* Greenland was annexed in 1261.
THf EARLS' ISLE
GREENLAND INCOGNITA
long last. But in those years there was still time and space on the islands, so the Earl-kin, well aware that they could expect no mercy from King Harald, went west.
The New Lands
Midway between the Shedands and the Orkneys lay Fair Isle, which had its corresponding Foul Isle; both of these were settled. Midway between Iceland and Norway were the Westman Islands - little more than green clifF-rocks, but even these had a few low flat places by the sea, and men built their houses there. West and west again they went, finding water-girt lands whose doubtful existence became sure forever when they waded onto them, as flocks of gulls took wing astonished, screaming and retreating west. For awhile they had an abundance of new lands: low green sheep-islands and towering sea-clifls, green hills and grey water, grey hills and green water . . . Islands waxed like clouds upon the sea-sky all the way to Iceland.* When new land came in sight, they jumped from their boats to reach it, with loud and joyous shouts. Often they found stranded whales, and the rivers were black with salmon. Then they praised their prow-dragons and gave them mead to drink; and they oflfered thanks to HEIMDALL, Odin and Thor. There were islands as numerous as stars, so that men went dreaming from archipelago to constellation, wind-blown and wave-tossed to flowery little coasts where they were deafened by the booming of waterfalls that no one had ever heard before. When King Harald came looking for them, they hid their ships; they spread moss over themselves. Then they went again in pursuit of islands. - So this confusion of islands became substantial and mapped. But becoming distinct, they remained separate nonetheless, for those were lonely, suspicious days; every island was its ovm kingdom, with its own laws. Between them sailed the dragons - but since even kingdoms must exchange commercial kisses, there passed also the stout trading-boats. From Iceland to the Faroes was a day's sail; from Iceland to the Shedands was only two. Islands exported wool, cheese and tallow in exchange for timber, malt and
* Which the Viking Naddour discovered in the year 860, being blown off course on a voyage from Norway to the Faroes. He landed on the east coast, and everything was white with snow. For this reason he wanted to call it Snowland, but history overruled him, for no particular reason. The first settlers came fourteen years later. - It is written that the new country was so thick with birch-woods that the colonists had to hack their way through them. (Now, it seems, the land is mainly grey and orange with volcanoes.)
linen. And the Earls and their descendants worked their windy fields, and birds flew westward over their heads, and at night they tossed in their beds, dreaming of the blue Ice-Mountain. As for Greenland, that stepping-stone to ViNLAND THE GOOD, that country was first sighted a decade later.
The Death ofKinq HaratdFairhair ca, 940
As he aged. King Harald became niggardly in some respects. He lived only in his dwindling ice-self, as I said; he had not the ambition to conquer the world. At banquets he ate quickly, and then knocked on the table wdth his knife so that his house-carles must clear away the dishes, no matter whether the guests might still be hungry. Yet he himself ate his fill of hazelnuts and raspberries. After dinner his concubines rubbed the soles of his feet until he fell asleep. - Once, it is said, Queen Gyda, in a transparent attempt to rearouse his interest in her, asked him if he took pleasure in ruling the country, "for without me," she said, "it would never have come about." - "Yes, I have what I want," said Harald gloomily; "now I can sit on it until my life and authority go rotten." - His fair hair became white hair. Once again he let it grow long, so that it tangled itself around his crovm like a field of fi-osted sedges. He had developed a mania for digging, and set many of his carles to spade-work in the forests of Hadeland - yet he would not tell them what he looked for, save that it lay inside a rusty iron trunk. "Look where the trees are dark!" he insisted, slyly wagging his head. - They found skulls and beads, it is true, and once they uncovered a great hoard of Viking gold, but when this was brought to King Harald he only sifted the coins through his fingers and said, "The wdzard spoke truly when he told me that I have eaten ice!" And nobody knew what he meant. - When he was forty his sons grew restive; when he was fifty he divided the kingdom with them; when he was seventy he took his serving-woman Tora Mosterstang to bed and had a son by her (she was somewhat hairy of person - a fact in which the King took comfort); when he was eighty he became very fat, and could no longer ride a horse. Then he brought his son Eric Bloody-Axe to the high-seat, and made him Sovereign King of Norway. He lived for three years after that, marrying off his daughters to his Earls, and died in his sick-bed, beset by a vision of Skull-Bears. In his delirium he called for the iron trunk, and when his followers said they knew not where it was, he cried, "Dig in the forest! Hurry! Bring it to me!", but then he had a fit and died.
