The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

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

  The next day was remarkable for the smell of cow manure—the neighbor was fertilizing his fields. I had a sore finger, blistered by my trowel, and a tired wrist from the sustained twisting action needed to trace the dips and furrows of fallen turves. I spent the day on my knees anyway, scraping out peat ash. A volunteer working near me talked nonstop about politics.

  At the close of the day, Tara Carter, a graduate student, found the missing south wall, allowing us to finally get a measurement: Gudrid’s house was 30 meters, or almost 100 feet, long. Doug sent John, surveying a different farm, a text message from his cell phone: “30 M.” John replied: “29,” the length the remote-sensing device had predicted. In ten minutes, John was striding across the field from the museum parking lot. Doug led him to the south end, pointed to a line he had scratched in the dirt, and said, “Put your toes there and then look up.”

  “Holy cow!” John said.

  I stood on the same spot. I looked up and a Viking longhouse appeared, the walls completely defined by red flags placed every five meters (or 16 feet), the north and south gable ends perfectly parallel, the long east and west walls narrower at the ends and bowing out a little in the middle. The walls were a uniform six feet thick.

  While I was marveling, John was quizzing Linda on our peat-ash pit. Our excavation was now about eight inches deep, over three feet wide, and round. There were bones and large stones mixed into the ash. Linda had found several small stones that had been cracked by fire, showing black and red inside.

  John, surprised and not entirely pleased that we had dug so deep, looked at our dirt pile and quietly mentioned that we ought to screen it for artifacts, which meant taking each bucketload of dirt and forcing it through a wire mesh. (In the end, we didn’t find any.)

  Doug, who was responsible for our digging so deep, began to interpret what we had found. Based on the amount of peat ash dumped outside, the fallen inside wall I had uncovered, and the fact that the shiny white 1104 tephra layer was always on top of the peat ash, he figured the house had been abandoned by 1050, give or take twenty-five years, and purposely flattened. In 1050, I thought, Gudrid would have been sixty-five years old—a ripe old age for a Viking woman. This house it seemed, was demolished just after she died.

  “A turf house will decay in ten years if there’s a lot of rain, but this one had help,” Doug said. The wooden frame and paneling had been taken out to be reused, and turves thrown into the hall to flatten it out. The fallen wall that I’d uncovered was too consistently flat and the same width all along its length for it to have just “happened.” The house had been completely ruined by the time someone dug the pit and started throwing ash into it. From the pit, the ash had blown over to where I was digging, inside the house, as my deposits were much shallower.

  For four more days I was assigned to the peat-ash pit. Linda had been moved to a site more in need of her excavating skill, and my new partner was our youngest volunteer, twelve-year-old Ayshe, who had a very light touch with a dental pick and a paintbrush. She spent the days brushing off a jumble of bones: a sheep’s rib, the jawbone of a foal, a cow’s tooth, four fish vertebrae in a neat line, and a mottled black lump that looked to me like a fossilized horse dropping. My knees began to ache, but I was feeling really comfortable with my trowel. I could get just the right amount of force to scrape off a dime-sized spot or to cut through an eight-inch-thick “nose” of peat ash. And the weather wasn’t bad. I tried to remember to look up every now and then and take in the splendid view. The ash pit grew to the size of three bathtubs, extending from the house wall to the edge of the grass, where it disappeared out of our deturfed site.

  Late on the last afternoon, having spent the day with my face five inches from the ground trying to find the southern edge of the ash pit, I stood up to empty a bucket and looked down at my work instead of off toward the mountains. Suddenly I saw two indentations in the side wall. I got out a tape measure and found that all three sides on both niches were exactly the same length—eight inches, or 20 centimeters. It looked as if somebody had pushed in a spade and cut away the dirt. I called over to Doug, who was on the east side of the house still trying to find the main doorway: “What size is a Viking spade?”

  “Oh, about 22 centimeters,” he said.

  I said, “How about 20 centimeters?”

  That got Doug off his knees. He came over and said, “Cool. This is really nice work.” I’d found the marks of a thousand-year-old spade: Snorri’s spade (or Snorri’s hired man’s spade), wielded just after Gudrid’s death.

