Hanus undir Leitinum, a schoolteacher and native of Húsavík, was my guide. Growing up, he was one of five other Hanuses in the village, so instead of being called by his last name, Sorensen, he was called after his family’s house. He’d been the teacher in Húsavík for nine years; before that he taught at the secondary school in Sandur, Sandoy’s main village. I walked to meet him at the schoolhouse. The evening sun was in the west, coming over the hills, and laying down ribbons of lemon-silver light along the ridges and hummocks. The black-painted houses gleamed. Not all of them had turf roofs; some were constructed of rippled, galvanized metal, and painted floury aqua, dusty rose. Many had red doors and red trim. The dark-blue sea beat upon the shore. Everything was colorful, quiet, and very cold.
We were meeting at the schoolhouse to get out of the wind and to find a history book or two that mentioned Gudrún. It was a single room, with six tiny desks, a chalk blackboard, and posters of bears, seals, and whales. There was a library of picture books, novels, and information, a small, shiny black piano, and a brand-new computer, which had just arrived last month. The children, all three of them, already knew how to use it. Hanus told me he hadn’t touched it yet.
The population of Húsavík is ninety-five today, about what it was in Gudrún’s time and less than half of what it was when Hanus was growing up here fifty years ago. After elementary school the children go to the middle school in Sandur and then to Tórshavn to study. Few who study in Tórshavn or Copenhagen return to Húsavík. Every year more people move away. “You don’t notice it so much in the summer,” Hanus said. “People still keep their houses, and they come back for holidays. But in the winter, when you take a walk and so many houses are dark, then you notice it.”
Hanus began to tell me about Gudrún, and to translate patiently from a Faroese history book that showed diagrams of how the houses at her farm once looked. He was tall and powerfully built, with a calmness and ease about him. He wore a darned wool sweater and a shirt whose cuffs were frayed: well-used clothes.
He explained that so much is known about Gudrún because six letters have been preserved from 1405. These documents concern the settlement of her estate. Gudrún not only outlived her husband but her two children as well; her estate went to relatives in Bergen and Shetland. The letters enumerate her properties and the rents she derived from them, as well as her possessions in Húsavík: silver platters, jewelry of gold and silver, fine clothes and headdresses, the house and the farm, horses and sheep.
By the fourteenth century, the Viking age was long over, and farming and trade were what mattered. Gudrún’s ships would have traveled regularly between the Norwegian mainland and the Faroes, and perhaps farther afield, to England, Spain, and Constantinople. She was no Grace O’Malley; it’s unlikely she captained her ships. But like Grace, she was a trader, amassing wealth by sea. I imagined Gudrún, like Christian Robertson, keeping a firm handle on her business. She would have had a grasp of geography much different from my own, and an understanding of weather as something to be reckoned with, not just ignored.
It was pleasantly sunny in the schoolhouse, and we sat for a long time and talked before venturing out into the chill so Hanus could show me what remained of Gudrún’s estate, now part of the village. Around a large courtyard was a longhouse where Gudrún and her family had lived; across from the house were kitchens and storehouses for food. Still standing, too, were the foundations of a hayloft and a barn, and several outbuildings, probably once a washing house, a bakery, stables. Gone was the arch over the entrance to the courtyard, under which Gudrún would have ridden her horse to church. The church was only a few hundred feet away, but highborn women always rode. The church that now stood was the third church in that spot. It was wood not stone, painted white, with a steeple. Gudrún’s bones lay beneath.
Not far away was a group of magical little boathouses built of drystone boulders. Each had a heavy green hat of turf pulled down over a weather-polished wooden door and large stone lintel. The doors had beautiful wooden latches and locks. Beyond the boathouses, the gray silk breakers rolled rhythmically onto a smooth sand beach. A band of twenty black-and-white oystercatchers stood in lines, all facing the ocean, as if they were a tuxedoed concert audience waiting for the symphony to begin.
