Thordur returned to the site thirty years later. “Icelandic farmers have the good habit of calling an archaeologist when they are about to bulldoze an area of buried ruins,” he explained. “My friend Hilmar Jón Brynjolfsson used to farm near Thikkvabaejarklaustur. One day he called me to tell me he planned to dig drainage canals near the old cemetery in order to dry the land; he asked me if I wanted to come over and take a look.” The bulldozer dug several trenchlike ditches, two feet wide and six feet deep. Thordur was able to identify an outer wall of the monastery and parts of the pavement. The workmen also dug up a slab of basalt about a foot wide. “It was very worn on the surface,” Thordur recollected. “It was clearly a door sill which had been placed at the entrance of the monastery. It was probably quarried in the mountains nearby. They must have used a very robust sled to transport it all the way to Thikkvabaejarklaustur. It was a very inspiring stone: I imagined Saint Thorlacius and his fellow monks coming out and crossing themselves on the way to church at the start of a new day.”
In the course of several visits, Thordur found many other medieval artifacts stuck in the turf. He kept most of them under a glass casing in his museum at Skógar. Among the objects he showed me were a wooden spoon, a ladle and other kitchen utensils, old nails, a rusty axe, a twelve-inch door hinge, several crosses, pieces of frayed cloth, a comb made of whalebone, a raggedy black lace purse knitted with an inverted stitch. My favorite, however, was a single rather smart-looking suede shoe with a half sole.
Thordur showed me the road to Thikkvabaejarklaustur on the map and gave me a few pointers on how to avoid getting lost in the Mýrdalssandur, the great sand desert one crossed to reach the old site of the monastery. “Once you’ve seen the grounds make sure you drive over to my old friend Villi,” Thordur said. “He has a farm east of there, at Hnausar, by the Elvatn River. He knows all the old stories.”
After Skógar, the road followed the lower end of the Mýrdal Glacier. Mount Katla, whose ash buried Thikkvabaejarklaustur over the centuries, rises at the center of the snowy mass. We drove through the small town of Vik, then crossed the flat Mýrdalssandur, covered with gnarled stones, little pyramids of lava, fanciful sandcastles with turrets and pinnacles. At the end of what looked like a bizarre geological playground we crossed a dry riverbed and entered a turbulent landscape of hardened magma. But that scenery also ended abruptly and we found ourselves driving through green pastures flecked with Icelandic sheep. Thikkvabaejarklaustur could not be far, I thought; sure enough, in the distance, I saw the stern little Lutheran church, planted firmly on the ground where the ruins of the old monastery lay buried.
Thordur had told me that the walls of the monastery started immediately to the west of the church, but that I would not be able to see them because now the ruins were entirely covered by a thick layer of turf. I poked around and saw a few small fragments of ancient masonry sprouting here and there like mushrooms. Nothing else. I tried to imagine the place as it had once been, with its herbal gardens and vegetable patches, hot water bubbling in the cloister, succulent smells coming from the kitchens, monks rushing to Matins at the sound of Augustine’s bell. It turned into a melancholy effort; a mournful silence had settled over the grounds.
I did find the slab of basalt that, according to Thordur, had served as a door sill at the main entrance of the monastery in the time of the monks. The workmen who had dug it out during the drainage project in the eighties had planted it into the ground vertically. Now it stood there like a solitary tombstone.
Farmer Villi
ARNA AND I HAD BEEN on the road since early morning. A chilly wind was blowing down from the Mýrdal Glacier; it was getting late and I was ready to drive back to Reykjavik. Still, Thordur had insisted we call on his old friend Villi Eyjólfsson, the farmer over at Hnausar, so we continued to drive eastward, across the Kutha Fljot, which was once a deep fjord teeming with fish and bird life and was now a vast and muddy drainage field for the waters of the great southern glaciers. On the other side, the uneven terrain was carpeted as far as the eye could see with thick, emerald-colored moss. “We have entered the Green Planet,” Arna said in a monotone.
