The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  That night after dinner I decided to walk to Arnarstapi, about four kilometers distant, by way of a coastal path that led through lava fields and overlooked a coast of blowholes, arches, and bird cliffs. With the crash of surf and the screech of birds, it was not a still evening, but there was quiet underneath. How strange the situation of sea birds: so free in the spaciousness of the air, but as crammed together as tenement dwellers when it came time to nest. When I first set off on my walk, there were patches of green here and there, with ragged and alarmed black sheep precipitously chewing, but after a while there was only lava.

  All day I’d looked at lava, crumbled, exploded, cracked. No longer as raw as when it was first spewed forth, now much of it was covered with moss, pale yellow with a gray or green tinge. All day similes had gone through my mind, and oddly, many of them made me hungry. The lava fields looked like vanilla cake batter poured over a thick jumble of dates, walnuts, and chocolate chips. In the sun the moss could also look like lemon yogurt spooned generously over granola.

  This evening, with a fish and potato dinner inside me, and with the shadows falling over the path, I could more easily picture the beautiful, heartbroken Helga frying up a plucked puffin in a cave, or one of the hidden people playing a game of checkers in a lava community center: gnomes, probably. Gnomes were very tiny, only about twelve centimeters tall, while lovelings were slender, the size of ten-year-old children. Light-fairies resembled lovelings, angels, and flower-fairies, and were mainly to be observed in nature, especially near lakes. Dwarfs, on the other hand, were the size of three- to five-year-olds, and they were not as nice as some of the others; they could be temperamental or unfriendly. Angels, of course, were radiant and good, and so were mountain spirits, who could be immensely tall, and who beamed out life force. It wasn’t really so difficult to see the lava formations as resembling small houses and apartments.

  I was someone skeptical of the supernatural, or so I said. My Christian Science upbringing had made me steer clear of the psychic world. Table rappings, ghosts, spirits, and fortune-telling were all anathema to Mary Baker Eddy and her followers. The truth of the universe was sunny and perfect; perhaps there was another altogether murkier substrata to life, but all we had to do was turn away resolutely and it would disappear. Ley-lines and pyramids and clairvoyant visions about Mount Snæfellsnes were not a language I could speak; in fact, I was inclined to mock them. Yet, it was also true that all the fairy tales and myths I’d read as a child had left their mark on my imagination. I could believe in magic—of a certain kind. Abstractions never spoke to me, but the poetic always did. I couldn’t feel myself traversing a ley-line deep below the lava shore, but yes, if I looked closely, I could imagine Helga in a cave or a dwarf peering out of an indentation in the volcanic rock. Some say the early Icelanders peopled the empty land they found with gnomes and spirits to make it less lonely. Others say that the hidden people were really the first inhabitants, whom the Vikings pursued and wiped out. (This may be a reference to Irish monks, who may have been here in small numbers when the colonizers first arrived.) The Irish, of course, had tales of leprechauns and fairies, the little people who still play a role in the Irish imagination.

  At Arnarstapi I had a cup of tea in the café and wandered around the tiny fishing village, where a towering statue of Bard had been constructed many feet high near the edge of a cliff. He seemed to have been built from stone Legos, so rectangular was he, with a massive head and legs you could walk between. On the way back to Hellnar I was torn between a grand sense of freedom at being out so late at night in such a mysterious and unfamiliar landscape and a shrinking unease. The blackened lava piles through which the path wound along the coast, the eerie long single notes of the gulls, the chill wind, and the still-light evening all conspired to raise goose bumps. It didn’t make me feel any more grounded to know I was on my way to ask advice about the inner voice that had directed me to change my name. At ten-thirty Gudrún was going to read my Viking cards at her kitchen table.

  AFTER THE reading I went down to the sea again. I felt curiously awake, though it was almost midnight. Behind me, the glacier of Snæfellsnes was faintly rosy with something between a sunset and a sunrise reflecting off its icy surface, a pink-lemonade snow cone. A rowboat knocked against a short concrete jetty. It was a measure of how accustomed I’d become to the constant harsh cries of the gulls and other sea birds that I thought of the evening as quiet, and a measure of how accustomed I’d become to the northern summer that I thought of midnight as evening.

