“My daughter demands all my attention – which is why I come so late to attend to my guest in his bed. She is inconsolable over the loss of her fancier, Þorbrandur, and his slayer Þorgeir has fled north to Hornstrandir. Yet now, despite the hour, I shall mend your swathings and brush off your cloak.”
After tending to his clothing, she sat for a time at his bedside, but complained that her knees were cold. He tried laying his hand on her knee to warm her. She bade him abandon his whim, and wept bitter tears.
He asked her what caused her distress.
“I have,” said she, “heard such stories of you that my mind cannot be eased at present.”
He asked what stories these might be.
“I have heard,” said the woman, “that when the little maiden in her loft in Ögur felt my lay sufficiently refashioned in her favor, she requested that you make a lay for her alone, lauding her above all others, particularly for having more knowledge in matters of the bedchamber than other women in the Vestfirðir.”
He said: “It is news to me if any verses that I made for that woman – if verses there were – traveled so far afield.”
“Her swain, Slave Kolbakur, learned the lay and taught it to his friends,” said the mistress, “and it has now become the butt of jokes among fishermen, maidservants, and beggarwomen here in the west, as well as among that slavish rabble most in need of bawdy blather for whiling away the hours when the weather is too poor for fishing.”
He said that it was certainly far from courteous, when a man converses privately with a woman, not to recite her a love-poem if she asks, but it was folly and whoredom for a woman to share such a poem with others. “And I never expected of Þórdís,” said he, “that she would dally with her slave, to my derision.”
The mistress said: “You men imagine that you have free rein when it comes to us women, particularly once you have grown out of our care. Know, too, it is true what they say: a woman’s knee is always cold. You shall discover, Þormóður, that the path to me is all but blocked, unless you have something to offer.”
He asked her what she expected. She replied:
“You are to turn the lay that you made for the ogress in Ögur to one of praise for me, and recite it in my ear. You may, if you wish, lay your hand on my knee as you do.”
Þormóður agreed to her terms, and then took the lay that he had previously made for Þórdís and reworded it in the mistress’s honor. Nothing further occurred that night or the next day, and Þormóður and his companions took their ease there in Hrafnsfjörður.
Toward midnight of the third night, when most folk in the Jökulfirðir had gone to bed, Skald Þormóður was suddenly surprised to see Mistress Kolbrún sitting at his bedside, clad in her mantle, for the night was freezing cold. The woman’s expression was melancholic. He asked her what it is that made her so mournful, and whether her knees were as cold as last time. She replied:
“I am certain your hand is warm, Þormóður, yet it remains to be proven how suited you are to warming my knees. There is no going back on the fact, however, that on the day you came here, the first thing I asked of you was that you go and kill my suitor, and I sent you to him when he had no web spun around him. On the other hand, I have heard that in Djúp, Þórdís Kötludóttir wrapped her truelove in hanks of yarn before sending you out to kill him.”
Þormóður asked whether the mistress had considered any other trials or tests that might allow him to prove his fidelity to her.
She replied: “You still have not made a lay for me alone – one that cannot be refashioned to the glory of another woman.”
He said that he could not imagine how a lay might be made for one woman only, so that it was impossible to twist it at will to fit other women.
She said: “I do not ask you to sing the praises of the bright moons beneath my eyelids, nor of the magnificence of my locks or my alluring hue, nor of any of the other things that men find to praise in women with whom they dally. I know full well that my eyes are not bright in the least, and though my hair was raven black of old, the day is drawing near when I will join the other hoary-headed crones. My youthful complexion is gone as well, and instead of having a figure that you skalds liken to aspens and other slender trees, I am certain you would describe me as fleshy. Thus any lay that you make for any other woman, but reword for me, is mockery, not praise. No longer will I hear or put up with such poetry. And you yourself, skald, are absurd.”
He said: “It is not in the nature of a skald to endow the world with the countenance it might have when viewed from the beds of decrepit crones – rather, one should be a hero first and a skald second, and let stoutness of heart rule one’s lays.”
