One Icelander whom Bishop Fridrek tried to convert declined, saying he would hold to the beliefs of his foster-father who “believed in the one who made the sun and ruled all things.”
The bishop answered, “I offer you the same faith.”
What the sagas call the Change of Ways came to Iceland in the year 1000, while Gudrid was on her way to Greenland. The island was converted by parliamentary decree, with the Althing essentially blackmailed by the crusading King Olaf Tryggvason, who held many Icelanders and their precious ships captive in Norway until the outcome satisfied him. All Icelanders were to be baptized, but sacrificing to the old gods was not outlawed—if it was kept quiet.
Many of the Vikings’ most ingrained values did not need to be Christianized. Men were praised for being peaceable, popular, and calm. They strove to be generous, hospitable, faithful, healthy, clean living, and tolerant. Among the advice in the pre-Christian poem Hávamál, or “Words of the High One” (the “high one” being the god Odin), are these stanzas:
Mock not the traveler met on the road,
Nor maliciously laugh at the guest:
Scoff not at guests nor to the gate chase them,
But relieve the lonely and wretched.
Never laugh at the old when they offer counsel,
Often their words are wise:
From shrivelled skin, from scraggy things
That hang among the hides
And move amid the guts,
Clear words often come.
With a good woman, if you wish to enjoy
Her words and her good-will,
Pledge her fairly and be faithful to it:
Enjoy the good you are given.
These things are thought the best:
Fire, the sight of the sun,
Good-health with the gift to keep it,
And a life that avoids vice.
As Russian saga scholar M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij complains, “What is taken for a Christian trait in the family sagas is usually ‘Christian’ only in the sense that it continued to exist after the introduction of Christianity.”
The Change of Ways wrought no huge upheaval in society. Those who had been in power, remained in power. As Gunnar Karlsson puts it in The History of Iceland, the chieftains “just changed gods but went on with their social roles as far as they possibly could.” The chieftains built churches as a mark of status. According to one saga, a chieftain could take as many of his followers with him to Heaven as could fit in his church. The chieftains declared themselves “priests”—rather like the pope, with no Church training (though when such training became available in the 1100s, they took it). Trade in wine and wax candles probably increased. According to Icelandic historian Helgi Thorlaksson, not until the 1100s did the Icelanders all learn to say the Lord’s Prayer, cross themselves properly, and act “with reverence” in church. As late as 1150, the archbishop in Norway was still putting pressure on the Icelanders to “sanctify” marriage, by condemning out-of-wedlock births, the keeping of mistresses, and divorce—all ways to rein in that “aggressive authority” by which women in the sagas pursued their sex lives.
“It has been argued that Christianity was a disaster for women,” writes Anne-Sofie Graslund, an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In the old days, women were at the heart of the rituals. Housewives took the offerings to the “heaps of stones and mountain caves” and asked the spirits of the land to bless the farm. Women saw into the future, healed the sick with charms and potions, and prepared the sacred ale for feast days. Two women in The Book of Settlements are named gyðja, “priestess,” though we do not know what their role entailed. Christianity, by contrast, has no goddess, and the Church is headed by men. When the Christian Church became fully established in the 1100s, these housewives and priestesses were shut out of the spiritual life, while wise women like Ongul’s foster-mother were declared “of little use” and told to abandon their witchcraft. Many episodes in the sagas support this view; archaeology seems to show, instead, that women of Gudrid’s day saw Christianity not as a threat to their social status, but as an attractive set of beliefs. After examining runestones and burials throughout the Viking world, Graslund believes that Viking women were the first converts.
During the time Gudrid was a nun, Christianity, Graslund says, was a religion of joy and sisterhood. Rather than limiting women’s sexual or spiritual power, it enhanced their sense of worth. “Christ made no distinction between men and women,” Graslund says. “His attitude toward women meant nothing less than a revolution.” No longer was a woman’s worth, high or low, defined by marriage or childbearing. Abandoned, orphaned, barren, kinless, a woman still owned a soul and a place in the world: She had rights from birth to death. A Christian father could not decide to set his baby girl outdoors to die. (Exposure had always killed more girls than boys in Viking Iceland, in spite of womens high status.) Shortly after the conversion, this practice, along with the eating of horsemeat (an essential part of pagan ritual), was declared taboo.
