The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read online

  The knarr belonged to Einar, a young and ambitious Icelander with a fondness for fancy clothes. He had spent the winter in Norway, whose king was fostering a new plan—towns—and a new merchant class. Einar, though his father had been a Viking’s slave, aspired to this class. His ship came home loaded with luxuries impossible to find in Iceland. Stacked in Orm’s shed, where Einar was setting up shop, were bales of linen and silk and fine wool dyed bright blue and red. He brought lumber, both oak and ash. Pine tar for preserving ships’ timbers. Barley and hops for brewing beer. Honey to make into mead. Perhaps even beeswax, for many of the Viking folk along this coast were Christians, and had been taught they must worship by candlelight.

  Orm owned the longhouse. He kept cows and sheep and was loyal to the chieftain who had granted him land. Gudrid was the chieftain’s daughter. Since her mother died, she had been raised by Orm’s wife. She was about fourteen when she passed the open doorway of Einar’s shop. Something about her—her looks, her dress, the way she walked or smiled—impressed the young man. Despite Orm’s warning, he decided to ask for her hand.

  His suit was denied. Gudrid’s father wouldn’t marry his daughter to the son of a slave. Orm’s hint that the young merchant’s wealth could be of use offended the chieftain. Ashamed that his money troubles were talked about, Gudrid’s father swapped his farm for a ship and took his daughter to Greenland to start a new life. Orm shrugged his shoulders and, loyally, went with him.

  The saga does not describe Orm’s farm, where young Einar unloaded his ship, it names it: Arnarstapi, “Eagle Peak.” I can imagine the green field and the cliffs and the harbor and paint the scene because I have driven down that long peninsula, under the eye of Snow Mountains Glacier. I have sat where Gudrid as a girl might have sat, watching the white birds circle and waiting for a ship to come in.

  Yet, daydreaming in the low summer sun, imagining what the place must have looked like when Einar unloaded his wares a thousand years ago, I bump up against the barrier faced by every reader of the sagas: Is it true?

  There are werewolves in the sagas, and trolls. Soothsayers, and warlocks who rule the weather. Ghosts who walk and strangle their foes—or give their widows charitable advice. Like Homer’s Iliad, the sagas were based on old tales told around the fire to enliven the long winter nights. Generations of storytellers can be counted on to elaborate—and to overlook.

  Who was there to write down what rich Einar said when he first saw Gudrid? Einar and his fancy clothes are never mentioned again, in this saga or in any other Icelandic source. Nor is Gudrid’s father reckoned among the chieftains in the other tales that take place on this peninsula. If Einar did not ask for Gudrid’s hand, if Gudrid’s father was not ashamed his money troubles were so well known, if he did not, therefore, up and move to Greenland—if this whole scene is fictitious—is the rest of The Saga of Eirik the Red fiction, too? Did Leif Eiriksson discover America? Did Gudrid live there and give birth to her son? Did she see Norway and Rome? Was she as plucky and capable, as adventurous and adaptable, as the stories imply? Are the sagas a true witness to the Viking world?

  Historians have debated this point since at least 1772, when the British explorer Sir Joseph Banks brought the literature of Iceland to the attention of the English-speaking world. There’s just so little to go on. No one in Gudrid’s society could read or write. Literacy did not come to Iceland until the Christian Church, made the official religion in the year 1000, set up schools in the 1030s. The first book in Icelandic was The Book of the Icelanders, a brief and sober history written by Ari the Learned in the early 1100s, based, he says, on the recollections of wise old women and men.

  The peak of saga writing came a century later. Thousands of fireside tales about kings and mythological heroes, about Iceland’s first settlers, and about men and women who had made names for themselves in one way or another were collected and gathered into manuscripts, some by masters of the literary art, others by beginners. Gudrid’s story is not found in the great sagas, the ones Jane Smiley places at the heart of human literary endeavor. It fills most of The Saga of Eirik the Red, which can be read aloud in less than an hour. Gudrid also appears in The Saga of the Greenlanders, which is even shorter and contradicts The Saga of Eirik the Red on several important points, especially concerning Gudrid’s early life.

