The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read online

  John was, he admitted, a little too pleased with their results. “I was pretty arrogant,” he said with a rueful smile. “I essentially attacked the Icelanders for being incompetent.”

  But if this technique—soil coring on a grid combined with the EM-31—worked so well, I asked, why was he bringing a new remote-sensing device—the untested ground-penetrating radar or GPR—to Skagafjord in 2005?

  “Because I’m not an Icelandic archaeologist,” he said. “I don’t want to spend years excavating these sites. I have a few basic questions. How big is the farm? How much hay did they store? I want a shortcut to digging. GPR is the best remote-sensing technique available to archaeologists. What we need it for is to not have to excavate.

  “Now we can find sites with the other technique, but we can’t tell what were looking at without digging into them. And we keep chewing into the wrong places. This pisses off the Icelanders no end. It’s hard to convince them I’m even sort of competent. I don’t know which wall is which. I can’t answer all this ambiguity in the remote-sensing data. We’ve learned that the biggest anomaly is usually a corner, but we’ve learned that only by chewing into it—and we just about destroyed that corner of the house.”

  “You mean Gudrid’s house?”

  “The house at Glaumbaer. But it had to be done. There was no other way. We had to calibrate our readings.”

  “You destroyed the corner of Gudrid’s house?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I think the case for saying the longhouse at Glaumbaer is the referent for the story in the sagas is true,” he said. “Whether the story is true is another question.”

  On a warm winter day in March 2005, we were in Iceland, on the site of the storied house, and John was looking even more uncomfortable.

  “Why do you think you can use a backhoe here?” Sigridur Sigurdardottir, known as “Sirri,” rolled a heavy glass paperweight between her broad hands. She had served us tea and coffee when we arrived at her office at the Skagafjord Folk Museum, and had even unwrapped a box of chocolates; but now she was installed behind her desk, taking on the full authority of the book-lined office with its unsettling touches of practicality: refrigerator, microwave, spinning wheel. Her gaze was firm and unapologetic.

  “He has already hired one,” Gudny Zoega told Sirri in Icelandic.

  John backtracked in his ninety-second introduction to his archaeological protocol, vainly trying to rephrase his argument. With the backhoe he intended to quickly strip the top layer of turf off the hayfield. Using trowels and shovels, his archaeologists (and unskilled volunteers, like me) would then expose the tops of the buried longhouse walls to check if the remote-sensing devices had drawn the floor plan accurately. That would be it for the 2005 field season. John was in northern Iceland now to work out where his crew of fifteen would eat and sleep, where they could have lab space, whether he could get a free car for five weeks in July and August. He had been in the country only one day and had spent much of that time searching out a certain kind of Danish backhoe that he thought was excellent for archaeology. The previous afternoon, he had found just what he wanted. Though the owner spoke no English, and John no Icelandic, they hit it off right away. “He keeps his backhoe inside, he likes it so much,” John had crowed to Gudny, when we met her in her laboratory in Saudarkrokur later that evening. “It will be perfect He had already gotten permission, he confided to her, to use a backhoe at Glaumbaer. The director of the national Archaeological Heritage Agency, from whom he got his official permits, had said it would be okay.

  Those permits, I could see now, were useless.

  Sirri’s eyes narrowed. “I see,” she said in English, and John fell silent.

  I wrote in my notebook: No backhoe.

  “Isn’t it easily cut with a spade?” Sirri said, putting on her phone headset. She smiled at us and nodded toward the chocolate box, as if to say enjoy! Hospitality is a prominent cultural value in Iceland, as important now as it was in the saga days, so I leaned past Gudny and took a couple. Gudny took some, too.

  After a rapid conversation in Icelandic, Sirri reported that two or three men could remove the turf in twenty-five hours. Her brother Helgi would arrange it.

  “That’s as fast as a backhoe!” John said.

  “Yes, I know.” Sirri’s smile was simultaneously smug and patient. “People who know how to do it are as fast as a backhoe. The people are a little bit expensiver, but not much. I like it better not to have a machine on the field. When do you want to start?”

