Our next work was Egil’s Saga, and sure enough, there was Gísli, my father. Egil can’t get along with his father. At a young age he is packed off abroad, seemingly a default, medieval solution for the difficult and heroic young men that Viking society produced. He travels to the courts of northern Europe and, through his skill as a poet, crafts a place for himself in the retinues of kings and chieftains.
Poets were prized in medieval Scandinavia. They were the propagandists of the day, recording the deeds and qualities of their leaders. And the most difficult poetic form to master was the skaldic poem, an intricate style that demanded great skill in the use of metaphor and grammatical construction.
Iceland is an island of poets, but of fishermen too. And this, of course, means that young men die. When Egil’s son is drowned, he locks himself away in a private room and refuses to eat or drink. He can’t go on. He prefers to share in his son’s fate. And his daughter Thordís asks to join him. She too would like to die. Egil is pleased that someone else understands him, and lets her in.
‘Well done, my daughter,’ he says. ‘We will die together.’
‘Yes. But one thing,’ she responds, ‘you must compose a poem for your son before you die. It would be wrong to leave him without one. Drink this cup of milk so you have the strength for it.’
It is a trick, of course, but a productive one. Egil empties the cup, and then composes ‘Sonatorrek’, or his ‘Lament for the Son’. It’s his most famous poem, and it begins with these two verses.
My mouth strains
To move the tongue,
To weigh and wing
The choice word:
Not easy to breathe
Odin’s inspiration
In my heart’s hinterland,
Little hope there.
My sorrow the source
Of the sluggard stream
Mind-meandering,
This heavy word-mead,
Poet’s power
Gold-praised, that
Odin from ogres tore
In ancient time.
When Egil feels his poetic craft coming back, there is a recovery, and soon the poem’s focus turns from the lost son to the father. The poem becomes a celebration of the poet’s own life, and indeed the role of poetry—gradually creation takes the place of loss. And so, when Egil finishes the poem, he feels he must perform it to the household. Otherwise, it will be lost. The suicide pact has been undone, and Egil is once again able to see himself as a member of the family.
And I, of course, was Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, only the most famous and daring of all the saga characters. He appears in Njál’s Saga alongside my namesake, Kári Sölmundarson. There are obvious reasons why Gunnar is popular, and why he has long captured the imagination of saga readers. He is fair, handsome, and agile. A great fighter and a bowman, and clearly a favourite among women. He swims like a seal. Almost a comic touch: he can jump as far backward as he can forward. He doesn’t mount his horse like other Vikings. Instead he runs up to it and uses his halberd to launch him into position.
Too good, almost. If ever a character needed a flaw to be sympathetic rather than just irritating, it is Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, and so the author of Njál’s Saga gives him three.
First, he falls in love with Hallgerð Longlegs, the most beautiful woman of her generation, but also the most fatal. Her first two husbands have been killed because of her, and Gunnar will, in part, die as a result of her obstinacy. She steals cheese from a neighbouring farm. Gunnar strikes her for it, and she vows to remember the blow.
Second, Gunnar dislikes killing more than other men do. This is a problem for a Viking, and particularly for one as able in the art of killing as Gunnar. He will always be challenged by his contemporaries, simply because he is so good.
Third, Gunnar ignores the warning of his most prescient friend, Njál, who tells him, firstly, that he must never kill twice in the same family, and, secondly, that if he does, he must accept whatever settlement is made for him by men of good will.
Of course, Gunnar does kill twice in the same family. The settlement made for him is to leave Iceland for three years, a sentence known at the time as lesser outlawry. As he and his brother, Kolskeg, ride towards the sea, where a ship waits to take them abroad, Gunnar’s horse trips and throws him. He looks up from the ground, back to his farm Hlíðarendi, and says: ‘How lovely the slopes are, more lovely than they have ever seemed to me before, golden cornfields and new-mown hay. I am going back home, and I will not go away.’
Shortly after, his enemies attack. For a long while, he is able to keep them at bay with his bow. Then his bowstring snaps. ‘Hallgerð,’ he calls out, ‘let me have some of your hair. I need it for my bow.’
‘Does much depend on it?’ she asks.
‘My life depends on it.’
‘In that case, let me remind you of the time you struck me. I refuse.’
And that was the end of Gunnar.
Waiting produces its own energy, I’m sure, and I found I was forever telling myself to be ready. For what, I wasn’t sure. I changed my enrolment from straight Arts to Arts/Law, and exchanged the sagas for lists of cases and statutes. The law was concerned with language, yes, but never for its own sake, and I ended up mixing with other law students who didn’t really suit the subject—frustrated musicians, writers, sportsmen even. They all came out of the exclusive schools, mainly Brisbane Boys Grammar, and had a preoccupation with The Smiths, The Housemartins, and Martin Amis—just about anything English, in fact. All flicked hair and end-of-the-world sarcasm.