Villi lived in an isolated farm surrounded by rich pastures. I noticed there were no sheep grazing, however; no farm animals, no pickup truck in front of the house. How did Villi get around? The place was so remote. Arna and I pushed the door open and were about to make our way in when a very tall, broad-shouldered man shuffled forward, filling up the entire frame of the door. He had a warm smile. Thordur had told me Villi was in his mideighties, but he seemed younger than his age and he bore an air of distinction despite his baggy jeans and frayed checkered shirt.
Inside, Villi moved about like a trapped giant, feeling his way along the thin walls and the low plywood ceiling so as not to bump his head. He led us by a small kitchen with an old woodstove, a tiny, disordered bedroom, and into a sitting room with peeling wallpaper, a beat-up old couch, two chairs and a stool on which I noticed a dial telephone from long ago.
Villi settled on the couch. He turned out to be a natural storyteller, a true Icelandic bard who knew all the old sagas and all the family stories handed down from generation to generation by the farmers of southern Iceland. I asked him what he knew about Thikkvabaejarklaustur; he reached back into his seemingly inexhaustible memory and retrieved images from centuries ago that were so vivid as to seem drawn from his own life.
“It was a large monastery,” he said in his low, raspy voice. “As many as twenty-five monks lived there during its heyday. They came from Norway but also England and France and other parts of northern Europe because it was a great center of learning.” I mentioned Njál’s Saga to Villi, and he spoke about Njál as if he were speaking of a neighbor or a close friend who had met a tragic destiny. “He was a good man, a peaceful man, a great legal mind. But there were great feuds in this region and his enemies torched Bergthorshvol, his house over by the Ranga River. He died a horrible death, and so did his sons.”
Indeed they did. It said in the saga that Old Beardless Njál, who had the gift of foresight, was visited by a vision of his death on the eve of the attack at Bergthorshvol. “Strange things are happening to me,” he told his family. “I look around the room and imagine that I see both gable walls gone, and the table and food all covered with blood.” He was resigned to die. As his enemies set fire to the house, he told his wife, Bergthora, “We will go to our beds and lie down.” And to his foreman: “Now you must see how we lie down and how I lay us out, for I don’t intend to budge from this spot, no matter how much the smoke and the fire bother me—then you will know where our remains can be found.”
I thought of Villi and Njál as figures connected across the centuries, the hindsight of one man enmeshed in the other man’s foresight.
Villi also told me how Iceland’s greatest poem, Lilja (“The Lily,” symbol of purity), came to be written at Thikkvabaejarklaustur. “One day a terrible argument broke out at the monastery,” he said. “A brilliant but hot-tempered young monk by the name of Eysteinn Ásgrímsson beat up the abbot in a moment of fury. He was locked up in chains and the trial caused great scandal. During his time in jail, he repented and wrote this beautiful poem about the Passion of Christ.”
Lilja was a pioneering work in terms of poetic language and metric: one hundred stanzas, each stanza eight verses, each verse eight syllables. Most Icelanders read it in school and keep a copy of the book at home.
Thikkvabaejarklaustur was a wealthy monastery. “It owned rich agricultural lands and it had extensive rights to gather driftwood along the coast,” Villi told me. “There were as many as a hundred and forty farms nearby with whom the monks had regular dealings. These were sheep farms in the main, but the farmers grew corn and coarse oatmeal for their horses. In those days the monastery was by the water. The supply of fish was very plentiful, and so were game and bird eggs. The fishermen who cast their nets in the Kutha Fljot used currachs made of calfskin or sealskin, similar to those in wh
ich monks had sailed over from Ireland in the early days. The skin was pulled tight and tautened with tallow and the vessels were very seaworthy. There was a nice harbor in the Kutha Fljot. Many ships spent the winter there. They were mostly Norwegian merchants, but later, when the Norwegian realm went into decline, they came from Germany and especially England. They made their way up here at the end of the fourteenth century and established commercial links. They wanted a piece of the cod trade. They came for cod and they would spend the winter.”