The fog had mostly receded, rolling up and back over the mountains like soft white sheets being taken off green armchairs. The bay was clear of large rocks, and the wide sand beach would have been a welcoming place to pull up a broad-beamed, shallow-draughted sailing ship, loaded with timbers and goods. The valley was marvelously green and flat, with a river running right through it. Before the Black Death the population had lived on one side of the river; afterward they built homes on the other side. The mountains closed in the valley, but unlike other parts of the Faroes where the peaks were often sharp black basalt, these were flattened on top. The mountains looked like green anvils hammered down by weather.
After leaving Hanus, I walked up and down the beach, imagining one of Gudrún’s merchant ships appearing on the horizon and coming into shore. In autumn the ships were rolled up on logs into shelter for the winter, to be repaired and retarred. In the spring they would set off again with sheepskin, dried meat, and grain. It’s believed that in those days the climate was somewhat drier and warmer; fodder could be grown to overwinter animals indoors. Gently sloped, treeless, bright green mountains surround the valley. At least two dozen waterfalls, some short and trickly, some much grander, leak out of the hillsides. I could see sheep. From this angle, there was no depth perspective: Two big white lambs seemed to be standing directly on top of their mother. Baaing and bleating, suddenly they rushed down to her, as if falling from a green sky, and buried themselves in her coat.
The sun was still high at this northern latitude. It was not a blaze of sun; it diffused through the sea mists as if silver and gold were being gently churned from the waterfalls and sprayed into the air. The combination of colors was electrifying: the jade green hills, the silvery gold light, the black houses with green grass roofs. There were no sounds but the round roll of the surf on the shore and the squashed-ducky cries of the oyster catchers. Back in Gudrún’s day there would almost always have been ships and longboats out to sea; I strained my eyes to see one on the horizon. I imagined her standing on the shore, waiting day after day for her husband to return. Then, I had another vision, a woman rowing.
All over Tórshavn hung posters for a film called Barbara that showed a woman pulling the oars of a small boat in the direction of a merchantman sailing off into the fog. The film came from a classic Faroese novel about a captivating heroine who enchanted, then betrayed, a pastor sent from Copenhagen. The novel, in turn, was based on the real story of a woman called Beinta, who’d had a habit of marrying clergymen in the eighteenth century. Although the poster was misleading—Barbara/Beinta was not a seafarer—there had been a famous Barbara in Faroese myth, a sea sorceress.
The southernmost island of Suduroy was where this mythical Barbara of Sumba had lived. She’d been tried as a witch, but the judge dismissed the case on the grounds that she was too beautiful to be tarred. According to legend she once had a contest with the sorcerer Guttorm to see whose spells were stronger. Barbara raised such a storm while Guttorm and his sons were at sea that the waves turned blood red. When Guttorm reached shore, he found Barbara sitting on a hillside by a stream, her long yellow hair loose on her shoulders. Guttorm cut off her hair, and thus vanquished much of her power. He bound her to a chair, put it on the roof, and called up a storm from the northeast. When she was finally let go the next day, her spirit was broken. That’s pretty much the message of the novel and film, too, though the film is more ambiguous about Barbara’s punishment. She’s allowed to row off endlessly into the sea after her lover instead of returning, humiliated, to Tórshavn.
I had to admit that it was a fine thing to walk around Tórshavn and see my name emblazoned everywhere. Barbara as a name had fallen out of favor in the United States, as
dated now as Gertrude or Hazel of my mother’s generation. Barbaras have been around all century, but the bulk of them were conceived in the forties and fifties. In the United States I’ve noticed that people rarely call me by my full name; it’s too much of a mouthful. They want to call me Barb. Some of my friends call me just B. In Spain my name sounds lovely, with the r’s rolling through it like thunder—no accident that St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery. My younger brother, of course, always pointed out that one of the meanings of my name is stranger. Foreigner is how I prefer to think of it, not barbarian.