Clayton was my entry point into this world of middle-class angst. He responded to the anger that I felt growing within me about Gísli, because, like me, he enjoyed being angry and didn’t really know what to do about it. Clayton sang like Morrissey, flicked his hair, and had formed a band made up of him and some med students. They watched Ren and Stimpy religiously and ironically, and smoked a packet of Marlboro Reds every day, like me. The credo was ‘be musicians, and do a law degree in your spare time’. We were, we thought, fucked-up but friendly. Or, not too unfriendly.
For me, it was a period of increasing introspection, and I have often thought of my twenties as alternating between learning about others’ achievements and despair at my own. Certainly, I changed from the gregarious boy whom Mum had likened to Gísli into someone more earnest and certainly less pleasant to be with. I now interpreted my part in the promise to Gísli’s secret as simple cowardice. I once mentioned to Clayton about Icelandic patronymics, and how I thought I might one day take Gíslason as my middle name—literally ‘son of Gísli’—if it were ever practical to do so; perhaps after Gísli died.
‘Your initials would be K.G.,’ he noticed. ‘How perfect for you: Cagey Reid.’
I had forgotten how to be charming, and I suppose like a lot of men in their early twenties, I had become awkward and fairly unappealing. But then, the law girls were mainly unappealing, too. You could already see them in silver four-wheel drives. There was a splinter group, a small, politically minded collaborative who formed WATL, Women and the Law. I had been at the first international women’s strike with Mum back in 1975, so it seemed okay to attend.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked one of them, Alyssa, when I strolled in.
‘This is WATL, isn’t it?’ She said it was. ‘Well, I’m here for that.’
‘Why? I wouldn’t have thought someone like you would want to hang out with a bunch of feminists.’
‘What if I’m a feminist, too?’ I asked.
‘That seems unlikely. Do you and Clayton spend your evenings talking about police interrogation of assault victims? Or is female circumcision more the topic of choice? Tell me. I’m fascinated.’
‘Is that the test for being a feminist?’
‘You guys don’t seem too worrie
d, that’s all. It’s going your way, isn’t it? It must be good to have a dick.’
‘The law hasn’t done me that many favours,’ I responded. ‘Nor my mother, I don’t think.’
‘Why don’t you tell me about that, then. Where are you coming from, Kári?’
I liked her. The accusatory tone was good. I needed it. She was the first girl since Jessica who told me that I was wrong. Every day, in fact. And it didn’t much matter about what. I was wrong about sex, family life, food, even cigarettes. It was better to roll your own, she said. And, yes, it was.
We began a relationship that would take me through the whole of my law degree, and my honours and masters years, when I finally realised that I was never going to make a good lawyer and returned to literature. And yet, we never quite managed to give our relationship a name. It was my fault. I set it up to be one of those relationships that would spend its life working out what it was, and most often what it couldn’t be. I couldn’t commit, but I couldn’t just be friends. That type of thing.
‘What is it that you want then?’ she would say, repeatedly.
‘I’m not sure. What sort of a question is that, anyway?’ I answered. ‘I want to do a PhD and I want to be an academic. I want to be a musician. I want to relearn Icelandic. I want to be with you, you know that.’
‘Every girl you ever know will be a hostage to Iceland. Why don’t you just go and live there? There’s nothing keeping you in Brisbane. There’s no rule that says you have to stay. You, of all people, should know that.’
‘Like I said, I want to start a PhD.’
‘And you have your mum, right? In Brisbane.’
‘I’m not doing a PhD for my mum.’
‘Are you sure? Just about everything you do is for her.’
‘Why do you have to bring this up?’
‘Well, that’s why you’re such a fuck-up. That’s why. Why don’t you just call your father and tell him that you’re going to end the secret? Don’t wait to go there. Stop waiting. Do you think someone’s going to come and pick you up and say: here’s your father, he loves you after all?’
It seemed hard, but I had sometimes said harder things to her. It was the way we were together, dark and direct. Often fucked-up and often unfriendly.
‘You’re scared of her, scared of this secret that she passed down to you,’ she went on. ‘And that’s why you’re scared of me. That’s why you’re scared of women.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You scare me in a million other ways.’
‘Good,’ she said.
It was all coming to a head, it seemed, but where would it end? Once, when I visited Mum and found she wasn’t home, I stood waiting on the thin cement walkway that ran along the doors of the apartment block. I was taking in the view over the western suburbs of Brisbane, towards the D’Aguilar Range, always hazy in the afternoons. And then I was looking down to the ground some way beneath me.
‘Am I a suicide?’ I asked myself, as though I existed apart from my own consciousness, as though a second self was lying against the ground far beneath me.
But it wasn’t my death that I needed, it was merely my father’s, in a manner of speaking. The spiral that was reaching its base ended with him. He was gone, just as he had never really been. It was the promise of fidelity and honour that had made him a father, and now I sensed that a different outlook was forming within me. It was a way of seeing Iceland that related the country to Australia, my mother, and me, rather than to his absence in our lives. The bridge to Iceland wasn’t Gísli, after all—I understood that now. If I returned to Iceland again, it could not be to find him.
