She crossed the Alps in the footsteps of Hannibal and his elephants, as well as Charlemagne and his knights, by the pass of Mont Joux. At the base of the mountains she probably met Bernard of Menthon, for whom the pass would soon be renamed the St. Bernard Pass. As archdeacon of Aosta, Bernard had for many years tended to travelers accosted on the pass by Saracens, who exacted murderous tolls. Gudrid may have sought protection by traveling in the train of one of the kings—Knut, Rudolph, or Conrad—on their way to Rome for Conrad’s coronation as emperor. Or she may have crossed after Knut and Rudolph, annoyed by the harassment of their people, banded together to wipe out the Saracen fort and replace it with a pilgrim’s hospice under Bernard’s care.
Coming into Italy, Gudrid passed the white marble city of Luna, sacked in the 800s by Vikings who mistook it for Rome and, in 1016, by Saracens—an attack from which the city never recovered; in 1058 the last of its citizens abandoned it. Her route intersected the Pilgrim Way to Santiago de Compostela, and the number of travelers increased. They walked through the famous chestnut forests of Lunigiana and the vineyards of Montefiascone. They ate lamb and olives and beans and onions, bread baked from chestnut flour, mushrooms, sheep’s-milk cheese, salami, and sweet cakes flavored with spring herbs.
Gudrid came to Rome during one of the few periods in the tenth or eleventh centuries when the holy city deserved the pilgrim’s song: “O Rome, noble thou art and of the world ruler, / Of all other cities in glory exceeding.” Pope John XIX was known for lavish spending, for courting kings and musicians, and for helping the Abbot of Cluny rein in the excesses (like those mirrored shoes) of monks. John XIX was not a priest and had no Church training. But like his brother, who was pope before him, he was a good statesman and a sensible man—a vast improvement on many popes of the time. John XII, for example, was a debauch, spending his days hunting with hawks or hounds, drinking, and playing dice. He so neglected the churches of Rome that rain dripped onto the altars. Female pilgrims shunned the city; the lascivious pope, they heard, would force them into his bed, whether wives, widows, or virgins. Boniface VII had two rival popes strangled or starved, robbed the Vatican treasury, and fled to Constantinople. Benedict IX, elected to the papacy as a teenager, sold the office to a priest so he could marry—then changed his mind and raised an army to take the papal throne back.
But the rot at the core of Rome would not have been apparent to Gudrid. Like her countryman, the monk Nikulas, who wrote a traveler’s guide in the mid-1100s, what would have stayed in Gudrid’s mind was the immensity of the stone and marble city. Four miles long and two wide, the city on the hill was a splendor of churches, sanctified Roman ruins, and the glittering bazaar, thronged with people dressed outlandishly and babbling in dozens of tongues.
If she spoke to Pope John or told her tale of Vinland to any churchman, we have no proof of it, although more than one writer has imagined a secret record of just such a conversation hiding in the Vatican archives.
When Gudrid returned to Iceland from this last eye-opening voyage, she found that her son Snorri had built a church at Glaumbaer—perhaps at her request—and she settled in as a nun. A few years later, on the nearby island of Drangey, Grettir the Outlaw was killed by Thorbjorn Ongul, aided by his fostermother’s witchcraft.
People despised Ongul, the saga says, for depending on a witch’s spell. His own brother-in-law scolded that the killing was “not altogether of a Christian nature.” The man who had outlawed Grettir refused to give Ongul the reward, saying, “I would rather see you put to death for your sorcery and witchcraft than pay you anything.” At the yearly assembly, the Althing passed a new law forbidding witchcraft on pain of exile—Isleif, a chieftain’s son who would become the first native-born bishop of Iceland in 1056, urged that the penalty be death—and Ongul was banished from Iceland forever.
The author of Grettir's Saga swiftly frames the moral of this story when Ongul first crashes into Grettir’s hut and confronts the outlaw:
Grettir said then to Ongul, “Who showed you the way onto the island?”
Ongul said, “Christ showed us the way.”
“But I think that wicked old woman, your fostermother, showed you the way,” said Grettir, “for you have always put your trust in her.”
“It will be all the same to you,” said Ongul, “whichever one we trusted in.”
But not all the same, the Christian audience of the saga would have understood, to Ongul.
