by Ice! [V2. 0]
I looked around me. People who had lived here were still alive. They had lived here, and played here, and cried here, and sung here, during my lifetime. Now it was all gone. Finished. Dead. Here, there was no proud achievement. Here man had been defeated, despite a long, hard, bitter struggle. There was the sadness, the sense of ineffable gloom. The presences around me were in the depths of misery.
I looked around the tumbled stones of the three churches, dedicated to Christ, to Brendan the Voyager, and to Columcille, then made my way back to the boat. Nelson was pleased to get back onboard. He had not liked the village one bit.
As I took off into the ocean dusk (I didn't fancy a night there), I wondered to myself how Iron Age people had reached these remote rocks. When the pro-English General Campbell arrived, chasing Bonnie Prince Charlie after the defeat of the 1745 Scottish rebellion, how was it that the islanders had never even heard that a war had been fought? Why were there so many bird beaks on the floors of the cottages? The last conundrum I figured out on the passage to Iceland. The poor souls had used the bird beaks in the place of wooden pegs, to fix the rush thatch to the roofs!
But still, there was something fascinating about the place, named after a saint who is not even on the Christian calendar, something mysterious and yet at the same time hopeful. After all, what else can we do but admire the plain courage of all the folk who had wenched an existence out of those barren rocks for so many centuries?
St. Kilda is now a British government wildlife reserve, and there is a rocket-tracking station on the main island of Hirta. I am told there are even more birds there now!
Now give me a nail and a hammer, And a picture to hang on the wall, Give me a pair of stepladders, In case that I should fall, Give me a couple of waiters, And a dozen bottles of ale, And I'll bet you I'll hang up
that picture, If somebody drives in the nail!
One of Tansy Lee's drinking
13
Background to the Sagas
As is shown in the old legends of the Gaels, and also in the accounts of the Greek Pytheas and the Roman Pliny, the Celts of Ireland and Wales made the long voyages to Ice-land and back with surprising regularity, many centuries before Christ. But there was no permanent Celtic settlement there until the 50s, when a hundred or so monks and anchorites, womanless, tiring of incessant Saxon and Norse raids on their coastal eyries, gathered up their parchments, bell, crosses, and tools, and, mustering among them hardy curragh sailors, sailed north to find a safe refuge on the wild, semibarren, volcanic islands of Papey and Papos. The monks knew well the old Gaelic legends. Had not the holy Saint Brendan sailed these waters and had he not told of fiery mountains being spewed out of the sea from the depths of hell and of a blasphemous sailor lost into the red-hot molten rock?
The monks had read of Cormac ua Liathain, who long before had sought his desert in the seas of the wild north. There Cormac had meditated for twenty years to drive the wailing banshees from his Gaelic soul and find his peace in the contemplation of infinite forgiveness.
From the monasteries of Aran, Anglesey, Bangor, Clonfert, and Clonmacnoise, the holy men set sail in their curraghs. Northward they pounded to Iona, off the coast of Strathclyde, there to listen to the clear words of De Ratione Temporum and Librus Regium Questionum, the works of the Venerable Bede, written far away in Wearmouth and Jarrow, giving them directions garnished from many voyages to the Faroes and Iceland during the past centuries.
With twenty to thirty men in each curragh, the saintly fleet bowled and rolled over the stormy waters, the wind bellying out the Celtic crosses on the flaxen sails. They called at the already established Christian outposts on the lonely Faroe Islands, then pressed on north, to Thule, the last land in the world. They took with them sheep and ponies, corn and beer, oats and flax, and iron tools to carve refuge from the rocks. The men of the fleet sailed on, singing hymns as the stone deadman-anchors were raised, the sails hoisted,
and the hide hulls slid away from the Faroes to take the cross of God to the country they thought nearest to hell.
For a hundred and twenty years the Gaelic colony of holy men clung to the steaming rocks of Lon and Sieda. For more than a century the holy fathers, the papar, dug into the desolate sands of Skeidara and the earth ledges of the tiny islands of Papey and Papos. They had regular communication with the mother monasteries of Britain and Ireland, with young men arriving to replace the older men dying in hard labor and prayer.
