by Tim Severin
SIX
SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS are remarkably quick to adapt. Naturally enough, the farm workers at Lyusfjord refused to spend the winter cooped up in a building where such supernatural events had occurred, so our household moved back to Brattahlid, and within days I was back into the normal routines of childhood, playing with the other children. There were more of them than there had been at Lyusfjord so our games were more complicated and rowdy. I was smaller in stature than most of my contemporaries, but I made up for my lack of brawn with clever invention and quickness of thought. I also found I had a talent for mimicry and an imagination more vivid than most of my friends. So in our group I was the one who tended to invent new games or embellish the existing games with variants. When spring came and the days lengthened, we children moved out of doors to play the more boisterous games that the adults had forbidden indoors during the winter months. Most of our games involved a lot of play-acting with loud shouts, makeshift wooden shields and blunt wood swords. It was only natural that one we invented was based on my uncle Thorvald's voyage. Of course Thorvald's heroic death was a central feature of the make-believe. The oldest, strongest boy - his name was Hrafn as I remember — would play the leading role, staggering around the yard, clutching his armpit dramatically and
pretending to pull out an arrow. 'The Skraelings have shot me,' he would yell. 'I'm dying. I will never see home again, but die a warrior's death in a far land.' Then he would spin round, throw out his arms and drop in fake death on the dirt and the rest of us would pretend to pile up a cairn of stones around his body. My own contribution came when we all boarded an imaginary boat and rowed and sailed along the unknown coast. I invented a great whirlpool which nearly sucked us down and a slimy sea monster whose tentacles tried to drag us overboard. My friends pretended to scan the beaches and called out what they saw — ravening wolves, huge bears, dragon-snakes and so forth. One day I created for them a monster-man who, I said, was grimacing at us from the beach. He was a troll with just one foot and that as big as a large dish. He was bounding along the strand, taking great leaps to keep pace with us and — to demonstrate - I left my companions to one side, and hopped along, both feet together until I was out of breath and gave up the pretence.
It was a harmless bit of play-acting, which was to draw attention to me in a way that I could never have anticipated.
The following day I got a really bad scare. I was walking past the open door to the main cattle shed when a thin arm reached out of the darkness, and seized me by the shoulder. I was yanked inside, and in the gloom found myself staring close up at the sinister face of Tyrkir. I was convinced he was about to batter me for some fault, and I went numb with fear as he briskly hefted me to the back of the cow byre and twisted me round to face him. He was still gripping my shoulder and it hurt. 'Who told you about the uniped?' he demanded in his heavy accent. 'Did you speak with any of the crew about it?'
'Turn the boy so I can look at his eyes,' said a voice with a deep rumble, and I saw another man, seated on the hay at the back of the byre. I had not noticed him before, but even without looking at his face I knew who he was, and my fright only increased. He was Thorvall, known as 'the Hunter'.
Of all the men in Brattahlid Thorvall was the one we boys most feared and respected. He was the odd man out in our community of farmers and fishermen. A huge, weatherbeaten man now in his late fifties but still as fit and tough as a twenty-year-old, he was disfigured by a scar which ran from the corner of his left eye back towards his ear. The ear had been partly torn away and healed with a ragged edge so that Thorvall looked like a tattered tomcat that had been in numerous fights. The injury was the result of a hunting accident in which Thorvall had been mauled by a young polar bear. Standing in front of him in the cowshed, I tried to keep my glance away from that terrible scar, while I thought to myself that Thorvall had been lucky not to lose the eye itself. As it was, the lid of his left eye drooped, and I wondered if it affected his vision when he was drawing his hunting bow.
Thorvall was dressed in his usual hunting clothes, heavy leggings bound with thongs, stout shoes and a jerkin with a hood. I had never seen him wear anything else, and to be frank the clothes did smell strongly even over the stench of the cow byre. Thorvall had no one to look after his laundry. He was a bachelor who lived by himself in a small house on the edge of the settlement and he came and went as he pleased. His only personal ornament was a necklace made of the teeth of polar bears he had killed. At that moment, he was looking at me steadily and I felt I was being scanned by some sort of predatory bird.
