The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (4 page)

The story of sailing in Greenland waters, writes Jens Rosing, former director of Greenland’s National Museum, “is the story of long cold watches, fogs, shining days when everything shimmers in the light, terrifying storms, and undercurrents so strong that the ice, against all reason, moves up against even the most powerful storm winds.... The Icelandic sagas and annals speak time and time again of the wrecks of Greenland ships, of ships that vanished with man and mouse.” The sagas tell much the same story, missing only the ice, of all the seas Gudrid sailed.

To protect themselves from such catastrophes, the Vikings had no Coast Guard. They had no chase boats, no winches, no diesel backup engines. They didn’t even have a friendly Eskimo in a kayak, as the artist Rockwell Kent did when his yacht wrecked off the coast of Greenland in 1929, to paddle home and radio for backup. All they had was magic. In
The Saga of the Volsungs
is a sailor’s verse:

Wave runes shall you make
If you desire to ward
Your sail-steeds on the sound.
On the stem shall they be cut
And on the steering blade
And burn them on the oar.
No broad breaker will fall
Nor waves of blue,
And you will come safe from the sea.

In a Viking longhouse in Greenland, dating from the days of Gudrid, archaeologists in the 1950s found a wooden rod covered with runes. On one side is the
futhark,
or complete runic alphabet—what one rune specialist called “the most powerful magic factor to defend and protect one.” On the other side is a verse, carved in precise runes that are easily read—yet remain mysterious.
On the sea, sea, sea, where the gods sit
—or watch, or lie in wait—it begins, and then its meaning grows unclear. One specialist thinks it’s a riddle about a mirage. Another thinks it’s a joke. The most persuasive reading makes it a prayer, or an epitaph:
Bibrau is the maiden who sits in the blue.
“Bibrau,” similar to the Icelandic word for mirage, is otherwise unknown as a name. “The maiden” could be a goddess, the Virgin Mary, or an ordinary girl. “The blue” could mean the sea, or the sky (the giant from whose skull the gods fashioned the heavens was called “The Blue One”). Yet
On the sea, sea, sea, where the gods sit
sounds so melancholy that this rune stick brings to my mind a similar stick, found in an otherwise-empty coffin in a Viking cemetery:
This woman, whose name was Gudveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.
Perhaps the same was the fate of Bibrau, whose lover was so poetic.

But it was not the fate of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. In spite of being shipwrecked and blown off course, she did not die at sea. Instead she was twice saved to sail again, as soon as she could, west, away from Greenland, away from Iceland, away from Norway and her trees, west off the edge of the known world, into the blue.

As they were looking through Einar’s wares, a woman passed by the open doorway. “Who is that beautiful woman?” asked Einar. “I have never seen her here before.”

“That is my foster-daughter, Gudrid,” replied Orm. “Her father is Thorbjorn of Laugarbrekka.”

“She’d make me an excellent wife,” said Einar. “Has she had any offers?”

“Indeed she has, my friend,” replied Orm. “She’s not to be had just for the asking.”

—The Saga of Eirik the Red

T
HE OTHER VERSION OF GUDRID’S STORY BEGINS NOT
with a shipwreck but with this glimpse of Gudrid through a young man’s eyes. Here is the scene: On the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting from the west coast of Iceland sat a small Viking longhouse. Turf-clad, except for one wooden door, the house looked like a low hill in the jewel-green field. A turf wall encircled it, keeping the horses from grazing in the manured homefield. Toward the sea, the land dropped off into ragged cliffs alive with nesting seabirds. Seals sunned on the seaside rocks. A
knarr
and a six-oared fishing boat, both clinker-built and tarred black, lay beached in a tiny harbor of black sand. Behind the turf house rose a pyramidal black hill, then the clean white flank of the glacier called Snaefellsjokull, “Snow Mountain’s Glacier.” Beneath the glacier hid a volcano, known to the inhabitants of the house only from a pleasant side effect: Water hot enough for washing bubbled up from the ground not far away.

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 simultaneously 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.