The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Thornbjorg was impressed. “You must be a wise and patient man,” she said. She accepted his offer and, her honor intact, rode to Uppsala, where she again symbolically changed sex. “He went before his father, King Eirik, lay his shield by his feet, took his helmet off his head, bowed to the king, and said: ‘My dear father, I have been overcome by strong fighters and exiled from the kingdom that you gave into my hands, and for this reason I ask that you make those plans for my marriage that are most to your liking.”

  She married Hrolf, devoted herself to embroidery, had two sons, and—according to some scholars—her “submission to her husband is complete.” But a parallel episode in the saga shows her “submission” to Hrolf to be no more conclusive or demeaning than that of a male warrior. While raiding in the British Isles, Hrolf attacked the fleet of a Scottish Viking named Asmund. The battle was going against Asmund’s forces and he himself was badly wounded, but he continued to fight. Impressed by his bravery, Hrolf offered to call a truce if Asmund would swear friendship and become his blood brother. Asmund agreed, “if you lay no burden of shame on me or my followers.” His honor safeguarded, Asmund sent most of his men home and, with one ship, joined Hrolf’s fleet. Like Thornbjorg, he gave up his independence and accepted Hrolf’s leadership, but the saga is clear that he was treated as an equal and that his friendship, like hers, was prized.

  It was for Asmund’s sake, in fact, that Hrolf returned to the British Isles, where he was defeated, captured, and imprisoned by an Irish king, the father of the woman Asmund wished to marry. When a year had passed with no news, Thornbjorg sent out a spy. Then she gathered an army of Swedes. She called upon Hrolf’s brother, the king of Gautland, and another blood brother, the king of Denmark, and joined her forces to theirs, but “the queen had the rule and command” of their combined fleet of sixty ships.

  When they reached the Irish kingdom and saw Hrolf’s ships deserted by the shore, the army angrily rushed upon the town. Hrolf’s brother, Ketil, said they should set fire to it. Thornbjorg argued—logically—that they might by accident burn down the house in which Hrolf was being held prisoner, but Ketil got his way, with near disastrous results. Hrolf was, in fact, hiding in the town, having been smuggled out of prison by the compassionate princess Ingibjorg. He and his men “took a log and rammed the door of the skemma, burst it in pieces, and rushed out. King Hrolf quickly recognized Gauts and Swedes among his attackers. Before him stood a most warlike man, fully armed. The man took off his helmet and stepped back—and King Hrolf realized it was Queen Thornbjorg.” Together they put out the fires and captured the Irish king, accepting his daughter Ingibjorg and “much wealth in gold and silver and all kinds of treasure” as the price of his freedom.

  And so the “bridal quests” end with another lesson on the importance of listening to the queen.

  * * *

  Hervor may have heard the saga of Thornbjorg told in Queen Gunnhild’s skemma, where she—like the saga heroine—at a young age learned the arts of weaving and embroidery. This saga of wise queens had a moral Gunnhild liked. It is the kind of tale—entertaining and instructive—that she would have favored.

  Eirik Bloodaxe, apparently, never learned the lesson. Again and again, in Egil’s Saga, he ignores his queen’s good advice, with the result that he loses the throne and is exiled from Norway.

  Over her objections, he accepts blood money for the killing of their friend Bard.

  Over her objections, he rescinds Egil’s exile, allowing him to spend the winter in Norway with Arinbjorn. “It would be different, of course, if anyone else had taken Egil in,” Eirik said.

  Queen Gunnhild was not happy. “It seems to me, Eirik,” she said, “that it’s happening again just as before, and you’re being taken in by fine talk. You’re not thinking of what he’s done.”

  The queen took matters into her own hands: She ordered two of her men to assassinate Egil. When they couldn’t find him, they settled for one of his friends. The next summer Egil retaliated, and when he next landed in Norway, Arinbjorn counseled him not to stay: The queen “hates you bitterly,” he said. Egil, suitably frightened, slipped off to Iceland with his Norwegian bride.

  The court scene I’ve retold at the beginning of this chapter (adding a role for Hervor) takes place a few years later, after Egil’s father-in-law died. When Egil and his wife returned to Norway to claim her inheritance, Arinbjorn deemed their case “pretty hopeless.” Another relative, Berg-Onund, had claimed the land, and he had the queen on his side. “Gunnhild is your worst enemy, as you well know. She’s certainly not going to order Berg-Onund to do right by you.”