Gunfiildjoins the FamiCy
And so King Harald was succeeded by Eric Bloody-Axe, whom he had always loved best. Of Eric it is written that his father gave him five long-ships when he was twelve. He plundered in Denmark, Friesland, Saxland, Finnmark, and all the way north to Bearland, on the White Sea. In Finnmark his men came upon a girl preening herself in a Lappish hut, who was more beautiful than any of the ones they had raped. Her name was Gunhild, she said, and she had come to the forest to learn witchcraft from two Lappish wizards. -"Hide under the bed," she told Eric's men, "and we will see if we can kill them." When the Lapps returned to the hut, Gunhild let them lie beside her and put her loving arms around their necks. Being rivals for her favors, they were exhausted with jealously watching each other, and soon fell asleep, at which clever Gunhild popped their heads into two sealskin bags. Then she winked like a whore at Eric's men, and they sprang out from under the bed to slice through the Laplanders' necks - a task which, being Norwegians, they undoubtedly performed with diligence. The next day they brought the girl to Eric's ship, and presented her to him. - And so Prince Eric and Gunhild were married, and returned to Norway. Gunhild was a very cruel witch and a poisoner, who used her art to bring her husband some success, although his life was short. - Eric's character becomes clear when we read that at King Harald's bidding he hastened to bum his brother Rognvald for witchcraft, along with eighty other warlocks. "Eric," says his saga, "was a stout handsome man, strong and very manly - a great and fortunate man of war; but hot-headed, harsh, unfriendly, and silent." - His successors were much the same.
Denial oftfxe Bear-Sfiirt
By then, nobody in Norway believed in the Bear-Shirt. While he lived. King Harald had denied its existence to his sons; they in turn, having never known it, derided it. A few of the Earls still wore it, but they were the ones who had fled to the new lands. What had been easy for grandfathers, possible for fathers, was scarcely to be met with anymore. Men remained men, except by accident, as when, for instance, according to the Book of Settlements, "an arrow struck the intestine of Eilif Grisly, and he became a shape-changer."
Dreaxns of the Ice-Mountain
Greenland, then, what was Greenland? And yet, north and west, the name GREENLAND was written in the ink of poisonous green icicles, water-clear and thereby illegible until the death of the readers, who must first die as green leaves died in the frost; only then were they permitted to put on the Ice-Shirt and sack Wineland the Good. - In Sweden, men woke from nightmares of some far white island; in their dreams they exhausted themselves wandering among the lesser peaks of the Ice-Mountain; and there was neither day nor night, but only a radiant white darkness in which they saw each other as silhouettes. (Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests wdthin your skull?) Sailors spoke of skerries in the direction of the setting sun, and immense flocks of land-birds winging westward. - What could it all mean? It was only that most desperate tribe of language-crackers, the cartographers, that dared to decipher this alphabet of symbols, and what they wrote they disguised in picture-writing. Some of them drew Greenland as a peninsula e
xtending to northern countries; others made it an icy horn of Africa, but what they were writing (every word a wave, a feather, a pebble) was an interpretation of dream-hopes and dream-rumors.
According to the great Macrobius, the world is divided into five zones, two alone of which are inhabited by men, for at either pole is a zone of fatal cold, and at the equator is a zone of burning and torridness, so that only two rings of temperate clemency, separated from each other by that hot mid-girdle, can be possible to dwell upon. It was clear that Greenland must ascend far into the northern polar death-zone, perhaps all the way to Jotunheim, Land of the Frost Giants. Obviously it required a desperate distracted ambition to make anyone go there. But there are always to be found dreamers who will do anything.