“No woman do I wish less to be,” said she, “than one who is praised by a hero.”
“What sort of woman would you be?” asked he.
She said: “I have sat here so long at your bedside that such a sharp-eyed man as you could hardly have failed to notice the little strawberry mark here on my skin. I would like you to make a poem about this mark – then, I believe, it will be impossible to twist it into praise for another woman.”
He said that he truly desired to compose this poem for her, and asked the mistress not to leave him before it was finished. Reliable sources say that he composed his Strawberry Ditty that very night. Upon his reciting it, the woman listened appreciatively, and in reward called him her Pet and her Jewel, declaring that that night, for the first time, he had indeed risen to the name given him in his youth, when he was called Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld.
At dawn that same morning, however, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld has the impression of waking up and drawing aside his bed-curtain. He leans forward on his pillow, looks down the hall, and sees that the servants have all gone to their chores, indoors and out. Then, in an instant, the house is lit with bright light, as when a snowstorm lifts – yet it is not sunshine, and is accompanied by great cold. To his eyes, the hall’s walls appear wider and its rafters higher than he had thought they were, and he wonders how such a magnificent homestead came to be in such a remote fjord. The hall’s woodwork is carved and decorated beautifully with dragons, birds, men, and other creatures from ancient tales. He cannot comprehend how he failed to notice earlier what sort of house he was dwelling in, which was assuredly as magnificent in every detail as the renowned halls of kings of yore, where events occurred that were of consequence for the entire world. As he gazes at this great hall, he hears a loud noise of wings flapping over the roof. At the same moment, the door through which the mistress had left just a short time ago opens up, and in steps a woman of gigantic size. Her face is pale, and she fixes him with her stare. She is nobler of mien than all other women, yet he feels that she bears a great resemblance to his friend the maiden in Ögur. The woman is accoutered as befits a Valkyrie, in a chain-mail tunic reaching down to mid-thigh. Round her midriff she wears a belt with a great buckle, in the custom of women of old. Her shoes are tall and her knees bare, her hair cut shoulder-length. On her head this woman wears a splendid helmet, and in her hand she holds a gold-inlaid spear. Draped over her arm is her swan-dress. The woman stops at Þormóður’s bedside and says:
“You have betrayed me once more, and this time much worse than when you ran off with Þorgeir. What do you intend for me now?”
This vision troubles Skald Þormóður deeply – that a maiden in the blossom of youth, delicate and the slenderest of all women, should have become, in the blink of an eye, a towering earth-goddess, mighty in flight and bearing splendid arms. Her face, which he had left yesterday swollen with sorrow, glowers fearsomely at him today from beneath its helm of terror.
He says: “I am the lover who rides halt and handless,1 and the love of you women is the only game in which no man can be a champion apart from him who chooses not to take part. That is what distinguishes Þorgeir and me. How shall we resolve this, Þórdís?”
She replies: “You may writhe here like a worm as long you choose, in the snares of th
e evil woman who inhabits the abyss. Yet until you have put my poem back in order, I will shed no tears for your plight.”
Saying this, she jabs her spear into his brow between his eyes, startling him so greatly that the vision ends and his eyes dim, while his head throbs with such pain that he feels as if his eyes will burst out – and all his strength abandons him.
16
ON THE SAME morning just described, Mistress Kolbrún of Hrafnsfjörður and her daughter Geirríður set off on a journey to Chieftain Vermundur’s, accompanied by Slave Loðinn. The rivers and lakes were all ice-bound. Their journey passed uneventfully, and on the third day they reached Vatnsfjörður.
When Kolbrún and her daughter entered the hall, Vermundur was sitting in his high seat, speaking with visitors. He asked the others to leave the room while he had a word with these women. They went up to the old man and greeted him with kisses. He directed the girl to a seat on a little stool at the edge of the dais, she being his bastard child, but bade the woman sit at his footboard, where she wrapped her arms blithely around the chieftain’s legs. He asked her what news was on everyone’s lips.
