The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  I preferred thinking of a whirlpool as the umbilicus maris, “the navel of the sea.” Even though the vortex led downward, perhaps to the hollow center of the earth, perhaps to Ran’s realm, it was the spiral shape the stirred waters made that intrigued me. So often when I imagined the shape of a whirlpool, I seemed to see it from above, its coils resembling a labyrinth, a circular path leading to a center. It was that inevitable center that fascinated me. In a labyrinth you picked your way closer to the heart of things, via paths that often dead-ended. In a whirlpool you were funneled along with the flotsam and jetsam of your life into the core depths. Either way, you came to the center, or as close as you were able.

  Did I believe in destiny? I thought back to my arrival on the west coast of Ireland over two months before, to my first glimpse of Clew Bay and my sense that, beginning with Grace O’Malley, I had so many lost and forgotten stories to discover along these northern coasts. I thought back even further, to a day by the tide pools of Cape Cornwall, when I lay on the warm rocks in the September sun and read a book about women pirates. Where are the stories of women and the sea? I want to know them, I’d decided.

  Had fate spoken to me then? Had the Norns made me take my journey around the North Atlantic? Had they brought me all the way to Iceland to show me something important? The Norns were said to be present at birth. They were the name givers; they decided what would happen to you. My practical, prosaic side reminded me that it was a film option on one of my books that had given me the resources to make this trip. I believed in daydreams, I believed in risk taking; I didn’t really believe in destiny. It was easier to believe that I’d been handed a ball of thread, a clew, and that my work was to follow it and see where it led. If I looked hard, I could just see the faintest thread of gold down in the darkening waters of Heimaey’s harbor. Was I making my fate or was my fate making me? Or was I perhaps weaving a net myself, a net of clews? I listened for the unexpected voice inside that had told me so recently to change my name. But for now it was silent.

  CHAPTER XIII

  ICEBERG TRAVEL

  Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland

  THERE WERE once two sets of cousins. Helga and her sisters were the daughters of Bard. Red-cloak and his brother were Thorkel’s sons. The cousins grew up together on the lava-licked edge of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in the far west of Iceland. There was rivalry between them. “The sons of Thorkel wanted to rule the roost because they were stronger, but the daughters of Bard would not allow themselves to be subdued any more than they were able,” Bard’s Saga tells us.

  One winter’s day, the cousins were playing down on the beach, and the playing was fierce as always, especially between Red-cloak and Helga. An ice field was just offshore and a floe had broken away and drifted very near land. Helga and Red-cloak pushed each other back and forth until he shoved her onto the floe. There was a thick fog that day and a strong wind. Just as Red-cloak pushed Helga onto the chunk of ice, a gust caught the floe and she was carried out to the ice field. That night the entire ice field moved away from the coast and out to sea. Helga had no choice but to cling to the ice as it drifted. But, as the saga tells us calmly, with no hint of the miraculous, the ice field drifted so quickly that within a week Helga arrived in Greenland, where she was rescued by Eirík the Red. The historical Eirík, the father of Leif Eiríksson, had led the colonization of Greenland in 985, which would put Helga’s purported voyage about a thousand years ago. You could argue that Helga was the first woman to make a solo crossing of the North Atlantic, however accidental the journey and unorthodox the vessel.

  “And this,” said Gulli Bergmann dramatically, “is Deep Lagoon, the very beach where Helga was pushed onto the iceberg!” Black pebbles like a million hard droplets from the dark center of the earth covered the half-circle of the bay. Behind us was an alien forest of grotesque and gorgeous lava formations through which Gulli had just led me and a German couple and their teenage son. At our feet were crusty orange tangles of seaweed that glowed vividly against the black pebbles when wet. The air was so clear, so bright that I lost depth perception, couldn’t judge whether anything was distant or close.

  “Amazing,” I said. “Wow.” I frequently said these paltry words in Iceland, though today I’d stopped gasping, “Wonderful,” since that always caused Gulli to burst into song: “It’s wonderful, it’s marvelous. . . .” He was a great fan of Frank Sinatra and other crooners as well as of Broadway musicals.

