The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

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

  One day I remarked to Sirri about the amount of pasture in the area. “Is that why Glaumbaer was such a good farm when Gudrid lived here?” I asked her.

  “I don’t think Gudrid did live here,” Sirri said, “though she may have died here. I think Gudrid lived in Reynines for a decade or two while Snorri was small. Reynines was Thorfinn Karlsefni’s heritage. It was the best farm in the district. I think Gudrid and Karlsefni lived there, but also owned Glaumbaer. Eventually their family owned the whole area. Snorri was the first farmer at Glaumbaer, but you can’t tell when he started to farm—at age fifteen or at twenty-five—no one knows when Karlsefni died and Gudrid became a widow. Nobody will ever know that.

  “But to answer your question,” Sirri continued, “Glaumbaer must have been a very good farm when Snorri lived here. It’s a very easy farm. You can cut grass wherever you like, everywhere in the area. You have good fodder for the animals all year long, even if you don’t make hay. In normal years you didn’t need hay. But of course you had to make it just in case.

  “I suppose Gudrid would not stay at Reynines after Karlsefni’s death,” Sirri added, picking again at the old problem. “The saga says something about her mother-in-law not liking her. But this is just my theory. I have no way to say she lived at Glaumbaer or not.”

  “Doesn’t the dating of the house John found suggest that she did?”

  “No.” Sirri pursed her lips, turning very serious. “All we can say, when archaeologists find something, is that the saga takes place at the same time. It’s wonderful to see the old turf house that you found under the hayfield, because now we have the first generation of turf house down in the field and the last generation of turf house up on the hill, and people can see what has changed and what has not in a thousand years. The two houses are real. People really lived there. The sagas are not real.

  “But it’s quite entertaining to have them both,” she added, smiling. “You can believe it was her house if you want. We have given her a place. And you can certainly place Snorri here. The saga says he built the first church here—though some people doubt that, too.

  “But whether they are true or not, the sagas have a meaning for people. Icelanders have listened to them for a thousand years. They have the soul of the people in them, the image of the people. They name people, they name places. You can use them to learn genealogy, geography, history, to teach your children how to behave—”

  “How do you use the saga of Grettir the Strong to teach children to behave?”

  Sirri laughed, then sighed. “Oh, yes, Grettir. He did everything wrong. He was bad to animals, bad to people, he stole, he drank. He was in many ways crazy, an antihero. Many people would like to do what he did, but they don’t dare.”

  The overarching theme of Grettir's Saga is that the Viking Age is over. The Viking values that Grettir embodies no longer apply: He was stronger than anyone, courageous to a fault, even a good poet, but his tragic flaw was hubris. Only when he learned to live humbly and love his brother was he happy. Until then he had no luck. He was outlawed in both Iceland and Norway for a good deed gone wrong: Seeking help after a shipwreck, he was mistaken for a troll, got into a brawl, and burned down a house, murdering several men. With a price on his head, he hid in caves and wilderness camps until his fear of the dark grew overwhelming, then convinced his fifteen-year-old brother IIlugi to accompany him to Skagafjord to the island of Drangey, whose steep cliffs couldn’t be scaled without a ladder.

  It’s on their journey through Skagafjord on a snowy day that Grettir’s saga intersects with that of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, for at Glaumbaer they picked up a companion. He was a funny-looking fellow called Thorbjorn Glaum, meaning “Noisemaker” or “Chatterbox,” and although his name might imply he had a connection to Gudrid’s farm, he called himself a wanderer and spoke of the people there with no affection. He was a gossip and a boaster. His low status is clearly relayed by the phrase “he was poorly dressed.” Clothing, in fact, seems to obsess him.

  “When you went by Glaumbaer, not even wearing a hood in this blizzard, they were pretty amazed,” Glaum said. “They were wondering if being so cold-hardy made you any braver. These two farmer’s sons, such big, strong men—when the shepherd told them to come out and give him a hand with the sheep, they couldn’t pile on enough clothes, they thought it was so cold.”

  Grettir said, “I saw one youngster in the doorway. He was pulling on his mittens. And the other one was going between the cowshed and the manure pile. I wouldn’t be scared of either of them.”

