The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  Our eyes went back to the art books, where in the heavily patterned rooms of red and dark blue, the white flesh of captive women shone like silk.

  NOT FAR from Steinunn’s flat is the cathedral named after Turkish Gudda’s husband. Hallgrím’s Church rises up from a square that, violently windswept as it was when I approached on a summer’s day, must be a terrible challenge to cross on a dark, snowy winter morning. The steeple is a beacon; it stands over two hundred feet tall. Inside, the church holds twelve hundred people. It has an airy plainness of purpose, its whiteness unrelieved by iconic decoration. Nothing could be more different from the swirls and flourishes of Arab color and form I’d been looking at in Steinunn’s photographs.

  I sat in a hard pew, relieved to be out of the wind, and read the small pamphlet about the church. Without knowing the story of Turkish Gudda, I would have been more receptive to the description of Hallgrím: “He influenced the nation’s spiritual development perhaps more than any other person.” There was no mention of his early adulterous romance, or indeed of his wife at all. I couldn’t help wondering whether Gudríd had found any happiness when she returned to the North. She must have wondered about her son: Was he still alive? Did he live as a slave or did he convert, as had so many of the Christians? Should she have stayed with him, after all?

  Wouldn’t she have longed for Mediterranean warmth and color? Iceland engages only one primary sense: sight. There are no smells of mint and saffron; you can’t finger an aubergine or pomegranate, stroke silk or satin, trail your hand in scented water. The tang of highly spiced food is absent here. The lunch I’d just finished of cheese and dried mutton had filled my stomach but not my imagination. No wonder the Icelanders were suspicious of Turkish Gudda. She’d sampled delights that were unknown in Iceland, that encouraged lasciviousness and wantonness. Could she really be a Christian after having lived among the harem, worn layers of veils and perhaps been the plaything of some wealthy pasha?

  A man becomes the closest thing to a Lutheran saint the Icelanders have; a woman is nicknamed Turkish Gudda and shunned. A man gets a cathedral; a woman gets a footnote in history.

  Though if Steinunn had her way, perhaps that would change. I thought back to Steinunn turning the pages of the photo album on the table in front of us in slow, considered movements, as she told me stories about the twisting streets of Rabat’s souks, rich in smells of mint and figs and ripe fruit. Far from accepting that it was a nightmare place to which Gudríd had been kidnapped, Steinunn saw the appeal of the orderly, enclosed world of the harem and the hammam, where fountains splashed and the muezzins called in the distance. Perhaps it wasn’t only a desire to unravel the mysteries of a strange fragment of Icelandic history that had led Steinunn to the tangled cities in North Africa, and to museums in Paris and Amsterdam, but a longing to be changed by what she felt and saw. To physically visit a place, to immerse oneself in a strange world, was what I was doing myself. My memories of mountains and waves and wind, the act of walking down a street in Stromness or looking for Betty Mouat’s house in Shetland had enriched every dry fact, every statistic and anecdote.

  Tomorrow I was flying to Heimaey myself. In months to come, I would turn the pages of my own album for friends, just as Steinunn had turned them for me, explaining dreamily, “Here we are in the Westmann Islands, where Gudríd Símonardottír was kidnapped by Algerian pirates.”

  AT SEA again, if only in a tour boat with fifty bird-watching Spaniards, I gazed over the railing into the water as we rocked our way into an island cave. The sun glanced off the cheese-holed volcanic walls, lightened to amber by guano. Sunlight seemed to enter the cave with us, its celestial gold becoming our gold, nets of gold folded wave by wave in water so turquoise as to seem deliciously swimmable. In the echo of the cave, a woman suddenly began singing “Summertime,” and “The leeving ees eesy” came at us, improved in tone, from all directions.

