Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  …I mostly keep in a corner and occupy myself with books and God. And I shall not allow even the most insignificant of men to approach me unless they be men from whom I can learn of things which they happen to have heard of from others, or they be my father’s intimate friends. For during these last thirty years… I have neither seen nor spoken to a friend of my father’s… For the powers that be have condemned us to this ridiculous position so that we should not be seen, but be a general object of abhorrence… And what I have added to my history… I have collected from some absolutely unpretentious, simple commentaries, and from a few old men who were soldiers when my father seized the Roman sceptre but have fallen upon evil times and retired from the turmoil of the world to the calm life of monasteries.12

  * The mancus, a single gold coin, was worth thirty silver pence.

  † See page 74.

  ‡ The Roman road that ran from London northwest towards the West Midlands.

  § In a BBC Radio 3 essay and in an insightful paper on Islamic women for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

  # She is represented by a place setting at Judy Chicago’s artwork The Dinner Party, and an asteroid, 615 Roswitha, is named in her honour.

  Chapter Four

  Chosen paths

  ✥

  GUDRID THORBJARNARDÓTTIR ~ SEERESSES AND CUNNING-WOMEN ~ TROTA, THE MEDIC OF SALERNO ~ A MOCHICA STIRRUP VESSEL ~ PEACE-WEAVERS, WAR-SPINNERS ~ A VIKING FEMALE WARRIOR’S GRAVE?

  If the majority of medieval women were expected to marry sensibly, raise children and toil on the farm, it is nevertheless relatively easy to tap into stories of women whose intrepidity, or determination to follow another calling, took them along a different route. Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir seems to have shared the broader horizons of her fellow Icelandic countrymen. In Anglo-Saxon England, and elsewhere, we find women practising medicine and the dark arts, while the elite women of the mead hall seem often to have acted as inciters of war and adventure, when they were not making peace among their menfolk. From such disparate sources, a polyphonic choir of unquiet talents is assembled.

  Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir

  The extraordinary career of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir (born c.980) as a Scandinavian pioneer, traveller and mother of the first known European to be born in the New World is preserved in two probably thirteenth-century works known collectively as the Vinland Sagas. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, she was ‘a woman of striking appearance and wise as well, who knew how to behave among strangers’. In Eirik the Red’s Saga, she is described as ‘the most attractive of women, and one to be reckoned with in all her dealings’. Gudrid was the daughter of Thorbjorn, a farmer from Laugarbrekka in western Iceland, originally settled by Scandinavian refugees and pioneers from about 870 onwards.* In Gudrid’s childhood, following Norse custom, her father put her to fosterage with a couple named Orm and Halldis at the farm known as Arnarstapi. She first attracted the admiration of a passing merchant; but her father thought him too low-born for his daughter and it was said that she was, in any case, rather choosy.

  During an ill-fated voyage by sea, which testifies to the deep-felt wanderlust of the Icelander, Gudrid and her father spent a tough winter stranded in Greenland, sheltering at the house of a farmer named Thorkel, during which Gudrid revealed some of her considerable accomplishments. In those lean times, the divination of future prospects for hunting and husbandry was a matter of keen interest; the advice and predictions of wise men and women were often sought. On one occasion, Gudrid was asked by a visiting seeress if she knew the chants required for carrying out the appropriate magic rites:

  Gudrid answered, ‘I have neither magical powers nor the gift of prophecy, but in Iceland my foster-mother, Halldis, taught me chants she called “Warlock songs”.’

  [The seeress] answered, ‘Then you know more than I expected.’ Gudrid said, ‘These are the sort of actions in which I intend to take no part, because I am a Christian woman.’

  …Thorkel then urged Gudrid, who said she would do as he wished. The women formed a warding ring [a sort of protective circle] around the platform raised for sorcery, with Thorbjorg [the seeress] perched atop it. Gudrid spoke the chant so well and so beautifully that people there said they had never heard anyone recite in a fairer voice.1

  In Eirik the Red’s Saga, she and her father set out the following spring and came to the settlement of the legendary Leif Eiriksson (c.970–c.1020) at Brattahlid on the southwest coast of Greenland. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, Gudrid was already married to a man called Thorir; together with their companions, they survived shipwreck, from which they were rescued by Leif Eiriksson returning from his voyage of discovery to Vinland. That winter Thorir died of a sickness. On the outcome of this family setback, the two versions agree: Gudrid was taken into Leif’s household at Brattahlid, and married his younger brother Thorstein.