  Or—an uncomfortable thought possessed me—could the two matching niches be the accidental result of how I wielded my trowel? I suddenly understood what John had meant when he said, Archaeology murders its informants. I knew why Sirri had urged caution in our ransacking of Gudrid’s house, why Orri Vesteinsson described the progression of archaeological techniques as “increasingly comprehensive destruction.” A complete beginner had been turned loose for days on a mysterious feature cutting into the wall of a Viking Age house on a historically important site. I had been told to scrape out and discard anything that was pink and had the texture of ash. I had also scraped out and discarded ash that was orange, red, and black, including those scraps I thought were birch bark and Doug, when I showed them to him, thought might be leather but in any case too small and fragile to save. I had discarded—as instructed—all stones smaller than my fist, whether fire-cracked or not. I had been the judge, when sifting my backdirt, of whether a bone should be bagged and cataloged or discarded. My untrained eyes were the only ones looking for artifacts. Would I have spotted a jasper strike-a-light, the artifact that proved both Icelanders and Greenlanders were at L’Anse aux Meadows? Or would I have discarded it as a shard of ordinary stone? Would I have recognized a thousand-year-old butternut, thereby establishing that Vinland had been named for wine grapes? What I called a fossilized horse dropping was roughly nut-shaped, but it disintegrated when Doug tried to pick it up for preservation, crumbling into bits of charcoal. No one knows what it actually was; future archaeologists have only our photographs and drawings to go by. No one will be able to excavate that peat-ash pit again. It is well and thoroughly gone, every bit of ash removed and sifted and mixed with dirt scraped from elsewhere in the house. Only the shell of the pit remains, some Before and After maps and photos, and my word that it had been uniformly full of peat ash.

  The Glaumbaer dig went on for two more weeks. Doug and Tara were alone on the site some days (the rest of us were moving mud at Stora Seyla, where John had laid out two square test pits), troweling at opposite ends, looking for the details of corners and doors and internal walls. The geese began flocking, preparing for their winter migration. The fields turned red as the pasture grass went to seed. It was dark by 11:00 P.M. now, and much colder, with spitting rain, a hard north wind, and temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Doug thought the rain was an advantage: It made the colors and patterns of the turves stand out better. You could plainly see the herringbone pattern of klömbrahnaus turf in some walls, the diamond-shaped snidda in others.

  On Friday, August 12, I was enlisted to help Doug map the site. Bundled up in long underwear and two sweaters under my rain suit, I still had to huddle behind the stacks of turf, out of the wind, to warm up every so often with a thermos of tea. Doug stood hatless in the cold drizzle, hour after hour, penciling his thoughts onto waterproof charts designed by the Icelandic Institute of Archaeology (for which John had swapped a carton of Marshalltown trowels). Cross-referenced to the GPS grid and compiled by computer, Doug’s drawings would be the main result of our season’s work. Under the most unpleasant working conditions of the entire summer, he was creating the scientific story of the Viking house at Glaumbaer, each line on the map his interpretation of the colors and patterns in the dirt.

  Even without the shivers, seeing what you hope to see, as I had seen the marks of Snorri’s spade, is inescapable in archaeology. I remembered Icelandic archaeologist Steinunn Kris
tjansdottir arguing in her 2004 doctoral dissertation: “Is it thus ever possible to reconstruct lost reality without making interpretations?” Material culture “is a text that can be read.” The archaeologist’s job is to read that text and then to write his own, “to generate a narrative about his subject, not merely describe it.” Yet to tell a story, you must draw conclusions and make interpretations based on what you think you see. You must fill in the gaps. An archaeologist, she concluded, “should be aware that the search for truth is like a story that never ends.”

  As a check on Doug’s storytelling ability, John took copious photographs, which meant we spent Saturday shovel-scraping the whole site once again so the turf lines would be clean and crisp for the camera. John borrowed a front-end loader and stood in the bucket to shoot down on the site, but he wasn’t satisfied with how the pictures looked from that angle, so for Sunday he rented a cherry picker. Sunday morning, in cold misty rain, we scraped the 8,000-square-foot site clean again, this time on our knees, with trowels.

