The Greenlanders

by Jane Smiley

  In addition to this, one of the skraeling boys often followed Thordis around, sometimes from a distance and sometimes closer at hand, although if the girl were to wave him away and make faces, the boy would run off in seeming fright. Neighbors who knew something of the skraelings declared that these demons especially admired stoutness in a woman. And it was true that there were no women among the skraelings quite as imposing as Vigdis and Thordis.

  Vigdis declared that demons could not be bribed, for, as she had heard from Nikolaus the Priest, if a demon thought that he could get something from you, he would always come back for more, until he had reduced your wealth to nothing. Therefore, said Vigdis, she would give the demons no milk and no cheese, as some of the farmsteads did, and she would receive none of their goods into her storehouses. A few Greenlanders had gotten into the habit of trading cloth and butter to the skraelings for hides and tusks that the Greenlanders could no longer get through hunting, since journeys to the Northsetur had ended. But Vigdis would have none of these.

  Erlend said that the demons must be frightened away, and he persuaded Hafgrim Hafgrimsson of Eriks Fjord, who had married a skraeling woman, to come and talk to the skraelings for him. Hafgrim did this, and he told the skraelings that Erlend and Vigdis would injure or kill anyone found on Ketils Stead thereafter, and for a day or so the skraelings stayed away, but then they returned, like maggots to a rotting carcase, and of course Erlend had no power to have them killed, because the Greenlanders had few weapons at this time, and had fallen far from the warrior days of Erik the Red or Egil Skallagrimsson and had little prowess in battle.

  Erlend’s already irritable nature was not improved by the summer’s difficulties with the skraelings, and when, in the autumn, they departed as mysteriously as they had come, he was not made any more pleasant by their absence. And one day in the autumn, Mikla, the new mare from Gunnars Stead, was found in Erlend’s horsefield with his stallion. Erlend determined that the mare was in season, and when he led the horse back to Gunnars Stead, he demanded of Gunnar the payment of two good lambs for the breeding, for, he said, a foal by his stallion would be better than any horse Gunnar had, and it was right that Gunnar should pay well for the privilege. At this Gunnar laughed and said, “Neither Ketil Erlendsson nor Erlend Ketilsson paid Thorleif for the breeding of Ketil the Unlucky, and I would follow the same rule. Unruly mares who stray get to keep what they find.” Erlend was little pleased with this reply, and came toward Gunnar as if to strike him, but then Olaf appeared nearby, in the doorway of the dairy, and Erlend stepped back, saying, “After all, there will be time enough at the Thing to discuss the matter.” Gunnar’s remark went around the district, and folk considered it neatly said. But men cajoled Erlend into dropping his suit before the spring, because in that time breeding arrangements between farms were quite informal, and Erlend’s horse was not considered such a good horse as to deserve payment for his services. Nonetheless, the ill feeling between the two farms, which had seemed to subside a little, now flourished again, and it was a bad business.

  In this autumn, Gizur the lawspeaker of Brattahlid died. He was very old, and left no children, and so at the Thing the Greenlanders chose Osmund Thordarson, who lived at another large farm at the head of Eriks Fjord, to be the lawspeaker. Osmund was an enterprising fellow, a good friend of Bishop Alf, and the nephew of Gizur Gizursson. Few cases now came to the Thing, and farmers from the distant fjords began to declare that they had too much to do to make the long trip. Gardar was more centrally located, and so folk seeking conversation and trade began going more and more to Gardar for Easter, which came just before the beginning of spring work, and for the feast of St. Michael, which came after haying and the autumn seal hunt. Many also went at Yule on skis, if the fjords were frozen solid and the snow had a good crust on it. All who came noted the changes that had taken place at Gardar, and most were pleased, for although there was more bending of the knee than before, not only to the bishop, but to Jon his vicar, there was also so much activity, so many priests and boys going hither and thither, so many well-favored beasts, so many buildings that had been put into good repair, and so many new and beautiful things in the residence and in the cathedral, that the Greenlanders said to one another that the Church would never abandon them again.

