The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

by The Far Traveler- Voyages of a Viking Woman (epub)

  At this point in The Saga of Eirik the Red, Gudrid has disappeared, and another woman—strong-minded, adaptable, brave, and pregnant—conveniently shows up. She is called Freydis and is said to be the bastard daughter of Eirik the Red. (There is a Freydis, a bastard daughter of Eirik the Red, in The Saga of the Greenlanders, too, but her path and Gudrid’s do not cross. This Freydis prepares her own expedition to Vinland, arriving there after Gudrid and Karlsefni had left.) Freydis appears in only one scene, here, as the Vikings flee:

  Freydis ran after them but fell behind because she was pregnant. She was following them into the woods when the Skraelings reached her. She saw a dead man in front of her.... His sword lay beside him. She picked it up and got ready to defend herself. When the Skraelings came at her, she drew her clothing away from her breast and slapped it with the sword. At this the Skraelings grew afraid and ran back to their boats and rowed away.

  This fighting technique has a long history in Celtic lore—one that Gudrid could have heard of from her Scottish grandfather. In the ancient Irish epic, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, when the hero Cuchulainn attacked the fortress of Emain Macha, the women “stripped their breasts at him.” Said the queen, “These are the warriors you must struggle with today.” Shamed, Cuchulainn “hid his countenance” and was captured. Such an action is in character for the Gudrid we have come to know in The Saga of Eirik the Red. It might be too racy, though, for a role model in a saga written for young nuns. I can see a squirming churchman attributing it to another, lesser woman, the late-arriving Freydis. The two women were easily switched: “Some people say that Bjarni and Freydis stayed behind,” one manuscript copy of the saga says, while Karlsefni explored to the south of Straumfjord. A different copy of the same saga puts it: “Some people say that Bjarni and Gudrid stayed behind.” Providing another clue that Karlsefni would not have left Gudrid behind and taken Freydis, the saga says that just before the birth of Snorri: “The men were now constantly at odds, and all the quarrels were over women.” The lonesome bachelors were pestering their few married friends to share their wives. Would Karlsefni leave Gudrid in another man’s arms for a year? Would Gudrid stand for it? It seems clear to me that Gudrid was the woman with Karlsefni when he scouted to the south.

  The Saga of the Greenlanders contains a very similar story of the Vikings’ interactions with the Skraelings, one in which Gudrid’s role is clearer. In this version, when the bull bellowed, the frightened Skraelings tried to barge into the Viking houses and hide. But when they realized that the Vikings did not fear the bull, the Skraelings relaxed. Karlsefni offered them not red cloth but pails of milk, and the Skraelings were happy to trade their furs for this strange new drink.

  Before the Skraelings returned, Gudrid gave birth to Snorri, and Karlsefni had a tall stockade erected around the settlement. The Skraelings were not alarmed by the Vikings’ new defenses. They flung their bales of furs over the wall and waited to be invited in. Karlsefni did so, calling out to the women to bring more milk. It was on this visit that a native woman approached Gudrid, while she was rocking Snorri’s cradle in the doorway of the house, and tried to speak with her. As the saga describes the woman, “She was rather short and had a band around her head. Her hair was reddish brown. She was pale and had very big eyes, so big that eyes that size have never been seen before in a human head.”

  Gudrid motioned for her to sit down. “My name is Gudrid,” she said.

  The stranger repeated her words: “My name is Gudrid.”

  Then came a great outburst of noise, and the woman disappeared. Following her out, Gudrid learned that a Skraeling “had been killed by one of Karlsefni’s men because he wanted to take some weapons.” It’s easy to imagine the scene. Men of both groups were examining the furs. A curious Skraeling eased up to a Viking and, drawn to this exotic, shiny object, put a hand on the Viking’s sword. Instinctively, the Viking drew his weapon and struck the man down. All hell broke loose. I can imagine, too, what Gudrid might have said to the killer: “Idiot. You and your mighty sword. We were making headway with these natives. Soon the woman and I would have understood each other. Now we’re at war.” Karlsefni predicted correctly that the Skraelings would not be so peaceful the next time they came, and although the Vikings won the skirmish in this saga, they realized it was not safe to stay. This rich land had already been claimed by another people, and they were not welcome. No doubt Gudrid, who “knew how to get along with strange people,” and who had a newborn son to protect, influenced this decision.