Mistress Kolbrún told him of the frost and harsh storms lashing the Jökulfirðir, yet she declared it far harsher when folk had to endure the aggression of browbeaters who arrived without warning in the district. These men had settled on a mountain crag where they had no land for their livestock and begun fishing on other farmers’ shores.
Vermundur declared this bad news.
“Luckily, that leak has now been plugged,” said the woman.
“Such news is more to my liking,” said Vermundur. “Can you tell me more of what took place?”
“For quite some time, we suffered the wearisome unneighborliness of Ingólfur and his son Þorbrandur, whom you allowed to settle across from us in Hrafnsfjörður, on the mountainside where there is no grass.”
Vermundur said that they were, to be sure, kinless seafarers who had shipwrecked there, but had become trusty liegemen of his. He asked how they were getting along.
Kolbrún replied: “In brief, they are dead. I have had them killed. And many would say that my daughter and I had an excuse for it, considering their arrogance.”
He asked what wrong they had done. She said:
“They had two bulls that they drove constantly onto the land you gave me. And they grazed their ewes on my land in the summers, driving them and their lambs over other farmers’ pastures and stopping only after reaching my own, because they knew that few there would defend a poor widow.”
Chieftain Vermundur declared it quite unconscionable to have two such doughty men killed for so little cause. What bravoes did you hire for this deed?”
“Your kinsman Þormóður Bessason and his sworn brother Þorgeir lent me their support in this matter,” said she. “It was valiantly done, to mend the lot of a penniless woman.”
Vermundur said that such deeds would never be left unredressed under his jurisdiction, no matter who did them. Any upright man would say that one’s bull gnawing another’s grass is no cause for neighbors to murder each other – if such a thing were law, most of those inhabiting the Vestfirðir would be forfeit of their lives. “Yet it puts me in a particularly tight spot if those who claim my protection take the lead in such deeds.”
Kolbrún said: “I have not yet mentioned the far-worse crime committed by this father and his son – wishing to spare you that story for the sake of my long-held love for you. As far as Farmer Ingólfur goes, he visited my house so frequently that had you been there, you would have dealt him a fate not much different than the one he has suffered now. He wanted me to yield my farm to him and become his concubine, but not his lawful wife. Many a woman would have been excused for having let herself be stained by such a man as Ingólfur, for he was an accomplished, courtly man, having dined at the table of the jarl in Orkney.”
Vermundur said: “When I was younger and abler than now, I had what I wanted from women without killing men, and I would prefer that you keep all of your gallants rather than have them kill each other.”
Kolbrún said: “Again, I have yet to tell you the greatest disgrace inflicted on us by the father and his son, when they asked for the hand of your daughter Geirríður on behalf of Þorbrandur Ingólfsson. No sooner had he held the betrothal feast for the girl than he ravished her in my house, and then put off fulfilling the marriage promise.”
“Geirríður,” said Vermundur, “are you so loathsome that you make your fiancé a fugitive?”
“I was born a bondwoman and belong with the by-blows,” said the girl, “and for it I have paid my dues. Yet luckily, Þorbrandur is now dead, for I loved him beyond all other men – so much, in fact, that I have not lived a happy day since he shunned me.”
Vermundur said: “My head will hang in shame if you two persuade me into granting your errand boys, Þormóður and Þorgeir, their lives, though some might say that their deed owes more to your heinousness than to their own stupidity, and it is a shame that the law no longer allows for women to be burned.”
“I can hear that you are angry with me, Vermundur,” said the woman. “Will you not accept redress for the men of Sviðinsstaðir from the purse you gave me long ago, which still hangs at my belt?”
He said: “I will accept no redress from you – and that purse dangling from your belt, you may open to other men. But now I give you two choices. The first is that I have Þormóður killed, so that in my jurisdiction innocent men do not lie unavenged in sight of all – and Þorgeir’s head shall go into the bargain, despite the risk of retribution by powerful men. The other choice is that you leave Iceland, and never return hither as long as I live.”