  We stood back from the waves as they crashed and pulled at our feet. The ocean was rough here, and vast, and Greenland was far away. Although I’d come to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in great part because of this strange saga episode, now that I was here, I could still scarcely picture it. The story began in the same sort of gender rivalry I remembered from my own childhood, when I tussled with Johnnie next door over which of our imaginary race-cars was fastest; yet Helga’s tale quickly veered into the fantastic.

  “Is there any basis in history for Helga’s voyage to Greenland?” I asked Gulli.

  “No,” he said, amending, “Well, who knows? The whole of Bard’s Saga is a mix of the supernatural and the ordinary. Bard was the son of a troll mother and of Dumbur, a giant king from up in northern Norway around the Barents Sea. He grew up living in caves in the Norwegian mountains. He lived in a cave when he first came to Snæfellsnes. Bard’s Saga explains why Iceland has the energy it has, the mysticism. It wasn’t just Norwegians who came here. It was Sami, the Laplanders, from the far north of Norway. Anytime you read about a troll, for instance Bard’s mother, you know it’s a Sami person. And then there were the Celts; you know Celts don’t just mean the Irish. The Celts go back to Babylon, when Nebuchadnezzar threw the tribes out of Babylon and one of the tribes got lost. Somehow these people, Celtic-Jewish people, ended up—after some centuries in Russia—in Iceland, as slaves brought from Ireland. What do you think of that?”

  “Wow.”

  Gulli was in his late fifties, a big-hearted, irascible, red-faced bear of a man who had once had a successful clothing business in Reykjavík and now, with his wife Gudrún, ran a small New Age resort at Hellnar on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. Last night, just having arrived, I’d been seated next to Gulli at the long dinner table, and after an hour, I’d been worried how our excursion today would go. He’d begun with Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and had ended up ranting about the intractable nature of human greed. “What we have to deal with constantly is the beast in man,” he said several times. “I tell you, the beast in man is our worst problem. Not pollution, not AIDS, not murder and rape. These are all results of the beast. The beast is what we must recognize.” His face turned a violent tomato and his blue eyes flashed. The Germans, a photographer and his wife and son, looked as taken aback as I felt. Gulli’s views were certainly not the droopy, feel-good type of New Age wisdom. He was a Communist for one thing, and a passionate environmentalist.

  Gudrún had smiled reassuringly at me last night, and had rolled her eyes slightly when Gulli got to the part about the beast in all of us. She was a classic beauty—a softer, more tranquil Vanessa Redgrave—with a long braid of silvered blond hair. She believed that the ancient conical volcano covered by a glacier that loomed above their community was a power plug and a potential source of the spiritual awakening of humanity. She’d written a small book about this mountain, full of references to Egyptian pyramids, ley-lines, and psychic research. In spite of this, she was a practical sort. At this moment she was back at the resort, wearing her bright blue overalls and wielding an electric saw. She was building another new cabin for visitors, while Gulli took me and the Germans out for the day to places of interest nearby.

  “After Helga was pushed onto the ice floe, her sisters went home to Bard,” said Gulli, rattling black stones in his meaty palm. “Bard went looking for his nephews. They were only eleven and twelve, but he showed them no mercy. He threw one of them into a ravine and the other off a cliff. Then he got into a big fight with his brother Thorkel,
and Bard broke Thorkel’s leg. At the end of his life, Bard disappeared into the Snæfellsnes glacier. He’s still in there, people believe. He’s the guardian of the mountain, of the glacier, a nature spirit.”

  “Do you believe he’s still in there?”

  “Of course.”

