The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (5 page)

In the Red version, Thorstein borrowed Gudrid’s father’s ship and set off for the New World with no mention of Gudrid accompanying him. Foul winds drove his ship east instead of west, until Thorstein thought he could see birds off the coast of Ireland. He limped home to Greenland with tattered sails at summer’s end. That autumn, he and Gudrid married and moved north to Lysufjord, where Thorstein owned a half-share in a farm.

Green Gudrid—the poor Gudrid—sailed with Thorstein. They took Leif’s ship, but they had the same bad luck. They made landfall back in Greenland just before winter and slept in a tent on the ship until they were taken in by the farmer at Lysufjord.

Thorstein’s death scene at Lysufjord is gloriously spooky—and remarkably consistent from one saga to the other. It is dark, and the dead are all around them. The farmhands (in the Red version) or the crew of the ship (in the Green) had died one by one as winter came on, and their bodies were piled up in the snow until they could be buried in the spring. Then Thorstein and the farmer’s wife fell ill. Red Gudrid became their nurse. One night, the sick woman was stumbling back from the privy on Gudrid’s arm when she let out a shriek. Gudrid tried to calm her. “This isn’t wise. You mustn’t get chilled. We have to go back in right now.”

The farmwife would not budge. She could see the dead lined up at her door. “Your husband is there. And I am with him!”

The vision passed, and Red Gudrid hurried her charge to bed. By morning, the woman was dead—though before she could be carried out, her corpse rose up and tried to get into bed with Thorstein. (In the Green version, we see the ghost through Thorstein’s eyes, as he called out in panic to Gudrid: “She is pushing herself up on her elbows and poking her feet out of the bed and groping for her shoes!”) As soon as the old wife was safely coffined, Thorstein died. He, too, did not lie quiet. Red Gudrid was asleep from exhaustion when her dead husband called for her; Green Gudrid was sitting on the old farmer’s lap while he “tried to comfort her in every way he knew.” In the Red version, the corpse begged for a proper Christian funeral, with a priest, and told her to give his money to the church or to the poor—appropriate fare for young nuns. He mentioned only in passing that Gudrid was “fated for great things.” To Green Gudrid, he spoke exclusively about her future—this Gudrid had not taken part in the séance. She hasn’t heard yet that she will marry an Icelander and that her progeny will be “promising, bright, and praiseworthy, sweet and fine-smelling.”

Both the Red Gudrid and the Green—these seventeen-year-old widows—convinced the farmer not to keep her to replace his dead wife, but to ferry her back to the main settlement in the spring, to her father (who died soon afterward, in the Red version) or to her brother-in-law and guardian, Leif. Both Red Gudrid and Green Gudrid knew she was destined for greatness—the idea that her future had been foretold was so fixed in the collective memory that both saga authors mentioned it, and the author of the Red version clumsily did so twice.

When the promised Icelander arrived the next autumn, captaining a merchant ship, Red Gudrid was fabulously wealthy. She had inherited Thorstein Eiriksson’s share of the farm at Lysufjord, as well as her father’s farm and her father’s ship. As a widow, she had the right to decide where she would live and whom, if anyone, she would marry. She chose to live at Brattahlid with Eirik the Red. Green Gudrid was marginally better off than she had been when she arrived in Greenland, the survivor of a shipwreck. She had inherited Thorstein’s share of Eirik the Red’s estate, but Leif was in control of it. She lived at Brattahlid as Leif’s ward. But rich or poor, Gudrid married the Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose nickname means “the stuff a man is made of” or “the makings of a man.” Once again, the two sagas hold a memory in common.

Then a curious thing happens in
The Saga of Eirik the Red:
Karlsefni sails for Vinland and Gudrid disappears from the story. This is Red Gudrid, the rich Gudrid, the one who caught the young merchant's eye, who took part in the seance, whose fate we have followed in such detail. From the words on the page, you would think she had stayed behind in Greenland—just as it seems she had when Thorstein Eiriksson set off on his Vinland expedition. We learn how far Karlsefni sailed, about the wind and the weather, the bears and whales, the wide beaches, the wine grapes, the wild wheat, the pasturelands, and the trees. We read about arguments that sent one ship back north and one (or two) farther south. We meet the Skraelings, the saga term for the native people, and watch the Vikings trade with them, then fight them, then flee from them. We discover that Karlsefni’s ship is the only one of the three to return to Greenland. But about Gudrid there is only an afterthought. We read: “Snorri, Karlsefni’s son, was born the first autumn; he was three when they left.”