Graslund sees evidence of this new regard for the individual in the burial practices of early Christians. In the old days, families were buried together, under a holy mountain or on the boundaries of a farm, where their shades could watch over their successors. In the new churchyards, families were broken up: Women were buried to the north of the church, men to the south. By stressing the individual, not the family, notes Graslund, Christianity offered “the possibility of salvation for everybody. If you were a good person, you could affect your own fate and afterlife.”
For women like Gudrid, this question of the afterlife—the Otherworld—might have been the biggest attraction of the new religion. Valhalla, the glorious feast hall of Odin, was open only to men killed in battle. Several other gods had halls that welcomed certain dead, but most women (and men who died of old age or illness) could look forward only to a cold, damp, dark, dreary, and depressing eternity ruled by Hel, the halfgiant daughter of Loki. Hel’s brothers are the Midgard Serpent and the wolf that will swallow the sun. Her hall, unappealingly named “Damp-with-Sleet,” has “extraordinarily high walls and huge gates.” Her plate is named “Hunger,” her knife, “Famine.” What woman would not choose Heaven—described in the Old Norse Homily Book as “delight and joy and all sorts of beauty... glory, and happiness without end”—over this?
In medieval Christianity, the Last Judgment—Doomsday—was just as cataclysmic as Ragnarok. In one Old Norse sermon, The burning fire shall flow forth from Heaven and out of that fire the wide world shall burn. Hills and stones will then run as hot wax.... The stars will fall from the sky. But in the Christian world, the men and women of Middle Earth were not doomed to die with their gods. Christ would walk through the destruction, leading His followers to eternal bliss, regardless of sex or status.
In the graveyard at Birka, the Viking market center in Sweden, Graslund notes, nine cross pendants and one pendant reliquary were found. All were in women’s graves, and the fact that several are “very simple, plain, and carelessly made” indicates that they were prized as symbols rather than as jewelry. Elsewhere in Sweden, Graslund found prayers to the Virgin Mary—always referred to as “God’s Mother”—on runestones memorializing a woman or raised by a woman in memory of her dead. The Church encouraged bridge building and road maintenance so that priests could keep in touch more easily with their bishops and archbishops and, ultimately, Rome. For these good and pious deeds, sins would be forgiven, paving the way to Heaven. A Viking Age “bridge” was not the arching span we’re used to, but merely two stones marking a passable ford on a river. In both Uppland and Sodermanland, Sweden, runic inscriptions show that more than half of the bridge stones were erected by, or for, a woman. Based on this and other evidence, Graslund believes women were “prime actors” in the Change of Ways.
Among these prime actors in northern Iceland might have been Gudrid the Far-Traveler, just returned from Rome and living as a nun, tending the church her son built her.
John Steinberg speculates that we may have seen signs of Snorri’s church without recognizing them when we excavated the house at Glaumbaer. Poring over the maps and drawings a year later, John noticed a similarity between the “strange alley” we had found in the southwest corner of the house, where the walls seem doubled with no space in between for a room, and something on the plans at Hofstadir. There, as Orri Vesteinsson and his colleagues at the Icelandic Institute of Archaeology indicate in their excavation reports, a plank-walled room was built, around which a protecting turf wall was later added—a construction method thought to have been used in the earliest Icelandic chapels. In the case of Glaumbaer, the two structures—house and chapel—seem to have been so close that the late-coming turf wall was snug against the house.