  Neither Gulli nor Gudrún were unusual in Iceland in their supernatural beliefs, though they were probably among the few to attempt to run a New Age resort. The Icelanders are a worldly and sophisticated population; people travel abroad regularly, and almost everyone is linked to the Internet and plugged into a cell phone. Literacy is universal and the per capita consumption of books is the highest in the world. Yet there is a persistent belief in nature spirits—elves, fairies, gnomes, and other hidden people—who inhabit the landscape, particularly lava beds and formations. In a town not far from Reykjavík, Hafnarfjördur, where I’d recently visited the maritime museum, the tourist bureau was selling a colorful hand-drawn map of the town’s environs, with all the places where the hidden people live. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that the map included a message from the mayor, which blithely stated,

  In Hafnarfjördur, we have known for a long time of another society coexistent with our human one, a community concealed from most people with its dwellings in many parts of the town and the lava and cliffs that surround it. We are convinced that the elves, hidden people and other beings living there are favourably disposed towards us and as fond of our town as we are.

  I’d seen lava in Hafnarfjördur, but it was very wet the day I ventured there, and the hidden people must have been inside, reading a nice book (or did they now have elfin computers to send and receive email?). Here in Snæfellsnes, in the thin bright air, the lava was shockingly vibrant and alive. There was so much lava, too. Some of it, the agglomerations above the Deep Lagoon, looked like flames of frozen rock. The cliffs at the edge of the land were basalt, the hardest lava, Gulli told us; it came from the center of the crater. A more crumbled lava made up the fields below the huge mountain; it had spewed from the volcano or been crushed by the advancing and retreating glaciers and spread across the plain. Imagine churned-up, jackhammered asphalt stretching as far as the eye could see. Lurid with yellow-green lichen, the land pulsed like a painting under black light. The shore was lava, too, but eroded into a slope of smooth ball bearings. The surf rolled in, white over black pebbles, and when it rolled out, all the pebbles, every single one, moved and knocked together.

  The German family with us picked their diligent way along the crunchy black beach—the father taking photographs, the boy climbing lava aggregate, the mother looking slightly worried—while Gulli stared at them pensively. Earlier this morning he’d made an anti-German joke, then asked if they were offended.

  “To be honest,” the mild-mannered German photographer had said, “yes.”

  “Things never went too well for Helga, starting from being pushed onto the ice,” said Gulli to me now. “In Greenland she fell under the protection of Skeggi, one of Eirík the Red’s men. She lived with him there and helped him fight off a troll attack; later she traveled with him to Norway. But when they returned to Iceland, Skeggi went back to his farm and got married to someone else. Helga was heartbroken and never recovered. Her father came and got her, but she couldn’t stand the sight of him. She was a poet. She said this verse:

  Soon will I seek to leave.

  My sorrow does not fade

  for the waster of wealth.

  I must wither away

  for with passion hot and heavy

  I loved the heaper of riches.

  So my sorrow I cannot hide.

  I sit alone, I tell my tragedy.

  We walked back and forth on the beach, as Gulli attempted to get the attention of the Germans by pointing at his watch. “Helga never liked men afterward. She spent one winter in someone’s house, often playing her harp because she couldn’t sleep. A Norwegian came to her at night. They struggled and when they parted, his right arm and his left leg were broken.”

  “It’s one of the strange things about the sagas,” I said, “that they’re always so specific. His right arm and his left leg.”

  “Many people thought she was a troll. But she was a nature spirit, too. She couldn’t live in houses for the most part. She was usually in small caves. There are many caves named after Helga in Iceland.”

  He continued, pulling me down to the water. “This is what you need to know about Iceland! We believe in the divine in nature and that is the Celtic heritage. And now they want us to celebrate a thousand years of Christianity this year, and the government is spending millions on it. What a waste of money. That is not the Icelandic religion, not really.”

  Gesturing at the big green waves, Gulli said to me, “It’s important to work with the energy of nature. When you stand in front of the wind, shout ‘Kari, kari, kari.’ When you stand in front of the ocean, shout ‘Ægir, ægir, ægir.’” We stood and shouted for a while until the Germans came back. Doubtless they thought we were calling them.