'Maybe the woman told him. She has the sight and knows a good deal of the ways,' he said.
Tyrkir was still gripping my shoulder in case I made a dash for the open door behind me. "We know about her qualities, but she's only his foster mother. Besides she wasn't there either. I think the boy saw the uniped himself. They say that Leif s Orcades woman had seidr powers. More likely the boy has his abilities from her.' He gave me a slight shake as if to check whether these mysterious 'abilities' would somehow clank together inside me.
'You'll only scare him more if you rattle him around. Let him speak for himself.'
Tyrkir relaxed his grip slightly, but did not release my arm. 'Have you talked with Gudrid about the uniped?' he asked.
I was puzzled.
I
had no idea what a uniped was.
'That creature who hopped along on just one foot.'
I now realised what this interrogation was about, but was completely baffled why Tyrkir and Thorvall would be interested in my childish antics. Surely I had done nothing wrong.
'What else do you see? Do you have any strange dreams?' Tyrkir was asking the question so intently that his German accent was all the more obvious. I did not know how to reply. Of course I had dreams, I thought to myself, but so did everyone else. I had nightmares of being drowned, or pursued by monsters, or that the room was squeezing in on me, all the usual terrors. In fact I was rather ashamed of my nightmares and never spoke about them to anyone. I had no idea where my vision of the so-called uniped had come from. It was not something I had dreamed in the night. The image had simply popped into my head at the time when I was playing with the other children and I had acted it out. I was still too scared to speak.
'Anything else unusual in your head, any odd sights from time to time?' Tyrkir rephrased his question, trying to adopt a more soothing tone.
My mind stayed a blank. I wanted desperately to answer, just to save myself, but I couldn't recall a single dream out of the ordinary. But I was beginning to understand that these two gruff men meant me no harm. With a child's acuteness of observation I was becoming aware that in some mysterious way they needed me. There was an undercurrent of respect, and of something else — of awe — in their attitude to me. Clamped in the rough grip of Tyrkir, and faced by the scarred face of Thorvall, I realised that the two men were expecting me to supply something they could not achieve, and it was something to do with the way I saw things.
'I can't remember any of my dreams,' I stammered. I had the good sense to look straight at Thorvall. A deliberately level gaze is a great help in persuading an interlocutor that one is telling the truth, even if one isn't.
Thorvall grunted. 'Have you talked about the uniped or any other dream like that with your foster mother?'
I again shook my head, still trying to understand why the two men were so interested in Gudrid's role.
'Do you know what this is?' Tyrkir suddenly brought his free hand in front of my face, and showed me what he had been holding in his palm. It was a small metal pendant, squat and T-shaped. The creases and lines on his hand, I noticed, were deeply ingrained with soot and grime.
'Mjollnir—' I ventured.
'Do you know what Thor uses it for?'
'Sort of,' I murmured.
'He uses his hammer to crack the heads of those who disobey him, and to obliterate his enemies. He'll use it on you, if you tell anyone about our little talk.'
'Let the boy go,' said Thorvall, and then, looking at me, he asked in a matter-of-fact tone, 'how would you like to know more about Thor and the other Gods? Would that interest you?'
I felt strangely drawn to his suggestion. I had now controlled my fear and nodded my agreement. 'All right, then,' said Tyrkir, 'Thorvall and I will teach you when we have time. But you don't tell anyone else about it, and we want you also to describe us any other dreams that you have. Now go on your way.'
