The Pirate Queen

by Barbara Sjoholm

  This story has, for a long time, intrigued and baffled me. Why would one of the leaders want half the expedition crew killed? Was it possible that a woman, even a bad-tempered Viking, would take an axe to five women she’d worked alongside for months? Even if they were slaves? How had this bloodthirsty tale made it into the Icelandic sagas, and did it have a purpose beyond its purported truth?

  Although Freydís wasn’t Icelandic herself, she was probably born here, and I hoped in Iceland, home of the sagas, to find some answers to my questions about this notorious woman. I most wanted to know why, given how far she ranged, she wasn’t seen for the seafaring explorer she was. Although I could understand the financial reasons for her trip, I thought she must have had other reasons—wanderlust, curiosity and a strong desire to prove herself fearless—to impel her from the safety of home out into the almost unknown ocean.

  IN THE harbor of Reykjavík, on a glass-bright summer morning with the icy whip of the Arctic in the north wind, a Viking ship prepared to set off for a voyage to the New World. Clinker-built from pine and oak, the Islendingur’s prow swept high up off the water, more like a sculpture than a boat. That sweeping prow and broad beam would keep it from foundering in the rough seas between here and Vínland. The shallow draught would help it ride out gales as well as glide on and off shore. A single tall mast was placed amidships; from there the heavy square sail could be hoisted from the yard.

  “Come onboard,” said Ellen Ingvadóttir, and I hopped over the side.

  The Islendingur had a deck, unlike ships from the past, where the cargo had been stowed in the hull and covered with ox hides, and livestock jostled for room with three or four dozen people. On this upcoming voyage from Iceland across the North Atlantic to the New World there would be only nine people, all of whom would sleep in bunks. It wasn’t luxurious, but compared to conditions in the Viking Age, it was extravagantly comfortable. Ellen showed me a small galley and a toilet secreted away. “I don’t usually show people the toilet,” she said. “Most of the media have an unhealthy obsession with our elimination arrangements, especially mine.” She was to be the only woman on a crew captained by Gunnar Eggertsson, who’d built this ship himself about four years ago. It was a faithful replica of the Gokstad ship dated 900 A.D., excavated in Norway, in 1880 and now displayed in an Oslo museum. They’d be setting off in about a week for Greenland and from there to Canada and down the eastern seaboard to Manhattan.

  Six feet tall, large-boned, with a mature woman’s figure, Ellen was bigger than a couple of the men on the ship, but still not quite someone you’d expect to find getting ready to cross the North Atlantic in a seventy-five-foot wooden sailing vessel. When I’d met her at her office, she’d looked every inch the successful woman professional: blond hair pulled back in a black bow from a strong, attractive face, big clip-on earrings, a flowing suit, and low heels. A certified court interpreter and translator, Ellen ran a translation bureau with a staff of eight. She was also head of Iceland’s National Organization of Conservative Women (since one of their goals was to increase the number of women active in politics via participation in the Gender Equality Council, I could only surmise that an Icelandic conservative was different from one in, say, South Carolina). But in her youth Ellen had participated in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, on the Icelandic swim team, and like most Icelanders, she was resilient and versatile. “In such a small country,” one Icelander had told me, “we don’t have enough people to go around. So all of us have to wear many hats.” One of Ellen’s hats included participating in this millennial voyage in honor of Leif Eiríksson’s discovery of Vínland in the year 1000.

  The Islendingur

  “We’ll be retracing the route of the Greenland and Vínland expeditions, stopping at something like twenty-four ports. There’s a lot of PR involved, setting up contacts, translating, talking to the media; I’ll be keeping the ship’s log, too, in English, on our website. Naturally I’ll be doing my share of the ship’s tasks,” she said, glancing at the three men who had jumped off the Islendingur to have a smoke on the dock. “I’m really tired of being asked by people how it’s going to be living with eight men in such close quarters for several months. We’ll be busy. There will be a lot of work to do and no time to worry about appearances. Of course,” she added wryly, “somehow or other I’ll have to pull myself together for the television cameras in port. I’m a little worried about the hair washing.”

