According to Saxo, Alfhild wasn’t the only woman, like the Irish pirate queen, to have “impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea.” In fact, he recounts:
There were once women among the Danes who dressed themselves to look like men, and devoted almost every instant of their lives to the pursuit of war, that they might not suffer their valor to be unstrung or dulled by the infection of luxury. For they abhorred all dainty living, and used to harden their minds and bodies with toil and endurance. They put away all the softness and lightmindedness of women, and inured their womanish spirit to masculine ruthlessness. They sought, moreover, so zealously to be skilled in warfare, that they might have been thought to have unsexed themselves. Those especially, who had either force of character or tall and comely persons, used to enter on this kind of life. These women, therefore (just as if they had forgotten their natural estate, and preferred sternness to soft words), offered war rather than kisses, and would rather taste blood than busses, and went about the business of arms more than that of amours. They devoted those hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the loom. They assailed men with their spears whom they could have melted with their looks, they thought of death and not of dalliance.
Steamer route up the Norwegian coast
One of the tough seafaring warriors in Saxo is Sela, a Norwegian queen who fought her brother Koll for dominion of the kingdom. Other Viking women Saxo mentions are Hetha, Wisna, and Webiorg:
On these captains, who had the bodies of women, nature bestowed the souls of men. Webiorg was also inspired with the same spirit, and was attended by Bo Bramason and Brat the Jute, thirsting for war. . . . Wisna, a woman, filled with sternness, and a skilled warrior, was guarded by a band of Sclavs. . . .
Rusla (or Rusila), according to Saxo, was another highborn Norwegian chieftain who fought with her brother, Thrond, for control of their country. She also resisted the Danish king Omund’s attempted rule over the Norwegians and “declared war against all the subjects of the Dane.” When Omund tried to suppress the rising, Rusla not only conquered them but also, “waxing haughty on her triumph,” decided to tackle the sovereignty of Denmark. In this she failed, leaving the battlefield with “only” thirty of her ships. Obviously vexed, she met Thrond on her retreat and stripped him of his army. King Omund continued to pursue her, however, and eventually sent a great fleet to drive her from her kingdom in Norway.
The king pursued her hotly, caught up with her fleet on the sea, and utterly destroyed it, the enemy suffered mightily, and he won a bloodless victory and splendid spoils. But Rusla escaped with a very few ships, and rowed ploughing the waves furiously; but, while she was avoiding the Danes, she met her brother and was killed.
The tale of Rusla and her many battles, as well as the even more compelling story of Alfhild was on my mind as I stood at the railing of the Lofoten, watching the turf-covered granite slopes behind Svolvær turn from dull olive to blazing emerald and back again, as the sun flashed in and out through clouds. For this was Viking country—vik means “bay” in Norwegian and is one of the possible origins of the name for the warriors who came out of the North to pillage, rape, and destroy, as well as to trade and colonize. Everyone knows that the Vikings terrorized the hapless Irish and Anglo-Saxons, but in fact there was also tremendous conflict among the different Nordic groups for dominance of the Baltic, North Sea, and Norwegian coastline. Most battles took place in the disputed passages of the Baltic and the fjords around southern Norway and Denmark, but there had been Vikings as far north as the Lofoten Islands. On the other side of Svolvær’s peaks at Borg was an archaeological site and reconstruction of a Viking chieftain’s longhouse.
I tried to imagine a fleet of a hundred Viking longships with dragon prows, massing for battle here in the Lofotens, with a tall, keen-eyed woman in command. She would be wearing a woven tunic, dyed blue, and a fur cloak around her shoulders. Her hair would be pulled into a braid, her strong-jawed face streaked with salt and sweat. Around her neck a torque of gold; coiling up her muscular bare arms bronze bracelets in the shape of snakes, and armbands wide as shackles. Nothing can give a better sense of the robustness and splendor of Viking women than to see (behind glass in museum cases) their heavy, barbaric jewelry. Nothing, perhaps, except the size of their ships. For the ships that Rusla and Sela and Alfhild would have commanded were not the cargo-heavy knarrs that Aud the Deep-Minded or Freydís Eiríksdóttir had sailed when they crossed the Atlantic from the Faroes to Iceland or from Greenland to Vínland, but sleek and deadly longships. These were to the knarr as the Concorde is to the Conestoga wagon.
