by Tory Bilski
They have not come back. Why is that? I wonder. Are we not worthy of being visited? Is it because we are not Icelandic? Is there a language barrier? Or are we no longer receptive to them? While the idea that the guesthouse is haunted has never been an impediment to our staying here—every year we greet our rooms in the guesthouse with giddy excitement, “We’re he-eere!”—I am not actually eager to see, hear, or feel them. I did not embellish one bit of my ghost story, and I am assuming the others didn’t embellish theirs, either.
But this year we are armed with new information. This year we know that all those headstones were moved when our guesthouse was built, and they all belonged to the people who witnessed the beheading of Agnes Magnúsdóttir in 1830. And this year we know who Agnes is. We did our homework—we read the new novel about Agnes before we flew to Iceland. So these ghosts are no longer nameless, generic ghosts that visited us. Now they are ghosts with a past and a purpose.
Sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the headstones, we are left to wonder: “What does it mean that they were moved exactly?”
“Were the graves all left underneath this house?”
“Were only the headstones moved? Is this a poltergeist situation?”
In all fairness to Helga, she had tried telling us the story of Agnes a few times over the years. She started telling us out on the trail the year of the horse flu but was repeatedly interrupted by horses thought to be coughing and riders too nervous to be riding. She tried again to tell us last year and brought over a CD with an aria from an opera written about Agnes. She put the music on, and I remember her saying, “This is a very sad story that happened around here.” And she looked sad as she listened to it, as she translated some of the Icelandic words from the song for us.
But after the song was over, our follow-up chatter took a different turn. It wasn’t about Agnes and her lover, it was about our old loves, and how some of them still haunt us. Helga wanted to know why we chose the husbands we did, what was the defining characteristic that made each of us think, this is the one. I was quick to speak up: “Humor. He can always make me laugh.” Eve seconded the humor reason, adding that Jack always made life exciting. Allie simply said, “Trust.” Sylvie said, “To get out of my mother’s house—I was nineteen!” When we asked Helga why she married Gunnar, she paused as if really thinking about it and said, “Dependability. I knew he’d make a good father. So many Icelandic men run around and have children with lots of different women. I knew he was trustworthy, a Steady Eddie.”
So every time the Agnes story was raised in the past it got usurped by our own emotional lives and loves. Until one day this past winter, I was standing in the Yale New Haven bookstore and I picked a book on the featured table, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, and had a “hold on, I know this story” moment. I dashed off an email to my fellow travelers. “This book is about that story that Helga was talking about, that song she played for us, that opera she mentioned.” We passed a flurry of emails back and forth. We all agreed to read the book about the life and death of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who started out with every strike against her: a poor, illegitimate daughter of a tenant farmer, orphaned at an early age and sent from farm to farm to work since the age of seven. A character straight out of Dickens, she hit the tragic trifecta: hard luck, hard life, awful death.
Hearing from all of us over the winter about how much this story finally resonated with us, Helga scheduled a full day of sightseeing for us through Vatnsdalur, Agnes Magnúsdóttir’s home turf. Thirty minutes south of Thingeyrar, Agnes was born; thirty minutes to the northwest, she lived with Natan in Illugastaðir; twenty minutes inland in Kornsa, she stayed with a family before her execution; and ten minutes from our guesthouse she was put to death in Þrístapar. (Travel distances are measured by today’s cars, not by the horses Agnes and her contemporaries rode.) And in Thingeyrar itself, Friðrik, the farmhand convicted of murder along with Agnes, was held before his execution. We were at the epicenter of this tragic tale. Not to mention, the witnesses were buried beneath us.
The night before we set out, Helga brings over the 1995 Icelandic movie Agnes, where actor, director, and our personal Samaritan, be-still-my-heart Baltasar Kormákur, plays the lead role of Natan, Agnes’ lover. When we see him in the opening scene we sigh like thirteen-year-olds. “That’s him, that’s our Baltasar,” Eve says, stressing the possessive. “Was it just a year ago?” Viv says. We ogle him in the steamy—literally, in hot springs—love scene. But it is not a swooning type of role for long and we have a hard time separating the Natan character from the Baltasar we had met last year. In the movie, he plays Natan as a self-promoting sexual healer.