The chance finally came in 1999, nine years after I had met my father at the president’s lodge. I began a doctorate in medieval Icelandic literature. As part of my early research, my university agreed to send me to Iceland for two months. The minute I received the news that I could go, I decided on two things, or at least decided that two things lay before me. I needed to go to Hlíðarendi, where Gunnar had made his decision to stay in Iceland, and I needed to meet my siblings, Gísli’s other children.
Unexpectedly, news then arrived that Gísli was unwell. He had Parkinson’s disease. My mother worried that it was genetic, and that I might be at risk, while I worried that it might be the end of any chance I had of disrupting the promise. Had I left it too long to break my word? More news came, that was out of date and out of order with his life in Iceland. His business had collapsed and there was a row, some kind of legal dispute, between the partners of his firm. Apparently, Gísli had lost his house because of money problems. And Ólafur, one of Gísli’s sons with his wife Ólöf, had died. A criminal case against the boy’s friends had ensued. The news was muddled: it came indirectly and unclearly. But it looked as though my father’s world was falling apart.
Around the same time letters arrived about Gunnar and Lilja, too. The first envelope contained letters from both Lilja and her granddaughter Björk, the one who’d enchanted me with her perm.
December 16. ’98
My dearest Susan,
Thank you for all your letters during the years. It has been a long time since I’ve responded to them, but now my granddaughter Björk is writing for me.
Now there is darkness in my life. You knew Gunnar had heart disease and was waiting for an operation. Well, in the morning of November 23, I went to the hospital because my health was not good and Gunnar had had a call from his hospital two weeks earlier that he should come the following day. So it was fine because then he didn’t have to worry about me alone at home these three days that I should be away. But it goes to my heart to tell you that he died a few hours after the operation, on the 24th.
I feel like an empty person, it was so unexpected. My health is very poor but fortunately I could go to the funeral. It was difficult but I had to, so I did. I don’t know anything about how my health is going to be, how long I will be here and where I’m going to be in the future. Our little house will be standing empty for some time, I’m afraid.
I hope you will keep in touch, you can send me letters addressed to Björk.
I send my best regards to Kári and ask the Lord to keep you both and thank you for everything.
Lilja
Dear Susan,
I want to write you a little note from myself. My grandma is taking all this by some incredible inner strength. Of course she cries a lot when she is alone but she doesn’t want us to see that. She is very sick now and we don’t know if she can be with us for a few hours on Christmas Eve, but we hope so. We’re all going to be at Lilja’s home.
There is a lack of Christmas spirit in the family, it has been a difficult year for us. But life goes on and we know that both my dearest grandfathers will look after us.
I want to thank you for your loyalty to my grandparents and hope you will send grandma news from you in the future.
I hope you and Kári will have a wonderful Christmas time and wish you a happy new year.
Björk
A second letter came not long after the first, it was from Björk.
14.03.99
Dear Susan and Kári,
I am sorry that I have not written earlier, but I have to tell you the tragic news that grandmother Lilja died on January 28th.
After grandfather’s death her condition worsened and she was never able to return home. During the last weeks it became clear that a recovery was unlikely but her spirits remained high.
She remained alert and had full consciousness until the last few hours. My mother stayed at her side until grandmother found her peace. She was never in pain and was up and about until the last week.
Unfortunately she had passed away when Kári’s letter arrived, but she often mentioned both of you and how much she valued your friendship and loyalty to her and grandfather.
I
f Kári puts the song he wrote in grandfather’s memory on a disc, I would like very much to buy the disc.
Finally I would like to express my gratitude to both of you for the dear friendship you showed my grandparents for all the years. I know it meant a lot to them.
I wish you both all the best for the future.
Yours sincerely,
Björk
Of all my mother’s friends, Gunnar and Lilja had been the least concerned about why she’d ended up in Iceland, or why she’d protected Gísli. Perhaps that is why they are still my heroes, and why as a parent I now understand that their generosity towards us was a parent’s generosity: it was unambiguous, non-mysterious, and calm. They had never shown any concern about my background, and in this omission they silently expressed what I still think are the twin rules of Icelandic society, the rules that my mother’s boss Garðar had once tried to teach her: all children are welcome, and we all have the right to stand alone. This, I have come to realise, is the paradox at the heart of so many things Icelandic: you are totally owned and totally on your own.
There were exceptions, of course. My father didn’t quite think all children were welcome, and the law had long fallen out of touch with common sentiment. But perhaps my brother and sisters would, and perhaps they would have enough of an independent spirit to make up their own minds about me. It was possible that they hadn’t inherited their father’s hesitancy, and instead still believed, as Gunnar and Lilja had, that the circumstances were never as important as the results.
Strange as it might sound, I firmly believed that at Hlíðarendi I would find an answer to what ailed me. I was convinced that this place, a remnant of the saga era, was the link between a life of waiting in Brisbane and a homecoming in Iceland. I had to find that spot where Gunnar had fallen off his horse, and had looked up the slope, and had decided to stay. Because that’s how you did it, I thought. That’s how you made decisions. Where did you find a horse like that, one that would throw you at just the right moment, except at Hlíðarendi?
The Promise of Iceland Page 12