Grettir’s Saga was one of the last classic sagas to be written, but behind its carefully crafted text lies a memory of the early eleventh century, when potential heroes didn’t know where the path to honor lay. Ongul is truly astonished at his reception at the Althing: Instead of being praised for killing a notorious murderer and thief, he is outlawed?
Gudrid would have known Ongul and the other men who helped him kill Grettir. They were her neighbors, the chief men of her district; she was related to many of them through Karlsefni. She would have known Ongul’s foster-mother, Thurid.
But to know what Gudrid the nun may have thought of old Thurid the witch, we need to understand what the Vikings believed in before they accepted Christianity—and how their beliefs changed. Unfortunately, not much remains to tell us about the old ways. Images carved on standing stones in the pagan eighth to tenth centuries seem to illustrate some of the entertaining stories Snorri Sturluson collected in the Christian thirteenth century in his Prose Edda, which modern writers have used to re-create a Norse mythology. These myths tell of the great ash tree, Yggdrasil, that linked the Nine Worlds, of the gods riding up the rainbow bridge to sit in counsel, of quests into Giantland after an enormous ale pot or a giant bride, of the thieving trickster, Loki, who pawned the golden apples of youth, of Thor’s great strength and how Odin sold his eye for knowledge, of the eight-legged horse and the ship that folds up into a pocket, the gold ring that drops eight rings of equal value every ninth night, and the sword that wields itself. The myths are funny, shocking, and mind-bending, with their doors to other worlds—but how did a true pagan interpret the gods’ quarrels and adventures? What did she think about Ragnarok, the end of the world, when good and evil would destroy each other and everything in between?
Take the story of Thor and the Midgard Serpent. One day, the burly, red-haired, and somewhat dim-witted Thunder God went fishing with a giant. They rowed so far from land that the giant was afraid. Thor baited his hook with the head of a bull and soon got a bite. He fought and fought with his catch, until finally he dragged its head up to the boat’s gunwales—and found staring him in the eye the Midgard Serpent, the evil sea monster that encircled the earth like a living equator, biting its tail. Thor raised his hammer to slay the monster, but the terrified giant cut the fishing line and the serpent escaped. The moral of this story is ... unknown.
One scholar interprets it as a clash between civilization (Thor) and the destructive forces of nature (the Midgard Serpent). Another sees it as the reverse: Thor is threatening the balance of nature and the giant must stop him. The fact that we can’t agree whether Thor is good or bad in this tale provides us with one key to the Viking worldview: “Order and chaos, good and evil, may be opposite aspects of the same things, precariously balanced,” as one scholar says. The gods may exist to give the chaos of nature some “shape and direction,” says another. They create culture by taking things found in nature (or in the cave of the giants) and giving them meaning. In this way the gods gave men poetry and ale. But the Norse gods are strangely like their enemies, the giants. They have “limited powers. They are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. To know what is hidden from them they have to consult wiser beings,” such as the mysterious old hag who lives at the Well of Knowing. And they are not to be trusted. They are grasping, duplicitous, vain, and brutal. Worse, they cannot defend themselves—or us—against the traitor among them, the half-god, half-monster Loki, blood-brother to Odin, who will lead the ranks of evil at Ragnarok. Then, says the poem “Words of the Seer,” Thor and th
e Midgard Serpent will battle to the death. One—the poem isn’t clear which—“mauls in his rage all Middle Earth ... Now death is the portion of doomed men.”
In Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, Thomas DuBois shows how this mythology of doom could be converted into everyday rules to live by. All people, he says, citing Karl Luckert’s American Tribal Religions, divide the elements of the world, seen and unseen, into three sets: less than human, equal, and greater than human. The less-than-human are “handled.” Animals, in Gudrid’s culture, were generally less than human. The greater-than-human—Thor and the Midgard Serpent—evoke awe and surrender. Reports from Christian missionaries give some sense—distorted by the writers’ disgust—of how people in pagan times expressed their awe. Adam of Bremen in 1070 describes a festival at Uppsala in Sweden, held for nine days every ninth year during the spring equinox, in which nine male animals of each kind were sacrificed, with the blood used to “placate the gods” and the carcases hung up in the trees of the Sacred Grove. “A Christian informant,” Adam writes, told him that he once counted seventy-two carcases—of dogs, horses, and even humans—in the trees. Such sacrifices seem to be borne out by archaeologists’ excavations, but these views through the eyes of outsiders cannot tell us why the Vikings conducted them.