  A slight mist rose off the surface of the water, a crocheted white spread over a dark-blue comforter. Mist and steam had come up twice in my Viking cards, in the form of the Sweat Lodge card. I was unclear about my name change, unclear how to explain it to myself or to others, the imaginary chorus with unsmiling faces that would sing the slow baritone question: Whaddya mean / Change your name? Not only did I have the miasma of the Sweat Lodge in my cards, but I was a Libra to boot. “That’s the Libra tendency,” Gudrún sighed (she was one herself). “Always this need to ask the opinion of others, to consider their reactions, to please them.”

  “But I’m so stubborn,” I’d protested. “I’ve always gone my own way.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t care about what people think of you.”

  We’d been sitting at her kitchen table, a plain wooden one, with the cards between us. Gulli had been reluctant to leave us; he’d wanted to talk about the film Erin Brockovich. Eventually he appeared, wrapped in a large bath towel, on his way to the sauna. There were no candles, no mystic music. The house was wood-paneled and pleasant, filled with family photographs. Gudrún wore a blue work shirt and jeans; her voice was light and firm, not spooky. She gave me a glass of water, and set a tape recorder going, in case I didn’t remember afterward what we said.

  She had me shuffle and cut the cards. “No one shuffles cards like an American,” she’d laughed. “It’s like you’re playing poker on a riverboat.”

  The Viking cards had brightly colored drawings, a northern tarot of Thor and Odin, ravens and dragons and Norns. I’d said I had only one question to ask the cards—not should I change my name, for I knew I had to, but what did it mean to do so? Soon I was talking about my father, the orphan, and how Wilson had been his name for us, for the three of us who had survived my mother’s death.

  A bowl had turned up in my reading; it signified abundance and my difficulty accepting it, and then the Sweat Lodge, swirling with mist and steam. “All you need to do is to open the door and clear your head,” Gudrún had said, smiling. “Easier said than done, yes? But that’s how you get out of the mist.” She’d watched me turn over another card, this one the Shield. “That’s good. A shield is something you can hold in front of you. It will protect you when people ask you why you’re changing your name.”

  “You have your shield, and here, yes! When you come out of the sweat lodge, the ship will be waiting for you,” she’d said as I’d turned over the card with a Viking ship on it. “The Ship card indicates the exploration of new worlds. A new name might be just what you need to make the journey.”

  “They say that when we reach seven times seven years we’re ready for our life’s purpose,” Gudrún had added as she’d collected and stacked the cards after the reading. Gulli had come tiptoeing noisily back from the sauna, sweating, red and merry, but at a look from Gudrún, he’d vanished into their bedroom. “You’re forty-nine. You can have a new name. You don’t have to ask permission. But you have to be willing to get onboard. When the Vikings went out in their ships, they had no idea what was ahead of them. You have to be willing to leave the harbor. Like the women you’re writing about.”

  Now, down by the water, I considered the rowboat thumping gently against the pier. If it had been a kayak, perhaps I would have been tempted. Helga hadn’t even used a ship; she’d gone by iceberg, by chance of course; yet all the same, she’d arrived.

  “Ocean, ocean, ocean,” I said, and then lou
der—much louder: “Wind, wind, wind.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  LEIF’S UNLUCKY SISTER

  Reykjavík and Glaumbær, Iceland

  JULY 17, 1006: A tall woman, red-haired, stands at the bow of her ship, looking back at the vivid green banks on either side of Eiríksfjord. The barren gray mountains of Greenland seem so close in the bright summer air; the icebergs, in fantastic shapes and sizes, sail serenely in the turquoise water. The ship is jammed with livestock and everything they’ll need to sustain themselves for the journey and to recreate their lives on the other side of the ice-strewn deep waters, far south of here. Vínland, her brother Leif has called it. Axes and stone lamps, wooden barrels of dried mutton and porridge oats, casks of water, even a loom—all make it hard to move around the ship. The woman wears a long woolen shift, with an apron front and back, attached by shoulder straps with oval brooches high on her chest. From a chain strung between the brooches hang scissors, knife, needle case, and keys. The farms she has known since childhood are receding in the distance; the icebergs grow larger, the wind stronger. The sail fills. They are away.