  In the end we had found four rooms: one large, one small, and two whose size we could not measure because they extended past the edges of our excavation. It was now clear the house was longer than 30 M. Its eastern wall stretched, unbroken, for 37 meters—121 feet—from the northeast corner until it disappeared under a plowed and planted field.

  The main entrance was on this eastern wall, toward the north end (not quite aligned with the flagstone pavement the GPR had seen). It opened into a great hall or skáli 72 feet long and 16 feet wide, providing almost 1,200 square feet of floor space. This room was twice the size of Eirik the Red’s house at Eiriksstadir (41 by 13 feet, or 530 square feet) or the skáli at the Farm Beneath the Sand (40 by 16, or 640 square feet), on which the reconstruction of the chieftain’s house at Brattahlid in Greenland was based.

  At the south end of Gudrid’s hall, a doorway led to a small room, about 10 by 16—perhaps Gudrid’s weaving room, if the layout of her house was like others of the period. A test trench from 2002 cut through the center, nearly destroying the doorway into the room and a second possible doorway out of it. Beside the trench, the farmer’s dog had uncovered the skull of a horse, inspiring Sirri to reflect that perhaps this building wasn’t Gudrid’s longhouse, but her stable. No one wanted to dig deeper—not with the field season running out—to see if there were human bones buried with the horse, as there had been in the pagan graves across the river at Keldudalur. Another small room, about 12 feet wide, shot out the back of the hall to the west and disappeared under the grass.

  To this point, the size and layout of Gudrid’s house were much like the house called Stong (meaning “Pole” or “Stick,” its ancient name now unintelligible) in southern Iceland. Stong had been abandoned in 1104: The volcanic eruption that had provided our handy white dateline at Glaumbaer had completely buried some twenty farms that lay within sight of Mount Hekla. Several had been excavated in 1939, and a reconstruction of the largest house was built in 1974. It is often pictured in coffee-table books as the quintessential Viking longhouse. Looking from the outside like a long green hill, inside it has a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled hall 52 feet long and almost 20 feet wide, bisected by a longfire, with wooden sleeping benches along the walls and an enclosed sleeping closet for the master and mistress of the house. (Experts like Gudmundur Olafsson believe that the ceiling is too high, but the floor plan follows the archaeological evidence.) In the smaller room (26 by 13) that extends from the hall, a loom has been set up, identifying it as the women’s “bower” or weaving room. The outshot off the back of the main hall was the dairy: Archaeologists found traces of barrels for skyr and other liquids, and workbenches for preparing food. Unlike Gudrid’s house, Stong has a second outshot at the hall’s north end, with a drain running down its length: This room has been identified as a lavatory, a place to keep a cow over winter, or a place to wash wool (and perhaps all three).

  Instead of the northern outshot, Gudrid’s house has a sizable room opening to the south, off the possible weaving room, and disappearing under the grass. None of John’s remote-sensing devices had discovered this southern room, so we had not deturfed the full length of the house. The part we could see and measure was almost 20 feet long and 16 feet wide, a significant room. With several rooms in a line, the layout of Glaumbaer reminded me of the southernmost longhouse at L’Anse aux Meadows, the one with the choicest location, being closest to Black Duck Brook, where Gudrid would have gone to draw fresh water every day. It was even more similar to the layout of a house at Sandnes in Greenland, where Gudrid’s husband Thorstein had died. This house, excavated in the 1930s by the architect Aage Roussell, is thought to be much later than Gudrid’s day, but archaeologists today realize that several layers of houses were built on that spot, and Roussell’s archaeological methods could not distinguish among them. The floor plan he drew shows three rooms in a row (two large, connected by a smaller one, as at Glaumbaer) and a single outshot off the back.

  After the photos were taken came the strenuous and melancholy task of “putting the site to bed”: covering the excavation with landscape paper and heaping the dirt back on top, so that Sirri’s brother and his workers could reset the turf and turn it back into a hayfield. We were all smeared with mud by the end; the rain had not let up. I gathered a handful of muddy tools and followed the others back toward the van parked behind the museum, willing myself not to look over my shoulder to say goodbye to Gudrid’s house.