In 860 the first Norseman, Naddod the Viking, blown off course on a voyage from his lonely vikke in Norway to the Orkneys, sighted Thule. But having also sighted an island of fire "risen from the sea," Naddod, wary of meeting the devils of hell, or more of his own breed, turned south and did not land. Upon his return to Norway, tales of his adventure fell upon the ears of a landless Swede, a Norseman, to be sure, but no Viking, loitering around the wooden eating-hall of Harald Fairhair, king of Norway. In short order, Gardar Svarvasson, though penniless, rousted allies from among the idle sea-rovers of Norway and set sail to discover this mysterious land. Rumors of the Christian expeditions of long ago had filtered back to the vikkes, to the lonely Norwegian fiords, over the years. Perhaps there were rich pickings to be had for the slash of a bloody sword?
The feelings of the Gaelic holy men as they stood on the forlorn shores of the Vatnajokiill, with the black clouds bursting over the Vestmannaeyjar Island out to the south-west, as they stared, horrified, at the blood-red-striped sail of Svarvasson, with his scowling dragon's head bow-stem, charging in from the east, can only be imagined. But Gardar Svarvasson was, first and foremost, an explorer; indeed, he was one of the first of the ancient sea-rovers of whom the record is at all clear.
Following the custom of the Norse, he called a council of war, and, with his twenty-two Vikings, argued the alternatives. They were seeking land for their families; this was not land, this was a desert of hard rock, fit only for Christian lunatics. They would sail on, to the west, and seek good grazing soil for sheep and cattle. They would leave the meager pickings of the Vatnajokiill, this smoking land, to unlucky latecomers.
Up went the striped squaresail, over the shield-bedecked gunwale the long oar sweeps were thrown, and the dragon's head bit into the wind again. Past the long, black, melancholy shores of the Landeyjaer, past the storm tossed, inhospitable peninsula of Reykjanes and the rocks of the Skagi they pressed with all muscle and flaxen sail, until before them opened up the wide, heart-lifting expanse of the Faxafloi, with the waters shining in the after-noon's pale sun. There they gazed, stupefied, beyond the mountain-rimmed gulf of green, white-spurned waters, at the stupendous cone of Snaefellsjokull rearing up, like the curse of Thor himself, into the cloud-swept skies of Thule.
But they found the pastures cold and windswept between the knurled claws of the Snaefell, and so pressed on north past the snarling mass of Ondverdarness, and finally entered Breidafiord, the broad fiord, where they wondered at the thousand skerries and swift currents, stronger than any they had ever seen. They stared at the seal-covered rocks and skulking reefs, and the seven ax-clefts struck by the gods into the Isharjardajub, a mighty rock heap thrown, defeated, into the sea by the snow-shouldered mount-mass of victorious, arrogant Glama! Gardar and his men plied their iron-banded arms to the sweeps, gliding the knarr into the Kalelen deep-fiord, where the icefalls of the Drangajokiill tumble into the sea like panicked sheep leaping from the mother herd.
Still Gardar was not satisfied, and after a rest of several days, onward to the north they went, with no sign of man, only the birds in their massed thousands as they swooped over the striped sail, only the seals and the walruses as they moaned low in the pale light of the falling sun. On they went, with the North Horn, the Hornbarg, under a stormy lee, to Hiinafloi, the great expanse of fish-ridden water with the low land around flatter and richly grassed, green valleys driving inland between the tumbling, stark, rock mountains. Warmer and drier, too, they were, for they were now protected from the southwest fist of the win
d.
Gardar's men peered beyond the green of the valleys and the soft blues and greys of the mountains. They could see, behind the bluff peaks, the steely, silver-gleaming glint of ice on the high falls. Gardar now determined to winter on this coast, before returning to Norway with news of his magnificent find. The longship headed east along the coast. He missed the best wintering haven, Eyjafiord, having been blown past it in a night storm, but, just to the east of the mighty upthrust of Skjalfandi, "the Trembler," he entered a long, south-running fiord, where he and his crew built a house. They named the place Hiisavik. House-Bay. No Celtic kindness yet in names.