  That settled, Sirri went to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of cheese, crackers, and grapes. Gudny and I helped ourselves; John suggested a bit of show-and-tell. He had a movie about his latest remote-sensing device to show them, to explain the new procedure he’d be using that summer. He slipped his laptop out of its case and opened the lid. Nothing. He closed it, opened it, wiggled it. Still nothing.

  Sirri took some cheese and crackers. “Tækni is good, if it works,” she said, and winked at Gudny and me.

  “If I could hook it up to your monitor...,” John said, and Sirri directed him to the computer in the outer office.

  I’d seen this movie before. It showed how ground-penetrating radar had located and mapped in colorful 3-D a first-century Roman marketplace and the Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. I excused myself and went to find a window facing east. The weather was astonishingly mild for Iceland in March, and Pastor Gisli, who preached in the Glaumbaer church and worked the farm, had turned out his sheep. They were grazing on top of Gudrid’s house and had cropped the brown grass quite short, but I saw no vague, humped shape of a tumbled longhouse rising from the field. The ground looked quite flat. The sheep milled around the metal hay feeders and the red hay wagon parked in the center of the field, just where Gudrid’s hearth should be.

  Sirri came up behind me—the tækni was still not working. “There are a lot of elves here,” she said, looking over my shoulder, “and trolls, too.” She was testing me. Coming out of the blue, that comment would have sounded strange to someone unfamiliar with the Icelanders’ love of old stories.

  “People always are asking, Do we believe in them?” She laughed. “I give them the benefit of the doubt. The stories are good. A good saga will never die.”

  Chapter 3: A Very Stirring Woman

  Karlsefni and Gudrid sailed to Iceland the next summer, home to his farm at Reynines. But his mother would not have Gudrid in her house that first winter. In her opinion, Karlsefni had not married well. Though later on she would learn how remarkable a woman Gudrid was...

  —The Saga of Eirik the Red

  JOHN STEINBERG’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL CREW DESCENDED on the Glaumbaer hayfield in early July 2005 and spent most of a week trying to make the new tækni—ground-penetrating radar—work.

  The gadget, when it had arrived, looked like a baby-jogger. A sealed plastic box, 18 inches square and fluorescent orange, protected the electronics, which send pulses of microwaves into the ground and pick up their echoes. The box was fixed between two bicycle wheels. A sturdy frame provided a handle and supported the data recorder, its computer screen shielded from the sun (or more likely, here, the rain) by a blue canopy. Dean Goodman, a California-based computer scientist who had written GPR-Slice, the best software to interpret ground-penetrating radar data, had come to Iceland to show off its capabilities. His was the movie of Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. He had mapped tombs and castles in Japan, and Native American ruins from Louisiana to Martha’s Vineyard. He looked jaunty in a Greek fisherman’s cap, pushing the gizmo up and down the hayfield as if he were mowing the lawn. Problem was, haymaking hadn’t started yet in northern Iceland. The GPR jogger could hardly roll through the knee-high grass. John duct-taped a two-by-four to the front, and yoked himself up like an ox to assist. The grass was wet, and in short order he and Dean looked as though they had waded a stream.

  Worse, the data was lousy. The wheels made too much noise, each bump across the lumpy ground registering as an electronic burp. So
they shucked the wheels, set the orange box into a white plastic tub, duct-taped on the two-by-four, and let John play ox while Brian Damiata walked behind, working the data recorder. Until the data recorder was in his hands Brian—who is as quietly critical as John is exuberant—had been invisible. Suddenly he was in control. Although Dean objected that doing things Brian’s way would mean tons more work for only a tiny improvement in data quality, Brian could not be dissuaded. He was here to get good data, and he would get it if he had to walk this field day and night. And since darkness never really falls in high summer in Iceland, he could—and did.