  When that prediction came true, and Gunnhild’s men broke up the court, Egil challenged Berg-Onund to a duel, calling him a coward. King Eirik, his blood up, said he’d fight Egil himself, but Egil—rational, for once—declined to face the king in combat. Instead, he cursed anyone, high or low, who took over the property at issue, calling down upon them the wrath of Odin.

  Arinbjorn gave Egil a fast ship and told him to leave. King Eirik chased after him, but by switching ships several times—once rowing a dinghy over a sandbar—Egil eluded him.

  Eirik could waste no more time hunting Egil, for his kingship was at stake: His youngest brother, Hakon the Good, had arrived from England. Eirik sailed south to face him, gathering an army along the way, and Arinbjorn chose to sail with him.

  Meanwhile, Egil loaded his merchant ship and ostentatiously sailed out past the barrier islands. Then, hiding the ship in a snug harbor, he took a small skiff and snuck south as well.

  Berg-Onund, for fear of Egil, did not sail with King Eirik. But, hearing his enemy had headed off toward Iceland, he relaxed his guard and invited some friends to a feast. Everyone was quite drunk when Egil arrived. He tricked Berg-Onund into stepping outside and killed him. He looted the farm and carried off everything he could. This time Egil did intend to sail to Iceland.

  But coming down the fjord, he recognized a pretty little ship, gaily painted, with six oars on a side. It belonged to Eirik and Gunnhild’s ten-year-old son, a “promising lad” who was being fostered in the area. Egil did not hesitate. He steered straight at it, ramming the prince’s boat so hard it heeled over and filled up with water. Egil grabbed his spear. “Let no one escape alive,” he cried. “Which was easy,” the saga continues, “since no one put up a fight.” In a pair of verses Egil boasted:

  Grim Gunnhild’s to blame

  for my banishment—

  I was never slow

  to avenge a slight …

  my blade I smeared

  with her little boy’s blood.

  Then Egil went onto land and, to make his revenge complete, set up a magical curse-pole: He carried a hazel branch and led a horse up to a high cliff. He carved runes onto the wood, slaughtered the horse, cut off its head, and stuck the head on the pole. He jammed the pole into a cleft in the rocks and pointed the horse’s nose toward the mainland. “I aim this curse at the land spirits who inhabit this country,” he said, “so that they will all lose their way, coming or going, and find no rest until they have driven King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild away.”

  * * *

  Who can say if Egil’s curse worked, and turned the dísir against Gunnhild?

  But when Hakon the Good arrived in Norway, people said he was the young Harald Fairhair come again, so different from the sulky and irresolute Eirik Bloodaxe. Strong, handsome, and eloquent, though only fifteen, Hakon the Good was also politically canny. He had been raised in England as the foster son of King Athelstan and knew how Christian bureaucrats ran a kingdom. He offered to revise Harald Fairhair’s most hated law: that all ancestral estates belonged to the king, and that all farmers had to pay a land tax. Hakon “offered to give the farmers back the estates King Harald had taken from them.” At this, “a great roar swelled from the crowd and the farmers shouted and called for him to be their king.” It was a marvelous political move. Hakon had said nothing about the taxes; he just returned the titles.<
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  It was enough. The news “flew like fire through dry grass” and Eirik Bloodaxe found his support shrinking away. Around Viken, in Vestfold and the other kingdoms he had just conquered, his warriors stood ready to fight. But farther north, in the lands Eirik had long ruled under his father, the chieftains abandoned him. “When he saw no way of matching Hakon’s forces,” says Heimskringla, “he sailed west over the sea with whoever was willing to follow him.”

  Did Gunnhild cast lots to tell their future? Did she petition the dísir to learn what to do? No one knows. I can’t even say when she and Eirik abandoned Norway, or where they went. Some sources place them in the Orkney islands north of Scotland, but for how long, even Snorri Sturluson doesn’t say. Snorri “evidently had little interest in absolute chronology,” write his translators. “It would be hard to fault him for inconsistency in his treatment of time within the framework of the narrative, but it has proved difficult to reconcile the timing of these narrative-events with historical dating.”

  An understatement. Based on Egil’s Saga, Eirik is fighting to be king of Norway until 947. Based on Heimskringla, Eirik abandoned Norway around 935. Snorri wrote both texts in the mid-thirteenth century. He does not number the years in either one.