According to DuBois, the elements of the world equal to humans are the ones that mattered most in Gudrid’s time. People then, DuBois writes, “had a vast array of equals—human, nearhuman, and nonhuman, mobile and immobile, visible and invisible—with which they shared and competed on a daily basis.” Among them were the dwellers in the mounds: the elves, the land spirits, the Hidden Folk. Mountains were declared “holy” and were not to be climbed by the unwashed, though beneath them the illustrious dead could be buried. Guardian spirits lived in caves and stones. “Some women are so unwise and blind about their needs,” wrote a medieval Christian author, “that they take their food and bring it out to heaps of stones and mountain caves and consecrate it to the spirits of the land and thereafter they eat it in order to make the spirits of the land friendly and in order to have more luck with their farming than before.”
In two sagas of the conversion to Christianity, the first missionary to come to Iceland, a Saxon bishop named Fridrek, made a bargain with a farmer: If Bishop Fridrek could drive the farm’s “steward” from his stone, the farmer would agree to be baptized. This steward, the farmer said, was a good friend: He protected the cattle and gave helpful advice. The bishop advanced on the stone. He sprinkled it with holy water while singing psalms. That night the steward appeared to the farmer in a dream and cried: “Ill have you done to let that awful man pour boiling water into my house, so that it scorches my children. Oh, how hard it is to hear the screeches of my little ones!” He begged and threatened for two more nights, but the farmer held to his bargain with the bishop to see who proved more powerful, the elf or Christ. After the third night, the stone broke apart, and the steward was heard from no more. The farmer was baptized, believing that his new invisible friend, Christ, was stronger than his old one.
It was their belief in holy mountains, sacred groves, and inhabited stones that made the concept of pilgrimage so appealing to the Vikings (besides the fact that it was so similar to “going a-viking”). The holy city, the saint’s shrine, were understood in terms of the steward’s stone: a place inhabited by the new stronger “friend.” At home, traditional holy places were resanctified by the addition of a cross or the mere blessing of a bishop. Gudmundur the Good, bishop in the twelfth century, erected a cross in a field. According to his saga: “People go there as they do to holy places and burn lights before the cross outside just as they would inside a church, even if the weather is bad.” The reverse had happened in the early days of Iceland’s settlement. When Unn the Deep-Minded and her Christian crew came to Iceland from the Hebrides, they marked their land-claim with a cross on a hill. There Unn prayed. Later, according to The Book of Settlements, “her kinsmen worshipped these hills.” They built a pagan temple there, in which their chieftains were sanctified, and “believed they would go into the hills when they died.”
The pagan belief in fortune-telling was also neatly co-opted into the Christian worldview, with soothsaying becoming a talent of Christian saints. Olaf Tryggvason, the missionary king of Norway credited with converting Iceland and Greenland, was baptized by such a one. When Olaf asked the hermit how he knew so much about the future, the hermit replied that the god of Christian men told him whatever he wanted to know.
In the old days, a person in difficulty would naturally turn, not to a bishop or holy hermit, but to a witch like Ongul’s foster-mother. The sagas name seventy-eight witches, half of them male and half female. They are sometimes portrayed as good and useful neighbors, sometimes as wicked and hateful interlopers (who nonetheless had their supporters). One saga explains: “As Christianity was new to the country and had not fully taken hold, many people considered it an advantage that a person was skilled in magic.”
A witch was a “fence rider,” one who straddled the barrier between the fields and the wild lands, civilization and chaos, natural and supernatural, good and evil. (Over time, the fence turned into the broomstick on which our cartoon witches ride.) A saga witch could bring snow or fog to hide a hunted man. She could change the course of a river. In famine, she could fill a bay with fish or summon a whale. She could turn herself (or someone she loved) into a goat, a boar, a spindle stick, a walrus, a bear, or a bull’s-hide bag filled with water. She could provide a shirt no sword could pierce and a helmet of invisibility. She could find a lost horse or family heirloom.