  THE SNÆFELLSNES Peninsula is riddled with craters, some of them lined with moss, like green nests, and with caves. Not far from Hellnar is the so-called Singing Cave, where Bard is rumored to have spent his first winter in Iceland. At the end of the afternoon, after many hours of driving around the peninsula, our two cars charged up the steep one-way road that led to the Singing Cave and gave us a grand, stomach-twisting view of the lava fields and sea below. It wasn’t only Gulli’s enthusiasm that made me think this one of the most extraordinary landscapes I’d ever seen. The hardened lava flow covering the plain below us, right down to the sea cliffs, was blackened as if the last eruption had been recent, not centuries ago. Waterfalls spurted out of the hills and at almost every turn we saw some aspect of the glacier, and some new coloration that ranged from shadow blue to lemon ice.

  The Germans, I noticed, had gotten quieter and seemed exhausted. Perhaps this accounted for the fact that when Gulli had squeezed us into the tiny cave and demanded that we sing something, they balked completely. “We don’t know any songs,” said the photographer.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You have folk songs, you have your national anthem. What is your national anthem?”

  “We don’t sing our national anthem,” said the woman, as stubborn as her husband.

  “Barbara, you sing!”

  I obliged with “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” It sounded extremely good in the acoustical cave.

  Then Gulli gave us a rendition of Iceland’s national song, and it made him proud and a little teary. The Germans looked sad. The melancholy fact is that Germans are not allowed to be patriotic the way Icelanders, for instance, can be. I thought their son could probably have given us a good rendition of any song by U2, but he wasn’t asked. Instead, Gulli broke into “Oklahoma,” and I joined him.

  Back at my little pine-paneled cabin in Hellnar, I wrote up my notes before dinner. I scribbled down everything I remembered Gulli saying, even the confusing bits (Pope is keeping Icelandic sagas in basement of Vatican?? What about Nebuchadnezzar and the Celtic-Jewish people?). Then I rested, thinking of Helga. Much as I was entranced by the story of Helga’s iceberg journey to Greenland, I couldn’t imagine it as very likely. Yet even as saga or myth, it’s one of the few tales I’d come across on my travels of a woman making a voyage alone. Not until the mid-twentieth century would women cross oceans again in solitude. We know, of course, that all the women who colonized Iceland arrived by boat, and that some of them journeyed farther, to Greenland or back to Norway or to Ireland or the Hebrides. Here and there in the Icelandic histories and sagas are a few tantalizing lines about women voyagers. In Celtic Women Peter Ellis mentions several Irish women who bore the name Muirenn (Sea-fair), “one of whom is said to have led a band of Irish travellers to Iceland and is mentioned in the Icelandic Landnámabok [Book of Settlements] in the form of ‘Myrun.’” Aud the Deep-Minded’s ninth-century journey from Scotland to Orkney, the Faroes, and Iceland is well documented
. It was not far from here that she first put in after crossing the Atlantic. Another saga makes mention of a widow, Thorunn, who commandeered a boat to return to Norway after her husband died in Iceland. There was also a woman called Thorgunna. She appears in The Saga of Eirík the Red as the Hebridean lover of Leif Eiríksson, who had been blown off course on a voyage between Greenland and Norway. When he was ready to leave those Scottish Isles, she asked to go with him, but he demurred because she was nobly born and it would have been seen as abduction. She told him she was with child and would send her son to him and would herself come to Greenland in the end.

  The Icelandic sagas, most of them written at least two hundred years after the events they describe, are a tantalizing brew of biography and history, sometimes quite realistic and specific and sometimes mixed with bits of skaldic verse from earlier times and with ghost tales, all of it completely readable and not quite reliable as history. In the sagas the supernatural and violent are anchored by the minutiae of verisimilitude. Hauntings and dreams are bracketed by meals; acts of vengeance take place while people are tending the sheep. Often, after peculiar and tragic events, characters just return home to a spouse who asks, “So where have you been?” Helga had zoomed off on an iceberg, yes, but afterward she fell in love with a man in Greenland, went to Norway, then returned to Iceland, where she lost him to another woman. She was heartbroken, and that sounds like the story of a real woman.

  The sagas had given me some of the oldest and most interesting stories of women at sea; yet what stories might there have been, what stories might have been lost or deliberately forgotten or unrecorded? What was the origin of the story about Helga on the iceberg? Had there ever been a woman who voyaged across the oceans alone? Had women ever traveled together by ship without men?