Green Gudrid is given a slightly bigger role. Not only did she give birth to Snorri in Vinland, she tried to make friends with a native woman. There is no echo of this event in the other saga. The only overlap between the two versions—the only shared memory of Vinland—concerns Snorri’s birth and the Vikings’ decision to abandon their settlement after three years. They'returned to Greenland. From there Red Gudrid and her family sailed directly to Iceland, while Green Gudrid first detoured to Norway. In both sagas, the family settled in the Skagafjord valley in the north of Iceland, where Gudrid had a second son.

Exactly where in Skagafjord they lived is still under dispute, particularly by the farmers who currently inhabit the two places in question.

The Saga of Eirik the Red
notes that Karlsefni’s mother thought he had married beneath him. She did not care to share her house with Gudrid. Karlsefni’s family farm was a large estate called Reynines, “Rowan Ness.” Gudrid apparently spent at least the first winter somewhere else.

The Saga of the Greenlanders
only hints at in-law trouble, but identifies the “somewhere else.” Rather than taking over Reynines, the saga says, Karlsefni bought a nearby farm called Glaumbaer. After Karlsefni’s death, Gudrid farmed at Glaumbaer until her son Snorri married. Then she went on a pilgrimage to Rome.

We have no corroborating record of her pilgrimage, although guestbooks in monasteries along the recommended route list other women travelers with Viking names: Vigdis, Vilborg, Kolthera, and Thurid, for instance, visited Reichenau monastery in Switzerland during the eleventh century (at about the same time as the monk Hermann was writing his treatise on the astrolabe there). That Gudrid might have gone to Rome is therefore plausible, but not certain.

Asking not
Are the sagas true?
but
Are they plausible?
will never tell me if Gudrid had a lovely singing voice or if, in Greenland, she was rich or poor. But historians and literary scholars collating the sagas with other scattered documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as church records, annals, and books of law, have revealed many other plausible details about her life and times. I can guess what luxuries Einar brought to Iceland, and even what some of these goods cost: Twenty pounds of beeswax was worth as much as a cow. I also know that Gudrid—rich or poor—spent her days milking cows and making cheese, spinning wool and weaving cloth. While milk was the foundation of the Viking diet, homespun was the culture’s chief export. When Einar left Iceland to go trading in Norway, each of his crewmen most likely took along a length of homespun two miles long and weighing two tons as “spending money”—all of it woven by women.

But to let me imagine more of Gudrid’s life—to truly see that turf house sitting like a low hill in the jewel-green field—the medieval sagas must give way to modern science. The sagas hold memories; archaeology can provide me with facts and physical objects. But archaeology, in Iceland especially, is a political sport. Fashions come and go. Whereas a hundred years ago every archaeologist in Iceland was bent on proving the sagas literally true, down to the last cask of whey in which a hero hid, today’s archaeologists tend to set the sagas to one side. They are not necessarily fictitious, they are simply irrelevant.

Still, as historians routinely remind their scientific colleagues, the sagas made Iceland a nation. They were penned, the story goes, to prove to the Norwegian overlords that Icelanders were not the sons of slaves and should be treated as equals. It took a while for that message to be heard. From the 1200s until well into the 1800s, Iceland was of little interest to its rulers (first Norway, then Denmark). The Renaissance did not find Iceland. The Reformation tore it apart: Before he was beheaded in 1550, Bishop Jon Arason unilaterally declared Iceland free of Danish control. The Icelandic church’s rents and properties were then seized by the Danish crown, which established a monopoly over all trade with the island. That trade did not prove profitable. By the late 1700s, after a prolonged and poisonous volcanic eruption had killed off one-fifth of the human population and half their cattle, the Danish king suggested the island be abandoned and the remaining forty thousand Icelanders resettled in Jutland. Throughout centuries of want and despair, the sagas and the Golden Age of independence and valor they painted kept the Icelandic nation alive. The sagas were the tool patriots used to bring the island to the world’s attention in the 1800s, and the cause of its ultimate independence in 1944. Iceland had a language and a story: Therefore, it was a nation.