  The word Skræling is sometimes translated as “wretch,” but it may in fact be more of an observation than an insult. The suffix “ing” meant a person: A Skagfirðing was a person from Skagafjord; the Ynglings were the descendants of Yngvi. Skræ seems to derive from skrá, “dried skin,” particularly the kind of well-scraped and stretched dried skins on which books were written. This kind of skin is not so dissimilar to the leather used by Native Americans for clothing, making a Skraeling a person dressed in leather clothes, as opposed to the Vikings, who wore woven wool and linen.

  The description of the Skraeling woman who visited Gudrid may also be accurate. Fixating on her reddish hair, her pale skin, and her huge, inhuman eyes—as well as the saga’s assertion that “no one saw her except Gudrid”—scholars in the early twentieth century argued that this woman with “an aura of strangeness about her” must have been a ghost or a fetch, an ancestral spirit, come to warn Gudrid that she was in danger.

  Lately the scholarly weight has shifted away from the fantastic. The Beothuck Indians of Newfoundland, a now-extinct Algonkian-speaking tribe with the same ancestors as the Micmac, dressed their hair with a mixture of powdered red ocher and oil, giving it a reddish sheen almost like a modern henna rinse. They were pale enough that several Europeans remarked on it. A map from 1520 says that Gaspar de Cortereal, who explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1500, “brought from this region men of the same color as ourselves.” Another map, from 1547, says, “It is a fair race.” The English geographer Richard Hakluyt, who in 1584 wrote an influential book summarizing the Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, called the Beothucks “very white. If they were apparelled as the French are, they would be as white and as fair.” Their large eyes were singled out in 1523 by Giovanni da Verrazano, in 1612 by John Guy, in 1618 by Marc Lescarbot, in 1633 by Joann de Laet, and by numerous modern authors commenting on the portraits of two Beothuck women published by James R Howley in his massive compilation, The Beothucks or Red Indians, in 1914. The two women had been “captured” by Newfoundland fishermen in the early 1800s. For their portraits, says a letter from 1820, they were bathed until their “light-copper” skin became “nearly as fair as a European’s” and their black hair was combed and oiled. Says saga scholar Bo Almquist, “It would be difficult to find a better illustration of our saga episode than these women with their wide-open staring eyes expressing a curious mixture of wildness and surprise.”

  Because of three butternuts, and the work of archaeologists studying the pattern of Indian settlements along the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we can say with some certainty that the people with whom Gudrid and Karlsefni traded and fought, the people with whom they tried and failed to communicate, and the people from whom they ultimately fled, were the Algonkian ancestors of the Micmac and Beothuck. But what about the cows that provided the milk, and the bellowing bull, so prominent in the saga stories? The archaeologists saw no bones of cows or sheep or other domestic animals in the midden. Birgitta Wallace’s reports are quite clear that “there are no traces of the barns or byres, fences or enclosures usually associated with livestock.” She writes: “The buildings also lack the dairy pantries which were so common in Iceland and Greenland. Nor is there any other evidence of livestock in the form of floral disturbances, or of insects associated with domestic animals.”

  Standing in the chilly August wind at L’Anse aux Meadows, Birgitta reminded me again of the limitations of archaeology. They had found no ba
rns, true, and no cow bones. But what kind of sign would be left after a thousand years if the cows had grazed outside all winter, and been milked but not butchered? Unless the Vikings had left behind a broken milk bucket or a butter paddle, the only proof would be the presence of pollen from an alien weed—a European buttercup, for instance—that had come, via hay and manure, from Greenland. This pollen could have been spotted when the bog samples were examined under a microscope. Pollen in bog mud is nearly indestructible, and pollen of different herbs differs by size, shape, and texture. But scientists can’t examine every pollen grain in a bog. At L’Anse aux Meadows, they took twenty samples and divided those into blocks representing twenty to thirty years of sediment. Each of these small blocks held up to 500,000 pollen grains; the scientists identified 300. A few buttercups could easily have been missed.