Looking back on that little episode so long ago when two grown men trapped and questioned a frightened small boy in the cattle byre, I can see what Tyrkir and Thorvall were trying to achieve, and why they behaved in the odd way they did. They feared that knowledge of the Old Ways was fading from Greenland, and had been jolted into action when they detected in me someone who might possess the seidr power. They may even have heard about Christian missionaries rounding up the schoolchildren and the women and preaching at them. By imitation Thorvall and Tyrkir must have been thinking that they should do the same, but in a secret and select fashion, picking a child who seemed to have special powers and was therefore already gifted with seidr ability by the Gods. Then they would teach him what they knew of the old wisdom so that the knowledge and practice of the Old Ways would survive. If that is how they felt, at least a part of my subsequent life would have been their justification, though they would be scornful to see me now, skulking here in a Christian monastery pretending to be one of the faithful.
The uniped, Tyrkir told me in one of my first lessons, was the creature he had seen during the trip with Thorvald Eriksson to Vinland. The uniped had been skulking at the edge of the woods, close to the beach, as their ship sailed by. It looked exactly as I had described it to the other children — a bizarre, hunched body of a man standing on a single thick leg, which ended in a single broad foot. It had hopped along the strand, just as I had done in my childish game, keeping pace with the Norsemen and their boat. But when the visitors turned their vessel and began to make for shore, intending to land and capture the uniped — whether it was beast or man they could not tell - it abruptly swerved away, and had gone leaping off into the undergrowth until it had vanished underground, or so it seemed from a distance.
The sighting of the uniped was curious and inexplicable. Perhaps it was just one of Tyrkir's eccentricities, and he was citing another of his hallucinations. But several of the crew also claimed they had seen the strange creature, though not as clearly as Tyrkir. Nor could they describe it in such detail. None of them had mentioned the incident when they got back to Brattahlid for fear of being considered foolish. So my imitation of the creature — even the exact way it had kept pace with the knorr - had led both Tyrkir and Thorvall to think that somehow my other-spirit had been on that exploring ship off the coast of Vinland, and yet back at home in Brattahlid at the same time, and — as every Old Believer knows - the ability to be in two places at once is a true mark of seidr power. A seidr-gifted person is born with this trick of spirit flying through the air, invisible and at supernatural speed to places far distant and then returning to the mortal body. Judging by what happened to me in Vinland soon afterwards, Thorvall and Tyrkir were right in detecting a spirit link between me and that unknown land in the west. On the other hand, I have to admit that it could have been pure coincidence that I imitated a hopping One Foot in the children's game because no one ever saw a uniped ever again.
But that doesn't mean that unipeds do not exist. Recently I came across one here in the monastery's library. I was preparing a sheet of vellum, scraping off the old ink before washing the page. Vellum is so scarce that we reuse the pages when their writings are too faded or blurred, or the content of the text is out of date or unimportant. This particular page was from Ezekiel, on the demons Gog and Magog, and had become detached from its original book. As I removed the old writing, I noticed a small, simple drawing in the margin. It was rather crudely done, but it caught my attention at once. It was a uniped, just as Tyrkir had described it to me in that cattle shed sixty years ago, except that the creature in the margin was drawn with giant, napping ears as well as a giant foot. And, instead of hopping, it was lying on the ground on its back with the single large foot held up in the air. I could just make out the faint word '. . . ped sheltering . . .' and then the rest of the caption was a blur. What the uniped was sheltering from was not clear. If it was a Vinland uniped then it might have been the snow and rain. But there was nothing in the adjacent text to explain the mystery.
Over the next months Thorvall or Tyrkir frequently picked on me for some chore or other, ostensibly because they wanted me to help them, but in fact they were looking for opportunities to tell me something of their beliefs out of earshot of the others. Neither of my tutors were learned men and Tyrkir in particular was very artless. But they both possessed the enormous advantage that they were not in the least hypocritical in their beliefs. Their genuine conviction made a stronger impression on me than all the sophistry imaginable. And the pagan world of the Old Ways was so easy to imagine, so logical, so attractive, and so apt to our situation on the remote shore of Greenland, backed by its immense and mysterious hinterland of ice and mountains, that it would have been a very dull student who failed to respond.