  Bit by bit, the bishop had learned the ways of the Greenlanders, and often judged cases as the Greenlanders themselves would have judged them. The only thing to be said against him was that he was somewhat too strict about fast days, and not quite strict enough about the “wife” of Nikolaus of Undir Hofdi church, who was really his concubine, but had lived with him for so long that she went about with him openly, and even spoke for him on all subjects, including those of proper practices and observances. In addition to this, one of the Gardar servingwomen began spending time with Petur, the plague priest, who, it was said, had once been married. The bishop allowed this, too, and, in fact, Petur still ministered to as many or more of the Greenlanders than he had before, for he was considered a kindly man, discreet, and a merciful confessor.

  Pall Hallvardsson came often to Gunnars Stead, and became friends with, first, Birgitta Lavransdottir, who chattered and joked with him as a child might, and then with Gunnar and the rest of the household. He especially enjoyed hearing Gunnar tell the tales he had learned from Ingrid, and once in a while he would tell a tale of his own, which the folk enjoyed although they were strange narratives about people with odd names who lived in lands far to the south, where there was no snow at all. The Gunnars Stead folk praised Pall Hallvardsson for being a good teller of tales, but he only laughed and said that he had read the tales of other men in books, and at that he hardly remembered the details. Gunnar declared that he was surprised to hear of such books, because the only books he had ever seen contained prayers and lists of rules, nothing else. Such were the books Olaf had carried with him when he first came to Gunnars Stead. Pall Hallvardsson said that he would bring with him on his next visit a book of excellent tales that he himself owned, and this he did. The book was called in Latin “Metamorphoses,” and from it Pall Hallvardsson related a tale, rendering the Latin into Norse as he spoke. This was a book he happened to have, he said, but there were other books in the bishop’s library, and some of these were already written in Norse, both histories of the Norsemen and histories of others translated by Icelandic monks at Skalholt and Holar.

  Now Gunnar quit his spinning and came over to Pall Hallvardsson and took the book into his hands. It was more elaborate than Olaf’s books had been, with small pictures on some of the pages in faded but attractive colors. Pall Hallvardsson said that he himself had copied the book as a student, and that a friend of his had drawn the small pictures. This had taken place in Ghent, among the Belgians. After a while, Gunnar handed back the book and asked to hear another of the stories, and so Pall Hallvardsson leafed through the pages, found one, and began again to translate what he found there. It was a story about a fox and a cock, and Olaf and Birgitta found it very funny. Gunnar laughed, but said it was a child’s story, not like the tales of Icelanders and Greenlanders he had had from Ingrid. Pall Hallvardsson asked for one of these, and so Gunnar related the tale of Atli, as they tell it among the Greenlanders, where it is very well known and one of the favorite tales.

  There was a woman called Gudrun, he said, and she was the sister of Gunnar and Hogni, who were great heroes and very wealthy men in the time of Egil Skallagrimsson and Erik the Red. Gudrun, he said, was married to a rich farmer called Atli, who lived in the east, according to the tale, but this probably meant the east of Iceland, since there is no other mention of this Atli among the Greenlanders. Atli, too, had a great farmstead with a multitude of sheep and cows and horses, as well as rich furnishings inside a large farmhouse with high wooden beams, as high as those at Gardar, and many rooms. He also had many servants, but even so, he was not content, and was resolved to have the wealth of his wife’s brothers, which was in the form of gold and silver. And so he ordered his wi
fe to invite her brothers to the Yuletide feast, and since he kept his designs a secret, she did so, and they came alone on their horses to the farmstead of their sister’s husband, eager in anticipation of great feasting, with much beer and ale as well as meat.

  As soon as Gudrun led them into the farmhouse, Atli’s servants seized the two men and tied them up, and Atli came to them and demanded to know where the treasure was hidden, and Atli threatened Gunnar with death, and with the death of his brother if he did not tell, but Gunnar did not tell. Then Atli told Gunnar that Hogni had indeed been killed, and that there was no use holding out, for Hogni had divulged the whereabouts of the treasure before dying, and so Gunnar said for Atli’s servants to bring him Hogni’s heart on a trencher. Since the servants had not killed Hogni, for he was a prodigious fighter, they seized one of their own men and put him to death and cut out his heart, which they brought to Gunnar. The heart, however, quivered on the trencher, and Gunnar declared that this was not Hogni’s heart, but the heart of a coward, and so Atli himself subdued Hogni, and cut out his heart and brought it to Gunnar. And Gunnar recognized the stout heart of his brother, and declared that now he would never speak, because now only he knew the secret. At this he took his own knife and cut out his own tongue. Then Atli and his men seized Gunnar and threw him into a snake pit, where he was done to death by adders and other poisonous snakes.