  A THOUSAND years ago Freydís Eiríksdóttir set off from Greenland on a summer’s day, with her husband Thorvard and crew, in a wooden clinker-built ship with a single square woolen sail she’d most likely helped to weave. Following the route Leif Eiríksson had pioneered, they sailed north from their home in Eiríksfjord, in the southerly Eastern Settlement, up the coast of Greenland, and crossed over to Baffin Island, where the Davis Strait was narrowest. Keeping land in sight, they worked their way down the coast of Labrador to the northern tip of Newfoundland. There, at the site the sagas call Straumfjord, now known as L’Anse aux Meadows, Freydís, Thorvard, and the others moved into the turf houses that Leif had constructed and left for members of his family and other Norse settlers to use as they further explored the region he called Vínland.

  Freydís Eiríksdóttir was an adventurer at sea and a leader on land. Like Grace O’Malley, she came from a clan of skilled and courageous seafarers who ranged across the northern seas. Her father, Eirík the Red, had colonized Greenland with his followers; her three brothers explored the coasts of Greenland and Atlantic Canada. One of them, Leif Eiríksson, is the first known European to have landed on the North American continent; he predated Columbus by five centuries. Freydís is one of the most vigorous women in the Icelandic sagas, but her name isn’t always mentioned in connection with the famous Vínland voyages described in The Saga of Eirík the Red and The Greenlanders’ Saga. When her name does come up, it’s often with a nervous laugh or a shudder. For if history is written by the victors, it’s also written by those who can write. By the time the tales of the Norse, who made those perilous voyages across Davis Strait, were carefully inscribed on vellum in the thirteenth century by Christian scholars in Iceland, Freydís Eiríksdóttir’s accomplishments were ignored in favor of the terrible deed she’d allegedly instigated while in Vínland.

  Unfortunately, all we know about Freydís comes from these two sagas. In The Saga of Eirík the Red, she’s described, depending on the translation, as “arrogant,” or “very haughty,” “a virago,” “overbearing,” or “man-like,” with a husband who is “rather feeble,” “not a very imposing person,” or “nobody.” We are told that she “had been married off to him mainly for his money,” and also that she was pagan, like all Greenlanders of this era. Although her brother Leif was celebrated for having converted Greenland to Christianity around the year 1000 A.D., it’s likely his reasons were more political than religious; the Greenlanders continued their allegiance to the old Norse gods for some time.

  If Freydís was haughty, that pridefulness would doubtless have come from being one of Eirík the Red’s children. A hot-tempered Norwegian who’d been banished for murder, Eirík fled to Iceland, where he was soon causing trouble as well. After several murders he was banned by the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He made an exploratory trip to Greenland, and returned to convince others to return with him to a country of lush virgin meadows, and fewer testy relatives demanding revenge. In Greenland Eirík was at the top of the heap, and so were his sons. Things were a little different for Freydís, a girl born out of wedlock. Haughty she may have been, but probably also resentful.

  Freydís, like her brothers, no doubt sought to better her social and financial standing in the community. It wasn’t easy to become rich—or even comfortable—in Greenland. Unlike the rest of the Norse, who traded and farmed from the Baltic to Normandy and Ireland, the Greenlanders had little arable land (though, in fact, they had more arable land per capita than the Icelanders). The lush virgin meadows were only a narrow strip along the southern coast of Greenland, and would soon be grazed over; there was no timber for ships, and no nearby trading partners. When Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course on his way to Greenland from Iceland, he ended up farther west and south, in sight of an unknown shore. Bjarni sailed north until he reached the latitude of Greenland, then east. It was Leif Eiríksson who, fifteen years later, set off to explore what Bjarni had only glimpsed: a land of forests, a sea of abundance.

