The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read online

  Gudrid has one great shortcoming—she’s rather bland. Although she gets caught in the sea on a skerry, lives in multiple places, and overall has an apparendy pleasant life, there are no good characterizations of her day-to-day affairs. Many of the other sagas tell us enough about the characters that you get a good feel of how people lived their lives—and they are often interesting lives. Gudrid has none of these particularly intimate displays of her dealings with others—it’s just assumed that she’s smart and well-behaved. Being smart and well-behaved probably spells out being boring.

  We never hear Gudrid whispering to her husband, bragging to her sister-in-law, or colluding with her son. We don’t know that her hair fell to her knees, or that she liked to wear men’s trousers under her skirts so she could comfortably ride a horse astride. The Vinland Sagas say very little about Gudrid directly. She was beautiful, we are told, which means she was probably fair and blond (dark hair being unattractive and red hair uncanny). She was intelligent (or wise, according to the other version of her story), and she had a lovely singing voice.

  What my student construed as “well-behaved,” though, becomes tantalizing when you realize it’s not a cliché applied to every significant woman in the sagas. It’s not that Gudrid is polite or ladylike, either. The translation we used says she knew how to behave among strangers. In the Old Norse original, that behave is a vague “be with,” or “get along with,” while strangers are “unknown” or “unfamiliar” people. Sagas have quirks that can fool the modern reader. One is that everything pertinent about a character is mentioned at once, when she first becomes an actor in the story. Later, when Gudrid is in the New World, trying to make friends with a native woman, we are expected to remember her skill. To someone immersed in saga style, the implication is clear: It was Gudrid who decided that the Vikings should abandon their Vinland colony. If she couldn’t get along with the natives, those “unfamiliar people” of North America, then no one could.

  The two sagas also imply that the Vinland expedition itself was her idea. She packed up and set off to sail there twice—with two different husbands. Although the two sagas disagree on the particulars, Gudrid’s hand in the preparations each time is clear. And, unlike many saga women who expressed a desire to join their men a-voyaging, Gudrid was never left behind to mind the cows. Time and again, she got on that ship. Realizing this—that it was Gudrid who was the explorer, not just her husband—I knew that if I were to pick a saga role-model, Gudrid would be it.

  Chapter 1: At Sea

  They set sail in good weather. But once they were at sea, the fair winds died. They were tossed this way and that and made no headway all summer. Sickness set in.... Half their people died. The seas rose, and they were faced with danger on all sides.

  —The Saga of Eirik the Red

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW A VIKING SHIP IN THE WATER, I was struck with the desire to stow away on it. Writers, even the normally sedate scholarly type, tend to wax effusive about Viking ships. They were “unrivaled,” “the best and swiftest ships of their time,” “the swift greyhounds of the oceans,” “the ultimate raiding machine,” “a masterpiece of beauty,” “the most exquisite examples of sophisticated craftsmanship,” “a poem carved in wood.” “What temples were to the Greeks,” wrote one expert, “ships were to the Vikings.” Said another, “Plato may have denied the existence of ideal forms in this world, but Plato never saw a Viking ship.”

  The story of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, however, begins with a shipwreck. As The Saga of the Greenlanders tells it, Leif Eiriksson had just spent a year in Vinland as the first Norseman to set foot in the New World, and was heading home with a ship full of timber and wine grapes. He’d had fair winds all the way and had just sighted the great ice cap when one of his crewmen admonished the young captain.

  “Going a bit close to the wind, aren’t you?”

  “I’m watching my steering,” said Leif. “But I’m watching something else, too. Don’t you see it?”

  It was a ship—or a skerry. He couldn’t tell which. The older man saw nothing until they came closer, then he, too, could see a wreck clinging to a bit of bare rock. Leif anchored close to the reef and sent his towboat over. He rescued fifteen people—to add to his crew of thirty-five—and as much of their baggage as he could fit into his already-laden ship. The wreck had been carrying house timber from Norway to the Greenland settlement; the men secured it as best they could on the rock, and the next spring Leif sent his boat out to fetch whatever could be salvaged. By then, most of the rescued fifteen had died. The only person known to have survived the journey is Gudrid.