  The two farmer’s sons being lampooned would be Snorri and Thorbjorn, his younger brother. The year is about 1028, making Snorri twenty-three and master of Glaumbaer. Gudrid could have been away on her pilgrimage to Rome, for the years 1025 to 1028 saw a brief interlude of peace in the wars between Norway and Denmark, and King Olaf the Saint of Norway was encouraging Christianity in Iceland.

  In these few words, the saga gives a good sense of the working farm of Glaumbaer a thousand years ago: two young men, a shepherd, sheep, a cowshed, a manure pile, work to be done on a cold winter day, and a painful awareness of the importance of hoods, mittens, and other warm clothes.

  As Grettir’s Saga continues, we get a wider picture of the neighborhood around Gudrid’s farm. Grettir and his two companions walked on as far as Reynines, where Gudrid’s mother-in-law may still have been in charge. She must have been generous and discreet, as well as haughty and capable, for the travelers spent the night there (without making any snide comments about it), and the next day traveled on up the coast to the farm with the hot spring now known as Grettir’s Bath. There, by greasing a palm, the outlaws got a man to row them out to the island. They climbed up, secured the ladder, and settled in.

  Grettir and Illugi were content on Drangey for five years. They had plenty of sheep to eat, with seabirds and gulls’ eggs for variety, and they were safe as long as they hauled the ladder up each night. The only unhappy one was Glaum. He got the blame when the fire went out—causing Grettir to swim the four miles to the mainland, warm himself up in the hot spring, and rape the serving maid.

  And how was Glaum to know that the great driftwood tree trunk he lugged home for firewood one night had been cursed by a witch? Her spell turned Grettir’s axe, and he struck his own leg while chopping the log. The wound festered and turned black. While the hero lay feverish, Glaum forgot his duties once again and left the ladder down. Forewarned by the witch, Grettir’s enemies clambered up and killed them all.

  When I first read Grettir's Saga, I wondered if this miserable creature known as Thorbjorn Glaum was really Thorbjorn of Glaumbaer, Gudrid’s second son. An impressionable eighteen years old, irritated by his older brother’s authority, had he remembered how Grettir refused to do farmwork? Had he pulled on his mittens and run after the ill-starred hero, looking for glory? Had he joked about himself and his brother to cover his tracks? What finally convinced me the name was an odd coincidence—or a scribe’s mistake—was the saga-writer’s remark that the chatterbox was “poorly dressed.” No matter how lazy or boastful, no son of Gudrid, living on the grass-rich farm of Glaumbaer, would be poorly dressed.

  A housewife’s chief duty was to see that her menfolk wore good clothes. Clothing was the most visible mark of her family’s status, the main outlet for her creativity and industry, and the foundation of Iceland’s economy. The sagas say little about such everyday tasks as cloth making, but this gap in our knowledge of Gudrid’s daily life has recently been filled in by experimental archaeologists, like two I met at the University of Copenhagen. Using tools Gudrid might have owned, they make cloth that matches, thread for thread, the samples dug up from Viking houses and graves.

  To clothe her family, Gudrid started in early summer, just after the lambs were born, with shearing the sheep. Their thick double-coated fleece could be pulled off by hand—called rooing—or snipped with iron shears, partial pairs of which have been found in several archaeological sites. Wool samples fr
om the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland showed both rooing and shearing were done at the same time; no one knows which was better, or why. At Copenhagen’s Center for Textile Research, Linda Martensson spread a full, sheared fleece, mottled black and gray, on the conference table. Beside it she lay a partial one in the rich, rusty color called “moor-red,” after the tint bog-water takes on from iron ore. Eva Andersson, who is in charge of the Center’s “Tools and Textiles” program, ran a hand over the gray fleece, as if it were a cat that had jumped into her lap.

  “The process,” Linda said, “is first you shear the sheep. Then you sort the wool.”

  The best wool, I had read, came from the neck, the sides, and the back; the worst from the belly and the legs. In between best and worst was a medium grade. To get a uniform thread, you would spin wool from only one grade at a time.