“Uh-oh, he’s doing her, and her, too?” Sylvie comments, when he moves from woman to woman. It reminds me of the stallion we watched one summer.
“What a womanizer,” Allie says. “Sheesh.” But she wasn’t with us the night we met Baltasar, so she doesn’t know his real soul.
“How could he do that, our Baltasar,” Eve says, sounding personally so disappointed.
I’m a little more forgiving of his character. “Yeah, but it’s Baltasar,” meaning that obviously it’s more like free love than womanizing. More obvious, at least to me, is that I am no better at distinguishing character from performer than my grandmother was when she watched her soap opera, One Life to Live. She’d twist her hands: “I’m so mad at Charles.”
When we set out the next day, our first stop is at the church at Tjörn where Agnes’s head is buried, or, er, reburied. I am first out of the car, charged with this mission. “Where’s her head?” I feel as if we are on a Dan Brown mystery-history-literary tour and this is our Rosslyn Chapel. We spread out across the graveyard, impatiently scanning the names of each tombstone. Finally, Helga finds the marker, which looks like it is carved out of new marble. The grass is thick and long with a sprinkling of dandelions. But wait, what’s this? Agnes and Friðrik—Friðrik?—share the site, like a marriage bed. The marker has just their two names, birth dates, and the same date of death. There is nothing indicating the story behind their deaths, or that it is just their heads buried there. If it is just their heads.
For me, Agnes is the central character in the story. Poor Agnes, wrongly put to death for her love and lust by the Danish colonial overlords to teach the wild Icelanders a lesson. The Danes thought they were a semi-feral northern tribe, who secretly worshipped pagan idols more than the Christian God. One prevailing thought about the case is that the Danes wanted to teach Icelandic women a lesson: stay chaste.
Because I am caught up in the story between Natan and Agnes, I forget that Friðrik was also beheaded in Þrístapar, only minutes before Agnes. And we pay little attention to two other women who played a part in the tale—Rosa, a famous poetess, who was Natan’s real love and intellectual equal, and sixteen-year-old Sigríður, another maid in Natan’s house who he easily seduced. This wasn’t just a love triangle, one needs a Venn diagram to figure it out.
But they only sent Friðrik and Agnes to the chopping block. After the beheadings, their bodies were quickly disposed of and their heads were put on pikes facing the road, which sounds more like bloody old England than Iceland.
Helga tells us how their heads happened to find their way to this churchyard in Tjörn, a ghost story within a ghost story. Back in 1932, a woman in Reykjavík, a psychic type, was “summoned” by Agnes, who expressed her desire to have her head and Friðrik’s buried in the churchyard at Tjörn. A picky, demanding ghost, this Agnes. She apparently told the psychic exactly where their heads were buried in Þrístapar, though they were buried secretly in the middle of the night. With the psychic’s excellent directions, the heads were dug up, complete with the wooden pikes embedded in skulls, and reburied in Tjörn.
We spend the rest of the time in Tjörn looking to see if Natan is buried here, too, figuring maybe that’s why Ghost Agnes chose this as her final resting spot. But there is no headstone that reads Natan Ketilsson.
We drive o
ver to where Natan had his farm in Illugastaðir, on the northern coast of the Vatnsnes peninsula. The sky is overcast. The tide is out. Seaweed is thick in the tidal basin. It’s a wild, moody place, and it’s easy to imagine a mad love affair gone deadly wrong. A new house stands where Natan’s house once stood, where a destitute Agnes came to him, hired as a housemaid, and stayed as his lover. The remnants of his workshop where he made his medicine and potions are nothing but fallen planks and broken sticks of wood, what nature has left after 180 years of abandonment.