There, at the darkening of winter, for the winds now blew from the north hard into the fiord, Gardar left one of his viking crew, with a thrall and a bondwoman named Nattfari. Gardar sailed on east in the spring, headed for Norway. A few months later Nattfari gave birth to a son—he first child known to have been born in Iceland. This is recorded in the Norse Landnamabok, a history of Iceland.
Gardar Svarvasson, never a man to hide his light under a bushel, named the land Gardarholm. The millenium of peace in Thule was over.
While Gardar was on his way home to Norway, Floki the Fisherman, a mystic by nature, sailed for Thule from Stavanger, Norway, with a small crew, a cage of ravens, and various small animals for sacrifices. Floki was continually making sacrifices to the gods and invoking their assistance in the smallest things (which is probably the reason for his small crew). He landed in Breidafiord and wintered there. Floki was no farmer, though he did take some live-stock. Whether he did this for breeding or for sacrifices is not clear from the sagas. What is sure is that the fishing that winter was bad, which is not surprising, considering how the winter gales storm into Breidafiord. Floki longed for the spring. When April came, it was still snowing, still cold, so he left in anger, ranting and raving at the weather, the gods, and the land, which he called in his spite, Iceland. Floki returned to Norway and gave his late winter home as bad a reputation as Columbus gave San Salvador, that barren stretch of sand, a good one. But one of Floki's crew, named Thorolf, who had made a very courageous passage over the wild Flaxafloi in his parted tow-boat, swore to all in Norway that the new land was so rich that butter dripped from every blade of grass, and forever after he was known as Thorolf Butter.
The following year Ingolf Arnarson and his brother Leif, having killed the two sons of the Earl Atli of Gaular, in South Norway, had, according to the Norse law, to pay blood-money. Being penniless, they called together their thralls and cousins, fitted out a longship, and sailed for Iceland.
The first year Ingolf and Leif spied out the land, as Gardar had done before. The second year they made another expedition with settlers, but Leif, in his longship, sailed first for Ireland, where he raided for slaves. Twelve of these, warriors all, he captured and carried to Oraefa, where many fine farms now thrive, nestled between the rocky outcrops of the jokull. The Irish warriors eventually killed Leif and stole away with Leifs women and boat. They sailed to an island off the south coast. There they held out for many months against Leifs berserk avengers, but in the end, defeated, they threw themselves off the high cliffs into the sea, from whence comes the island's name, Vestmannaeyjar— "Irishman's Island."
From 865 on, the Norse immigration into Iceland was regular and steady. With them, the Vikings brought many captives from the Gaelic lands of Ireland, Wales, and Scot-land. The anchorites of Papos, Papey, and the Vatnajokull had now retreated into the fastness of Kirkjubaejar, a site so holy that even the Norsemen were afraid to visit it.
Between 890 and 920 events took place which greatly increased the Norse immigration to Iceland. A Viking army, plundering the west of Europe, was battered into defeat by the Gaelic Bretons of Northwest France. The survivors of this army fled, some east, to join their kinsmen in Normandy, some north, to join Hastern and the Great Horde, who were invading Saxon England. Here, with the continuous harrying of King Alfred and his Celtic allies, they were again hammered into defeat, and the Viking array, split into ragged tatters, was thrown back from the Saxon-English shore.
In 902, King Cearbhuil, the monarch of Leinster in Ire-land, defeated a Norse army and in 1014 the great Brian Bom finally threw the Viking plunderers out of Baile Atha Cliath (Dublin) and into the sea. The Norse survivors of this debacle sailed for North Wales, the very heartland of the Celts, where they were promptly decimated and flung back in bloody disarray to sulk in their sea-lair of Man. But here the Vikings found no respite, not even in their own flaunt-ing grounds, the North Sea, the Irish Sea, and the English Channel, for now the Celt had regained his sea legs and the Saxon had found his. With the aid of lessons well learned from the Norsemen, they time and again attacked and defeated the dragon-head ships of the Vikings, forcing them ever northward. These seaborne hammers, struck bloodily year after year from the British Isles, turned the Norsemen's bows towards Iceland, where they arrived in increasing numbers, along with their families and Celtic captives. Gradually, over the next two centuries, the two bloodstrains mixed. The Landnamabok, the old book of families and their settlements, drawn up around the year 1000, shows four hundred families living in Iceland, and one-seventh of the names in the book are unmistakably Celtic.