The longship was a flexible marvel of engineering, whose axe-hewn, thin oaken planks overlapped clinker-fashion and were riveted with iron. It could carry from sixty to as many as one hundred oarsmen. With a stylized dragon or serpent lunging high up the prow, round painted shields turned outward along the sides, and a massive square sail, often striped or dyed bright colors, this was the fleet’s war machine whose dreadful shadow on the horizon caused Alcuin of York to write, after the Vikings had attacked the holy island of Lindisfarne in 793, “Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”
The struggles between Koll and Sela and between Thrond and Rusla were family affairs to begin with, and seem to show that women of that time felt they had as much right to power as their brothers. Then there were women like Alfhild, who took to pirating and war, not from a desire to claim or extend territory, but purely, it seems, for the adventure of it.
According to Saxo, Alfhild, the daughter of a lesser Danish king, Siward, was guarded jealously since birth in order that she could be awarded to a hero worthy of her—that is, someone who best suited a political alliance. In this case it was Alf, the son of Sigar, the ruler of most of mid-ninth-century Denmark. Alf stood up to the viper and snake that Alfhild’s father had placed in his daughter’s chambers to deter prospective suitors, but he was no match for Alfhild’s indifference.
Instead of falling happily into the prince’s arms, Alfhild showed a strange desire to dress as a male warrior and go off to enjoy for herself the pleasures and financial rewards of looting and battle. As Olaus Magnus writes: “Her determination to stay chaste was so steadfast that she began to reject all men and firmly resolved with herself never to have intercourse with any, but from then on to equal, or even to surpass, male courage in the practice of piracy.” She must not have been the only maiden to have chafed at the restrictions of a woman’s lot and to have “preferred a life of valour to one of ease,” for she “enrolled in her fighting company many young women of the same inclination.”
Both Saxo and Olaus Magnus give her a ship and a crew by accident. “She happened to arrive at a place where a band of sea-robbers were lamenting the death of their leader, who had been lost in war,” writes Olaus Magnus. “Because of her beauty and spirit she was elected as pirate chief by these fellows and performed feats beyond a normal woman’s courage.”
What exactly these feats were, or whether she confined herself to plundering innocent trading vessels in the Baltic or, with her oarsmen and women, raided the monasteries and towns of England like other Danish Vikings, we’ll never know. Alfhild seems to have kept the attention, however, of the Danish king and his son Alf, who “undertook many voyages in her pursuit.” Like Lord Deputy Henry Sidney and Lord Justice Drury, whose dispatches from Ireland to Elizabeth’s court plainly illustrate their mingled irritation with and admiration for Grace O’Malley, both Saxo and Olaus Magnus seem conflicted, praising the valor of Alfhild and her female crew as well as other pirate maidens, while retelling the stories in ways that emphasize their eventual defeat by death or subjugation.
Unlike Sela and Rusla, whose punishment was death, Alfhild had a different fate. She and her followers were pursued into a harbor, up the narrow f
jord of Hangö in Finland, by the determined Alf. It’s not clear whether either Alf or Alfhild knew their opponent’s identity. Seeing unfamiliar vessels making for the harbor, however, Alfhild didn’t wait to be attacked, but ordered her longships (for by now she had a fleet) out to meet the enemy head-on.
Olaus Magnus describes the battle thus:
They began the sea-fight and sustained it on either side with high regard for their fame and courage. Then came the lucky moment the young man had been waiting for when he leapt onto Alvild’s bows and, surrounded by soldiers who were fresher and more numerous, forced his way right up to the stern, slaughtering all who withstood him. Borkar, his companion, struck off Alvild’s helmet and, as soon as he saw the delicacy of her countenance, realized that they should be going to work with kisses, not with weapons; they should lay aside their hard spears and handle their foe with more persuasive attentions. Alf was overjoyed when, beyond all hope, he had presented to him the girl he had sought indefatigably over land and sea despite so many perilous obstacles. He seized her passionately and straight away had her adorned with the most elegant and feminine clothing. Following the praiseworthy custom of his forbears, he married her and afterwards had by her a daughter, Gurith.