  When Thorstein decided he would sail to the New World described in such glowing terms by his brother, Gudrid and her father went with him, seemingly undaunted by their previous experience of those dangerous and hostile waters. It was an unlucky voyage: they lost their bearings and saw no land for the whole of that summer and, as winter came on, they made landfall at Lyusfjord, on Greenland’s northwest coast, and were taken in by a farmer; but as winter deepened, sickness struck and fever killed many of them, including Thorstein and Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn.

  Gudrid, returning to Brattahlid and by now possibly twice-widowed, was once more taken into Leif Eiriksson’s household; and here she married again, this time a wealthy visiting trader called Thorfinn Karlsefni. Now an orphan, albeit the beneficiary of her father’s wealth, it is significant that she asked Leif, effectively her guardian and protector, for his advice; or rather, perhaps, for his approval of her decision.

  Inspired and attracted by stories of Vinland’s wealth and opportunities, the newly married couple fitted out ships sufficient for sixty men and five women plus animals, and sailed west. One thinks of the sorts of equipment and provisions with which the Oseberg ship was fitted out, but very likely on a much more modest scale. Farming and weaving equipment; tools; chandlery; provisions enough to survive a first winter. Once again Gudrid took to the sea, and we understand that she and her family had not just discovery, but settlement in mind. First, they

  …made an agreement that anything of value they obtained would be divided equally among them. They took all sorts of livestock with them, for they intended to settle in the country if they could. Karlsefni asked Leif for his houses in Vinland, and Leif said that he would lend but not give them to him.

  They then put out to sea in their ship and arrived without mishap at Leif’s booths [perhaps of turf walls, to be roofed by ships’ sails and spars covered with more turves], where they unloaded their sleeping-sacks. They soon had plenty of provisions, since a fine, large rorqual [perhaps a fin whale] had stranded on the beach… They had plenty of supplies from the natural bounty there, including grapes, all sorts of fish and game, and other good things…2

  For three years they explored the east coast of the Americas from northwest Newfoundland – where a Viking Age settlement, possibly Gudrid’s or Leif’s own hall, has been excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows – as far south, perhaps, as Maine. They found wild vines and self-sown grain; timber in abundance from great forests that came down almost to the sea;† and natives with whom they first traded and then fought. Somewhere in Vinland, Gudrid bore a son, Snorri: the first European born in the New World.

  A counterpoint to Gudrid’s story is provided in the Vinland sagas by Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eirik the Red and, therefore, Gudrid’s stepsister-in-law. Gudrid does the right things: she is beautiful, talented, tough and resourceful; marries conventionally and conducts widowhood and courtship with dignity; bears no children outside wedlock and brings honour to her husband’s family. Freydis is the yin to her yang. In the Saga of the Greenlanders she sets off to Vinland with her husband, Thorvard, they in one ship, two brothers
in another. In contravention of an agreement they made before embarking on the voyage west, her ship carries more men than the brothers’ vessel, but she somehow keeps them secret. At Leif’s camp she takes his booths for herself and her ship’s company and makes the brothers build their own camp some distance away. One night she contrives to visit the brothers; returning, she tells Thorvard that they have beaten her, and incites him to avenge the insult. The men of her household go to the brothers’ house, overpower them and their men and bind them. Freydis has them murdered, then takes an axe and kills their women.