Despite the rockiness of the country, there is almost no stone in Iceland suitable for building or caning. There were hardly any trees, the woodcarving of which would give vent to artistic expression. The only way that the Icelanders could express themselves on a higher level than tilling the soil, fighting, or fishing was through words—spoken and written. The Celtic leavening on this race of hard warriors, farmers, and fishermen gave breath to the greatest flowering of literature the world had seen until the Catholic Re-naissance. There is no other viable explanation of how the works, for example, of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the great Welsh legends came to be translated into Icelandic Norse. So far as is known, there was nothing similar in Norway, which, word-wise, was practically dormant until Ibsen, nine hundred years later.
There were three sources of Celtic influence in Iceland. First, the surviving anchorites of the old Christian settlement, who came into contact with the early Norse settlers. Second, intermarriage between Celts and Norsemen (Helgi the Skinny, prince of Norway, was born in the fourth century of a Norse nobleman and an Irish princess, and one of the foremost chieftains of Iceland, Olav Peacock, was born of Hoskuld Dallakollsson, descendant of Aud the Deep-minded, and Mael Curcaigh—Melkorka, in Norse—daughter of the great King Murcataigh of Ireland). Third, there were the hundreds of Celtic thralls and bond-women (not exactly slaves, more like indentured servants). These thralls were, as often as not, sturdy warriors captured in battle and held until ransom was paid (which it seldom was, for there was rarely anything to pay it with). Some of the Icelandic thralls had been great and powerful men of influence in the Gaelic countries, men such as those Celts mentioned in the sagas, like Njal, Kormak, and Kjartan. As a result, there are place names of Celtic origin all over Iceland.
But the conversion to Christianity of the wild Vikings proved, in the first centuries of Icelandic settlement, beyond even the vocal charms of the Irish and the Welsh. Soon the whole island was worshiping gods more fitted to its terrible aspect, more amenable to its inhospitable climate, more understanding of its awful wrath. The old gods of the Northmen soon displaced the Son of Man even in the Celtic blood, and Niord, Tyr, Balder, and Odin were among those worshiped. However, Thor of the mighty hammer and the fertility god Frey, with his great phallus always stiff and erect, were the most feared and respected.
The attempts of the crown of Norway to establish sway over Iceland failed, having been resisted with all the craft, guile, and violence of the Icelandic Norsemen and Celts. Soon a system of self-government was developed. This was the Althing, the parliament, which the Icelanders claim was the first democratic parliament ever established. This is untrue; the Althing was not representative of the people, but only of the more prosperous landowners. It derived its origin from the Law of
the Gulathing of southwest Norway, which had as much to do with democracy as the Senate of ancient Rome. The Althing was, in fact, an institute for the maintenance of a wealthy, powerful, and avaricious establishment of land barons.
In any case, it had been preceded as a representative body by over one thousand years. The Eisteddfodd of Wales was a meeting place where every man could speak and no man could be held in jeopardy for anything said during the sessions.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Iceland prospered as a fount of literature. But the Norse spirit was shortsighted and lazy, always seeking the easy, if violent, way out of a dilemma when it came to day-to-day living. The few trees that grew on the island were cut down, and no attempt was made to keep the cattle alive during the cold winters; instead they were killed wholesale and the carcasses buried in the snow (though this in itself helped the literary effort, calfskin vellum being used for writing the sagas). No attempt was made to develop the right kind of clothing for the climate, nor to resow pasture land.
And so, around the fourteenth century a plague caused the population to stagnate, then slowly decline. Gradually Iceland withdrew again, back behind its curtain of mist and fog, until very recent times, when it became first a staging point of ship convoys during two world wars, and later an important airways crossroads on the great-circle routes from Europe to the Western Hemisphere.
But about seven hundred parchments of sagas and precious translations survived the centuries of isolation. Seven hundred, or about one tenth of the total written. A treasury of lively, human stories, full of Gaelic dreaming, of deep, abstract, oblique meaning in the simplest descriptions. And full also of Norse vigor and humor; the humanness of the characters shines strong and bright across the dark span of the lonely years between us and them.