Alfhild battles Prince Alf
From Olaus Magnus’s point of view, this is a very successful conclusion. For those of us thirsting for tales of women’s valor on the water, for stories of sea fights sustained with “high regard for fame and courage,” the ending is disappointing. What happened to Alfhild? What happened to Webiorg and her supporter, Brat the Jute? Were such women, who thought of “death instead of dalliance,” so easily trounced?
MAGGIE AND Helen and I were on day three of the Norwegian coastal voyage, which travels up the Norwegian coast from Bergen around the North Cape to the border with Russia and then back again. They were doing the whole eleven-day round trip. I was getting off in the Lofoten Islands, then continuing on to Tromsø for a week, before beginning a series of flights that would take me back to Seattle. It was late August by now, and the shortening days made me think of home, even as I longed to be at sea forever.
I’d met Maggie the morning of the first day out, when we were sailing toward Ålesund. In her mid-fifties, plump and asthmatic, wearing a large flowered blouse over several turtlenecks, and a thickly crocheted blue cap on her head, she was a junior high school teacher from a small town outside Sacramento. Within twenty minutes I knew how much Maggie’s house cost, when she bought it, what it sold for last year, what her two children did, and what they earned. This was her fifth trip on the coastal steamer. She’d first traveled up to the North Cape the summer of 1973; she’d even been on the Kong Olav.
“I was on the Kong Olav then, too!” I said. “I was a dishwasher.”
It turned out Maggie had taken her trip in May, before I’d started my job, but even if we’d been on the ship at the same time, we probably wouldn’t have met. “Just think, you could have washed my dishes,” she said, punching my arm in a friendly way.
In the years since Maggie and I had made that first trip, the ships of the line—Hurtigruten it’s called in Norwegian—have gotten larger. The Kong Olav was retired some years ago and sold to Thailand; its sister ships, the Lofoten and the Harald Jarl, were destined for a similar fate soon. These older ships were being replaced by vessels with dance floors and panorama lounges, vessels that could compete with the massive cruise ships that plied Norway’s scenic fjords.
No doubt about it, the Lofoten, especially after traveling on big car ferries like the St. Sunniva and the Norröna, seemed tiny and cramped, low in the water, an Alice in Wonderland change of scale. The doors opened heavily; the stairs were narrow, the corridors crowded. No lightweight materials here, but cast iron, many times painted, so that there was a thick skin of white, green, and black over every part of the ship. The wooden railings had been much lacquered; they had a skin of shellac, worn thin in places.
Still, like many passengers, I was attached to the old ships for their ambiance, and I especially loved the Lofoten for the memories it brought of my summer working on the Kong Olav, an experience that, like many during a hand-to-mouth, unstable period of wanderlust in my early twenties, seemed now both remarkably interesting and even amusing. Then, I’d been bitter about my low standing onboard, and wracked with anxiety about what to do at the end of the summer. I had been lonely at times and bone-tired from the long hours. But on this voyage, as a passenger, I’d found myself haunting the areas where the crew draped themselves over the railings to enjoy a smoke. I peeped into the kitchen, caught a glimpse of the cooks’ and dishwashers’ mess. The same jar of pickled beets seemed to be still sitting on the table amid overflowing ashtrays.
No cruise ship could ever replicate the feel of one of the coastal steamers, for the line had a long history in Norway. Inaugurated in 1893, at a time when the country didn’t have railways or highways in the north, the coastal steamer connected towns and villages from Bergen to Kirkenes, bringing news, cargo, and passengers. News came no longer, but the daily ships, one steaming north and the other south, were still an event in some places, where small children might still wave as we came into or out of port. I found I was still fascinated, as I had been on the Kong Olav and during my childhood visiting the Port of Long Beach, to see the cargo being loaded and unloaded. Frozen fish came onboard; boxes of grapefruit and bananas and car parts were taken off. Occasionally a car swung on or off the top deck of the ship. The Lofoten, like the Kong Olav, could only fit four cars aboard at a time.
In Maggie, for all the ways we were different, I’d found a similar appreciation of the Hurtigruten. “There’s nothing I’d rather do on vacation,” she said, “than be on one of these ships and at sea. A cruise ship, no thank you. On a ship like this, it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re alone, whether you’re young and fit. The coastal steamer has a purpose—and you’re part of it.”