  Linda touched the gray fleece delicately here and there, poking, squeezing, petting, fluffing. “The back leg is coarse and dirty,” Linda said. “The back is a little dry. The sides I would see as a good quality to spin with. The front legs and neck are very felted. I would put that in another group.”

  “After you sort the wool,” continued Eva, “you have to wash it.”

  She plucked a handful from the moor-red fleece and gave it to me. It was greasy with lanolin and slightly gritty. The washing step, I knew, we weren’t going to get into here, in a glass-walled conference room. The Vikings washed wool in barrels of stale urine. When heated, urine, being alkaline, acts as a detergent—and it was certainly available. One scholar suggests that after the big milk tubs in Viking larders were emptied of skyr or whey during the winter, they were refilled with urine, little by little, especially on cold, windy days. Modern sensitivities should not preclude the proximity of functions in the past now regarded as insanitary, such as the storage of urine and food in the same room, he chides, noting, it is less than a century since Yorkshire women used the chamber-pot contents to wash their face and hair. The washed wool would be laid in the sun to dry, then stored in a wool crib until winter, when the work Eva and Linda were about to demonstrate would occupy every woman’s day.

  Linda had begun combing a hank of red wool with her fingers, teasing apart the mats and tangles, stretching it like taffy. “You can do a lot of work by hand, separating the different kinds of wool and hair, and opening it up.” The handwork also warms the wool, softening and spreading the lanolin. She piled the fuzzier, woollier bits on the table, leaving the longer hairs in her hand. “Long hairs make a stronger yarn than short hairs. The warp of a loom is long hairs, but for the weft you can use short ones.”

  “You can’t do too much by hand, though, or you start to make felt,” Eva said. She got out a pair of wood-handled combs shaped like small rakes, with one row of four-inch-long metal teeth—reconstructions of Norwegian Viking finds. “You put them next to the fire to heat the teeth. That melts the fat while you comb.” She placed the worked hank of wool in one comb, the teeth through the woolliest part, the long hairs hanging down, and passed both combs to Linda. Keeping the loaded comb still, cocked up to provide tension, Linda used the other to brush out the strands.

  “You’re so calm,” Eva commented. “I’m much tougher when I comb.”

  “I like to be meditative,” Linda said, with a flash of a smile.

  After a moment she put down one comb and waved the other, letting the well-brushed wool ripple in the wind. “Doesn’t it look like angel hair?” she said. With her fingers, she then pulled very slowly and gently on the dangling end. The hair lengthened magically until it was a yard long, from a beginning length of about four inches.

  If she had been working, not just demonstrating, she would have wound the combed wool onto a stick—or distaff—accumulating a full reel before moving on to the next step, spinning. But now Eva simply took the handful of combed wool, twisted it a little, and tied one end to the top of a spindle stick, securing it in a notch like that on a crochet hook. At the bottom of the stick was a conical weight, the spindle whorl. Holding on to the wool, she flicked the stick between finger and thumb to set the whorl twirling like a top in air. It dropped toward the floor, slowly as a spider on its silk—except the thread was being produced from the top, from Eva’s fingers feeding the wool down, pulling and pinching it, while the spinning whorl stretched and twisted it into thread. When the spinning slowed, but before it could stop and reverse, she flicked the spindle again. When the whorl reached the floor, she caught it, wound the new-spun thread around the stick, and started over. The motion was so simple, the tools so light, that she could have spun—as Viking women did—anywhere, sitting or walking. Spindle whorls are often found in odd places, like the boatshed at L’Anse aux Meadows; at one farm in Greenland, out of twenty-five whorls, nine were in the kitchen and two in the church.

  The whorl could be placed either at the bottom of the stick or at the top, without affecting the thread quality. The shape and substance of the whorl—whether amber, soapstone, ceramic, or bone—also didn’t matter. But the size and weight of the whorl did.