  This was the denouement of an exhilaratingly brisk cruise around Heimaey and other smaller islands of the Westmann chain off the south coast of Iceland. We’d motored close enough to the lava cliffs to see that they were not as sheer as they appeared, but wrinkled and pitted like pale brown cardboard. In every pit and crevice, along every ledge, a bird was nesting. Topmost were the gentle kittiwakes, who could nest on next to nothing. This was their own protection against marauders, who could not find a purchase on the finger-sized outcroppings that formed the nurseries of the kittiwakes. Lower down were razorbills and Brünnich’s guillemots. Both had black heads and wings and snowy breasts, but the razorbill, a small auk, had a thick, parrotlike beak. They were pelagic birds, spending winters at sea and breeding in the Far North in summer. They stood side by side on the cliff’s ledges, at deck height, long lines of sports fans rooting for the other team, jeering and heckling as we sailed slowly by. Closest to the surf breaking at the feet of the cliffs were eider ducks, while, high up, on the green pate that crowned the islands, were the tunnels and burrows of the puffins, thousands upon thousands of these sociable little birds, who like to stand around gabbing like old people reminiscing, but whose tiny-winged, heavy-bodied flights over the ocean’s surface always seem to bear the hallmarks of anxiety.

  Surrounded by parka-headed Spaniards with serious zoom lenses, digital cameras, and camcorders, I was out of my league with a small pair of binoculars and my Collins’ Birds of Britain and Europe, which I couldn’t even open properly because of the wind. No matter, I was happy. I’d only been in Iceland a week, but my Faroese funk had been dispelled by the free spirits I found here. When I asked an Icelander if I could do something, he or she almost invariably thought a moment, and said, “Yes!”

  Our tour boat had bounced from island to island in search of more nesting birds and had finally come to rest here, in the echoing aquamarine chamber of the moberg cliffs, where an icy breeze blew off the water, where the loops and coils of the submerged golden net at the opening to the cave entranced and warned. The half-visible webbing made me think of Ran, the Norse goddess of the sea, who lived in a great golden hall under the ocean with her husband, Ægir, and their nine daughters. It’s said that Ran steered a ship with one hand, while with the other she swept her net through the waves. With this net, this golden net, she snared sailors and carried them to her underwater palace, and there they lived as if they were on earth. To die by drowning was “faring to Ran” or “falling into Ran’s hands.” Many sailors, knowing her love for gold, carried coins in their pockets to allow them to enter Ran’s domain, her bed. Ran-bedr, the ocean floor was called.

  The Westmann Islands, off Iceland’s forbidding south coast, are above the Mid-Atlantic rift, where the continental plates are pulling apart, and where the earth’s liquid-hot center escapes through the break in the plates to surge upward, sometimes in spectacular ways. Beginning in 1963, the island of Surtsey was created from the waves over a period of four years of eruptions. Ten years later, on Heimaey, a volcano blasted forth, very near the homes of a number of unlucky Icelandic fishing families. That cone is Eldfell, “fire mountain”; it increased the island’s size by fifteen percent. Burnt orange and black in color, the volcano’s cone still smolders in places thirty years later. This morning I’d flown from Reykjavík to Heimaey, a journey of about twenty minutes. Our twelve-person plane could only come in at an angle between two mountains, and the wind was not cooperating. With nothing between these islands and Antarctica to the far south, the Westmanns are one of the windiest places in Iceland; gales have been clocked at 120 knots. The plane turned on its side, easily, as a Frisbee lurching in the breeze, and gave us a close view of red-ochre mountains frosted with lime green, a bright blue sky in the wrong place—down—but still very beautiful.

  Myth places Ran’s golden palace near the island of Hlesey, which could perhaps have been the island of Hellisey in the Westmann chain. Hellisey is home to a great many gannets, but no one else. From the air it has the shape of a half-submerged horseshoe, clearly the visible C of a volcanic cone, with
one side eroded and open to the sea. I found it interesting that, unlike the Celtic storm and sea goddesses, Ran had a home. In fact she was, like few Norse mythological figures, in a stable relationship with many progeny, everyone in the household working together. Ægir kicked up the storms at sea, Ran cruised underneath gathering drowned souls, and their nine daughters helped out however they could. The nine daughters, the waves, had these names: Cold One, White One, Grasper, Howler, Heaven-Bright, Billow, Comber, Dip, and Bloody-Haired. Medieval Icelandic poets called them “the claws of Ran” and described a time “when hard gusts from white mountain-range teased apart and wove together the storm-happy daughters of Ægir, bred on frost.”