  If she had ever shared my delusions of peaceful, sunny, blue-sea sailing, surrounded by a crew of handsome men, she would have lost them abruptly on the first of her eight voyages. She knew the killing force of the sea, of weeks at the mercy of the winds, of fog that froze on the sails and rigging, when “hands blue with cold” was not a metaphor and no land, no shelter, was in sight. She knew how fragile a Viking ship was.

  “You can easily sail her down if you are not doing it right,” Gunnar Marel Eggertsson, the captain of Gaia, told me. Gaia was a Viking-ship replica with the dual mission of spreading environmental awareness and arriving in America in 1991, one year before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery.” From the west coast of Norway, where the boat was built and financed by the Norwegian owner of the Viking cruise-ship line, Gaia and her diesel-powered chase boat had followed the Viking route to the Orkneys, Shetlands, and the Faroe Islands, to Iceland and Greenland, then over the ice-filled seas to Labrador and Newfoundland. In Nova Scotia, Gaia met up with two other Viking-ship replicas, Oseberg and Saga Siglar (which had been crated and shipped by common carrier across the Atlantic). The convoy then headed south, stopping for speechifying at Boston, Newport, New York, and Washington, D.C.

  Sailing a ship down is one way to sink it. I had seen videotapes of Viking-ship replicas under full sail going down with all hands in the Oslo Fjord—and winched back up to try it again. (The crew bobbed to the surface in their bright survival suits and were gathered into Zodiacs.) But I had assumed the untrained crew had simply goofed. Off the coast of Spain in 1992, Gaia’s companion ships, Oseberg and Saga Siglar, sank on their way to the World Expo in Seville. The eleven crew members—all veteran Viking-ship sailors—were plucked out of the stormy sea by the crew of their modern chase boat. The replica ships were not recovered.

  Gaia, Oseberg, Saga Siglar, and the later, American-made Snorri (named for Gudrid’s son) are examples of experimental archaeology, of learning by doing. They teach us how these poems, masterpieces, swift greyhounds, and temples actually worked, what this technology meant to people like Gudrid. Gaia is copied from a ship discovered on the farm of Gokstad, beside the Oslo Fjord in southern Norway, in the 1880s. A chieftain had been buried in the ship in the year 900, a not-unusual way for a wealthy Viking to make his way to Valhalla. It’s the soil in this part of Norway that’s unusual. The burial pit was rich in blue clay, which preserved all the wood it covered. Whereas in many ship burials what’s left are lines of iron rivets in the sand, for Gokstad we have all but the ship’s high stem and stern. We have the rudder, the bailers, the gangplank, even the towboats—“rather crank” little vessels that would capsize easily if sailed, according to Arne Emil Christensen, who was curator of the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdoy, Norway, when I visited there in 1984.

  Gokstad, on the other hand, “is a rather optimum compromise of speed, seaworthiness, and a fairly good capacity for men or cargo,” he told me. “You could easily put a hundred people in it for a short trip when you don’t have to sleep.”

  At 76½ feet long, Gokstad is only medium-sized, as Viking ships go. Even so, trees big enough for its keel—a single oak log almost 58 feet long—are rare in Norwegian forests today. When a replica was built in 1893, the oak for the keel had to be sent from Canada.

  From the keel up to the gunwale are sixteen long oak strakes, each made up of sever
al carefully joined boards. The strakes bow from stem to stern in an elegant curve; the boards come from trees with a slight bend, so the grain follows the curve of the boat. Although we don’t have a Viking yardstick, it seems the Vikings had the concept of the inch. Twelve of the strakes are exactly an inch thick. The waterline strake is 1¾ inches, while the strake that held the thirty-two oar holes (each with a swiveling cover to close when the ship was under sail) measures 1¼ inches. The two top strakes are very thin: ¾ inch. The hefty gunwale is almost four by four.

  This precision becomes more impressive when you realize that the Vikings had no saws. Those inch-thick strakes were split from tall oak logs with an axe. They were shaped and smoothed by axe, too—there’s a fine cartoon of it in the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered to celebrate the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The shipwright has his tunic hiked up and is straddling the plank, scraping it with a long, curved axe, while his fellows chop down more trees.