  “Here,” Tara Carter called, “hand me those shovels.” She was standing in the drainage ditch between two fields, scrubbing clean a wheelbarrow in the outflow of a pipe, sleeves rolled up, pant legs soaked.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” I asked.

  “You kidding? This water’s hot!”

  I climbed into the ditch with her and stuck my hand under the pipe. It was indeed as hot as dishwater. I wondered where up the slope the water originated. Gudrid would have had a bathing pool there, like the one Grettir the Strong had thawed himself out in after his long, cold swim from the island of Drangey. Hot-spring pools were social places: Young men hung out there, making themselves seductively clean and flirting with the women who were doing the laundry; men met there to make deals and talk politics, knowing if a fight broke out everyone was unarmed. It was a matter of pride among the Icelanders that they were cleaner than their Norwegian cousins, who had to heat water with wood and bathe in little tubs.

  Now I remembered John, when we had first arrived at Glaumbaer, discussing the name of the “Farm of Merry Noise” with Pastor Gisli of the Glaumbaer Church. An expert had told Gisli she thought the Glaum was the noise of iron being hammered on an anvil. John concurred that there had been a smithy on the farm—they had found plenty of waste slag in the soil cores, and the remote-sensing devices had picked up an iron pan off the south end of the house, where bog iron would have been extracted. His theory of the name, however, compared it to Steamboat Springs in Colorado: The Glaum was the whistle or bubble or chirp of the hot spring.

  But now that the water’s piped, we will never know what it sounded like.

  Chapter 9: The Farm of Merry Noise

  They passed Glaumbaer at the close of the day ... and when they had gone on a short way, a man came to meet them. He was tall and thin, and had a big head. He was poorly dressed. He greeted them and they exchanged names. He said his was Thorbjorn. He was a wanderer, not one to work much, always chattering and boasting. Some people thought him amusing. He was very friendly and started telling funny stories about the people of the nearby farms. Grettir thought him great fun. Thorbjorn asked if they didn’t need a man to work for them. “I would gladly join you,” he said. He told such good stories that they let him tag along....And because he was such a talker and joker he’d earned himself a nickname and was called “Glaum,” or “Noisemaker.”

  —Grettir’s Saga

  OF ALL THE HOUSES GUDRID LIVED IN DURING HER LONG and adventurous life—at Arnarstapi under the Snow Mountain’s Glacier; i
n Greenland at Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid and farther north, at Sandnes; at L’Anse aux Meadows in Vinland and somewhere near the Miramichi River on the Gulf of St. Lawrence; at Reynines with her haughty mother-in-law—the house at Glaumbaer was her only true home. The others were owned or overseen by someone else. Glaumbaer was hers, unfortunately, alone.

  The sagas say almost nothing about the years she lived at Glaumbaer, only that she raised her two sons alone. Karlsefni died before the eldest, Snorri, came of age. Chances are that Karlsefni was lost at sea soon after his second son was born—otherwise, we could expect Gudrid to have had more than two children. Nor, this time, did Gudrid inherit a ship. Perhaps Karlsefni was caught in a storm on a routine trading run from Norway, and sailed his ship down somewhere in the icy North Atlantic. Gudrid never remarried.

  But barring loneliness, her life at Glaumbaer was not a difficult one. She remained wealthy enough to fund her final adventure—a pilgrimage to Rome, essentially a grand tour of Europe that would have taken at least a year to accomplish—with enough money left over to let Snorri, in her absence, build her a church on their property. And, like all of her neighbors, her only source of income was the cloth she could make from the wool of her sheep.

  By tallying the sexes and ages of sheep’s bones and teeth, archaeologists concluded that the sheep in Iceland in the Viking Age were not kept mainly for milk and meat, as they are now. Instead of being culled young, as tender lambs, males were gelded and allowed to become “aged,” as one archaeologist puts it—up to eight years old. These wethers were “valuable assets,” another expert writes. “They were the kind of property which the farmer could keep from one year to the next with limited risk.” Sturdy enough to graze outdoors in most weather, they could be turned loose and essentially forgotten until shearing time, when they would yield twice as much wool as a ewe that was being milked. At the two farms studied, 20 percent of the flock was tall, wool-heavy wethers: the Viking cash crop.