  For her doctoral dissertation in 1999, Eva studied the textile tools from Viking Age houses in southern Sweden. “I found that whenever there was more than one spindle whorl found in a house, they were of different sizes. Why? So I got these four spindles reconstructed, all copies of whorls found in Hedeby in Denmark. They’re 30, 20, 10, and five grams.” (Thirty grams is a bit more than an ounce.) She recruited Anna Batzer, who runs the weaving house at the Lejre Experimental Centre, a living-history museum outside of Copenhagen, and both women, the expert and the novice, spun thread with the same wool. “With the big spindle,” Eva said, “we got 40 meters of thread for 10 grams of wool. When we spun with the five-gram whorl, we got over 200 meters from the same amount of wool.” (Forty meters is about 131 feet; 200 meters is 656 feet.) The size of the spindle whorl determined the gauge of the thread. “When we look at Viking textiles, there are many types of quality. Of course, there would be different types of thread for different types of cloth.”

  Spinning with the tiny whorl was much more difficult than with the bigger ones. “You have to concentrate a lot. You have to have few, few fibers in the thread, or it won’t turn around,” Eva said, still spinning while she talked. You also have to have the right spindle stick. “They had found some little sticks in Hedeby, but they were not interpreted as spindle sticks because someone said they were too short, they wouldn’t function. But when we started to spin, we learned we couldn’t use a long stick on a small spindle. It wouldn’t turn. So I looked at those sticks again, and they were perfect.” The smallest spindle whorls had also been mislabeled. “The classical archaeologists were very surprised that you could spin on a spindle under 10 grams. They were sorting all the little spindle whorls out and calling them beads.” She wound up the thread and dropped the spindle down again. “Sometimes it is hard to see the difference. The hole has to be absolutely centered, so the spindle is balanced. And the hole should be quite big so you can put a stick into it. That’s what I went after when I reregistered them. There are some spindle whorls made of amber—they were called ‘beads,’ but they had a very big hole.”

  Linda leaned over and pointed at a minuscule bit of fuzz on the thread Eva had spun. “Here you can see it wasn’t combed enough,” she said. “If there is any underwool, any fuzzy wool in it, it will look like this. And it will break.”

  Eva laughed. “Even if they had slaves to do their spinning, Viking women had to watch. They had to know it was good enough. What is Gudrid’s status? If she was rich, she would be doing mostly sewing and embroidery. Rich women did some spinning, but they never did weaving—at least, they were not producing the everyday textiles. But I’m quite sure Gudrid learned how to do it all. We see, historically, that it’s important for all women to know how to produce fine cloth. Textiles are often used as gifts. It’s a sign of a woman’s status that she could produce excellent textiles.”

  In addition to choosing the right whorl f
or the job, the spinner also chose the direction of spin, the twist she would give the thread. On two samples of thread wound flat onto a paper card, the twist was easy to see. Reading right to left, the angle of the first sample went from high to low, like the midline of an S; the other went low to high, like a Z.

  “It’s easiest for me to spin sunwise,” Linda said. She did not say “clockwise” because Viking women didn’t have clocks. Half sitting on the edge of the table, she didn’t flick the spindle with her fingers to set it twirling, but rolled it down her thigh. Since she is right-handed, she explained, her thread is S-spun; if she switched hands, or rolled the spindle up her leg instead of down, it would be Z-spun.

  The spin angle matters for two reasons. First, if you began spinning S and switched to Z, the thread would unwind and break. Second, the spin angle provided texture to the finished cloth.

  Said Eva, “You can see in the archaeological excavations whether they wanted S-S or S-Z cloth,” that is, whether they used the same twist for both the warp and weft of the loom, or not. S-S cloth has a fine nobbly pattern and gives a nice drape for a shirt or dress. With S in the warp and Z in the weft, the fibers will be going in the same direction, Eva explained. “It’s much easier then to full the cloth, which you would do for a sail or an outer cloak.” Fulling called for more hot, stale urine. When the cloth was soaked in it and pressed, the ammonia in the urine caused the lanolin to coagulate. Fulling shrank the cloth and tightened the weave, making it more waterproof.

  Linda had begun transferring the spun thread to a reel, three sticks of wood connected into a crooked H. “When I get enough thread that its weight affects the spinning, I wind it off onto this other tool. The thread wants to tangle, so I put it on this reel for a few days to straighten it out. That’s called ‘killing’ it.”