She and Helen had joined forces early on. A teacher from New Zealand, Helen was in her late twenties, attractive but shy, with beseeching blue eyes. Her mouth wore a practiced and brave don’t-worry-about-me expression, but even her shoulders looked rejected. I’d seen her wandering around the ship the first evening, and she’d looked melancholy among the younger couples and out of place among the retirees. Maggie told me later that Helen’s fiancé had dumped her in London, where they’d been staying with his brother. “And so she just decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to the North Cape by sea. I told her, ‘To hell with him! This is the trip of a lifetime!’” Maggie chuckled, wheezing, “Does this mean I’ve had five lifetimes?”
The sun broke through, decisively, and cast a radiant gleam over the bronze “Fisherman’s Wife” as we slipped past. She continued waving, not to us, but to the imaginary man fading out of sight. The verse of the skaldic poets in old Norway and Iceland often assumes a woman standing on shore, admiring the man setting off to sea. The skalds were employed, often by the courts of the kings and nobles of the Norse realm, to celebrate the battle victories of the ruler on land and at sea. One of them wrote:
The prince’s band can pull
their oars straight out of the sea.
The widow looks and admires
the wondrous flight of the oars.
Madam, there’ll be much rowing
till the tarred sea-tools fall apart.
Some Viking scholars, such as Judith Jesch, dismiss the story of Alfhild and other women warriors as male fictions based on stories of Amazons that date back to the ancient Greeks. Jesch suggests that these warriors (sometimes called Valkyries after the Norse god Odin’s handmaidens who conducted slain heroes to Valhalla) were setups; after all, in the tales of Saxo and Olaus Magnus they invariably lose the battle and the kingdom in the end. Other historians are more sanguine. If the names of male nobles in Saxo correspond to other historical genealogies, why shouldn’t Alfhild, Rusla, and Sela have existed?
Folklore that can’t be proved or disproved present
s a conundrum. I want to believe that parts of Alfhild’s story might be true, that she turned pirate and performed “feats beyond a normal woman’s courage.” But I’m skeptical that she embraced Alf as robustly as he apparently embraced her. Her reaction to him isn’t noted, and if the word “passionately” is removed from the sentence, “He seized her passionately and straight away had her adorned with the most elegant and feminine clothing,” it might well sound more coercive than romantic.
In a corner of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, a former Norse stronghold and trading town near Copenhagen, are a mirror, some photographs and a row of pegs on which hang Viking clothing, men’s and women’s, in three sizes. For the girls and women there are a long white under-dress with full sleeves, a blue overdress, an apron gathered up at the shoulders and pinned with bronze oval brooches, and a long, fur-trimmed mustard-colored cloak. For the boys and men there are tunics and leggings and a short cloak edged with fur, secured at the shoulder with a stickpin. Just in case you should get any wrong ideas about which costume is appropriate for your gender, there are three pairs of photographs—boy and girl children, teens, and adults—to guide you.
But wearing male attire at sea, as Grace O’Malley, Trouser-Beret, and Skipper Thurídur could have explained, was more a matter of practicality than defiance. When Alfhild’s warrior tunic and leggings, cloak, and helmet were stripped from her and she was once again “adorned” in dress and apron, it wasn’t just a matter of gender being restored so marriage and motherhood could begin. It was a signal that Alfhild’s days at sea were definitively over.
I SAID goodbye to Maggie and Helen and spent several days in the Lofoten Islands before traveling onward on a different ship. This was the Richard With, one of the newer-generation coastal steamers built to resemble a cruise ship. On the Richard With, you could move about freely without bumping into anyone. There was a cocktail bar, a library, and all manner of soft swivel chairs in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows with spectacular views of narrow blue fjords and sharp granite mountains, of red fishermen’s shacks and wharves, once the site of intensive winter fishing (this is where Trouser-Beret captained her boat), and now impossibly picturesque. Yet the Richard With was a more insulated world, whose very comfort made it seem sometimes as though we were passing through a travel video about the breathtaking Land of the Midnight Sun. To sit in a panorama lounge with a view of mountains and sea, with a novel on one’s lap, was not the same as leaning over the railing and taking in great gulps of marine spray: salt water, fish, diesel, and a hint of frost from distant glaciers.
The Pirate Queen Page 28