  In the alternative narrative told in Eirik the Red’s Saga, Freydis joins Thorfinn’s and Gudrid’s expedition and is present when natives attack their compound. Thorfinn and his men flee, but Freydis follows them and calls out:

  ‘Why do you flee such miserable opponents, men like you who look to me to be capable of killing them off like sheep? Had I a weapon I am sure I would fight better than any of you.’ They paid no attention to what she said. Freydis wanted to go with them, but moved somewhat slowly as she was with child. She followed them into the forest, but the natives reached her. She came across a slain man, Thorbrand Snorrason, who had been struck in the head by a slab of stone. His sword lay beside him, and this she snatched up, and prepared to defend herself with it as the natives approached her. Freeing one of her breasts from her shift, she smacked the sword with it. This frightened the natives, who turned and ran back to their boats and rowed away.3

  In the sagas, then, heroines and anti-heroines needed each other to balance the requirements of the narrative, just as fallible mortals needed their capricious superhuman gods; and just as brother fought brother.

  Thorfinn Karlsefni’s fleet eventually sailed back to Norway laden with exotic and valuable goods, its crews recounting many tales that must have grown taller in the retelling. Returning to their native Iceland, Thorfinn, Gudrid and their son settled on his family’s estates at Reynines on Skagafjord in the north of Iceland and bought a farm at Glaumbaer. Thorfinn’s mother did not, at first, approve of the marriage – Gudrid was the granddaughter of a bondsman who had been freed by another Viking woman, Aud Ketilsdóttir, the so-called Deep-Minded. The tensions between mother and daughter-in-law must have resonated with many women, for whom adult married life meant living with their husband’s kin and, effectively, being adopted into a new set of relations and affiliations. But Gudrid’s virtues eventually won the affection of her mother-in-law. Gudrid and Thorfinn raised two sons on the farm at Glaumbaer; each founded a dynasty that boasted bishops in its line. After Thorfinn’s death, Gudrid’s wanderlust struck again; she set off on a pilgrimage, perhaps to Rome or to Santiago de Compostela, and, on her final return to Iceland, she became a nun in the church founded and built by her first son, Snorri.

  Gudrid is hardly a rounded historical figure. But those who wrote down her story in the centuries after her death remembered with admiration a woman of character: of stoicism and bravery, intrepidity and resourcefulness; and archaeologists have fleshed out much of the context of those early settlements in Greenland and Iceland. It is hard to think of another woman of the Early Medieval period of whom it can be said that two of her houses have been identified and excavated.

  Seeresses and cunning-women

  The semi-fictional seeress who encountered Gudrid in Greenland has real, physical counterparts. The grave of a female excavated in the 1950s at the Viking period fortress of Fyrkat, near Hobro in eastern Jutland, appears to mark her out as a shaman, seeress or völva. She had been interred within the frame of a horse-drawn carriage – a hybrid, perhaps, between the bed burials of Anglo-Saxon England and the ship burials of contemporary Scandinavia. Entombed with her were a pair of shears and the spindle whorls that no woman would be without in life or death. Her tunic (dyed blue and red and trimmed with gold thread), her silver toe rings, a duck’s foot silver pendant and two bronze bowls, which might have come from as far away as Central Asia, show her to have been a woman of status and wealth. What makes her special are the contents of a metal-bound wooden box found at her feet: an owl pellet, small bird and animal bones and a little silver amulet shaped like a chair – the calling sign of the seeress, perhaps? Close by her head lay a unique box-brooch, which had held white lead. Seeds from the poisonous hallucinogen henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), contained in a wallet or purse at her waist, and the presence of a heavily corroded iron staff with bronze fittings, also buried with her, incline one to believe that she was a practitioner of magic, divination and prophecy. Smoke from burning henbane, inhaled while incanting verse or ritual songs, would help to induce a trance. The iron stick might be her wand (the Norse word völva means ‘wand-bearer’).