Greenland Dreams Recaiied on a Sunny Swedish Morning
In the spring, when the birds sang like green water and the first bees hummed over sunny bushes, there remained shadowed snow-drifts in which saplings lurched like the masts of drowning ships; and even though the foundations of the great pines were green moss-islands in the snow, even though the trees were green, the bark-moss was new-green, yet those grey-trunked and
THE CHANGERS
47
white-trunked trees spread their hemlock-hued fans of needles in chilly silence, and a chill seeped up from the ground, so that every dreamer expected to round a pine-tree hill-crest and come upon some great white Mountain-shoulder, beautiful and shockingly high. Sometimes the dreamer thought that he could glimpse the Mountain rising far above the highest trees, but it was only a cloud, a bleached white wood-corpse entombed in
CLPV*0?A^^ND [A-t. ODN, SAFF^N i^LAND
branches, or the snow-capped crown of some great ash-tree. - At first his dreams led him onto wide sunny snow-meadows, and he felt very warm. The Ice-Mountain was grey and white ahead. The tree-branches were bent down and trapped in the snow, so that they looked like roots. Then everything became colder and clearer, for, as that thirteenth-century macropedia, the Speculum Regale, remarks, "it is in the nature of the glacier to emit a cold and continuous breath which drives the storm clouds away from its face so that the sky above is usually clear." - As the dreamer proceeded up a ridge toward the lesser crest, the bluish-white wall before him became more and more sheer. As the ridge steepened, it became a high broad way, grandly adorned with trees. The trees had livid grey bark. They extended wddely-spaced branches, as if they were ferns. Then after awhile the ridge fell away; the trees fell away, and the other mountains fell away; and he
was ascending a vast and featureless slope of white - not impossibly steep yet, but very high and grand and dangerous, so that he became vertiginous if he looked down. The snow was glittering and granular, and there were deep round craters where the sun had melted the snow (for the dreamer was not really climbing the Ice-Mountain; he still stood in the Swedish forest where tree-shadows fell upon the snow, which was sprinkled v^th dead pine needles, and the trees were cool and black and quiet, so despite himself he brought spring up the mountain with him). There were grey stones and orange lava pebbles on an occasional ridge where the sun had struck in full force, melting snow away, dow^ to the grey spiny shrubs that lived in the sand - for now the dreamer's sunny imagination was beginning to drag him dovm; and though he strove through the melting dream-snow he sank deeper and deeper into it with every step, and for a moment he thought he saw the summit of the Ice-Mountain above him like a snowy shoulder upon which a hand of rocky ice pressed cruel fingers, but then spring burst forth in an explosion of birds and crickets, and the branches, having been pressed dow^ under the snow, sprang up fi-om the moldy ice and grew heart-cutting spears of green leaves, and the last patches of snow became steam and left the ground black and warm, and it was a hot Swedish afternoon in summer and there might perhaps have been snow somewhere deeper in the forest but by now it would be riddled with tiny air-bubbles; and the war-bears would be yawning and coming out of their caves.
The League of the Ice-Dreaxners
Some lives were disturbed in wide but short-lived ways thereby, being crossed by the vacuously perfect ripples of yearning, while others became whirlpool-lives, devouring and spewing not only those who crossed them, but any in their reach. But those lives too have become as mirror-seas, for nothing is left of them save the old stories. It is that way even with cartography. In our new Greenland we cannot find the Ice-Mountain anymore, nor Karsoe, the Island of the White Bears, nor Berefjord, where a Whale's Whirlpool is reported to have lain beyond the sand-ribs (the water is a mere mirror now), and that endless fjord, Longest-of-All, went inland among the mountains, its banks grass-green long past the islands of uncounted birds. - As for Vinland the Good, who knows where it is now? If continents are free to contract and elongate themselves at will, if islands may sail anywhere upon the great Ocean Sea, then how may we pronounce upon dreams, which not even dreamers can
find again? We can only say that Greenland had appeared in our dreams for ages - in any event a statement without utility, as dreams come true only for him who sleeps in the pre-moral position.
Queen Gunfdid and her Murder-Burners
ca.962
A lady sits upon her throne, And many a craft she knows; Reads the books of well-writ runes And sews her silken clothes.
Kvaedi af Loga i VaUarahlid (ca. 900)
In those days Norway was ruled by the sons of King Eric Bloody-Axe. These were their names: Harald Greycloak, Ragnfrod, ErHng, Gudrod and Sigurd Sleva. They dwelled mainly in the middle of the country, for in Drontheim and Viken they had enemies. They hid their money in the ground. In many ways they were laughable fellows. Their mother Gunhild was still as much a witch as she had been in Lapland. She called herself the King-Mother, and meddled much in her sons' affairs. It was she who counseled them to tax the country more heavily, "for otherwise," said she, "how could you get more gold pieces to bury?" And she smiled at them lovingly.