  The pollen analysis confirmed that the Vikings had lived lightly on the land, but a pollen count is not sensitive enough to say whether Gudrid brought her cows or not. “Five cows and a bull, even five cows per ship, if they grazed here for one year, wouldn’t make any difference,” Birgitta told me.

  Chapter 8: The House of the Sagas

  Karlsefni now sailed across the sea, and his ship came to land in the north, in Skagafjord, where he laid it up for the winter. In the spring he bought the farm at Glaumbaer and built a house. He stayed there as long as he lived. He was a great man, and many fine people are descended from him and Gudrid. And when Karlsefni died, Gudrid took over the farming with her son, Snorri, who had been born in Vinland.

  —The Saga of the Greenlanders

  GUDRID AND KARLSEFNI AND THEIR LITTLE SON SAILED from Vinland in midsummer, after the ice went out, their ship laden with timber, furs, butternuts, and grapes crushed and fermenting in baleen-strapped barrels or in leather bags made from the entire tanned hide of a deer.

  They had hoped to sail home with the two other ships from their expedition, but one ship hadn’t returned that year to the gateway at L’Anse aux Meadows. It was Gudrid’s ship, with its mostly Greenlandic crew. While the third ship headed for Greenland, Karlsefni set off north to look for the missing one, until in a quiet bay one of his men was killed by a stone-tipped arrow shot by a one-footed humanoid—a Uniped—on shore. After that Karlsefni called off his search. Unipeds and other fantastic beings are standard fare in medieval travelers’ tales (although they are usually found in Africa). But in 1936, an arrowhead was found in the eroding Norse graveyard at Sandnes; experts say it is “very similar in style and material” to the projectiles used by the Algonkian-speaking Indians of Newfoundland and Labrador. More than one writer has linked it to this saga episode.

  Sailing home, Karlsefni came upon another kind of Skraeling, a small family group that fled from the Vikings. Karlsefni captured two young boys; the others “disappeared underground,” perhaps into the kind of sunken house, with a domed roof made of a whale’s ribs covered with sealskin and turf, that the Dorset Eskimos inhabited from Newfoundland north to Baffin Island at the time Gudrid and Karlsefni were adventuring. The Dorset were “probably the least threatening of the peoples the Norse encountered in the New World,” according to Arctic expert Peter Schledermann. Efficient hunters, they made houses, boats, and sleds entirely from the bones and hides of animals. Fine artists as well, they carved intricate tiny amulets of antler, ivory, and bone to honor and entice their prey. The two captive boys were baptized, the saga says, taught Norse, and quizzed about their culture, but the account is brief and garbled, and what happened to the boys afterward is not told.

  The saga does give news of Gudrid’s ship. Traders who came to Greenland years later reported that the ship had been storm-blown to Ireland, where the survivors were “attacked and taken as slaves.” The third ship in Karlsefni’s fleet also failed to make it home, sinking off the Irish coast. The handful of men who escaped in the towboat—the choice determined by drawing lots—returned to Iceland with the tale.

  The loss of two ships and their crews was a blow to the Greenland Norse. Around the year 1000, the whole colony numbered only 400 to 500 people. When the thirty Greenlanders among the adventurers at L’Anse aux Meadows failed to return, Greenland lost 5 percent of its critical laborers—the hunters who brought home the walrus tusks. It was not a fair exchange for one shipload of timber and luxuries. No further expeditions were sent to explore and settle Vinland, although occasional trips to Markland to harvest timber may have continued until the 1400s.

  Karlsefni did not tie his own ship and crew—or Gudrid—to Greenland’s precarious future. The next summer he sailed for Norway and, the saga says, “never had a ship so full of riches left Greenland before.”

  In Norway, Gudrid and Karlsefni were “made much of,” the saga says, leaving out the details we would love to know. Who hosted them that winter? Who heard the news of the rich land and warlike people farther west than West? Two brothers, Svein and Eirik Hakonarson, shared the kingship from 1000 to 1015. In the medieval histories, they are given short shrift, wedged between two colorful missionary kings: Olaf Tryggvason, converter of six lands, and Olaf the Fat, also known as Olaf the Saint. After 112 chapters about the first Olaf (who reigned for five years), we get only one chapter on Svein and Eirik. They were baptized, were told, but “while they reigned, they let each man worship as he wished. They upheld the old laws and customs and were wise and popular rulers.” And Eirik got Olaf’s famous ship, the Long Serpent.