  The voyages of Freydís and Gudríd

  The forests of Canada, with rich pastures, rivers, and bays teeming with fish, seals, and whales, must have seemed a magnificent opportunity for Leif and those who came after him. They may originally have thought of colonizing, but unlike many of the places where the Norse had staked a claim—the Faroes, Iceland and southern Greenland—the new country was inhabited. The Norse most likely used their base at Straumfjord in northern Newfoundland as a gateway to further explorations down the coast to Nova Scotia and New England or inland to New Brunswick (all of which have been proposed as possible sites for Vínland).

  Freydís’s expedition was only one of several to Vínland, and possibly one of the last, though we can’t count on the authors of the sagas for strict chronology. According to The Greenlanders’ Saga, she undertook this journey in conjunction with two brothers from Iceland, Helgi and Finnbogi, who’d arrived in Greenland by ship. Freydís visited them over the winter and asked “if they would join her with their ship on an expedition to Vínland, sharing equally with her all the profits that might be made from it. They agreed to this.”

  Freydís and Thorvard had their own vessel and crew, and together the two ships departed. Already Freydís is depicted in the saga as underhanded, taking thirty-five able men, when the agreement had been for each ship to take thirty. Women, who may have been servants, slaves, or concubines (or perhaps all three), were presumably not part of this equation. The Icelandic brothers made land at Straumfjord first and moved into the houses Leif had left. Upon her arrival Freydís protested this arrangement, arguing that Leif had lent them to her, not the brothers. Haughtiness perhaps, but also a sense of her family’s social standing and its bonds.

  When Freydís told them to leave, Helgi responded, “We brothers could never be a match for you in wickedness.” In a huff, they abandoned Leif’s buildings and constructed new houses farther away. The summer and fall were spent in felling timber, fishing, hunting, and exploring the new land. What the sagas don’t tell us about daily life, archaeology can. The original site at L’Anse aux Meadows was discovered in the 1960s by Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian writer, and excavated under the direction of his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad. They found remains of three turf longhouses, and a few objects, among them a needle and a spindle whorl. There was work for the Norse to do, but not as much as in the warmer months, and a winter could be long, especially if there was bad blood.

  When winter set in, the brothers suggested that they should start holding games and other entertainments. This was done for a while until trouble broke out and ill-feeling arose between the two parties. The games were abandoned and all visiting between the houses ceased; and this state of affairs continued for most of the winter.

  Eventually, as The Greenlanders’ Saga tells it, Freydís set up a situation in which she was the innocent victim of the
two brothers. She went to Finnbogi early one morning and asked if the Icelanders would exchange ships with her, as theirs was larger and she was eager to go away. “I shall agree to that,” Finnbogi said, “if that will make you happy.”

  Rather inexplicably, seeing that Finnbogi had agreed to her demand, Freydís returned home, woke her husband and said that the brothers knocked her around when she offered to buy their ship. She goaded her husband to avenge her honor, threatening to divorce him if he refused. He and the other men then marched over to the Icelanders’ camp, broke in, tied the men up, and dragged them out of their turf house. The saga continues:

  Freydis had each of them put to death as soon as he came out.

  All the men were killed in this way, and soon only the women were left; but no one was willing to kill them.

  Freydis said, “Give me an axe.”

  This was done, and she herself killed the women, all five of them.

  After this monstrous deed they went back to their house, and it was obvious that Freydis thought she had been very clever about it. She said to her companions, “If we ever manage to get back to Greenland I shall have anyone killed who breathes a word about what has just happened. Our story will be that these people stayed on here when we left.”

  They returned to Greenland in the summer, following the opposite route up Labrador to Baffin Island, across the Davis Strait and south. They were wealthy now, loaded with timber and furs, and at first, perhaps, everyone expected the Icelandic brothers to follow, equally loaded down with goods. Eventually the story of the massacre leaked out and Leif discovered what Freydís had done. “I do not have the heart,” said Leif when he heard the news, “to punish my sister Freydís as she deserves. But I prophesy that her descendants will never prosper.”

  “And after that no one thought anything but ill of her and her family,” the writer of The Greenlanders’ Saga concludes.