  For their historical dates, scholars turn to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written by Christian clerics who numbered years relative to the birth of Christ—as Anno Domini, or “the Year of Our Lord”; this dating system, still used today, came into fashion in Christian countries just before AD 800, replacing an older system that related dates to the creation of the world according to the Bible. Neither system, of course, made any sense in the pagan North. There, the passing of time was expressed through genealogies—lists of names, not numbers. In a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle copied in the mid-eleventh century, an Eirik (possibly not Bloodaxe) is acknowledged king of York, in northern England, from 946 to 948 and again from 952 to when he is killed, still a vigorous and dangerous man, in 954.

  This chronological uncertainty means that, even if I assume Hervor became Queen Gunnhild’s foster daughter, I can’t say where she spent her formative years. Science doesn’t help me either; the chemistry of the teeth recovered from grave Bj581 tells me only that she moved at least once as a child and arrived in Birka, Sweden, after she turned sixteen. To continue with her story, then, I will pick an arbitrary date—942—for twelve-year-old Hervor to arrive on Orkney, where she will mature from a bold child into a warrior woman, alongside Gunnhild’s remaining seven sons and her only daughter, Ragnhild.

  9

  THE QUEEN OF ORKNEY

  They meet on Stone Ness, the headland named for its rings of standing stones. The wind whips their garments and shreds their words so that, from where she stands, Hervor can hardly follow what is being said. Bored, she lets her eyes roam over the strangely stirring landscape.

  There were standing stones in Vestfold, she remembers, but Vestfold is wooded. She recalls the day she discovered the stones, walking through the thick forest on a well-beaten path, stooping to pick the spindly fronds of club moss she was sent out to gather: The weavers used it when dyeing cloth to brighten the yellows and reds.

  Above her, the intertwining twigs and leaves had woven a green screen against the sky. In the shadowy dimness, white-barked birches flashed. Pine boughs whispered, layering the air with their pungent scent. Acorns rattled underfoot. Birds sang, and unseen creatures rustled in the underbrush. She wandered over and down a hill. Suddenly she stepped into a sunny glade and stopped, awed by the aura of sacredness achieved by the rings of standing stones. They were ancient but seemed alive. To enter their sanctuary was to enter a mystery. She circled around them, parsing their patterns. Two stones were twice her height; they were stem and stern of the outline of a boat. Smaller stones were set in perfect circles. She was not afraid, only puzzled. What did they commemorate? What heroes were buried here? No one could tell her.

  Orkney, where she is now to live, is not wooded. Orkney, named for its seals, lies bare to the vastness of the sky, a brave clutch of green islands laughing in the midst of the endless sea.

  Clouds darken the rumpled bulk of the High Island, over there across the water, then suddenly dapple the acres of barley, oats, and flax here on Horse Island. The wind rushes through, setting the seed heads dancing. The wind booms in her ears, makes her eyes tear. It buffets the gulls, which battle it, diving and screeching. It whips up spray from the tops of the waves, salting the stone walls of the houses, salting her lips no matter how far she is from the shore. Sometimes, people say, the wind pulls the fish from the sea. The cows and sheep huddle against low walls. The dogs dig themselves hollows in the sand. The horses turn their tails to the wind.

  Only the stones do not notice it, the two great rings of standing stones jutting from the purple heather, one on either side of the stream. Some tall stones are twice as tall as the tallest person she knows. Lichen-spotted slabs with sharp-angled tops, they are ancient and unknowable and sacred, still. One stone standing alone has a single eye—they call it Odin’s Stone, though to Hervor the hole near its base looks more like a mouth than an eye, the mass of rock swelling above it like a blind skull. To clasp hands through the hole calls the god Odin as a witness to any bargain.

  The Orkney islanders have no need of hazel rods or horsehair ropes to mark out their law courts, as in Norway. They hold their assemblies within these rings of stones, set so long ago between the sheltered sea cove and the freshwater loch. So it is here that her foster father, Eirik Bloodaxe, has chosen to address the people he has come to rule. He brought many ships and warriors from Norway, he tells the islanders—as if they cannot see that for themselves. But he also brought those warriors’ families, as well as his own, he reminds them. He means not to rob these islands, but to enrich them. Allied with the warriors of Orkney and of all the islands in the Western Sea, down through the Hebrides to Man, Eirik means to be the greatest sea-king of the west. Not a speck of trade will travel from Dublin or York without his say-so—and without paying toll to Orkney.