I stood on the shore in this lonely place, thinking about the Barbaras of old, and about Hanus undir Leitinum. I was thinking about names and naming, about being so firmly attached to a place that you took its name, that you were of it. Two of my grandparents, immigrants from Ireland and Sweden, came from a peasantry that was once part of the land, and they put down roots in the Midwest. But my parents moved west for new opportunities, and my brother and I never considered staying in Long Beach. I was more rooted in the Pacific Northwest than I’d ever been in Southern California.
Yet if I could take the name of my family home, I would choose one of the wonderful street names that some fanciful developer had given to my childhood neighborhood: Monlaco, Gondar, Faust, Senasac.
Barbara of Gondar, that had a nice ring.
FIVE HUNDRED years before Gudrún sent her ships far and wide from Húsavík, another powerful woman traveled through the Faroes and stayed some time before sailing on to Iceland. Her name was Audur djúpúdga, Aud the Deep-Minded. Her father was Ketil Flat-Nose; one of her sisters was called Jorunn Wisdom-Slope. Aud’s story is told in the two primary sources of Icelandic history, Ari the Wise’s twelfth-century Book of the Icelanders and the Book of Settlements, compiled during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, where she’s remembered as one of the four most important settlers in the new country.
We also know of Aud from the Laxdæla Saga, where she’s called Unn. According to the saga, Ketil Flat-Nose was a powerful lord in Norway, who decided to leave the country, like many well-born provincial chieftains, rather than submit to King Harald Fine-Hair, who was trying to unite Norway by destroying other seats of power. Ketil’s two sons, Bjorn and Helgi, set off for Iceland to make their fortunes, while Ketil took the rest of his kinsmen and women to Scotland. Aud married Olaf the White, a Norse-Irish king. He was killed in battle, as was her son, Thorstein the Red. An early chapter in the Laxdæla Saga describes her decision to abandon Scotland and join her brothers in Iceland:
When she learned that her son had been killed she realized that she had no further prospects there, now that her father, too, was dead. So she had a ship built secretly in a forest, and when it was completed she loaded it with valuables and prepared it for a voyage. She took with her all her surviving kinsfolk; and it is generally thought that it would be hard to find another example of a woman escaping from such hazards with so much wealth and such a large retinue. From this it can be seen what a paragon amongst women she was.
The ship constructed for Aud’s voyage to Orkney and the Faroes and her transatlantic voyage to Iceland was a knarr or hafskip—an ocean ship. These were seagoing trading vessels, smaller versions of the langskips, the great sailing galleys with which the Vikings harried and plundered Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth. These trading vessels were clinker-built and broader in the beam than longships; they were usually about fifty feet long, and had a curved prow, without the dragon head of the fighting longships. They carried one large square sail of hide or thickly woven cloth, and were steered by a side rudder. The tackle and anchor were made of walrus hide. The cargo was stored in an open hold and covered with ox hides. There were few oars, as the ocean ship wasn’t made for battle; it was a load-bearing sailing vessel, capable of carrying from forty to fifty people, as well as livestock and supplies. Each voyager had something called a hudvat, a hammock in which they carried their possessions and which offered shelter when emptied. No fires could be set at sea; those onboard ate dried fish and meat and drank sour milk and beer. It was with this ship that the Norse people colonized Iceland, one of the largest planned migrations of medieval times.
I STOOD on the deck of the Norröna as we sailed out of Tórshavn’s harbor on a bright evening. There were dark maroon clouds to the north, but from deck the town looked charming with its grassy-roofed houses of red, black, and blue. I wasn’t sorry to be leaving; I was eager to move on to Iceland, a crossing of about fifteen hours. The Norröna was carrying a by-now thoroughly weary assembly of a thousand or so passengers, a number of whom had started their voyage in Denmark days ago. The ship was powered by huge engines and navigated using GPS and computers. There is always romance in crossing the sea; no matter how large the ship, it is always so very much smaller than the ocean. Yet for most of the voyage passengers are encouraged to turn their minds to other things than looking at the horizon and contemplating the vastness of the deep. The Norröna lacked the amenities of a first-class cruise ship, but it had a bar and a video parlor, both of which were heavily in use.