  I think of the two girls as Red Gudrid (the one in The Saga of Eirik the Red) and Green Gudrid (from The Saga of the Greenlanders). Red Gudrid left for Greenland as a pampered, protected daughter, too good for young Einar’s offer of marriage. She sailed in her father’s ship, surrounded by his belongings and connections. Then her fairy tale ended. The ship wandered at sea all summer. The food and fresh water ran out. Sickness set in. Gudrid watched many of the people she knew and loved, including Orm and his wife, die miserable deaths. She undoubtedly grew up. Yet her social status was relatively unaffected. The ship made a safe landfall in southern Greenland just before winter, and Gudrid and her father were welcomed as guests by Eirik the Red’s cousin, who farmed there.

  At this point in the story comes an example of the antiquarianism in the sagas that so attracted Victorian writers like Sir Walter Scott. That winter, we read, the hunting was poor and meals were scanty. To learn how to alleviate the household’s hunger (or perhaps to take their minds off it), the farmer decided to hold a seance. Though the saga was written at least two hundred years after the event, the seer is described in wonderful detail. She wore a long blue gown and a black lambskin hood lined with white cat’s fur. She had catskin gloves, too, with the fur inside, and carried a brassbound staff. Both her gown and her staff were adorned with jewels. She could eat only the hearts of animals, one of each kind, cutting them up with her ivory-handled knife and picking them up with her brass spoon. She could sit only on a cushion stuffed with hens’ feathers. To invoke the spirits, she needed a helper to sing certain magic songs. Only Gudrid knew them, and she sang them expertly. Charmed by her singing, the spirits gathered and revealed many things, among them Gudrid’s future: “Your path leads to Iceland, and from you will come a large and worthy family, for shining over your descendants I see bright rays of light”—a reference, scholars believe, to her two great-grandsons and one great-great-grandson who served as bishops in Iceland in the 1100s.

  The next summer Red Gudrid and her father sailed farther north to Eirik’s settlement at Brattahlid (“Steep Slope”). Fifteen years earlier, before Eirik had been banished from Iceland and went off to settle Greenland, he and Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn, had been best friends. Their reunion was joyful. Gudrid and her father joined Eirik’s household until their own house could be built, on a piece of land Eirik gave them, right across the fjord. They ended up with a farm as good as or better than the one they had left in Iceland, all the goods they had brought on their ship plus whatever had belonged to the people who had died, and the ship itself. By the standards of the day, they were quite well off.

  Green Gudrid, on the other hand, was alone and destitute after having been shipwrecked and plucked off the icy rock by Leif Eiriksson on his way home from discovering Vinland. She was said to be the wife of the captain of the ship, a Norwegian merchant named Thorir. In return for the rescue, Leif took for himself everything that could be salvaged from the wreck. He invited Gudrid and her husband to stay with him, but that winter sickness set in. Gudrid’s husband and most of the other people Leif rescued died—as did Leif’s father, Eirik the Red. Leif became the leader of the Greenland colony. Gudrid, with no one else to turn to, became his ward. She owned nothing. There is no mention of her singing or her bright future (though that will come).

  Strangely, for both the Red Gudrid and the Green, the rich and the poor, the result was the same: She soon married Leif’s younger brother Thorstein.

  A little book written in the 1970s, called in English The Saga Mind, explains how to accommodate such additions and contradictions. The saga writers, says the Russian literary historian M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, “strove si
multaneously for accuracy and for reproduction of reality in all its living fullness.” Or, as Icelandic saga scholar Vesteinn Olason wrote more recently, in Dialogues with the Viking Age, when a saga writer added something from his imagination, he was not “inventing” something new, but “finding” something that had always been part of the story.

  This concept of truth mingles our ideas of history and of art—the record of what actually happened with the truth a good novel can tell you about yourself and the world around you. The Old Icelandic word saga mingles them, too: It was applied indiscriminately to tales that sound like sober history and to ones we can easily peg as fiction. Saga-truth assumes that both Vinland tales are at bottom “accurate,” based on stories passed down from generation to generation from Gudrid's day to the 1200s.

