had fallen down, detect any breaks for doorways or alcoves or halls into side rooms, and find the main door—preferably above the “pavement” the ground-penetrating radar had shown was a foot and a half farther down. John explained that I should look for where the distinctive turf colors ended or broke off. The series of breaks would line up to make the edge of the wall. “It’s not a line you’re looking for,” he said, “but the breaks in the turf that line up.”

  Four days later, I was still on my knees. Now the weather was breezy, misty, and cold. I had put on my sweater, rain suit, stocking cap, scarf—and still I was cold. With Linda Rehberger, who was back in school getting a master’s degree afte
r working as a professional archaeologist for several years, I’d been assigned a spot where the wall seemed to disappear under a layer of ash from burning peat—a standard fuel for blacksmithing. We drew a map of the peat-ash lens, a distinctive pale rose-pink color, and started to scrape. The lens seemed small and selfcontained. The ash was crumbly and so light that once, when I began to reply to a question Linda had asked, the wind picked up a hunk of it and tossed it into my mouth.

  We scraped all morning and all afternoon, the cold fog giving way to splendid, brisk sunshine. The pink became mixed with dark streaks of charcoal, in which I found four or five strips of burned birch bark. Other patches were cranberry red with fine spots of moss green that might be tephra. The colors swirled, the same palette that Edvard Munch had used in The Scream—there was even a light orange circle, like the screamer’s face, highlighted by white. We dug and dug in some places, chasing pink ash in and out of tumbled turves. The hot ash had obviously been dumped there after the wall had fallen; in places it had burned its way into the turf.

  I was concentrating on scraping down to burned turf in one part, carefully removing tiny bits of pink ash, when Doug walked over, looked down, and said, “Nancy found the edge of a wall.” When I readjusted my gaze, it popped out: a section of turf wall about a foot long, rising above the pit out of which we had cleaned the ash. On the side where I was working was a completely straight edge.