The journey of Aud the Deep-Minded
I’d already investigated my cabin and found it lacked a certain mystery with another person occupying the bottom bunk. She was Norwegian. She said she’d been on the ship from Bergen, or about twenty-five hours by now, and just wanted it to be over. The cabin smelled of her toiletries and some packaged fish cakes that she must have brought from Norway.
The wind grew stronger as we sailed north alongside and through the Faroes, and the rain began to spill like shards of stained glass from the gilt-lined maroon and indigo storm clouds. For a while the view was glorious, and the dedicated photographers were on hand with expensive equipment to capture the dramatic chiaroscuro effects. The clouds crashed together in brass-edged cymbals of purple and rust, and the mountains, vivid green below and black above, seemed to rise straight out of the sea. But after being lashed with freezing rain for half an hour, I was too numb to properly appreciate the splendor of the ongoing, ever-darkening sunset, and had to retreat to the cafeteria.
In Viking days, of course, I wouldn’t have had that option. Transatlantic voyages took place mainly in the summer months, but as I’d come to realize, summer in the North couldn’t always be depended on. The Laxdæla Saga tells us that Aud’s journey went well, though when they made land in the south of Iceland, their ship was wrecked. Most of the crossings from Norway or the Faroes to Iceland and back again were successful. Yet the sagas report enough stories of disaster and shipwreck to remind us what a hazardous journey it could be. I considered this as I sat at a table in the cafeteria with a bowl of soup before me. Outside rain slashed and slammed against the windows, and a murky purple dimness surrounded our ship. The jagged peaks of the Faroes began to recede until we were out of sight of land.
The flexible hafskip rarely swamped or foundered, for the simple reason that the sailors kept the prow to the waves. When a fair wind was blowing, the ship could make good time, but when the fair wind stopped or was replaced by squalls and contrary winds, or worse, thick fog, a ship might drift for weeks in the open sea. Sailors who lost their bearings were said to be in a state of hafvilla. As the Laxdæla Saga tells us in the story of another voyage: “They met with bad weather that summer. There was much fog, and the winds were light and unfavorable, what there were of them. They drifted far and wide on the high sea. Most of those on board completely lost their reckoning.”
Dead reckoning was one of the main methods of Norse navigation. Over a long sea voyage, sailors were able to keep a remarkably good record of where they were and how far they had come. With a fair wind they could travel 144 nautical miles a day. In summer they used the sun to give them their latitudinal bearings, and in spring and fall, the pole star. When in sight of land they were careful to note distinctive landmarks and commit them to memory. They also noticed varieties of sea birds and whales to give them a sense of how far north they were. Icebergs,
unwelcome as they were, oriented them as well.
Still, what would it have been like to be on a wooden ship with a single sail in the midst of a North Atlantic storm? Especially a ship loaded with people, farm animals, timber for building, goods for trading? A few long kayaking trips in Puget Sound and along the east and west coasts of Vancouver Island had made me appreciate the strength of currents and the power of the wind to stir up waves. A kayak is a flexible boat, low in the water, difficult to capsize, but it is still not reassuring to see a regiment of dark-gray waves approaching. My Canadian friend Nancy and I had once made an ill-fated expedition to one of the northern Gulf Islands from the mainland of British Columbia. Midway across the channel a thirty-five-knot gale rose suddenly. A passing water taxi had his window blown out by the force of the wind. It was this fortuitous loss that enabled the boat’s captain, Mike, to see our two kayaks battling through ever-increasing and ever-higher waves. He persuaded us, meeting little resistance, to let him pull our kayaks onboard. At the time, we experienced it as an ignominious failure. In retrospect we realized we were lucky to have been spotted by Mike (who was tremendously pleased to write in his logbook, “Saved two female kayakers”).
In the North Atlantic, in the Middle Ages, there would have been no passing water taxi. There would have been no weather radio, no GPS. You could call “Mayday” all you wanted, but no one would come. Of course, this made the Norse much better sailors than we are now.
The Pirate Queen Page 17