The chapel would have been quite small. The interior of Thjodhild’s church at Brattahlid in Greenland is only 6½ feet wide and less than 12 feet long. In the center of the churchyard Gudny Zoega investigated at Keldudalur was a small, rectangular space free of graves. A few postholes were all that remained of the wooden church building, but if it were protected by outer turf walls, it could not have been larger than Thjodhild’s church. Twenty or thirty people, “closely packed together,” says one archaeologist, could worship inside these tiny candlelit rooms. Gudrid’s chapel, built for a solitary nun, might have been even tinier, just a private space to light a candle before a simple cross and close a door on everyday cares.
Gudrid is one of only six Icelandic women called nuns before the first Icelandic nunnery was founded in 1186, and what the sagas mean by “nun” is a mystery. The Icelandic word translated as “nun,” einsetukona—“woman living alone”—implies that she enjoyed the independence she undoubtedly had grown used to between Karlsefni’s death and Snorri’s coming of age. She may even have retained control of some of her wealth, instead of becoming her son’s dependent. In later years, at least, when a church or chapel was built, all or part of the farm and its income were dedicated to it, with the proviso that the owner could continue to live on and manage the property. On a more personal level, Gudrid as a nun could not be expected to remarry and bear more sons, as Gudrun the Fair had done at age forty. Nor was she brushed aside as a hornkerling, the superfluous old hag sent to sit in the corner and be ignored—the fate Hallgerd Long-Legs had feared at age forty-five.
Being a solitary nun may have supplied Gudrid with a respectable—if unusual—position in society, one well in keeping with her history as a remarkable woman. It was not quite unprecedented. According to the sagas, Gudrun the Fair was the first woman in Iceland to learn the Psalter and call herself a nun; Gudrid the Far-Traveler followed her in less than five years. In Laxdaela Saga we have a brief glimpse of how Gudrun the Fair enacted the role of holy woman. She spent hours in her church at night by candlelight, on her knees, reciting her prayers so strenuously that a witch buried beneath the floorboards had cause to complain to Gudrun’s granddaughter in a dream: “She twists and turns all night on top of me, and burns me all over with hot drops. I’m telling you because I like you a little better—even though there’s something strange about you, too.” When the church floor was dug up, Gudrun’s people found some blackened bones, a brooch, and a staff. They reburied them far away, and peace returned to the church.
Gudrid the Far-Traveler may have learned to recite the Psalter—the 150 psalms, the Credo (“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth...”), the Paternoster (“Our Father...”), and perhaps other prayers and hymns. This was the first step in religious education and, as the sagas say, Gudrid was a good singer with a memory for poetry. But unlike Gudrun the Fair—who shamed her husband into killing his own cousin and foster-brother, the man she loved most—Gudrid had no great sins to atone for by grinding her knees into the church floor every night. According to historian Helgi Thorlaksson, “Gudrid was always Christian, behaved with great circumspection, and lived a thoroughly respectable and dignified life in a hazardous world.” But what does this mean, to be “always Christian”? The Saga of Eirik the Red says she was raised a Christian, yet before the Change of Ways there were no churches in Iceland, and no priests to hear confession or perform mass.
No one knows what form of Christianity Gudrid might have practiced—or, for that matter, what form Unn the Deep-Minded brought with her from the Hebrides in the late 800s. It was “a strange and battered Christianity,” says one historian; other scholars tend to name it Celtic Christianity. Early churches in Ireland and Scotland were surrounded by circular churchyards like those found at Thjodhild’s church and at Keldudalur. Norwegian churches of the time had rectangular churchyards. But what the difference in shape signifies, no one knows. We don’t know how Gudrid prayed, or if wax candles, bells, and incense were as central to the rite as the sagas would have us believe. What little we do know about the church of St. Patrick puts it in direct competition with Rome. Already for hundreds of years, Rome had been trying to suppress what it saw as an offshoot of Druidism. When the British monk Pelagius debated theology with Augustine in the fourth century, the sticking point was free will. The Celtic Christian believed Divine Grace did not require the physical trappings of a church, or uniform rites such as mass, confession, extreme unction, and absolution; an individual with free will could achieve grace through his or her own actions. Such a theology would have appealed to an independent-minded woman like Gudrid.