I asked Villi about the hot springs Messer Nicolò described in his letter. “They may have dried up or gotten clogged up long ago,” he said. “There have been so many volcanic eruptions over the centuries in this region that the terrain has changed a great deal.”
The wind had picked up. It was getting dark but the lights in the house were still switched off. I asked Villi why he didn’t keep any sheep on his farm.
“I had plenty before I retired a few years ago. And cows and pigs and of course hens. The Icelandic hen was brought over by the first settlers around the year nine hundred. It is still with us,” he chuckled. Some years back it had been on the verge of extinction and Villi happened to own the very last of the Icelandic roosters. One day he got into his pickup truck and drove to Reykjavik with his rooster and he handed it over to the Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture so they could breed it. That’s how Villi saved the Icelandic hen.
The old farmer kept talking even as he faded in the darkening room. I could barely make out Arna anymore, a mere shadow sitting opposite me. Her long silences told me she was so absorbed by Villi’s stories that she was forgetting to translate.
The vintage dial phone rang with a shattering suddenness. Arna managed to switch the light on. Villi’s large hand groped for the receiver, and it was only after he had fumbled a good long while that I realized the old man was blind.
He spoke briefly on the phone. “It was Thordur,” he said, putting the receiver down with two hands. “He wanted to make sure that you had come by to see me.” He laughed. “As you can see I have friendly neighbors who take good care of me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Estotiland, Drogio and Icaria
AFTER SPENDING the summer in Iceland, Messer Nicolò rigged up his ships and headed back south.1 According to Nicolò the Younger, he did not make it through the following winter: “Being unaccustomed to the bitter cold, he fell ill and died soon after returning to Frislanda.” But Nicolò the Younger was mistaken: it turns out Messer Nicolò did not die in the North Atlantic after all. His paper trail in the Venetian archives shows that he was back in the city by the end of 1387. He did not stay idle very long. In January of the following year, he accepted the post of commandant in Methoni and Koroni—the two eyes of the Republic on the western coast of the Peloponnese. He continued to serve the country in a variety of offices, but his reputation, as I shall describe later on, was tarnished by charges of financial misconduct; eventually he was forced to withdraw from public life.
Icaria, Estotiland and Drogeo (sic) are the westernmost outposts in Nicolò the Younger’s chart of the North Atlantic. (illustration credit 6.1)
ANTONIO SUCCEEDED Messer Nicolò as commander of Zichmni’s fleet in Frislanda and stayed on another ten years, roughly until the end of the century. Typically, Nicolò the Younger suggested Antonio would have liked to return sooner to Venice. “But despite all his efforts and prayers, he was not allowed to come home because the enterprising and courageous Zichmni was determined to become the lord of the northern seas, and relied on him to achieve that goal.” Always the indispensable Venetian!
Antonio, the youngest of the Zen brothers, was a more elusive figure than either Carlo, the war hero, or Messer Nicolò, the rich merchant and navigator. I found it hard to track his earlier life in the Venice archives. He may have been the same Antonio Zen who succeeded Messer Nicolò as captain of the army in Romagna in 1359, but there was another Antonio Zen, a cousin, living in the city at the time, and since there was no patronymic attached I could not be certain. Perhaps he was the Antonio Zen who went to Cyprus in 1360 at the head of a merchant galley, although he would probably have been too young to lead such an important commercial expedition. There was little else to go on in the public record, suggesting he had not held important offices. Nor did he appear to have played an important role in the war against the Genoese, in which his two older brothers proved so instrumental.
I did find out he married a woman called Nicoletta; they had an only son, Pietro Dragone. After Messer Nicolò left Venice in 1383 on his journey to the Atlantic, Antonio and his young family moved into the large house at San Fantin with Messer Nicolò’s wife, Fantina, and their four children: Antonio, Giovanni, Chiara and Tommaso. It was shortly after his own family had settled in that Antonio joined his brother in the north.
HENRY SINCLAIR, meanwhile, was consolidating his power in the earldom. The conflict with his cousin and archenemy, Malise, had continued to fester after the failed assault in Shetland. It now came to a bloody end.