  I could sympathize. On this chill windy morning, I’d clamped the knit watch cap I’d bought in Orkney over my disheveled hair and wrapped my neck in a scratchy woolen scarf. I was wearing long underwear and a bulky Icelandic sweater under my green rain slicker. I’d felt like a large androgynous gnome making my way to Ellen’s office. It was hard to be both elegant and warm on this trip. I could hardly imagine battling waves and storms only to come into foreign ports under camera surveillance.

  The Islendingur smelled clean, of tar and wood oil and sawdust. Because of the wind, the ship was in motion even tied to the dock. I tried to imagine myself among forty to fifty people shoulder to shoulder on this rocking vessel, all our worldly goods piled around us: knives and scythes, barrels of water, sacks of feed and seeds, dried fish, whey; precious woven wool for sails and clothes, spindles and needles. I tried to imagine other ships around us, loading up as well with families hopeful and afraid. In the summer of the year 985, twenty-five oceangoing knarrs departed Iceland to help Eirík the Red colonize Greenland. Only fourteen of the vessels arrived in Greenland, the rest driven back or sunk by heavy seas.

  Later colonists also suffered from foul weather: A girl called Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir set off from under the shadow of Snæfellsnes Mountain with her family in the spring of 997; they didn’t reach Greenland until the end of October. Apparently Gudríd didn’t harbor terrible memories of the ocean journey; within a few years she was voyaging farther north up the coast of Greenland, to the Western Settlement, with her husband, Thorstein, Eirík the Red’s son. After his death she married the Icelandic trader Thorfinn Karlsefni and they decided to try their luck in Vínland. That expedition probably lasted several years; with them came as many as a hundred Greenlanders and their slaves, in search of the rich resources Leif had described.

  Gudríd’s sea journeys are told in The Vínland Sagas. She and her husband Karlsefni spent two or three years in the New World, and Gudríd gave birth to a son, Snorri. After clashing repeatedly with the natives, the colony sailed en masse back to Greenland; the following year Gudríd and Karlsefni went on to Norway to sell their rich harvest of timber and furs. Already wealthy, Karlsefni was now even better off. He and Gudríd returned to a farm in the north of Iceland. But Gudríd’s travels weren’t over. After the death of her husband—and no longer young—she set off on a pilgrimage to Rome, crossing first to Denmark, and then going overland from there. Other Icelandic women made the same voyage, it appears. In a register of medieval pilgrims at the Swiss monastery of Reichenau, a page devoted to Icelanders lists four women’s names from the eleventh century, most likely highborn women who would have had companions and servants.

  After centuries in which the most common image of a Viking was a wild-eyed warrior with hairy legs, who wore a bronze helmet and wielded an axe, centuries in which the very word Viking meant “man” and the voyages to Greenland and the New World were perceived as male enterprises with Leif “the Lucky” Eiríksson as the single hero, quite recently a new figure—female—has entered the picture to become part of the myth of the Vikings’ westward expansion. Even before arriving in Iceland, I’d come across Gudríd’s name in a brochure for a new translation of the complete Icelandic sagas.

  In Reykjavík, I found that Gudríd’s star was definitely on the rise. A local playwright and director, Brynja Benediktsdóttir, had written a play about her life, and Jónas Kristjánsson, saga scholar, had recently published a novel. Gulli and Gudrún Bergmann, back on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, had been working to have a statue of Gudríd erected th
ere, near her birthplace, and up in the north, in Glaumbær, where Gudríd was said to have spent the remaining years of her life as an anchoress after returning from Rome, there was a monument. Even Ellen and crew had gotten on the bandwagon; they mentioned Gudríd in their promotional material and Ellen planned to take the opportunity as the Islendingur came into port to talk up this seafaring woman to a public ignorant of Viking heroines.

  But of Freydís Eiríksdóttir there was, oddly, not a word.

  “IT’S TIME that Gudríd was acknowledged,” said Jónas Kristjánsson to me a few hours later as we sat in a café in central Reykjavík. I was feeling a bit the worse for wear. After leaving Ellen, I’d ventured into a hair salon, removed my tight watch cap and asked for help. I didn’t want to meet a manuscript specialist, professor emeritus, and novelist looking like a gnome. The stylist had recommended something called Hár Hónnun (Hair Honey), which quivered in its plastic jar like a musical instrument from another planet. I thought it was a gel, but it was more like glue; my hair was now plastered down like sticky chunks of wood.