  One of the most important collections of Norse legendary verse, known as the Poetic Edda, begins with a ‘Seeress’s prophecy’, a poem of 62 stanzas in which the seeress looks back to the beginning of the world, forward to the last great battle of Ragnarök, and beyond even that. Odin the One-Eyed seeks her knowledge of what will come. Her answers are always allusive; but her sayings are regarded by scholars as the most significant statement of the Norse myth of creation. She accounts for her own profession by describing the first seeress:

  Bright-one they called her, wherever she came to houses,

  The seer with pleasing prophecies, she practised spirit-magic;

  She knew seid, seid she performed as she liked,

  She was always a wicked woman’s favourite.4

  The ‘Bright-one’ alludes to Freja, the goddess of love, war, fertility and death, said to be skilled in seid, a sort of shape-shifting magical practice. A vivid description of the seeress called Thorbjorg (in whose story Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir plays a cameo role) survives in the Eirik the Red’s Saga. Its value as ethnography is suspect – the saga was written in the thirteenth century, long after the Christianisation of Scandinavia. But it is nothing if not evocative:

  …Preparations were made to entertain her well, as was the custom… A high seat was set for her, complete with cushion. This was to be stuffed with chicken feathers.

  When she arrived… she was wearing a black mantle, with a strap, which was adorned with precious stones set right down to the hem. About her neck she wore a string of glass beads and on her head a hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin. She bore a staff with a knob at the top, adorned with brass set with stones on top. About her waist she had a linked charm belt with a large purse. In it she kept the charms which she needed for her predictions. She wore calfskin boots lined with fur, with long, sturdy laces and large pewter knobs on the ends. On her hands she wore gloves of catskin, white and lined with fur…5

  If the description is fanciful, the objects and trappings that accompany her bear a strong resemblance to the paraphernalia buried with the Fyrkat woman, as they do to a much earlier grave of the late fifth or sixth century from Anglo-Saxon England: the so-called cunning-woman from Bidford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, excavated in 1971. She had been interred in more modest fashion, lying on her back in a plain earth-cut grave. None of her possessions was especially valuable or exotic: two brooches of a sort found elsewhere in pre-Christian England and Wales; a knife with a bone handle of unusual form, which may have had a surgical function; two strings of beads, one of blue, red and yellow glass and the other of amber. These are common finds, although they bring to mind the beads of the seeress in Eirik’s saga. More telling were a triangular spangle and a disc-shaped pendant with twelve miniature bucket pendants which, analysis by Dr Tania Dickinson suggests, were contained in or sewn onto the outside of a purse tied with thongs whose ends were finished with lace tags. At her side, the Bidford woman wore another purse closed by a pair of copper-alloy rings, which seems to have contained a small metal stud and a cone of antler. Tania argues that the bucket pendants contained either fragments of textiles or other charms, and that they symbolise drinking rituals associated with the cunning-woman’s craft;‡ and the idea that a cunning-woman might also practise as a midwife makes c
onsiderable sense.

  Several charms for women healers survive in Anglo-Saxon texts, mostly concerned with obstetrics or gynaecology. Darker interventions, or the suspicion thereof, attracted notices in the Laws of King Ælfred and of his grandson Æthelstan: women thought to be guilty of causing death by cursing were likely to be sentenced to very unpleasant fates.

  Elsewhere in southern England, women might be buried with crystal balls, cylindrical bronze boxes, pieces of broken glass, and objets trouvés (something old, reminiscent of the talismanic bridal rhyme). Surviving Old English terms that could refer to women with special or supernatural powers include wælcyrige (from which Valkyrie derives), wicce (perhaps simply ‘healer’ or ‘medium’) and hægtesse – a fury – although their contextual nuances are obscure.

  Women with special powers, echoing the charismatic healers and visionaries who appear in a more sanctified form in the lives of the early saints and as bogeymen and -women in tall tales of druids, performed important social and psychological functions in societies vulnerable to the multiple caprices of gods, poor harvests, plagues of insects, droughts, storms and floods – not to mention infant mortality, infertility, mental illness and genetic abnormality. Men and women with the gift of prophecy, with training and knowledge of medicine and a talent for showmanship, played roles later fulfilled by priests, leeches and pretentious charlatans offering hocus-pocus remedies and the power of foresight. That cunning-women and -men were seen as a threat to the orthodoxy of prayer and fasting, of good behaviour, chastity, and submission to the authority of learned men – the stocks-in-trade of Christianity – is demonstrated by many attempts to demonise, ban and punish those who practised what would later be cast in a much more sinister light as witchcraft. The penitential of Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (from 668 to 690) spells it out: