The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read online

  Exactly where in Skagafjord they lived is still under dispute, particularly by the farmers who currently inhabit the two places in question.

  The Saga of Eirik the Red notes that Karlsefni’s mother thought he had married beneath him. She did not care to share her house with Gudrid. Karlsefni’s family farm was a large estate called Reynines, “Rowan Ness.” Gudrid apparently spent at least the first winter somewhere else.

  The Saga of the Greenlanders only hints at in-law trouble, but identifies the “somewhere else.” Rather than taking over Reynines, the saga says, Karlsefni bought a nearby farm called Glaumbaer. After Karlsefni’s death, Gudrid farmed at Glaumbaer until her son Snorri married. Then she went on a pilgrimage to Rome.

  We have no corroborating record of her pilgrimage, although guestbooks in monasteries along the recommended route list other women travelers with Viking names: Vigdis, Vilborg, Kolthera, and Thurid, for instance, visited Reichenau monastery in Switzerland during the eleventh century (at about the same time as the monk Hermann was writing his treatise on the astrolabe there). That Gudrid might have gone to Rome is therefore plausible, but not certain.

  Asking not Are the sagas true? but Are they plausible? will never tell me if Gudrid had a lovely singing voice or if, in Greenland, she was rich or poor. But historians and literary scholars collating the sagas with other scattered documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as church records, annals, and books of law, have revealed many other plausible details about her life and times. I can guess what luxuries Einar brought to Iceland, and even what some of these goods cost: Twenty pounds of beeswax was worth as much as a cow. I also know that Gudrid—rich or poor—spent her days milking cows and making cheese, spinning wool and weaving cloth. While milk was the foundation of the Viking diet, homespun was the culture’s chief export. When Einar left Iceland to go trading in Norway, each of his crewmen most likely took along a length of homespun two miles long and weighing two tons as “spending money”—all of it woven by women.

  But to let me imagine more of Gudrid’s life—to truly see that turf house sitting like a low hill in the jewel-green field—the medieval sagas must give way to modern science. The sagas hold memories; archaeology can provide me with facts and physical objects. But archaeology, in Iceland especially, is a political sport. Fashions come and go. Whereas a hundred years ago every archaeologist in Iceland was bent on proving the sagas literally true, down to the last cask of whey in which a hero hid, today’s archaeologists tend to set the sagas to one side. They are not necessarily fictitious, they are simply irrelevant.

  Still, as historians routinely remind their scientific colleagues, the sagas made Iceland a nation. They were penned, the story goes, to prove to the Norwegian overlords that Icelanders were not the sons of slaves and should be treated as equals. It took a while for that message to be heard. From the 1200s until well into the 1800s, Iceland was of little interest to its rulers (first Norway, then Denmark). The Renaissance did not find Iceland. The Reformation tore it apart: Before he was beheaded in 1550, Bishop Jon Arason unilaterally declared Iceland free of Danish control. The Icelandic church’s rents and properties were then seized by the Danish crown, which established a monopoly over all trade with the island. That trade did not prove profitable. By the late 1700s, after a prolonged and poisonous volcanic eruption had killed off one-fifth of the human population and half their cattle, the Danish king suggested the island be abandoned and the remaining forty thousand Icelanders resettled in Jutland. Throughout centuries of want and despair, the sagas and the Golden Age of independence and valor they painted kept the Icelandic nation alive. The sagas were the tool patriots used to bring the island to the world’s attention in the 1800s, and the cause of its ultimate independence in 1944. Iceland had a language and a story: Therefore, it was a nation.

  Poking holes in recognized saga sites is, for these reasons, not something people are encouraged to try. Especially not outsiders like John Steinberg of UCLA, who desperately wanted to dig up the hayfield at Glaumbaer to see if the floor plan his remote-sensing device had mapped out—of Gudrid’s last house—was accurate.

  With no brick or timber or building stone, houses of turf, like the sod homes of prairie pioneers, are all the medieval Icelanders ever had. Once abandoned, a turf house disappears quite quickly, beaten by wind and rain back into the landscape. Those that were abandoned in the last century (poured concrete became the favorite Icelandic building material after World War II) have sunk and settled, leaving distinctive mounds on thousands of Icelandic farms—except where they’ve been bulldozed to neaten up the place. Archaeologists in Iceland approach these mounds like a rescue squad: When a road or a river (or the foundation of a new summerhouse) cuts into an ancient farm mound, the state sends in an archaeologist to map the ruins and salvage whatever bones or artifacts are uncovered. Several hundred pagan graves and eighteen Viking longhouses were discovered this way over the last hundred years. But as for digging on purpose in historical spots, the official opinion is that Iceland’s history is far safer left in the ground.

  The Icelandic verb “to research” or “to investigate” is rannsaka, the same as our English word “ransack.” Ransacking is what Vikings did to fat English monasteries: torched the roofs, broke down the doors, destroyed the walls, and carted off the treasure. In the language of the Vikings, rannsaka merely meant “to search a house”; the idea of total destruction is purely English. Yet both senses apply to archaeological research. According to Orri Vesteinsson of Iceland’s Institute of Archaeology, “One way of looking at the development of excavation techniques in Iceland in the last century is to see it in terms of increasingly comprehensive destruction.” Or as John Steinberg had explained to me the first time I met him, Archaeology murders its informants.

  “Is archaeology a science?” he asked me. For a scientific experiment to be valid, any scientist, following the published methods of the original experimenter, should be able to reproduce the original results. In archaeology, that’s not physically possible.

  “Archaeology uses scientific methods,” John said, “but it’s inherently not reproducible.” By digging into a historic site like the one that hides Gudrid’s longhouse, John and his crew will destroy it. They will chop up the ground, sift it, sort it, save certain things, and dump what’s left in a heap.

  What John will leave for posterity is not Gudrid’s longhouse, but his notes and maps and reports: his story of Gudrid’s longhouse. The local historical society, which coincidentally operates a museum on the Glaumbaer farm, will most probably build a reconstruction near the site and call it “Gudrid’s longhouse”—but it won’t be. It will be an architect’s interpretation of John’s story. It’s no wonder, then, that the Icelanders from whom John must get permission to dig want him to ransack Gudrid’s house as slowly and carefully as possible.

  His 2004 field season was canceled. The National Science Foundation rejected his grant proposal, following the advice of an anonymous reviewer who’d said that ground-penetrating radar—the latest remote-sensing device John wanted to bring in—had already been tried in Iceland. The reviewer had apparently misread an Icelandic newspaper story, which convinced John the reviewer was Icelandic. John revised the grant proposal, including proof that ground-penetrating radar had not been used in Iceland in the way he planned to use it. The project was a go for July 2005.

  As soon as I heard, I flew to Los Angeles.

  In his cubicle in the basement of UCLA’s Fowler Museum, John pulled the just-funded grant proposal from a file, pushed aside a cow skull on a cafeteria tray, and regaled me with the methods he’d used to find Gudrid’s house in 2001. “We had an experimental grant that year,” he began. “We tried everything.”

  The two surveying techniques he had used to find ancient houses in Denmark, as a graduate student in the early 1990s, were defeated by Iceland’s unusual soil. The first depended on potsherds. To an archaeologist, bits of pottery are road signs marking wher
e you are in an ancient culture and when things changed. Iceland had no Viking potsherds because its clay was not conducive to making pots.

  “The clay won’t stick together,” John explained. “The earth in Iceland has a very weird feeling to it. It almost feels wrong. It coats you. It gets everywhere. It rusts your trowel. It also makes it so that phosphate is not available to grasses. All the phosphate ions attach to the clay.” Phosphate testing was the second way he had mapped early settlements in Denmark; high phosphate, from manure, marks pastures and fertilized fields. But in Iceland the test didn’t work the way it had in Denmark.

  Iceland’s odd earth does hold one advantage over Denmark’s: Whatever you do find can be easily dated. Dig a trench in an Icelandic hayfield, and the trench walls will be conveniently stratified, striped like a layer cake with volcanic tephra—a term for anything that spews out of a volcano and is light enough to travel through the air some distance. Tephra has a different color and texture from soil or sand. When you run the edge of your trowel over it, it rings out, as if you had tapped a glass bottle. It feels grittier, almost spiky on your fingertips or, if you’re not certain, on your tongue. (Archaeologists taste a lot of things they pick out of the dirt: Putting a sample on your tongue is also the best way to tell pottery from bone.) In northern Iceland, the tephra layer from an eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104 is particularly thick: It looks like a line of white icing between the dark cakes of soil. Equally obvious are two honey-brown lines from eruptions two thousand and four thousand years ago, well before the first people came to the island. An eruption from about the year 1000 left a greenish-gray layer that can be traced in most spots. A darker line, often swirled with charcoal or organic matter, marks the settlement of Iceland in the year 870. Archaeologists call this tephra the Landnám or Settlement Layer; they have found no signs of human culture beneath it. The historical dates—870, 1000, 1104, plus or minus a year or two—are quite secure. Not only is the 1104 catastrophe mentioned in church records (it wiped out several farms in the south of Iceland), signs of all three eruptions can be seen in the cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheets to study climate change. It’s a lucky accident that the eruptions in 870 and 1104 frame the Viking Age in Iceland.

  To make use of this tephrochronology, John’s colleague Douglas Bolender, a doctoral student at Northwestern University, devised a soil-sampling protocol. He and his assistants walked back and forth across each modern farm-field on the Langholt ridge in Skagafjord, an area that encompasses both farms named in Gudrid’s saga: Reynines (now called Reynistadur, or “Rowan Stead”) and Glaumbaer. They logged their coordinates with GPS, reading off two satellites and a transmitter on a lighthouse offshore. They flagged each site, creating a grid of colored plastic flags 50 meters (a little more than 50 yards) apart. At each flag, they punched in their steel soil-coring tube and recorded the depth and quality (including tephra layers) of the soil. If the soil was shallow, they passed it by—only deep soil will preserve a turf house. Shallow soil means the wind has already eroded everything of interest. They examined pockets of deep soil (20 inches is as deep as the corer goes; poking it in twice, you can sometimes reach 40) for marks of a kitchen or garbage midden: flecks of charcoal, peat ash, or burned bone. If they found these below the white 1104 tephra layer, the spot was worth testing further. (Logical on paper, this protocol broke down somewhat in reality: A farmer making hay mowed down the plastic flags before the soil samples could be taken; a bull chased the soil corers through two fences and into a muddy drainage ditch, fouling all their equipment, though they preserved the precious data sheets.)

  To places with interesting soil cores, John and Brian Damiata, a UCLA geophysicist, brought a variety of machines that can see beneath the earth. Adapting these remote-sensing devices to Iceland’s wet soils was tricky, as was adjusting any magnetic effects for the nearness of the North Pole. The gadget that finally did work was originally designed for plumbers to detect problems in buried pipes. Called the EM-31, it measures how well the soil conducts electricity. It is unwieldy (a 12-foot-long tube carried by a strap over the shoulder), heavy (30 pounds), and temperamental.

  “You have to get all the neighbors within half a mile to turn off their electric fences,” John said. “Sometimes they gave me a pretty short window.” At one farm, a band of young stallions seemed to know exactly when the current to their electric fence was off and would break through the wire to rumpus with the mares.

  The results were disappointing. “We’re making these maps,” John said, “and we couldn’t see anything on them.” But then Tim Earle, John’s mentor, now teaching at Northwestern in Chicago, suggested John “rough up the data.” John wrote a computer program to look at the differences among readings and discovered a series of anomalies. On the new map, each showed up as a colored cluster of squiggles that stuck out from its surroundings. Choosing one, they dug a test trench. The hole came up empty: no sign of a turf house.

  “Later,” said John, “we found out that this machine’s coordinates were one meter off”—about a yard. (John, like all scientists, thinks in meters; I still see things in inches, feet, and yards.) Once they corrected for that yard-long error, they started finding things in their trenches. “We got a lot of landslides. Then one of these anomalies wasn’t a landslide, it was a wall. Once we identified that signal—that it was a turf house—we were flying high!”

  The buried turf wall was in the hayfield behind the Skagafjord Folk Museum at Glaumbaer, a collection of historic houses on a busy road that runs the length of the valley to the town of Saudarkrokur, population 2,600. Beside the road is a stone statue of a stout-armed woman balancing a tiny boy on her shoulder—Gudrid and Snorri, the first residents—but the museum was not established to honor them alone. On a low mound, beside a trim white church that is still active, is a rambling turf farmhouse, its walls and roofs of sod forming a jumble of lumps much like a collection of hobbit holes connected by tunnels. Its wooden gables and doors are painted mustard yellow. A house has been on this site, the history books say, since saga times, a thousand years ago. The current structure, begun in 1750, was lived in continuously until it passed to the museum in 1948.

  Two other historical buildings were moved onto the museum grounds in the 1990s. One houses a coffee shop and galleries. It had been built in 1886 to be a girls’ school (though “this never came to pass,” a museum brochure relates). The other building, a little white wood-framed house with a green grass roof, provides office space for the museum staff. Its claim to fame is its track record: The house had been dismantled and moved six times since it was built in 1862, logging over 120 miles by ice, sea, and road. Arriving at Glaumbaer in 1996, it was very nearly placed on top of the turf wall yet to be discovered beneath the hayfield.

  That wall, John found, was topped by the shiny white tephra from the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104. Curious, John angled a soil corer into the mound on which the 1750s turf house sits, right in front of the mustard-yellow kitchen door, where the family would have thrown their fireplace ash and scraps. “That ash sits exactly on the 1104 tephra layer, and under that is sterile soil,” he said. “For the house we found down below in the hayfield, everything is under the 1104. So the main house at Glaumbaer moved about 1104.”

  John’s Icelandic colleagues, including museum curator Sigridur Sigurdardottir and archaeologists Gudny Zoega and her supervisor at the time, Ragnheidur Traustadottir, were skeptical. They asked Gudmundur Olafsson to come up from the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik to take a look. Gudmundur, who has excavated more Viking Age longhouses than anyone else, spent several days on the site, dug a long trench, and was also not convinced.

  No one doubted that John had found something made of turf and older than 1104. But was it a longhouse? None of the histories, censuses, or tax records showed a house there. And even if a longhouse did exist in the Glaumbaer hayfield, another line of reasoning went, it was just an oddity. In general, both history and archaeology agreed, turf ho
uses didn’t move. When fashions changed, the new house was simply built on top of the remains of the old. John argued, on the other hand, that if there was one invisible Viking house in the valley, there might be many.

  The Icelanders suggested they take another farm—one not mentioned in the sagas—and survey it using both methods. John chose the farm of Stora Seyla (“Big Marsh”), about three miles south of Glaumbaer. Its turf house had stood until the 1920s atop a complicated mound cut through by a stream, and the nearby fields had not been bulldozed flat or plowed. With the historical records in hand, the Icelandic archaeologists marked every feature on the landscape that looked man-made. John’s team tested each by taking soil cores: According to the tephra lines, none of the features was older than 1104. “So then we cored the whole place on a 50-meter grid,” John told me, “past the modern boundaries of the farm Stora Seyla until we hit the fjord. One core came up with charcoal, and an adjacent one had some very deep soil.” They tested that area with the EM-31.

  John paged through the 2005 grant proposal to the EM-31’s output: a map of Stora Seyla from the surface to six feet down, color-coded by how well the soil conducted electricity. “If you fuzz your eyes,” he told me, “you see a tract of light blue and dark blue. We imagine this is the limits of a structure.” It was 115 feet long. Based on this map, John’s team dug test trenches. They found a turf wall, a floor, hay, and a burned birch-bark roof, perfectly preserved—and older than 1104. The main house at Stora Seyla had also moved.