“I can scarcely believe,” said she, “that you would be such a scoundrel, Vermundur, as to have your kinsman Þormóður slain, or to stir up conflict in the Vestfirðir by provoking that moneybags at Reykjahólar for the likes of Þorgeir. As for Þormóður, he was but a motherless boy when he first landed here at your door, and delivered me a little lay, for which he was named Kolbrúnarskáld – my skald – and in return I promised him that if he ever needed refuge, he would find it with me. He is now a member of my household. It is my design that when he grows a little older, and I am but a decrepit crone, he shall wed our daughter Geirríður.”
“My daughter will never entangle herself in that snare,” said Vermundur. “As always, the designs of you women can be truly outrageous. I do not want Geirríður to go home with you now to Hrafnsfjörður, but instead, to remain here and learn better manners than those she has been accustomed to lately. And if I do not have Þormóður killed this winter, then I will do something with him far worse in your eyes: I will wed him to Þórdís of Ögur.”
17
NOW THE STORMS abated and Þorgeir Hávarsson’s men grew weary of dawdling in Hrafnsfjörður, devoid of spoils or a leader. They found themselves increasingly less welcome the longer they stayed, until finally Mistress Kolbrún served them no other fare than tough whale-flesh, prompting them to make ready to leave. Since they had little pluck for sailing leaderless, weathering Horn in winter, they left their vessel in the boatshed at Skipeyri, where it had been stored for some time, and set off on foot in search of their leader, taking the shortest route northward over the mountains. Nothing is to tell of their journey until they came across Þorgeir by an inlet in the northern part of Hornstrandir, where he had settled into the little hovel of a crofter, whom he made his slave, along with the three crones in the man’s household. Þorgeir welcomed his companions gladly and ordered his slaves to serve them what food and drink they had, and asked the news of his sworn brother Þormóður Kolbrúnarskald. The men said that Þormóður was bedridden down south in the Jökulfirðir, infirm and nearly blind from raging headaches, so bad that he could not bear the slightest glimmer of daylight.
Þorgeir was weary of farm life on Hornstrandir and daydreamed of exploits yet to be accomplished, and now that his men had joined him again, he decided to get on the
move. He determined to visit the farmers in the region to discover what items of profit they had for stalwarts and Vikings. As they roamed from farm to farm, they discovered that the farmers gave them all they demanded, in terms of food, drink, and shelter. Yet whether it was because of people’s destitution in these northern abodes, or else because the farmers hid from them any commodities they had, Þorgeir’s gains from these places proved far less than he had hoped – disappointing, as well, were the inhabitants’ submissiveness and their unwillingness to hold their own against powerful men. Brave and valiant men, bent on spoils gained through stoutness of heart, had little business in those parts. Every time that the men of Hornstrandir were given the opportunity to defend their possessions by passage of arms, they gave the same reply: they had nothing to defend from such great and dauntless champions but the vermin crawling over them and the wind in their guts – nor did they have any arms to speak of but knives for flitching fish and saws for sawing driftwood. The deadly axes that they had inherited from their fathers were now little more than rusted junk.
Now the story moves eastward to Víðidalur, to the farm called Lækjamót, where there dwelt a farmer that most books name Gils, the son of Már. Farmer Gils was a great fisherman and hunter. In his youth he had sailed far and wide to trade. He was respected by his fellow merchants as bold and enterprising, and his voyages brought him substantial wealth. He was one of the finest men in his district, of those who were not chieftains or persons of rank. He was much in the habit of fishing and hunting in outlying places and on the commons, taking seabirds, big fish, and seals.
Report now spreads of a whale stranded to the east of Horn, on the Eastern Commons at the foot of the cliffs. Gils Másson and four of his slaves happen to be on a boat near where the whale washed ashore, and they are the first to begin flensing the carcass. Þorgeir Hávarsson hears of the stranding as well. He immediately loads a small boat with the tools and other things necessary for carving up whales, intending to acquire a supply of oil – a great commodity. Gils and his men have been butchering the whale for two days before Þorgeir lands his boat at the site. They greet each other and exchange a few words. Þorgeir then says:
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