  That’s it. No mention of Vinland.

  The discovery and attempted settlement of the New World a thousand years ago had, as far as we can tell, absolutely no effect on the Old World. The only result of the Vinland voyages was to make Gudrid and her husband rich.

  Though word of their explorations may have gotten out. As Karlsefni was readying his ship to sail home to Iceland, a man from Bremen, Germany, approached him and asked to buy his húsasnotra. No one knows what a húsasnotra was, but it was apparently made of wood, attached to the ship, and of some value. One scholar calls it a “carved gable end,” another a weather vane, a third thinks it was an astrolabe. Karlsefni at first refused to sell. His húsasnotra was made of irreplaceable mösurr wood from Vinland. But when the German upped his offer to half a mark of gold, Karlsefni, like a true merchant, parted with his souvenir. Half a mark of gold was eight times the tax a shipowner had to pay to the king of Norway for permission to dock. As folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson notes: “Given the way that oral stories circulate, it is not hard to imagine, if there is anything in this story at all, that this húsasnotra might have been accompanied by some kind of narrative or other details of its origins and that this information may have been passed on by the Bremen merchant when he displayed his exotic acquisition back in his home port.”

  Coincidentally—or perhaps not—the first historical reference to Vinland was written by Adam of Bremen in 1070, who said his source was the king of Denmark. Although Adam professes to be truthful, you can’t believe everything he says. Of Greenland he writes: “The people there are greenish from the salt water, whence, too, that region gets its name.” While about Iceland he says: “Here also are good Christians, but on account of the excessive cold they dare not leave their underground hollows in the wintertime. For if they go out, they are burned by the cold, which is so extreme that like lepers they lose their color as the swelling gradually spreads. Also, if they happen to wipe their noses, the whole nose pulls off with the mucus itself and, having come off, they throw it away.” Yet the king of Denmark’s description of Vinland, as Adam relays it, matches that in the sagas:

  He spoke also of yet another island of the many found in that ocean. It is called Vinland because vines producing excellent wine grow wild there. That unsown crops also abound on that island we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relation of the Danes. Beyond that island, he said, no habitable land is found in that ocean, but every place beyond it is full of impenetrable ice and intense darkness.

  From Norway, Gudrid and Karlsefni
and little Snorri sailed to northern Iceland, turning south into a great gray fjord, past the high, jagged peaks of Trollaskagi (“Troll’s Cape”) to the east and the gentler massifs of Skagastrond (“Cape of Beaches”) to the west; between the jutting, angular Thordarhofdi, a headland named for Karlsefni’s great-grandfather, whose nineteen children had peopled the region, and the island Drangey, the sheer-sided block where the outlaw Grettir the Strong would spend his last unlucky years. A green valley opened out ahead of them, the broadest and flattest in Iceland, its braided glacial rivers irrigating acres of grasslands. They probably moored at the mouth of a salmon stream, where a small island made a cove that sheltered ships from the north wind. On the rocky spit up from the harbor was a cluster of turf-walled huts with cobblestone floors; tented with sailcloth, they made good warehouses in which to store the foreign goods Karlsefni had brought to sell. Before he saw to the unloading, though, he may have sent a man upriver, past the gorge foamy with rapids, to the farm of Miklabaer, where a cousin of Karlsefni’s father lived. Out of courtesy (and for a cut rate on Karlsefni’s wares), the cousin, Arnor Old-Woman’s-Nose, sent back horses to take Karlsefni and Gudrid and their essential luggage west to Karlsefni’s estate at Reynines.

  The harbor at Kolkuos—or the little bit that is left of it—has been under excavation since 2003. Most has eroded into the sea. But it was a busy place in the early eleventh century, according to Ragnheidur Traustadottir, the Icelandic archaeologist who leads the dig. Her team has found a pagan grave, an ironworker’s shop, six stone-floored warehouses, and 4,000 bones from birds, fish, whales, sheep, goats, pigs, and fourteen different dogs, from small to large. “People were importing lapdogs just to show off,” Ragnheidur said of Gudrid’s peers. Skagafjord was not the hand-to-mouth kind of place Gudrid was used to.