  Over the next two weeks, Brian and John made several discoveries—each at the cost of a five- to ten-mile hike back and forth across a hayfield. For instance, water off the tall grass, pooling in the white tub, caused the microwaves to “float,” scattering sideways instead of penetrating the ground. John discarded the tub and gave the orange box a more aerodynamic profile by duct-taping on two rounded “fenders” he had carved from a green plastic watering can with his utility knife. Even without the wheels, the box bumped and bounced too much. John duct-taped a soccer-ball-sized rock to its top to add weight. The antenna wasn’t shielded. If Brian’s knee hit the cable that tethered him to the orange box, as he walked behind John carrying the data recorder, the microwave receiver saw it as data. When the battery was changed the data recorder was prone to reprogramming itself to its standard settings—which were completely wrong for Iceland’s wet soils. To enter the data manually, Brian had to click “Enter” at every meter mark. But the buttons on the recorder were close together, and instead of “Enter,” his finger might hit “Stop.” Then they had to start the line over.

  And how do you walk in a straight line for a hundred meters, the length of a football field? First we marked opposite sides of the field with colored plastic survey flags spaced a meter apart. Then we advanced a hundred-meter measuring tape from flag to flag, meter by meter across the field, as a guideline. On calm days, after the hay was cut, two of us—one on each end of the tape—could handle it and have ample time to count the horses grazing along the river or the round bales accumulating in the neighbors’ hayfields, to admire the dramatic sky over the glacier-carved mountains, or to watch a pair of swans drive two interlopers away from their nest by the brook. On the day the wind hit gale force, it took six of us, staggered along the guideline, to pull the tape out taut and keep it more-or-less straight, holding it down with our toes.

  By the end of the first week, John decided the crew needed an excursion. After supper we would go to Grettir’s Bath, a hot spring beside the ocean a half-hour’s drive north, walled up for bathing since saga times. The name honored Grettir the Strong, a saga character renowned for his superhuman strength and his fear of the dark, a killer and a troublemaker who lived as an outlaw for nearly twenty years, hunted from place to place until he came to Drangey, a grass-topped rock in the middle of the inlet that gave the valley of Skagafjord (“Bay of the Headlands”) its name. Tall, lone, and visible for hundreds of miles, this island had been a crucial resource for the local farmers in Viking days. They trapped seabirds and gathered eggs on its sheer cliffs, and hoisted sheep to its top to graze the rich grass there. When Grettir hauled up the rope ladder and declared the island his own, he was in essence raiding their pantry. All the farmers along the fjord could see the smoke of his cooking fire and know Grettir was feasting on their meat.

  The story of Grettir’s Bath begins on a night when the outlaw’s fire went out. Grettir, who was built like a bull seal, determined to swim to the mainland to fetch live coals. The distance is four miles. The temperature of the sea is a few degrees above freezing. (Lately it’s become fashionable for extreme swimmers, in wet suits and Vaseline, to try to match Grettir’s feat; Sirri at Glaumbaer has lost track of how many have tried it, but she assured me that none had drowned.)

  John Steinberg, who wanted his crew to get the full Icelandic experience from their visit to the hot spring, opened a translation of Grettir's Saga and began reading:

  He swam strongly, and made Reykjanes by sunset. He walked up to the farm at Reykir and took a bath, for he was feeling very cold. He basked in the warm pool for a good part of the night, and then he went into the hall. It was very hot there, for a fire had been burning earlier, and the room had not cooled off. Grettir was exhausted and fell fast asleep; he lay there until the following day.

  Late in the morning the household got up, and the first people to go into the room were two women, a maidservant and the farmer’s daughter. Grettir was asleep, and his cover had rolled off down to the floor. The women saw and recognized who he was. The maidservant said, “What do you know, dear, here is Grettir Asmundarson, and lying there stark naked. He is certainly big enough in the chest, but it seems to me very odd how small he is farther down. That part of him isn’t up to the rest of him.”

  The farmer's daughter said, “Why do you keep running off at the mouth like that, you silly little fool? Keep quiet!”

  “I can’t keep quiet about this, dear,” said the maid, “since I never would have believed it, even if someone had told me.”

  She kept going over and peeping at him, and then running back to the farmer’s daughter and bursting out laughing. Grettir heard what she was saying, and when she ran across the room again he seized her....

  The saga proceeds with a pair of dirty poems that Grettir composed on the spur of the moment—puns on swords being prominent—and a cheerful rape scene that had the male scientists howling with laughter while the women snickered and looked at each other askance. When things quieted down, someone asked, Was this scene typical of the sagas?