  But Jónas treated me very courteously; I could see he was having trouble with his sparse hair today as well because of the furious cold wind. He combed it down carefully before ordering coffee for us, and bringing out a copy of a novel he’d written about Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, The Wide World. Now retired from his long-held position as director of the Árni Magnússon Institute, which was built especially to house the old vellum books from Iceland’s past, he was turning his energy to fiction.

  Eventually I brought up the subject of Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Why didn’t she get more recognition as a pioneering seafarer?

  “Ah, Freydís Eiríksdóttir . . .” Jónas looked away.

  It was a common reaction: an embarrassed laugh, a rolling of the eyes, a sigh. Earlier today Ellen Ingvadóttir had groaned when I mentioned Freydís, as I might if someone wanted to enthuse about what a strong role model for women Margaret Thatcher had been. The kindest description of Freydís I’d come across was “hot-headed.” Other sources were far more pejorative. “Arrogant” and “greedy” were two of the lesser epithets; “bloody” and “murderous” two of the worst.

  “Who knows exactly what the truth is?” Jónas said when I pressed him about whether he believed that Freydís was really so evil. “The fact is we have only the sagas to go on and they were written between two and three centuries after the events. Perhaps Freydís had some reason to do what she did. Perhaps someone didn’t like her.”

  Perhaps it was a question of blame. After Jónas had departed, I sat for a while longer in the café, reluctant to face the freezing wind. I took out my copy of Women in the Viking Age by Judith Jesch. Jesch is part of a new generation of Scandinavian scholars who have applied feminist theory to accepted history. She takes a cool view of the oft-made claim that women in the sagas were strong heroines: “Because the women of the sagas of Iceland are not portrayed primarily as objects of desire, many critics have been fooled into overlooking the stereotypic ways in which they are portrayed.”

  In a section called “Iceland’s Vengeful Housewives” Jesch dissects the image of the female inciter who appears in so many of the great family sagas. Unlike their mythic predecessors, the Valkyries, these literary women almost never employ violence themselves, either with fists or weapons. Instead, they use cruel jibes and threats to create situations in which their men, unable to stand being taunted any longer, break down and murder someone.

  Iceland in the thirteenth century, when the sagas were written down, was a country riven by blood feuds, the Sicily of the North. The democratic institution of the parliament with its lawgivers had almost collapsed. By 1235 civil war had broken out, and in 1262 the Icelanders submitted to the Norwegian crown. The lack of centralized authority had, while creating a more classless society, also resulted in family-enforced punishments and increasing civil disorder. In looking for someone to blame for the disintegration of their society into warring factions, the saga writers lit upon the not completely novel idea of pointing the finger at women. Freydís fits right into this scenario of women who whet, except that, not content merely to goad, she takes the axe into her own hands at the end to become a mass murderer.

  PLAYWRIGHT AND director Brynja Benediktsdóttir was one of the only Icelanders I met willing to entertain a different view of Freydís. A few days after my coffee with Jónas, I walked over to Brynja’s house for lunch. The rooms were dark mustard with wide-planked wooden floors; a lace-curtained window offered a view of the Tjörn, the small lake near the city’s center. There was a shiny black grand piano, an antique four-poster bed in a corner, and a very random collection of chairs.

  “My play, The Saga of Gudríd, is based on both sagas, particularly The Saga of Eirík the Red. That’s the one with the most information about Gudríd and her husband Karlsefni. One of the things I was most interested in writing about was the interaction between the colonists and the native population. You know, the reason that the Vínland settlement failed was not lack of resources. The world climate was warmer then; there was plenty of everything, timber, game, fish, fruit, and they were in addition very resourceful people. But they had no concept of how to deal with a native population, the people they called skrælings. There had been no significant native population in either Iceland or Greenland when these countries were settled, so the encounters with the inhabitants [perhaps ancestors of the Mi’kmaq or the Innu] which had begun with some friendliness, quickly deteriorated into suspicion, attacks, and counterattacks. That’s really the story of The Vínland Sagas, the attempts and ultimate failure of the white settlers to understand and acknowledge the people already living there. It foretells the failure of the Europeans five hundred years later!”