The saintly actions available to her, as a nun at Glaumbaer, would have included caring for travelers and helping the poor. Along with these fairly obvious good deeds, however, Gudrid could also have sought Heaven by sharing her experiences. Wisdom is one of the four pillars of the Church, according to the Old Norse Homily Book, and the early Church in Iceland shows a surprising reverence for the wisdom of old women.
Christianity is a religion of the book, and one of the first and greatest changes the new faith introduced was this new technology; it was as essential to the making of a Christian society as the technology of shipbuilding was to the Viking voyages to Vinland. In addition to the Latin alphabet, the Church taught the Icelanders how to transform the skin of a light-colored calf into a smooth vellum writing surface, how to create a long-lasting ink out of boiled bearberry and willow twigs, how to cut a goose feather to make a quill pen, and how to fold and sew the pages into a binding of wood or sealskin to make the book durable and portable.
The alphabet was not a new concept to the Vikings, merely an expansion of the runes they had used for centuries to mark their names on tools or trade goods, to keep tallies, to cut bridge markers and memorial stones, and to work magic. Perhaps because of their experience with runes—difficult to cut, difficult to read, limited to bulky materials like wood, bone, and stone—the Vikings were not immediately impressed with the technology of literacy. The human memory can file prodigious amounts of information. In storytelling cultures, people compose and share stories and poems, establish laws, preserve histories and genealogies, and investigate the sciences of medicine, mathematics, navigation, geography, and astronomy, all without books.
When the technology of the book came to Iceland in the 1030s, with the first Church schools, it had little effect outside religion. Says folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson, “The art of speaking and telling did not change, nor the art of composing poetry, and learned men continued to hold their honored position in society—at least to start with. It took a long time for people to accept the precedence of the written word over the testimony of the wise.”
Gudrid, whose voyages had taken her from one end of the Viking world to the other, would have been counted among the wise. She had one grandson and three granddaughters whose names we know, and I can imagine the stories she told them: of the rich young merchant with the fancy clothes whose suit her father turned down; of the harrowing voyage to Greenland; of the séance and the songs she sang to raise the spirits, Christian though she was; of her marriage to Thorstein Eiriksson, their frustrated voyage to Vinland, and his spooky death a
t Sandnes; of Thorfinn Karlsefni and their three years exploring the New World, where Snorri was born and Gudrid tried, but failed, to talk to a Skraeling woman.
In 1118 Gudrid’s great-grandson Thorlak became the bishop of Skalholt and, with his colleague, the bishop of Holar, commissioned Ari the Learned to write a history of Iceland. Íslendingabók, or “The Book of the Icelanders,” was the first book written in the Icelandic language—not Latin—a critical step that made the Icelandic sagas possible.
Reading Ari’s brief and sketchy book (only twelve pages in a modern translation) is nothing like listening to the lively tales Gudrid could have told her granddaughter Hallfrid, Bishop Thorlak’s mother, as she sat spinning yarn by the fire, watching the younger woman weave. Ari cites his sources, making it clear that he got his information in the time-honored way—from the lips of old men and women—but his style is altogether new. It shows its Church origins in many ways. It’s sprinkled with Latin words. It begins with a table of contents, and its ten sections (not counting a prologue and appendix) have subject headings: one on the settlement, one on the laws, one on the wise man who figured out why “the summer was moving backward into spring” (the old calendar had 364 days in the year). Local events are fitted into an international chronology. Iceland was discovered the same year that St. Eadmund, the English king, was killed, we learn, and that “was 870 years after the birth of Christ.” Serious and straightforward to a fault, Ari only very occasionally lets a little gossip sneak in, such as when he refers to the Norwegian king as “Olaf the Fat” rather than “Olaf the Saint,” or when he explains that Greenland got its name because Eirik the Red thought “people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name.”
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