  Memories are not myths, points out Gisli Sigurdsson, who teaches folklore at the University of Iceland. In 1988 Gisli published the controversial Gaelic Influence in Iceland; the Gaelic “gift of gab” led him to explore other storytelling cultures for his 2004 book, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. Though tales change with their tellers—bits left out, others embellished (as the description of the seer obviously was)—they still must ring true to their audience. “They’re still within limits,” he told me, regarding the two young Gudrids. “You must fill in the gap somehow. The basic idea is that she comes to Greenland, and soon enough there’s a problem. She has to make a fresh start. She has to get involved with Eirik the Red’s family, since in order to become somebody there, you had to make friends with Eirik.

  “The only way we can explain these written texts,” he continued, “is that you first had stories about separate events and characters. I think people were telling these stories in a mishmash, without the beginning and end that we know. They were very regional. They were stories about disputes, about the qualities of the land, about someone’s misbehavior. They had a very clear ethical message, both about how you as a farmer should behave, and about how a chieftain should react. These stories were being told to reinforce that ideology.”

  The written sagas were a way of systematizing the oral stories. “When people in Iceland in the thirteenth century saw the long written narratives they were getting in books from abroad, they realized they could use these old stories in that new form. They learned to write them down chronologically. That’s not what you would do with oral literature. When you told these stories, you just told them from event to event and key word to key word. The Icelanders in the thirteenth century were fascinated with chronology, with this new way of systematizing knowledge, just like we’re fascinated by computers. They weren’t saying anything new, they were just putting it into a different form.”

  To work chronologically, to follow a set of characters through time, a writer needed to build bridges, to fill in gaps, to connect one oral tale to another. These bridges could be drawn from another tale, or come from the writer’s general knowledge about the area in which the story took place. The differences between the two Vinland sagas, then, can be set down to their writers’ interests, intentions, and abilities, but also to which tales they had heard, what memories they shared, what bridges they needed to build, what audience they were addressing. The Saga of Eirik the Red has been traced to a nunnery in northern Iceland, whose abbess was Gudrid’s seven-greats granddaughter: Gudrid was presumably an exemplar, a role model for young Christian women. The Saga of the Greenlanders comes down to us as disjointed chapters in a long saga of the kings of Norway. The discovery of Vinland, rather than Gudrid, lies at its heart.

  When it comes to Gudrid, the memory both sagas seem to be based on is this: Gudrid had a suitor who was a merchant, plying the sea routes from Norway. She may or may not have married him, but he soon passed out of her life. She went to Greenland. She had a bad voyage. Her first winter there was hard, with hunger and sickness. By spring she had lost most of the people she loved. But she was remarkable in some way that was not dependent on her being wealthy, and she married Eirik the Red’s son, Thorstein, becoming Leif Eiriksson’s sister-in-law. Thorstein attempted to sail to Vinland, but failed. He and Gudrid lived for a time in Lysufjord, a lonely spot remote from their fathers’ farms, and there, after a terrible illness, Thorstein died.

  In the Red version, Thorstein borrowed Gudrid’s father’s ship and set off for the New World with no mention of Gudrid accompanying him. Foul winds drove his ship east instead of west, until Thorstein thought he could see birds off the coast of Ireland. He limped home to Greenland with tattered sails at summer’s end. That autumn, he and Gudrid married and moved north to Lysufjord, where Thorstein owned a half-share in a farm.

  Green Gudrid—the poor Gudrid—sailed with Thorstein. They took Leif’s ship, but they had the same bad luck. They made landfall back in Greenland just before winter and slept in a tent on the ship until they were taken in by the farmer at Lysufjord.

  Thorstein’s death scene at Lysufjord is gloriously spooky—and remarkably consistent from one saga to the other. It is dark, and the dead are all around them. The farmhands (in the Red version) or the crew of the ship (in the Green) had died one by one as winter came on, and their bodies were piled up in the snow until they could be buried in the spring. Then Thorstein and the farmer’s wife fell ill. Red Gudrid became their nurse. One night, the sick woman was stumbling back from the privy on Gudrid’s arm when she let out a shriek. Gudrid tried to calm her. “This isn’t wise. You mustn’t get chilled. We have to go back in right now.”