  At sixty, Brynja had been in theater most of her life. Her blond hair was short; her face composed and open. She had the contented, busy air of a successful impresario. She showed me clippings from newspapers in Sweden and Ireland, where her play had been performed. Her favorite performances had been in Greenland. She patted an unusual necklace of carved bone on her chest, which had been given to her by Greenlanders.

  Brynja saw Gudríd and Freydís as mirror images. The purpose of putting Freydís beyond the pale was to raise Gudríd’s status. It was all about religion, about deconstructing Iceland’s pagan past and assigning blame. “The descendants of Gudríd were bishops, a long line of them. One of them was trying to put together a good Christian lineage to impress the Vatican. When the story of Gudríd was written down, Gudríd was elevated as Christian and quite devout. After she and Karlsefni returned to Iceland he died, and then she went off by herself on a pilgrimage by ship and foot to Rome. When she returned, she became a nun and an anchoress. Freydís, on the other hand, was a bastard and a pagan, and comparing the two women made Gudríd look wonderful. Some scholars now think that part of the purpose of The Saga of Eirík the Red was to elevate the courage and goodness of Gudríd and Karlsefni so that her descendants might be canonized.”

  I knew too little about the intricate belief systems of the pagan Norse to even guess what sort of heathen Freydís might have been. Would she have sacrificed animals at the shrine of Odin, or perhaps to Freya, the Norse goddess of fertility? Freya introduced divination to mortals, and her cult of followers, many of them women, included seers and foretellers. Freya was also known for bringing discord among the gods. But before Freya joined the complicated pantheon of Norse gods, and was relegated to a lesser position as female troublemaker, she’d been the Great Goddess herself. Freya. Freydís. Was this the reason the churchmen who wrote down the sagas had it in for her?

  Leaving Brynja’s, I walked over to Hallgrím’s Church, where a statue of Leif Eiríksson towers over the square. Although it was presented to the city by a group of Americans in 1930, it embodies the centuries-long pride the Icelanders have taken in this native son (though he actually lived in Greenland most of his life). One of the reasons that Leif was called “the Lucky” was th
at he seems to have led a charmed life, and that’s emphasized in the sagas. As charismatic as his father, Leif comes down to us a born leader. The stories of him reminded me a little of those told about Grace O’Malley. They had a certain prideful pleasure. Here was someone well respected, well remembered, and well loved, who reflected only good upon the race.

  Freydís was no Grace O’Malley, but was she really Lizzie Borden? In The Saga of Eirík the Red, the one Brynja had used as the basis for her play, there’s no mention of Freydís as a psychopathic killer of her own sex. In that saga, Freydís barely appears, and seems to be on the same expedition to Vínland as Gudríd and Karlsefni. But her brief appearance is, in fact, heroic. When the Norse were attacked by the Indians, the male settlers ran off, but Freydís, heavily pregnant, stood her ground, calling to them, “Why do you flee from such pitiful wretches, brave men like you? You should be able to slaughter them like cattle. If I had weapons, I am sure I could fight better than any of you.” She snatched up a sword from a slain man and faced the skrælings. Pulling down her shift to show one of her breasts (possibly to indicate she was a woman), she slapped at it with the flat part of the sword and frightened the natives off.

  What was the truth of the events so long ago in Greenland and Vínland? Was Freydís a heroine or a murderer? What happened to Finnbogi and Helgi and their followers? Perhaps one of the ships was no longer seaworthy enough for the return home, and the Greenlanders, under the direction of Freydís, did take the remaining ship and sail off, leaving the Icelanders behind. Perhaps when the two ships set a return course for Greenland after their stay in Straumfjord, the Icelanders didn’t get back safely. Their absence gave rise to rumors; the rumors were pinned on Freydís. The Norse were a violent people; we can only speculate about events so long ago. The important thing is to speculate, to keep the possibilities open.