These otherworldly talents, too, were translated into the Christian world. Christ could raise the dead, turn water into wine, calm the storm, and feed the multitude. The early Christians highlighted not only Christ’s miracles, but those of His followers as a way to prove God’s might and His concern for His creation. Bishops of Iceland would become famous for ending a long winter or a drought, providing a calm breeze so young boys could sail home safely, turning aside a flood-swollen river to save a farmhouse, and causing a midwinter thaw so bodies could be buried properly at church. They found lost things, treated frostbite, cough, insomnia, and toothache, lessened womens labor pains, and healed crippled or broken limbs. One priest was said to be able to turn a bone into a horse that could carry a rider over the sea. Another had a whistle that could call up troops of demon workers to fetch in the hay before it was ruined by the rain.
The magical stones and potions and amulets a witch might have pressed on a client were replaced with saints’ relics and holy water and all sorts of crosses, from silver pendants to two sticks tied with yarn. Even the story of a saint could be potent. In a small manuscript book of the saga of St. Margaret, the letters have been almost rubbed away on some pages. Such books were held against the legs of a woman in labor to ease her pains. The magical pagan songs that Gudrid sang so beautifully to call the spirits in Greenland, and the elaborate ritual surrounding the seance—the seer’s jeweled blue dress and white catskin gloves, her cushion of hen’s feathers, her meal of animal hearts—were replaced by equally beautiful and elaborate Christian prayers and rituals. The farmer who made the bargain with Bishop Fridrek had had no interest in Christianity—no desire to evict the farm’s steward from his stone—until he witnessed a mass:
But when he heard the ringing of bells and the fair song of priests, and smelled the sweet fragrance of incense, and saw the bishop clothed with splendid vestments, and ... the fair shining of wax tapers ... then all this pleased him rather well.
It was easy for the Norse to put a Christian gloss on their old ways. In the saga of the Christian king Hakon the Good, who ruled Norway in the mid-900s, the king is at a pagan feast held by some rebellious nobles, and the sacred ale has just been brought out.
When the first cup was poured, Sigurd the Jarl spoke before it and blessed it in honor of Odin and drank to the king from the horn. The king took it and made the sign of the
Cross over it. Then Kar of Gryting said: “Why does the king do that? Will he still not sacrifice?” Sigurd the Jarl answered: “The king does as all do who trust in their might and main; he blesses the cup in honor of Thor. He made the sign of Thor’s hammer over it before he drank.”
What’s important here is not that the T-shape of Thor’s hammer looked like the sign of the cross, but the similarity of the beliefs and rituals of the cults on a deeper level. Writes DuBois: “The shared assumptions reflect a tradition of comparison, in which the Christian Lord appears at first as just one more deity of the sky, vying with the others for the best of adherents.”
Christian doctrine does not allow for any other gods. Christ cannot be “just one more deity.” Yet both archaeology and history imply that the Viking world failed to grasp this essential tenet of the new religion for at least a hundred years, well after Gudrid’s death. Burial customs changed very slowly, with Thor’s hammers and Christian crosses sometimes found in the same grave. Thor and his hammer appear on a Swedish baptismal font, alongside Christ and the cross. A jewelry mold found in Denmark could simultaneously cast a cross and a hammer. In one of the earliest Christian Norse poems, dated to circa 1000, Christ sits beside the Well of Weird next to the three pagan goddesses of Fate. The names of the days of the week were not changed in Icelandic until the 1100s—and were never changed in English: We still honor the gods Tyr (Tuesday), Odin (or Wodan, Wednesday), and Thor (Thursday), and the goddess Frigg (Friday).
Nor was the Christ who came to the Vikings the suffering, broken, abandoned, blauður Christ of Good Friday. He was the glorious, invincible, hvatur Christ of the Last Judgment, separating the righteous from the damned. He was the Christ in the letters of St. Paul, the “young hero” and “victor over evil.” He was, in fact, “virtually a picture of Thor under the name of Christ,” as one scholar writes. Crucifixes made in the newly converted North never show the dying, human Christ, but always Christ Triumphant, standing bolt upright, his feet on a footrest, his head held high and his expression regal, wearing a crown of gold, not thorns. In Old Norse poetry, he is called “creator of heaven and earth, of angels and the sun, ruler of the world.” He is “king of the heavens and the sun and angels and Jerusalem and Jordan and Greece, master of apostles and saints.” Wrote the poet Markus, “Alone the ruler of men, Christ can control all things.” Said his colleague Eilif Kulnasvein, “The sun’s king alone is finer than all other true glory.”
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