  The farmwife would not budge. She could see the dead lined up at her door. “Your husband is there. And I am with him!”

  The vision passed, and Red Gudrid hurried her charge to bed. By morning, the woman was dead—though before she could be carried out, her corpse rose up and tried to get into bed with Thorstein. (In the Green version, we see the ghost through Thorstein’s eyes, as he called out in panic to Gudrid: “She is pushing herself up on her elbows and poking her feet out of the bed and groping for her shoes!”) As soon as the old wife was safely coffined, Thorstein died. He, too, did not lie quiet. Red Gudrid was asleep from exhaustion when her dead husband called for her; Green Gudrid was sitting on the old farmer’s lap while he “tried to comfort her in every way he knew.” In the Red version, the corpse begged for a proper Christian funeral, with a priest, and told her to give his money to the church or to the poor—appropriate fare for young nuns. He mentioned only in passing that Gudrid was “fated for great things.” To Green Gudrid, he spoke exclusively about her future—this Gudrid had not taken part in the séance. She hasn’t heard yet that she will marry an Icelander and that her progeny will be “promising, bright, and praiseworthy, sweet and fine-smelling.”

  Both the Red Gudrid and the Green—these seventeen-year-old widows—convinced the farmer not to keep her to replace his dead wife, but to ferry her back to the main settlement in the spring, to her father (who died soon afterward, in the Red version) or to her brother-in-law and guardian, Leif. Both Red Gudrid and Green Gudrid knew she was destined for greatness—the idea that her future had been foretold was so fixed in the collective memory that both saga authors mentioned it, and the author of the Red version clumsily did so twice.

  When the promised Icelander arrived the next autumn, captaining a merchant ship, Red Gudrid was fabulously wealthy. She had inherited Thorstein Eiriksson’s share of the farm at Lysufjord, as well as her father’s farm and her father’s ship. As a widow, she had the right to decide where she would live and whom, if anyone, she would marry. She chose to live at Brattahlid with Eirik the Red. Green Gudrid was marginally better off than she had been when she arrived in Greenland, the survivor of a shipwreck. She had inherited Thorstein’s share of Eirik the Red’s estate, but Leif was in control of it. She lived at Brattahlid as Leif’s ward. But rich or poor, Gudrid married the Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose nickname means “the stuff a man is made of” or “the makings of a man.” Once again, the two sagas hold a memory in common.

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p; Then a curious thing happens in The Saga of Eirik the Red: Karlsefni sails for Vinland and Gudrid disappears from the story. This is Red Gudrid, the rich Gudrid, the one who caught the young merchant's eye, who took part in the seance, whose fate we have followed in such detail. From the words on the page, you would think she had stayed behind in Greenland—just as it seems she had when Thorstein Eiriksson set off on his Vinland expedition. We learn how far Karlsefni sailed, about the wind and the weather, the bears and whales, the wide beaches, the wine grapes, the wild wheat, the pasturelands, and the trees. We read about arguments that sent one ship back north and one (or two) farther south. We meet the Skraelings, the saga term for the native people, and watch the Vikings trade with them, then fight them, then flee from them. We discover that Karlsefni’s ship is the only one of the three to return to Greenland. But about Gudrid there is only an afterthought. We read: “Snorri, Karlsefni’s son, was born the first autumn; he was three when they left.”

  Green Gudrid is given a slightly bigger role. Not only did she give birth to Snorri in Vinland, she tried to make friends with a native woman. There is no echo of this event in the other saga. The only overlap between the two versions—the only shared memory of Vinland—concerns Snorri’s birth and the Vikings’ decision to abandon their settlement after three years. They'returned to Greenland. From there Red Gudrid and her family sailed directly to Iceland, while Green Gudrid first detoured to Norway. In both sagas, the family settled in the Skagafjord valley in the north of Iceland, where Gudrid had a second son.