  Love scenes there are in plenty—enough that historian Jenny Jochens needed a dozen pages of her book, Women in Old Norse Society, to explain how a woman became pregnant. First the man “placed her on his lap ... and talked with her so all could see it,” talk that was visible as kisses and caresses. Then he might stretch out with his head in her lap and let her pick lice out of his hair. (Another sure sign of love is a woman offering to sew a man’s wide shirtsleeves tight around his wrists, a daily task before buttons became common.) After a bit he might take her by the hand and lead her to a more private spot; an illegitimate baby was variously called a “forest child,” a “corner child,” and a “cowbarn child.” There, says Jochens, the Vikings assumed the missionary position, the man “romping on” the woman’s belly. For married couples such scenes take place in the crowded skáli, the main room of the longhouse, where the whole household slept on the wide benches that lined the walls on either side of the longfire and could listen in while spouses who were at odds “settled the matter between them as though nothing has happened.” High-class couples like Gudrid and Karlsefni might have plank walls and a door separating their sleeping space from that of their farmhands and family, but for most couples, the only privacy in a longhouse was provided by the dark.

  What is striking about the love scenes in the sagas is how often sex is proposed by the woman—and not exclusively to her husband. Grettir’s rape scene—the only one I can remember in the forty major sagas—is so out of the norm that a later poem lampoons him by claiming, in some four hundred lines, that he had sex not only with girls, widows, and “everyone’s wives,” but with farmers’ sons, deacons, courtiers, abbots, abbesses, cows, and calves. In fact, the “maiden in distress” is notably missing in the Icelandic sagas. Instead we meet, as scholar Carol Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, puts it, “women who prosecute their lives in general, and their sex lives in particular, with a kind of aggressive authority unexpected in a woman and unparalleled in any other European literature.”

  Four or five years before Gudrid was born, says one saga, there lived on the north side of Snow Mountain’s Glacier two middle-aged widows who were competing for the favors of the same young man. This fellow, Gunnlaug, had “a lust for learning.” From his father’s farm under the glacier, he would ride to visit Geirrid at Mavahlid, th
e seaside estate she shared with her grown son and his wife. Halfway, he would stop at the hut of the second widow, Katla, to pick up his friend, her son Odd. On the way home, Katla always invited Gunnlaug to stay the night, but he always declined.

  “So,” said Katla one day, “you’re off to Mavahlid again to pat the old hag on the belly.”

  Gunnlaug laughed. “Are you so young that you can make fun of Geirrid’s age?”

  “That may be so, but she’s not the only woman around here who knows a thing or two.”

  That night, as Gunnlaug was getting ready to leave Mavahlid, Geirrid said, “There are too many sea spirits on the loose tonight, and you have an unlucky look about you. You should stay the night with me.”

  Gunnlaug said no thanks, and he and Odd rode off.

  Katla had already gone to bed when they reached her hut. “Ask Gunnlaug to stay tonight,” she said, as her son Odd came inside.

  “He insists on going home, Mother,” said Odd.

  “Then let him get what’s coming to him.”

  Late that night, Gunnlaug’s father found him lying outside the family house, unconscious. He was scratched all over, the flesh ripped to the bone. People said he had been “witch-ridden.”

  In the same saga, we meet Gunnlaug’s stepmother, Thurid, who was just as lusty as the two old witches. Gunnlaug disappears from the story after this night (although we’re told his wounds did heal), and his father was killed quarreling with the people of Mavahlid, leaving behind a very young widow. Thurid quickly got married again, at the insistence of her brother Snorri, the chieftain of Helgafell. But her fat merchant husband soon had complaints. A young buck named Bjorn, who lived on the south side of the glacier, had begun coming by unusually often, and “people said he and Thurid were fooling around.” Anyone who has read Jenny Jochens’s description of sex in the Viking Age would agree. Thurid and Bjorn sat close together and “talked,” while Thurid’s husband made it a practice to interrupt his farmwork frequently to come inside and check on them.