Tyrkir told me of the Aesir, the race of heroes who migrated out of the east long ago and established their capital at Asgard, with Odinn as their chief. With the twin ravens Hugin and Munin — Thought and Memory — perched on his shoulders, Odinn was — and is, so Tyrkir insisted to me — cunning and ruthless, a true king. Dedicated to the pursuit of advantageous knowledge, even sacrificing the sight of one eye so he could drink a draught of water from the well of wisdom, he still treads the world in a variety of disguises, always seeking more and more information. But his role is doomed, for in his wisdom he knows he is leading the other Aesir in the ultimately hopeless task of defending the world against the powers of darkness, the frost giants and mountain giants and other grim monsters who will finally crush them, to the hideous baying of the monstrous hound, Gorm. In his palace at Valholl Odinn entertains the departed heroes of our human race, proven warriors who are provided with feasting and drinking and the company of splendid women, until they will be summoned forth for the last, fatal battle at Ragnarok. Then they and all the Gods will be overwhelmed.
There is no doubt in my mind that Tyrkir's eerie tales of Odinn and his deeds were the original inspiration for my later devotion to the All-Father, as Tyrkir always called him. To a seven-year-old there was a morbid fascination in how Odinn interviewed the dead or sat beside men hanging on the gallows to learn their final secrets or consorted with the maimed. His skill as a shape-shifter was no less beguiling, and I easily imagined the Father of the Gods as he changed himself into a bird of prey, a worm, a snake, a sacrificial victim, according to whatever stratagem he had in mind. Being still a youngster I had no inkling of his darker side — that he can trick and cheat and deceive, and that his name means 'Frenzy'.
Thorvall's hero, unsurprisingly given his own name, was redhaired Thor, Odinn's son, who rides across die sky in his goat-drawn chariot, his passage marked by rolls of thunder and flashes of lightning, hurling thunderbolts, controlling the sea, and laying about him with Mjollnir, his famous hammer. Thorvall was an ardent member of the Thor cult, and once he got started on one of his favourite Thor-stories, he became very animated. I recall the day he told me how Thor went fishing for the Midgard serpent, using an oxhead for bait, and when the serpent took the hook Thor pulled so hard on the line that his foot broke through the planking of the boat. At that point in his story Thorvall stood up and, as we were in the cattle shed at the time, put his foot against one of the stalls and heaved back to imitate his hero. But the stall was poorly made, and collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters. I can still hear Thorvall's great bellowing laugh and his triumphant cry of 'Just like that!'
Despite Thorvall's enthusiasm for Thor — and my boyhood respect for the tough hunter — I still prefe
rred Odinn. I savoured the idea of creeping about in disguise, picking up intelligence, observing and manipulating. Like all children, I liked to eavesdrop on the adults and try to learn their secrets, and when I did so and stood hidden behind a door or a pillar, I would close one eye in imitation of my one-eyed hero God. Also, if my foster mother had searched under my mattress she would have found a square of cloth I had hidden there. I was pretending it was Skidbladnir, Odinn's magic ship, which received a favourable wind whenever it was launched and could carry all the Aesir, fully armed, yet when Odinn no longer needed it, he could fold it up and tuck it in his pocket.
Several years later, when I was in my teens, it slowly dawned on me that I myself might be a part of Odinn's grand design. By then it seemed that the path of my life was increasingly directed by the All-Father's whim, and whenever possible I paid him homage, not only by prayer and secret sacrifice, but also by imitation. That is one reason why, as a callow youth, I sought to become a poet, because it was Odinn, disguised as an eagle, who stole the mead of this night, and tomorrow afternoon I believe I will be able to reply to your question.'
There was a general sigh of despondency. Those who lived close enough to be able to walk to their homes through the dark left the building. The others bedded down for the night in Herjolf s hall and waited anxiously for the long, slow spread of dawn, which comes so late at that season that the light begins to fade almost as soon it reaches the earth.