Malise made a formal claim on the estates he was occupying illegally. The Crown rejected it in 1386. The following year Malise obtained a pardon in exchange for a vow of submission and he eventually managed to get into Queen Margaret’s good graces. He and Henry were both in Denmark in 1389 to put their seal on the claim of Erik of Pomerania, Margaret’s nephew, to the twin throne of Norway and Denmark—the act that put a formal end to the old Norwegian realm. Interestingly, Malise came immediately after Henry in the order of precedence, suggesting his standing had risen considerably with Queen Margaret.
Shortly after his return to Shetland, Malise and several of his cohorts were ambushed and brutally murdered at Tingwall, the valley in the heart of Mainland, where the old Viking chiefs used to meet for their assemblies. It is impossible to say with certainty whether Henry had him killed. But in Shetland lore, it is generally assumed that he did.
During my visit to Shetland, I drove out to Tingwall along an old and narrow road that wound its way through the vale. The place had probably not changed much at all since the time of Malise’s murder. On one side of the road were several silvery lochs teeming with wild duck and guillemot; on the other, green hills and sheep. It was a beautiful drive, and it was easy to miss the rough-hewn block of granite that was said to mark the place where Henry’s cousin was hacked to death. It stood about eight feet high, right by the side of the road, and was entirely covered with green and grey lichens. There was no inscription, no sign of any kind—just a weather-beaten stone standing tall in the ancient landscape.
AFTER HIS murder, Malise’s estates went to his only surviving aunt, Isabella Sinclair—Henry’s mother. To make sure that he would inherit all Malise’s possessions at Isabella’s death, Henry then convinced his brother, David, and his sister, Elizabeth, to renounce the rights to their share in exchange for several estates in Scotland.2 In this way Henry strengthened his family’s position vis-à-vis the troubled Norwegian kingdom while maintaining a relative independence from the Scottish crown. Antonio wrote home admiringly that “Zichmni was worthy of immortal memory as much for his courage as for his statecraft.”
IN THE Zen narrative Antonio came across as an able and loyal second in command, one who probably thrived in the shadow of greater men. But he was also eager to leave his own mark, as his more charismatic brothers had already done. When the opportunity arose to lead an ambitious expedition across the ocean, he pursued it with enthusiasm.
In a letter to his family, Antonio wrote that a fisherman had made his way back to Frislanda after spending many years in rich and fertile lands across the ocean, and that his story was causing great excitement among the population.
Nicolò the Younger assured the reader he was faithfully reproducing the fisherman’s tale as Antonio related it in his letter. “I have merely substituted some archaic expressions and changed the style a little here and there,” he said. But his hand was perhaps busier than he let on, especially as he neatly
embedded the fisherman’s tale within the larger story of the Zen travels. In fact, his use of the “tale within a tale” technique throughout the book may have been a way for him to give rhythm and structure to the narrative while masking the lack of verifiable facts.
The fisherman’s tale itself generated so much controversy in later years that it deserves to be given in full. What follows is my translation of Nicolò the Younger’s version.
The Fisherman’s Tale
“FOUR FISHING BOATS went out to sea twenty-six years ago. They were caught in a storm and lost their way. When the storm finally abated after many days, one of the boats came in sight of an island called Estotiland, about a thousand miles to the west of Frislanda, and made a landing. The six men aboard were taken by the islanders to a beautiful and populous town. The king summoned his interpreters. None could understand the language of the foreign fishermen, save for one, who had been shipwrecked on the island some time before and spoke a Latin tongue. This man asked the six fishermen who they were and where they came from; he then repeated everything to the king, who asked that the men remain in the country. The fishermen did as the king wished, for they had no choice but to obey. They stayed five years and became familiar with the local language. One of them in particular (the fisherman who returned to tell the story) traveled to different parts of the island and says it is very rich in all manner of goods and is not much smaller than Islanda, but much more fertile as it is irrigated by four rivers that come down from a high mountain.
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