The land itself is now a nature preserve for eiders. There is a car park, a restroom, and a well-maintained path where the ducks nest, protected in the grass by old tires. The path ends at a point where there is a bird lookout with a sign-in guest book. Looking west there is a spit of land where the seals are trying to sun themselves on the rocks. The sun shoots out in brief intermittent flashes of light. And beyond that, across the fjord, are blue-and-white snow-capped mountains, a sparkling winter land in great contrast to the green summer land we stand on. It hovers almost as a mesmerizing mirage. Helga points to that blue, wintry coast, which looks for all the world like something out of a fairy tale, and tells us that is where her mother was born.
Then we head to Þristapar, where the execution took place. It’s marked by a green post on the side of the road, signifying a historical event, that we have passed for eleven years without stopping to look around.
It is warm and rainy as we walk to the site of the executions. We don’t engage in our usual chatter. We walk solemnly, as if in a funeral procession, as if we are paying our respects to a woman executed almost two centuries ago. The three hills are only small mounds, only about ten feet high, not exactly grand gallows. Standing there, I’m not thinking of Agnes and Friðrik as we walk to the site; I’m thinking of the neighboring farmers who were forced to witness the event, the ones who haunt our guesthouse, the very ones who were kicking the muddy snow off their boots while I was trying to sleep that first night at Thingeyrar. I don’t imagine they were thrilled about being buried together just because they happened to witness a couple of beheadings.
I was once on a jury for a personal injury case. I had lunch with my fellow jurors, we cracked some good jokes, and we had a two-week camaraderie based on being stuck together every day and wanting to get the trial over with. But I would not have wanted to be buried with them.
And why was the guesthouse built on top of the graveyard anyway? Why not move it a little to the left? They have 8,000 acres of open land. They couldn’t have reconfigured a parcel of pasture?
Icelanders think nothing of having ghosts around, but this seems as if they were asking for ghosts. Maybe that’s the point, maybe they like their ghosts; they always have a piece of history whispering in their ears.
At the top of the mound, the Þristapar marker is weathered, pocked with lichen and moss. It looks a thousand years old. I can’t make out the letters and it’s not much to look at. But the views are vast in this part of Iceland. Look one way and there are the hills of dry dirt left behind by a landslide from the Ice Age. And inland from there is Kornsá, a deep lush valley. Look the other way and the land opens up to the rolling green farmland that gives way to Lake Hóp. I can easily make out the black basalt of Thingeyrarkirkja, and the low building that is our guesthouse.
At dinner that night, we pepper our Icelandic hosts with questions about the details of the execution. We, who come from a country that just bungled a supposedly foolproof chemical execution in Texas—it took three tries! We are fascinated with the idea that Icelanders rejected capital punishment almost 200 years ago.
It is our last dinner together, since we leave tomorrow. We put together two dining room tables to seat everyone: Helga and Gunnar, Oli and Gita, Frieda, plus the six of us.
Oli has grilled lamb chops, baked potatoes, and sautéed mushrooms for our dinner. When we express admiration that capital punishment was banished after Agnes and Friðrik were beheaded, Oli reminds us that the Icelanders didn’t have a say in the matter; they were a colony under Denmark’s rule. A reprieve would have had to come from the King of Denmark. And capital punishment wasn’t officially off the books in Iceland for another hundred years. Iceland wasn’t independent from Denmark until 1944.
I ask Oli, “Did Agnes kill Natan out of mercy after Friðrik bludgeoned him, like in the book, or do you think it was like in the movie, when she finds him dead already and pulls him out from the burning wreckage?”
Before anyone has a chance to answer, I follow up quickly with another question. “Do you think Natan emotionally abused her and she lost it when she found him with Sigríður?”
My questions cause a flood of inquiries from the rest of us:
“Did women from her station of life have no rights?”
“And did Agnes have a child with him or not?”
“Rosa had a child with him, right?”
“And why were Agnes and Friðrik buried in the same plot? Was it assumed they had an affair and they killed Natan because of it?”
“And where is Natan’s body buried?”
“Yeah, where is Natan’s body?”
“And where are Agnes and Friðrik’s bodies? What did they do with them after they put their heads on pikes?”
“Was the poet Rosa jealous of Agnes?”
“Was it Rosa who wanted Agnes blamed for the murder?”