  In the early 1960s, Christensen had made an academic study of Viking tools. Through images in manuscripts and the Bayeux Tapestry, and artifacts from excavated graves (craftsmen were often buried with their tools), he had a pretty good grasp of how the wrights put together the Gokstad ship. Except for the rivets. The strakes lap over each other, giving the technique its name, “lapstrake”; it’s the same look as the clapboard siding on a New England farmhouse. But where the housebuilder uses nails, the shipbuilder needs to nip off the nail point and bend the end against an iron plate to keep the boards from wiggling apart. This clinching step—which gives us the word “clinker-built” to describe such ships—had Christensen perplexed. The Vikings had no nippers.

  One day in 1973, he was watching shipwright Sigurd Bjorkedal working on a replica ship. Bjorkedal had a good set of nippers—farrier’s tongs—but they went unused as he riveted the ship. Instead, he snapped off the nail points with the sharpened peen of his hammer, then reversed the hammer to pound the nail flat. From then on, Christensen concentrated on studying living craftsmen, as he wrote, while there is still time. “The tools are the same, so the process must be the same,” he told me.

  “You start with a keel roughly T-shaped. To shape a keel, take a wedge-shaped board, make four cuts, and axe away to make a T-shape. Use the axe to make the corners smooth,” he said. Then affix the first strake. “Use a clamp looking like an enormous clothespin to keep it in place. How wide this plank is, and the angle of the next plank, governs the shape of the ship. You shape the top edge by eye from stem to stern in a proper curve. The whole time you can adjust the angles and plank widths by a pure sculptural process. Then you cut ribs.”

  Ribs stiffen the ship and hold its shape against the pressure of the waves. As with the keel and the strakes, the ribs were made from a tree with the right shape—in this case, a natural V-shaped curve between the trunk and a branch. The V-shape is wide at the center of the ship, but narrows toward bow and stern, so several trees are needed.

  The ribs in the Gokstad ship were lashed to the strakes with withies made of spruce roots. Other shipwrights preferred to tie them on with baleen, the fibrous stuff from a whale’s jaw. But lashing went out of fashion before Gudrid sailed to Vinland. In her ship, the ribs would have been trunneled—fastened with wooden pegs or “tree-nails.” “Trunnels for ribs, iron rivets for planks,” Christensen said, explaining that “the trunnel is more flexible, it’s less likely it will snap between rib and plank when the boat twists. Iron would snap. Juniper is the preferred wood for trunnels if you can get it. Juniper branches with pith in them form good, rot-resistant nails.”

  The pine mast would have stood thirty-six-feet tall, an estimate made by wrapping a string or measuring tape around the widest part of the ship’s hull; the top of the buried mast had poked out of the blue clay, so it had rotted. Pine was also preferred for the decking and the oars.

  To make a Viking ship that was flexible, light, and watertight thus took not only a great deal of wood, it required specific shapes and kinds of wood: oak, pine, spruce, and juniper; thick and straight, bent and V-shaped, tough-rooted and pithy. Viking shipwrights, it seemed, spent a lot of their time wandering in the forest marking trees to be felled and trimmed into the correct parts of a ship. The Viking ship could never have been invented in a land without trees—a land like Iceland, or Greenland. Nor could ships that wrecked on those far shores be replaced.

  But it was due to the wrecks, the sinkings and sailing-downs, that the ships reached the stage of seaworthiness that seduced the Vikings to point them west, away from forested Norway. Reading Gokstad, Christensen can see hundreds of years of trial and error. He pointed out the waterline strake, where the ribs meet the crossbeams; the strake that is three-quarters of an inch thicker than its neighbors. “It’s a longitudinal stringer. It’s at a critical point of the hull,” said Christensen. “By experience, the Vikings knew how boats behaved in the water. Specially shaped planks like this one take up the stress.”

  Specially shaped planks didn’t go out of fashion until water-powered saws were invented—well after the Viking Age—and some traditional craftsmen, like Sigurd Bjorkedal, were still shaping strakes by eye in the late twentieth century. When the order came in to the boat-building village of Bjorkedalen, on the west coast of Norway, for a Gokstad replica to be called Gaia, however, Sigurd Bjorkedal didn’t insist on being a purist, his son Ottar told me.