  That night Atli went to his bed very drunk, and did not notice the sword that his wife had placed between them. And after he was asleep, she rose up and plunged the blade into him. Then she opened the door of the farmstead, roused all the dogs and sent them outside, and burned Atli and his servants in their beds.

  Gunnar paced back and forth while telling this tale, for it was one of his favorites, and he got great enjoyment from it. At the end of it, Pall Hallvardsson smiled. “This is a bloody tale,” he said, “not much fit for a priest, except as an exemplum of the lives of men before the coming of Christ as their Savior.”

  “Is it not true,” asked Gunnar, in an agitated voice, “that men are still very greedy and murderous, even those who go to the church every Sunday and make themselves good friends with the priests?”

  “If there are such men, even so,” said Sira Pall, “God thinks ill of a man who cherishes an enemy in his breast, and fondles the injuries done to him by others as if they are treasured possessions.”

  “It seems to me that Gudrun’s tale is a fine one, for when I tell it, my breast swells for the injuries done to her, and her bold resolve in avenging herself.” After this, they stopped talking of this tale, and Gunnar asked Pall Hallvardsson to show him some of the pictures and the words in his little book.

  Now Nikolaus the Priest became very ill, and took to his bed for almost the entire winter. This illness was the occasion for even more frequent visits by Pall Hallvardsson, for he was sent by the bishop to care for the parishioners of Vatna Hverfi, which was a populous district. On one of these visits he brought with him a book of tales written in the Norse tongue, and he began to teach Gunnar to read, and Gunnar was a much more avid student than he had been many years before with Olaf. The result was that by the time Nikolaus the Priest was on his feet again in the spring, and Pall Hallvardsson stopped coming, Gunnar could read most of the book he had brought, and Birgitta, who was younger and sharper-eyed, could read all of it, so that between them they knew all of Pall Hallvardsson’s tales better than he did. When this became known in the district, there was much talk, for everyone knew Gunnar Asgeirsson to be lazy and dull. Some attributed his new knowledge to the vision of Our Lady in the Gunnars Stead homefield, and others said that he was merely coming late to his wits. Most people talked about it for a little while and then forgot the whole thing, for, they said, knowledge of reading was small and useless knowledge, anyway, and without Olaf no books would keep the Gunnars Stead folk from starving as they nearly had done before.

  In this winter there was a great sickness, and many people died. The course of the illness was swift, lasting only three or four days, and often it was the old people and the children who survived and those in the strength of their years who died. The first sign was always great vomiting, so that the victim could not keep the least drop of sourmilk or bit of meat inside, but must heave it all up as soon as he tasted it. Accompanying this was a great fever, so that the person seemed to be aflame within his flesh, and could not stand the touch of any hand on his cheek or even the weight of the lightest coverlet. In these signs it was not a little like other vomiting ills that came every so often, but much more severe.

  One of the first to take sick and die was Thordis of Ketils Stead, and at her funeral, Pall Hallvardsson, who was still sharing the duties of Nikolaus the Priest, preached a sermon about Thordis’ red dress and her lively ways, that had seemed to bode years of good health and prosperity, and had brought her nothing but the grave. And so, he said, are we all. And people of the district were much cast down by the weight of this sermon and there was much talk of the plague in Norway. Also at Ketils Stead, Geir Erlendsson died of the sickness, and then people began taking sick and dying everywhere in the district, usually one or two at each farmstead. At Gunnars Stead, Maria, the wife of Hrafn, died, and Birgitta and Olaf got sick, but managed to survive, although Birgitta was very weak, and stayed near to her bed for many days. Petur, the plague priest, also died, and two of the bishop’s singing boys, and two of the other boys as well, so that services were not so elaborate as they had been. Pall Hallvardsson and the bishop himself also fell ill, but Pall Hallvardsson would take nothing but water from a tarn high in the mountains, and soon recovered, and so the bishop followed his example and recovered also.