“Why wasn’t Sigríður also accused of murder?”
“And why, why, did they bury the witnesses together? What was the point of that?”
“And did they really just move the grave markers and not the bodies underneath this house?”
We throw out so many questions that we’re talking over each other. The Icelanders sit back and take a breath.
What more can they tell us?
No one could have anticipated—either in 1830 or 2014—this sympathy for Agnes, the historical novel written by an Australian, or a bunch of American women newly obsessed with a love-murder tale that took place so long ago, a tragedy spawned on this island long forgotten by most of the world, now suddenly worthy of a Hollywood movie.
Who could have seen this coming?
But we have been here, sleeping on these ghosts each year at Thingeyrar, looking at their grave markers every morning over breakfast without giving it much thought. And now that it has finally aroused our curiosity and our compassion, we can’t stop thinking about it. We have so many questions that the Icelanders can’t, or don’t want to, answer or revive the story. Helga tells us that this is still a touchy story in these parts, that old people remember their great-, or great-great-grandparents’ parts in the execution or trial, or witnessing the beheading. In other words, we should back off or at least tread more carefully. The Agnes story has never fully died around here. History in Iceland is ever present. The ghosts are still active at Thingeyrar. It’s personal for them.
My Iceland Thing
As we leave Helga’s farm we have the dates for our return trip the following June.
Sylvie says, “It’s not that we’re returning and repeating this trip every year, it’s that we’re recreating the trip and ourselves each year.”
“This was a great year,” Eve says. “Some years come together better than others.”
“It was the right mix of people,” Viv says. “That matters.”
“You never know how it is going to turn out,” Eve says. “That’s what I like about these trips.”
“You never know what people are going to bring,” Margot says.
“Most of the time, people bring something good here, and leave with something better,” Eve says. “I like to think of it that way. But I’m done trying to save people by bringing them here. I’m over that. It got too messy.”
Margot says, “You have to be open to the possibilities. Otherwise you can’t be saved.”
“Every trip has saved me in some way,” I tell them. “Not that I think of myself as needing salvation. It’s more that I think of myself
as needing to get lost. It’s the opposite of that youthful obsession of ‘trying to find yourself.’ I need to lose myself, and more often. Sometimes I lose myself with the horses, and sometimes I lose myself just being in Iceland.”
Eve says, “I get that.”
“It’s like personal emancipation.”
We stop at a bakery in Borgarnes. After coffee and cake, we stop in a gift shop to buy last minute presents for friends and family. I have difficulty making choices. Does my daughter need another wool hat? Would my son use a package of Icelandic herbs? I am mindlessly humming to a song that is on, before realizing it is the well-known song by Of Monsters and Men, “Little Talks,” but sung in Icelandic. The others are rushing about saying we have to leave soon. I feel antsy and melancholy leaving Iceland, overwhelmed that I am leaving it too soon. I want to hang back, stay longer, remain in this country for at least a few more days. Everyone else is eager to leave, though. We have to be in the airport in two hours.
I arrive home on a Friday and two days later I am at a party, looking for someone to talk to. The party has a DJ, a sushi chef, a pizza truck, a crepe stand—soon to be followed by oysters and lobsters. A young waiter circulates on the lawn offering mojitos. I swipe one off his tray. It’s a swanky lawn party at a friend’s beach house that sits on the Connecticut Sound, and I can’t help but add up the costs of this event and note that it would fund at least ten of my trips to Iceland.
Iceland is still with me. I carry in me a leftover sense of peace, and a residual exhaustion from a week of midnight sun insomnia. I still have the gravlax and smoked lamb that I bought at Keflavík airport waiting for me in my refrigerator. And I still feel as if I don’t want to reenter my regular life, not quite yet. This party is a perfect go between.
There is something about this particular part of Connecticut that reminds me of the coastline in Iceland. Maybe it’s the dark green and black of the moss and seaweed on the rocks during low tide. Maybe it’s the dark pebbly sand and the big craggy rocks that tumble disorderly into the blue-gray sea. Or maybe it’s that the New England coastline is a gateway to the more northern waters.