  “Oh no, we sawed the wood. It would have taken a lot more time to split it.” We were chatting in the cabin of Gaia, moored by the Massachusetts Maritime Museum. “The people talked to us over the summer,” Ottar continued, “and wanted the boat the next summer. We were only four people: we three brothers and my father. We built it over one winter. That’s not any problem. You just have to work hard.”

  “How did you learn to build a Viking ship?” I asked.

  He cocked his head, puzzled that I would have to ask. “I learned from my father. And he learned from his father. My family have been building boats for four or five hundred years, maybe before that.”

  Gokstad and its double, Gaia, have the spareness and elegance of line that seem to me the epitome of a Viking ship: slim, sleek, and predatory. I’m not alone: Close-ups of its hull, head-on, are reproduced on everything from magazine covers to Christmas ornaments as the emblem of the Vikings. But the ship Gudrid sailed on to Greenland and Vinland and home again to Iceland did not look like this. Hers was a knarr, a cargo ship, like the replica Saga Siglar that sailed with Gaia and Oseberg. Watching the three ships sail into New York harbor, side by side, I wrote in my notebook: “Saga Siglar is so squat and tubby compared to the others.”

  Saga Siglar (“Saga Sailor”) was based on one of five ships recovered from the sea bottom near Skuldelev, Denmark, by Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, whom I met in 2006 at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, near Copenhagen. The five Skuldelev ships—in five different styles, from a fishing boat to a dragonship for eighty warriors—had been scuttled at the head of the fjord to bar raiders from the Danish royal residence at Roskilde. Legend had it that they dated from the 1400s. But when parts were removed in the 1950s, to clear a deeper passage for motorboats, they appeared to be Viking work.

  “Underwater archaeology was only just starting then,” Crumlin-Pedersen told me as we toured the docks and warehouses and hands-on exhibits outside of the museum proper. “We had thought the site was so damaged we could do no harm. We had no experience.”

  Trained as a naval engineer, Crumlin-Pedersen suggested they build a coffer dam, which drained the fjord around the site. Then the problem was to lift the shattered wood out of the mud, while keeping it from drying out and disintegrating. “You keep the wood in water all the time until it can be treated with polyethylene glycol,” Crumlin-Pedersen explained. A type of plastic, polyethylene glycol crystallizes within the wood cells. This plasticized wood can then be heated and gently pressed back into shape. “That brings out the lines of the boat.”

  Those lines are so various, just among the replica sh
ips afloat in Roskilde harbor, that it’s hard to say they’re all “Viking ships.” The knarr, 52 feet long and a buxom 16 feet wide, is docked beside the dragonship Havhingsten (“The Sea Stallion”), 98 feet long but a slender 12 feet wide. A smaller cargo ship, a byrding of more “elegant” proportions, carried only 4½ tons of cargo to the bigger knarr 24 tons, while a smaller warship, called a snekke, or “snake,” could handle only thirty warriors to Sea Stallion’s eighty. And then there’s the toy-sized fishing boat, 37 feet long by eight feet wide, on which Crumlin-Pedersen signed me up as an oarsman when a German TV personality wanted to take a Sunday-morning ride. Nicely maneuverable in the narrow harbor (even with a raw crew brand-new to the oars), it seemed precariously low to the waves once the sail was up. Yet when scientists compared the pattern of the tree rings in the original ship’s pine timbers to wood samples from throughout the Viking world, they found a perfect match with the wood of a church in Sognefjord, Norway. The ship had been built there and had sailed the 500 miles to Roskilde at least once. By the time it was sunk to blockade the fjord, it had been patched in several places and refitted to be a small cargo ship, the oarlocks taken off and an extra strake added to give it a little more height.

  With a childlike smile and a courtly bashfulness, Crumlin-Pedersen explained how he knew that the tubby model was what the sagas meant by a knarr. “It’s because of the nickname for women in the Icelandic sagas: Knarrarbringu. ‘Knarr breast.’ Look at it from the front. It comes right up like this—” He pantomimed a woman’s tight waist and heavy breasts.