  The sickness did not depart from the Greenlanders until after Easter, and many farms were left with but one or two recuperating folk to work the fields, tend to the lambing and calving, and oversee all the spring work, so in this spring, a few farms were abandoned, as it happened never to be worked again, and on many others calves and lambs and kids were lost through neglect and the grass was left to grow in the fields however it might. In this summer, Gunnar first left his spinning and his lazy ways and worked long days in the fields doing tasks he was unaccustomed to and had little talent for.

  Shortly before the morning meal, he would come to Olaf in his bedcloset and ask what was to be done that day, and Olaf would say, for example, that Gunnar should walk along the south wall of the homefield and replace any stones that might have fallen, and Gunnar would exclaim at what quick work that would be and go out into the chill morning light. But the walking would be heavy in the snow, and the stones weighty and difficult to fit, so that some he managed to put back would fall out again as he turned away. At last, toward mid-day, Birgitta would go out with his food and find him staring at a stone, seeking to find the proper turning for it with his eyes, and she would come in and say that he was doing well enough, and would surely finish very soon. Or he would be set to rake up the manure in the cowbyre, and he would rake it up under the feet of the cows themselves, so that they would flatten and scatter it before he was finished. When the grass turned green shortly after Easter, it was Gunnar who took down the last vestiges of the byre wall and carried the cows into the homefield. Hrafn and his sons, who did not take the sickness, assisted the ewes at lambing, but Gunnar had to deliver the three calves, one of whom presented hind legs first and was lost, but Hrafn and Olaf, who rose weakly from his bed, managed between them to save the cow. Now Olaf began getting up more frequently and coming out of the farmhouse, and then he began turning his hand to a little work, helping Gunnar here and there, more and more often, especially after Hrafn and his sons herded the sheep into the hill pastures and Gunnar and Olaf were alone on the farm, and the result was that when haying came around, Gunnar had not lain late in his bed one morning since the beginning of Lent, and there was much laughter about this.

  When in the summer the representative and ombudsman of King Hakon and Queen Margarethe arrived in a ship from Norway, he found t
he settlement much depleted. The king’s two farms, Foss in the south, and Thjodhilds Stead, in Kambstead Fjord, had fallen into great disrepair, and Kollbein Sigurdsson, for that was the name of this ombudsman, was not a little put out to find that the Greenlanders could not rebuild his buildings and dig out his water system at once. He kept his great tapestries rolled up and his golden vessels wrapped and put away at Gardar, and worked his fields along with his sailors. He was a man of choleric temper who had left a prosperous district in Norway and come to Greenland after incurring the displeasure of Queen Margarethe herself, it was said, though the full tale of this did not get about quickly enough to suit the curiosity of the Greenlanders.

  Many farmers in Vatna Hverfi district and in the district of Hrafns Fjord declared that there was much to be said for settling one’s disputes within the district and being well out of sight of the king’s tax gatherer, no matter how highly the king himself was held in respect.

  Not long after the arrival of the ship, a man in sailor’s clothing appeared at Gunnars Stead and declared that he was known there, but neither Birgitta nor Gunnar nor Olaf recognized his face or his name, although they gave him refreshment and invited him to stay for the night, as decent folk do with travelers. Margret was away in the mountains, gathering herbs, for Birgitta was with child, and the child, said Margret, did not seem to be thriving. As it was summer, Margret did not return until late, after Olaf and Birgitta had gone to their bedclosets. Only Gunnar was sitting up with the sailor, asking him of his adventures in Norway and elsewhere, and telling him of the deaths of Asgeir and Ingrid. They were sitting out of doors in the long rays of the late sun when Margret appeared carrying her bag and striding toward them. After a few moments, she stopped, turned, and disappeared. Some time later, she came up behind them, from the direction of the steading, and she set on the bench before them Gunnar’s little boat, still neatly carved, but now missing two sailors and the high knob of the bowsprit. Then she said, even before Gunnar could speak, “Good evening, Skuli Gudmundsson, welcome to Gunnars Stead.” Now Gunnar, too, remembered who Skuli was, for the little boat had been his favorite plaything as a child, and he embraced the visitor.