Harald Greycloak was the eldest of the brothers. It was he, therefore, who had the supreme dignity. - "Mother, it is not so easy as that to get gold," he said. "You must remember that we cannot tax everywhere. Earl Sigurd rules in Drontheim, and Trygve and Gudrod in the east. You know the people hate us! We do not have sufficient strength to march against them all."
"Oh!" said Gunhild dryly. "Strength is a fine quality. Don't think I don't enjoy it when I feel a strong man between my legs! - But if I decided not to enjoy it, what good would his strength do against two drops of poison? -Remember, my sons, that craft is better than strength. Your father was both strong and bold; his boldness brought about his death in England. You were only boys then, who could not whirl your axes around your heads. When I heard that Eric had fallen in battle, I knew that we would not be safe in Northumberland. Of course it was but my woman's cowardice that made me gather our booty and our thralls to set sail for the Orkneys. But if I
had not done it, then you would not have lived to overthrow your uncle Hakon. Probably it was my lust that brought King Harald Gormsson to my bed. But after that he fostered you, my own son Harald, on his knee. He gave you great fiefs in Denmark, and Danish men-at-arms to attack Hakon. - My sons, when you plundered in Viken, and Hakon cut down your brother Guttorm, I counseled you to row away, and you were ashamed and angry at me for so doing, but I comforted you; I knew you would come back. And you did. When you sailed to Agder I paid a thrall to do what you denounced as a scurvy trick: - remember? - to kill the man who ran to light Hakon's war-beacon. And the end of it was that we got as far as Stad that time. And then Hakon himself used craft to defeat us, for he had his men raise standards from behind a ridge, so that you thought he had a great army and fled. Oh, you were gullible, my sons! That gave Hakon the time to assemble more men together, and the result was that your brother Gamle - my prettiest little son - died in the water. Once again I advised you to return to Denmark, although as ever you abused me and called me a cowardly old whore, but you followed that advice, and we returned to attack Hakon again. That time, my sons, you tho
ught to stand in battle-lines and use that strength you boast about. My own brothers, Eyvind and Alv, came charging boldly at King Hakon's golden helmet, and for their trouble they were slain. At that you feared, my sons, and so to save you I whispered into the ear of my shoe-boy and he shot an arrow wdth many fishhooks into Hakon's arm, from which he bled to death very slowly. Now, I ask you: Who killed King Hakon? Was it you, or your Danish Vikings? Was it my shoe-boy? (I am sure you heard him running through the spears, crying, 'Make way for the King-killer!' It was for that I had him killed.) Was it his arrow? - No, it was my craft, and my whispered words. Am I not right, my sons?"
For a moment the sons of Eric said nothing. But at length King Erling nodded his head and said, "Yes, mother, it is exactly as you say."
At this. Queen Gunhild smiled sweetly, for she was charming when she was not crossed. "Very well, my Golden-Hair," she said. "We will begin by burning Earl Sigurd in his house."
They lured Earl Sigurd's brother Grjotgaard into their plot, and one night when Earl Sigurd was in Oglo at a feast. King Harald and King Erling sailed there by starlight and did what they had come to do.
"Well," men said when they heard the news, "these sons of Bloody-Axe are not like old King On, who hoped to live forever. But it seems they will be a nuisance to highborn lords throughout their short lives."
Freydis^s Father ca. 945 - ca. 1006
There was a man called Eirik the Red, who lived in Jaederen, not far from the sea. People called him well-bom, for his father was Thorvald, the son of Asvald, the son of Leif, the son of Oxen-Thori. Thorvald was a man of considerable distinction, devout in his duty to his namesake ThoR; in his youth he had fought against Harald Fairhair, but was later forgiven on account of his deeds against the Shedand Vikings. When, at the instigation of Queen Gyda, the King began to reduce the highborn men to vassals, Thorvald said, "Well, this Harald will not live forever. We can weather this out." But when the King was laid in his mound, Thorvald thought his successors even worse.
The Ice-Shirt Page 5