Poking holes in recognized saga sites is, for these reasons, not something people are encouraged to try. Especially not outsiders like John Steinberg of UCLA, who desperately wanted to dig up the hayfield at Glaumbaer to see if the floor plan his remote-sensing device had mapped out—of Gudrid’s last house—was accurate.

With no brick or timber or building stone, houses of turf, like the sod homes of prairie pioneers, are all the medieval Icelanders ever had. Once abandoned, a turf house disappears quite quickly, beaten by wind and rain back into the landscape. Those that were abandoned in the last century (poured concrete became the favorite Icelandic building material after World War II) have sunk and settled, leaving distinctive mounds on thousands of Icelandic farms—except where they’ve been bulldozed to neaten up the place. Archaeologists in Iceland approach these mounds like a rescue squad: When a road or a river (or the foundation of a new summerhouse) cuts into an ancient farm mound, the state sends in an archaeologist to map the ruins and salvage whatever bones or artifacts are uncovered. Several hundred pagan graves and eighteen Viking longhouses were discovered this way over the last hundred years. But as for digging on purpose in historical spots, the official opinion is that Iceland’s history is far safer left in the ground.

The Icelandic verb “to research” or “to investigate” is
rannsaka,
the same as our English word “ransack.” Ransacking is what Vikings did to fat English monasteries: torched the roofs, broke down the doors, destroyed the walls, and carted off the treasure. In the language of the Vikings,
rannsaka
merely meant “to search a house”; the idea of total destruction is purely English. Yet both senses apply to archaeological research. According to Orri Vesteinsson of Iceland’s Institute of Archaeology, “One way of looking at the development of excavation techniques in Iceland in the last century is to see it in terms of increasingly comprehensive destruction.” Or as John Steinberg had explained to me the first time I met him,
Archaeology murders its informants.

“Is archaeology a science?” he asked me. For a scientific experiment to be valid, any scientist, following the published methods of the original experimenter, should be able to reproduce the original results. In archaeology, that’s not physically possible.

“Archaeology
uses
scientific methods,” John said, “but it’s inherently not reproducible.” By digging into a historic site like the one that hides Gudrid’s longhouse, John and his crew will destroy it. They will chop up the ground, sift it, sort it, save certain things, and dump what’s left in a heap.

What John will leave for posterity is not Gudrid’s longhouse, but his notes and maps and reports: his
story
of Gudrid’s longhouse. The local historical society, which coincidentally operates a museum on the Glaumbaer farm, will most probably build a reconstruction near the site and call it “Gudrid’s longhouse”—but it won’t be. It will be an architect’s interpretation of John’s story. It’s no wonder, then, that the Icelanders from whom John must get permission to dig want him to ransack Gudrid’s house as slowly and carefully as possible.

His 2004 field season was canceled. The National Science Foundation rejected his grant proposal, following the advice of an anonymous reviewer who’d said that ground-penetrating radar—the latest remote-sensing device John wanted to bring in—had already been tried in Iceland. The reviewer had apparently misread an Icelandic newspaper story, which convinced John the reviewer was Icelandic. John revised the grant proposal, including proof that ground-penetrating radar had not been used in Iceland in the way he planned to use it. The project was a go for July 2005.

As soon as I heard, I flew to Los Angeles.

In his cubicle in the basement of UCLA’s Fowler Museum, John pulled the just-funded grant proposal from a file, pushed aside a cow skull on a cafeteria tray, and regaled me with the methods he’d used to find Gudrid’s house in 2001. “We had an experimental grant that year,” he began. “We tried
everything
.”

The two surveying techniques he had used to find ancient houses in Denmark, as a graduate student in the early 1990s, were defeated by Iceland’s unusual soil. The first depended on potsherds. To an archaeologist, bits of pottery are road signs marking where you are in an ancient culture and when things changed. Iceland had no Viking potsherds because its clay was not conducive to making pots.

“The clay won’t stick together,” John explained. “The earth in Iceland has a very weird feeling to it. It almost feels
wrong.
It coats you. It gets everywhere. It rusts your trowel. It also makes it so that phosphate is not available to grasses. All the phosphate ions attach to the clay.” Phosphate testing was the second way he had mapped early settlements in Denmark; high phosphate, from manure, marks pastures and fertilized fields. But in Iceland the test didn’t work the way it had in Denmark.