  So much Hervor understood before the wind picked up. Before her mind wandered.

  Now Eirik Bloodaxe and the Orkney chieftain are clasping hands through Odin’s Stone, and Hervor realizes she’s missed something important. It’s only when she sees the shocked look on her friend Ragnhild’s face that she knows what bargain King Eirik has made.

  * * *

  Well before Eirik’s father, Harald Fairhair, unified Norway in the late 800s and forced those chieftains who disagreed with his ambitions to emigrate, the islands off Scotland had known a strong Norse presence. A day’s sail west from the Norwegian coast, and within easy striking distance of England and Ireland, Orkney, especially, was prized for its snug harbors and bountiful barley harvests (and thus plentiful beer).

  The Vikings never conquered Orkney; they insinuated themselves into its society. In the 700s and early 800s, the islanders were Picts. Known since the Roman Empire as pirates, the Picts were famed for their seamanship and their tattoos—“Pict” means “painted.” Remarkably, the Picts of the Viking Age were Roman Christians, following the hierarchical structure of the Holy Roman Empire rather than the looser, community-based Celtic Christian Church of the Scots and Irish to their south.

  The ruler of Pictish Orkney was its bishop, supported by the Pictish king across the strait in northern Scotland. On each of Orkney’s major islands, Christian chapels—not feast halls—crowned the mounds beside ruins of Stone Age round towers, or brochs. The church administered the king’s law and collected the king’s taxes. It owned a third of the islands’ farmland, granting estates to war leaders in the king’s name. By the mid-800s, most of those war leaders were Norse. Then, in 843, the Scots king conclusively defeated the mainland Picts. The Pictish church was “freed” from Rome, and Orkney’s bishop was abandoned. The Norse stepped into the breach: Orkney became a Viking stronghold. When its sea-king threatened King Harald Fairhair, he invaded, the sagas say, an
d gave the islands to his friend Rognvald as a battle prize.

  The first Norse earl of Orkney was Rognvald’s brother, Sigurd the Powerful. He is remembered for his hapless death. Sigurd and his ally Thorstein the Red, whose father was the Viking king of Dublin, invaded northern Scotland and conquered it. Sigurd didn’t celebrate for long. He had chopped off his enemy’s head and hung it by his saddlebow as a trophy. On the long ride north, the dead man’s bucktooth scratched Sigurd’s bare leg. The wound festered and finally killed him.

  Thorstein the Red died soon after, ambushed by the Scots. He is remembered for his remarkable mother. As the Icelandic Book of Settlements says, Aud the Deep-Minded, long divorced from the Dublin king, was in Scotland when she learned of her only son’s death. She had a ship built in the woods, secretly, and when all was ready she sailed to Orkney, where she married off one of her granddaughters. She married off another granddaughter in the Faroe Islands, then sailed to Iceland. There, she established herself as a chieftain, claiming an entire fjord and granting farms to twenty men who had followed her from Scotland.

  Twenty or thirty years later, the gruesomely named Thorfinn Skull-Splitter met the equally gruesomely named Eirik Bloodaxe when he and his people descended on Orkney. I can imagine the two men instantly liked each other. They were a lot alike.

  Thorfinn Skull-Splitter was a son of Turf-Einar, Rognvald’s son, who took over Orkney after his uncle Sigurd’s death by tooth. Thorfinn and his brothers were tall and ugly, like their father (who was also one-eyed), but as Orkney earls they were wealthy and well fed. Keen to make their names, they were eager to ally with Eirik Bloodaxe. Olaf Cuaran, the upstart half Irishman who was calling himself king of both Dublin and York, was no friend of theirs. They wouldn’t mind seeing him ousted. An agreement was reached. Thorfinn’s two brothers would go raiding with Eirik, while Gunnhild and her people stayed with Thorfinn on Orkney. Perhaps Eirik Bloodaxe met Thorfinn Skull-Splitter at the great standing stone, destroyed in 1814, once known as Odin’s Stone. They reached into the gap and clasped hands to seal their bargain. The key? Eirik’s only daughter was to marry Thorfinn’s eldest son.