Odin’s Child (57 page)

Some seven years ago, the old man returned to Iceland, rowing up from the coast alone in a small boat. He was skin and bone, say his neighbors, and near dead from exposure. And though he spoke to no one, rumors swirled around him: that as a young man he had served with Harald in the Empire of the Greeks, and had returned with fabulous riches, which he buried beneath his floor. And that he was a heathen sorcerer, like his father before him.

“Never fear, my boy,” said my father, always the optimist. “We'll get the old fellow to talk.”

I was against it from the start, but my father has a way of getting what he wants. We came armed with food and a cask of ale, with sheaves of second-quality parchment, with pens and pots of ink. But when days stretched into a week, and the old man had not even mentioned Harald's
name, insisting upon telling us
his
story before anyone else's, my father decided that he must return to Skalholt. “Keep him talking, my boy,” he said, “and write it all down because it's not without some interest, the old fellow's life. These were our forefathers, after all.” And with a cheery wave of his hand he left me alone with the madman, as winter closed in.

I stood it for another two weeks. Two weeks in which Odd Tangle-hair, as he calls himself (though the hair is now only a fringe of white) wove his life around me. No, sucked me into it is a better image, talking by the hour, while my inky fingers struggled to keep up, pouring out his tale of blasphemy and lechery and sorcery; of blood and lust. Filled with lies, of course, for who could believe half of what he says? It's all boasting and conceit. At last, thank God, the old man fell ill, coughing until he couldn't speak. And I made my escape, taking the pages with me.

I told myself that once safely home, those three weeks would pass like the shadow of a dream.

I was wrong.

On my first night under my own blankets, I dreamt such wicked things as I could never confess, even to my dear father. I am the same age now as the old man was when his tale began. And I feel my own blood stirring, though I fight against it. All through these last days, up to the moment of this writing, while I assist at mass, while I pore over the
Lives
of the blessed martyrs, even, God forgive me, while I kneel in prayer, always and everywhere the specter of Odd Tangle-Hair haunts me.

And now, my father says that when Spring comes, we will go back, and if the old man is still alive, hear more of his story.

I dread it.

Despite the title of
Odd Tangle-Hair's Saga
, I have not tried to imitate the style or tone of an authentic Icelandic saga. Those amazing works of medieval literature, whose lean, spare prose breathes the cold Icelandic air, have already been written—and they are inimitable. I have instead written a novel with a modern sensibility, inspired by the facts and realities of Viking history. If readers are encouraged by it to read some of the sagas for themselves (which exist in many fine English translations) I will feel well rewarded.

Odd and his family are fictitious, but the crucial events in their lives—the conversion of Iceland to Christianity and the law and legal process relating to murder, feud, and banishment—all follow closely the accounts in the Icelandic family sagas. These anonymous works of literature, written mostly in the thirteenth century, relate events of two centuries earlier. While not precisely history, they bring us as close as we can come to the world of Viking Age Iceland.

A reader of
Njal's Saga
, one of the longest and best of the family sagas, will find described there a house-burning which inspired the one in our story. Violence is pervasive in the sagas. They exult in swirling battle scenes where arms, legs, heads are lopped off with a single slash of the blade. I have, if anything, toned things down a bit.

I have taken some liberties with the topography of Iceland, in particular, Mt. Hekla. I have climbed Hekla—well, half-way, before knees
gave out—but the Hekla described in chapter three is mostly the Hekla of my imagination. I have also allowed myself some latitude in describing the battlefield of Stiklestad.

King Olaf, today the patron saint of Norway, and his young half-brother Harald Hardrada (the Ruthless) are historical figures, and both are the subjects of biographical sagas by the great Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson. If it seems to the reader that I have treated Olaf too harshly, his savagery against pagans is remarked on even by Snorri, who wrote in an age that was not squeamish about violence. In recounting the disappearance and recovery of Olaf's corpse after the Battle of Stiklestad, I have abandoned Snorri's version of events almost entirely (“The Saga of Olaf Haraldson,” chapters 249, 251 and 258). It is doubtful how factual his pious tale is anyway.

The central fact of eleventh century Scandinavian history was the abandonment of heathenism for Christianity. In this period of transition, there will have been many who found themselves caught between the pull of their pagan heritage and the lure of the new faith. Egil Skallagrimsson, the hero of another of the family sagas, remained a fierce pagan throughout his long life, despite the conversion of his contemporaries. And there were others, even among converts, for whom old habits died hard.
Any man with sense prays to Thor in a storm
, one Christian viking is reported to have said. I have made Odd more articulate on the subject of religion than any real Icelander is likely to have been, but that is, I hope, a novelist's prerogative.

Parenthetically, no one knows precisely why Jesus is called the ‘White' Christ (
Hvitakrristr
) in Icelandic sources. It may be a reference to the white baptismal robes worn by converts.

Of the Lapps, known to themselves as the Saami, and their shamanistic religion, I have given only what is recorded fact. A few of their spirit drums survived the zeal of eighteenth century missionaries and can be seen today in Scandinavian museums.

The berserkers certainly existed but did not long survive the coming of Christianity. They were more than fierce warriors, they were, in contemporary belief, shape-shifters, werewolves. Similar figures can be found in folk cultures around the world.

Concerning the Jomsvikings, the sources give conflicting accounts and scholars have even doubted their existence. I give them the benefit of the doubt and have worked into my story most of what we are told about them.

The Finland chapters are of a different character from the rest. Here I have recast the
Kalevala
, the great poetic epic of primitive Finland, into the form of a realistic narrative (with apologies to the Finns for the liberties I've taken with it). Some scholars have suggested that behind these tales of witches, sorcerers, and the miraculous
sampo
may lie a kernel of historical fact: namely, the struggle between two tribes of southern Finland for possession of a potent fertility fetish. (It should be noted that the ethnic nomenclature of Finns and Lapps in the Viking period is quite confused. I have preferred to use the modern names for simplicity's sake.)

A word about runes and rune magic. Although the Vikings credited their chief god, Odin All-Father, with the invention of writing, the runic script takes its origin from our own Latin alphabet, adapted by Germanic tribes in contact with the Romans. The connection with Odin guaranteed the runes a strong tincture of pagan sorcery. Runic writing could be used as well, however, for purely mundane purposes. Excavations at Bergen in Norway have brought to light hundreds of specimens of Medieval date, including shipping labels, bills of sale, love notes, and doggerel.

Teit Isleifsson, Odd's unwilling amanuensis, and his father are real characters. Isleif was Iceland's first native-born bishop, and his son lived to teach Latin and theology to the grandsons of Vikings in the cathedral school at Skalholt. It is only my fancy, however, that Bishop Isleif contemplated writing a biography of Harald. It would be another two centuries before Snorri Sturluson and his contemporaries composed biographical sagas of the Norwegian kings
.

As a boy, Bruce Macbain spent his days reading history and historical fiction and eventually acquired a master's degree in Classical Studies and a doctorate in Ancient History. As an assistant professor of Classics, he taught courses in Late Antiquity and Roman religion and published a few impenetrable scholarly monographs, which almost no one read. He eventually left academe and turned to teaching English as a second language, a field he was trained in while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Borneo in the 1960s.

Macbain is the author of historical mysteries set in ancient Rome, (
Roman Games
, 2010, and
The Bull Slayer
, 2013) featuring Pliny the Younger as his protagonist.
Odin's Child
is the first in his Viking series,
The Odd Tangle-Hair Saga
.