  Who were these nine daughters or ocean giantesses? Saxo Grammaticus wrote in his History of the Danes of “the Nine Maidens of the Island-Mill, who far out beyond the skirts of earth, set the ocean moving as if a quern were being turned.” There are also Celtic links. Hilda Davidson, in Gods and Myths of the Viking Age, points to a Celtic story about nine giant maidens of the sea who mothered a boy among them:

  In the tale of Ruad, son of Rigdonn, Ruad was crossing the sea to Norway with three ships, when the vessels ceased to move. He dived down to find out the reason, and discovered nine giant women, three hanging on to each ship. They seized him, and carried him down into the sea. There he spent a night with each in turn, and then was allowed to continue his journey. They told him that one of them would bear him a child, and he promised to come back to them after he left Norway. But after a stay of seven years he broke his promise, and went straight back to Ireland. The nine women discovered this, took the child ‘that had been born among them,’ and set off in pursuit, and when they could not overtake Ruad they cut off the child’s head and flung it after his father.

  The maidens turning quernstones are sisters of Finnie and Minnie, the giant bondswomen whose revolt off the coast of northern Scotland caused the sea to turn to salt. Whirlpools are created in cauldrons, like those of the Cailleach, who turned her laundry bright with foam. Celtic mythology makes frequent reference to cauldrons of regeneration and cauldrons of plenty, and these cauldrons are usually said to come from the Land-Beneath-the-Waves. In the Norse tale “The Lay of Hymir” the story is told of a visit by Thor to the golden hall of Ægir and Ran. “Brew some ale for the gods,” Thor demands. Ægir, angered at the peremptory tone, says coolly, “I’ve no cauldron that would hold enough. Bring me a cauldron, Thor, and I’ll brew ale for all the gods.” None of the gods know where to get such a cauldron, until one-handed Tyr volunteers the information that his father, the giant Hymir, has a huge cauldron five miles deep, a “water-whirler.” Tyr and Thor eventually manage to reach Hymir’s hall, where they find not one, but nine cauldrons. Hymir smashes eight of them, but Thor and Tyr manage to steal the ninth for Ægir, who then becomes “the ale-brewer.” The sea could be Ran’s Road, a highway of death, but it could also be a golden palace, a storehouse of plenty, with a cauldron that never stops brewing, a cauldron of regeneration. It is of course of interest that Hlesey or Hellisey is shaped like a cauldron, is in fact, a volcanic caldera.

  The Cailleach was a storm goddess who lived close to shore and used the rocks and currents to stir up whirlpools. Ran ranged freely through the northern seas, whisking up storms with her daughters and husband and then lying in wait, like a giant spider at the bottom of a web of waves for sailors to fall into her embrace. The famous poem by Egil Skallagrímsson about his drowned son has these lines:

  The sea-goddess

  Has ruffled me

  Stripped me bare

  Of my loved ones

  The ocean severed

  my family’s bonds

  The tight knot

  That ties me down.

  Although she was called the wife of the sea god and queen of the drowned, Ran had perhaps once been the great goddess of the sea, with Ægir (more a giant or personification of the sea than a god) a later addition. Ran’s nine daughters, says one mythology dictionary, indicate the presence of a college of priestesses. Some sources speak of the girls as mermaids not waves, but I like their Eddic names—Howler and Grasper—“storm-happy daughters.” Could any phrase give a better sense of being at one with the elements?

  I WENT to the town’s library to ask about Ran and her possible home in the Westmann Islands, and was directed upstairs to the museum. The guide was a wild-eyed man of seventy-five who lunged at me with a terrifying handshake and shouted, “Hello, hello, hello! Sign the guest book, sign the guest book. Seattle, Washington. SEE-attle. Come with me. Now this model shows what everything was like before the eruption. You see, SEE-attle? Nice and quiet. Then—boom! You’ve heard of the eruption? You know the eruption? Everyone around the world knows the eruption. I didn’t leave the island, I saw it all. One of the few, one of the few.”

  When I tried to interrupt with a question about Ran and her undersea palace—“Was it the island of Hellisey?”—he dismissed me. “Ran. Ran, you say, Ran? Maybe. Maybe not. Come with me. Look at these photographs of burning houses. Lava bombs. Flying ash and cinders. Gas. Look at the gas masks in these cases. Five thousand people lived here. They all left that night. I didn’t go. I lived on a hill outside of town. I saw it all.”

  The photographs were shocking. Half the town was buried under ash and many other homes were on fire. It looked as if the new volcano would close the harbor, too, with a steady gush of lava moving oceanward. The fishing community, the richest in Iceland, could not bear to see this happen. An Icelandic scientist suggested a radical solution: pumping water in great volume from the sea and directing its stream at the lava in order to deflect its course. The harbor was saved and, in fact, improved.

  “Well, that’s how it was. That’s how it was.”

  He was bouncing up and down next to me, making a dash for a display case, rushing back and taking my arm to make me follow after. There was no way to look at anything in the rooms without him telling me what to think about it. When another pair of tourists entered and the guide seized on them (“Welcome, welcome. Benvenuto! Italianos? Sí, sí, sí. Roma, Roma, Roma. Venga!”), I escaped. Even going down the stairs I could hear him assuring them, “I was there. Io. Io. I was there.”

  It was the time of year when the sun stays up long past her bedtime. Even after every shop—there weren’t terribly many—had closed on Heimaey, the light blazed coldly on, scouring the empty streets like a gold-bristled broom. I had dinner and took a walk. The worst-hit neighborhoods of Heimaey were still under tons of lava and ash, but other sections had been bulldozed and built up again, this time with modern, split-level ramblers that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Florida or California. The homes often had large picture windows, draped in gauzy curtains, with small Greek or African statues visible on the sills. Surrounded by green lawns, bordered with low shrubbery, the only thing “Icelandic” about these houses were the chunks of dark-gray basalt, often oddly shaped, that decorated many of the front lawns. Some were at least four feet tall; many had purple-hearted pansies planted around their bases.

  I circled back to Heimaey’s harbor with its view of the bright green hills and moberg bird cliffs. I leaned against a bollard and looked into the water, where there were still faint strands of gold reflected from the sun. Ran’s net? Or something woven by the Norns, those three figures of fate? No one knows just where the word Norn comes from, but one etymology ties it to the Indo-European root ner, which means “twist” or “twine.” The Norns were those who worked with the threads of destiny; they twisted and twined them to form a life, and at some point, Third or Skuld, the goddess in her destroyer aspect, cut the thread. In eighth-century Ireland an abbot wrote, “I invoke the seven Daughters of the Sea who fashion the threads of the sons of long life.”

  Other myths said it was a serpent, not Ran’s family, who stirred up trouble at sea. In 1957, Roger Corman, king of the B flick, directed a movie that even for him was extraordinarily silly. The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the W
aters of the Great Sea Serpent was shot over a period of ten days along a California beach and in Monument Valley. Half the women wear flaxen Brunnhilda wigs, and all are statuesque in short, belted tunics. When the story begins the women are worried about what has become of their men, who set off some weeks ago in a ship and haven’t been seen since. Should the Viking women stay and wait or should they go in search of the men? There’s conflict between an evil, dark-haired girl and a blond heroine, but in the end the women pull a longship down to the shore and get in. Not long after, what looks like a storm comes up, but it’s not a storm; it’s a whirlpool, caused by a giant sea serpent.

  Once Christianity was established in the North, there were other explanations for whirlpools, or “ocean whirls,” than the sea serpent or Ran and Ægir. The King’s Mirror, a late-medieval Norse text, describes such a phenomenon:

  It is called hafgerdingar [ocean-whirl] and it has the appearance as if all the waves and storms of the ocean had been collected into three heaps out of which three great waves form. These so surround the entire sea that no openings can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep overhanging cliffs. In only a few cases have men been known to escape who were upon the sea when such a thing occurred.

  Far off the coast of Iceland, where I would not venture on this trip, midway between Snæfellsnes and Cape Farewell on Greenland, was such an ocean whirl. Sailing directions from the nineteenth century mention that the sea broke strongly in that area and the cause was believed to be volcanic. When Eirík the Red and his followers sailed to Greenland in the first colonizing effort, only fourteen of the twenty-five ships made it. The rest were lost at sea, perhaps caught up in the ocean whirl and destroyed.