The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage

News Round-up

2012-03-03T13:38:00.000Z

I am delighted to announce that the short documentary about my project released last autumn ("Memories of Old Awake", produced by Patrick Chadwick for the University of Cambridge) has been selected for competition in the European Independent Film Festival which will be held in Paris, 30th March to 1st April. Further details about the Festival programme and tickets are here http://ecu.festivalgenius.com/2012/films/memoriesofoldawake_patrickchadwick_ecu2012. "Memories" has already picked up a prize at the Jaipur International Film Festival in January.

...Red carpets are universes away from the world I inhabited last year. For those who worried about the somewhat abrupt termination of regular blog posts, all is well! The ambulance and I are safe though now separated (I'm still in Iceland, the ambulance is back in the UK). By the beginning of October, it became clear that it was time to start writing the book about my travels, the sagas, and Iceland...so I retreated to an old turf-roofed and corrugated-iron-walled house in the south of Iceland. No internet connection, an outdoor suspended-bucket shower (a luxury after having no means of washing at all while I was living in the ambulance!), and stunning views south over to the infamous Eyjafjallajökull volcano. And I hammered out the first draft of my book.

I drove the ambulance home to Britain in December and got back just before Christmas; the trip took 10 days. Temperatures in the north of Iceland while I was driving through were just under -30 and I had to scrape off ice that formed on the inside of the windscreen... a fittingly extreme way to end the Icelandic journeying.

Goðafoss, early December

I'm back in Iceland now and working on medieval manuscripts by day in the Árnastofnun Manuscripts Institute, and on the book and other projects by night...including putting up photos and posts about sagas that I covered but didn't go up on the blog. So please check back from time to time! Returning to normal city life has taken a bit of adjusting and when the wind howls, I long to be out in the middle of nowhere. One reason why I haven't yet sold on the Embulance!

Vatnsdæla saga: Place-Names and Petit Point

2011-10-10T15:51:00.000+01:00

Vatnsdalur, looking north up the valley

"As we advance along the rich meadows of the dale, Jörundarfell rises grandly over a magnificent facade of contorted beds of rock, like a bit of the Savoy Alps in general aspect, though not identical in geology. Among the incidents of the valley there is a pretty waterfall ... hanging from the cliffs, -- losing itself half way down in spray, and finding itself again in a stream collected out of the thin fringe of falling rain, in which the iris shines distinct in the afternoon against the black background of the gill" (Pilgrimage, p. 160). As I drove south down Vatnsdalur the other day, the rich meadows Collingwood noted in his description of the valley were barely visible for thick low rainclouds; the waterfall was less of a -fall than a -lift or an upward-kicking of spray because of the winds; and when the clouds eventually lifted, snow could be seen to have dusted itself over the upper reaches of the steep mountain Jörundarfell, and had lined the countless vertical cracks and gullies running down to the lower reaches, producing a sharp inlay effect.

Hof in Vatnsdalur, Ingimundr's farmstead

Collingwood thought Vatnsdalur to be one of the most beautiful valleys in Iceland. The saga which tells of the valley's first settlers and their descendants, Vatnsdæla saga, is a rich one too, with a romping mythical-heroic opening section set in Norway that includes giant-killing and princess-marrying; a reluctant emigration to Iceland by the son of the giant-slayer and the princess; local feuds a-plenty over several generations once Vatnsdalur and the surrounding area has been settled; magic of various kinds; prophetic dreams; a clowder of cats (really!); and endless anecdotes explaining how one place or another acquired its name...rich picking-grounds for those interested in saga-onomastics.

In the entrance hall of the local school is a vast mural painted by the Catalan artist Baltasar Samper (famous for his frescoes in the church on the island of Flatey) in the 1980s which presents the saga narrative chronologically in visual form. I was told that all children know of the saga and know the principal episodes in it because of this mural; presently, the saga is being 'retold' in textile-form by a group of local people who began work on the 'Vatnsdæla tapestry' this year. The tapestry's design takes its inspiration from the Bayeaux Tapestry; work will continue for a good 10 or 15 years...until the tapestry reaches its projected length of 45 metres...

In an inversion of the more usual topos at the beginning of the Íslendingasögur where 'independent Norwegian emigrates to Norway after refusing to bow to the tyranny of King Haraldr hárfagri ('Fair-Hair)', Ingimundr -- who is a close friend and ally of King Haraldr -- is reluctant to emigrate to Iceland, calling it an eyðisker ('wasteland skerry'; Vatnsdæla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 8 (Reykjavík 1939), ch. 10, p. 27). But a Finnish seeress prophecies that Ingimundr's fate lies on this hostile rock, and says that her prediction will come true -- as a proof, some silver that is in Ingimundr's purse will disappear and he will find it in the place in Iceland where he is ordained to build a farm. A little later, three more supernatural Finns perform an out-of-body exploration of Iceland on Ingimundr's behalf, and survey the area where Ingimundr's fate will lead him, describing the local features of the landscape.

Memorial stone to Þórdís at Þórdísarholt

Ingimundr sails from Norway with his wife and children; they come into Borgarfjörður in the North-west, and set off to explore the land to the north, naming valleys and natural features as they go. In one fjord, two rams run down a mountain towards them: that fjord they call 'Hrútafjörðr' ('Rams' Fjord'); they come across a large piece of driftwood on a small peninsula in Hrútafjörður and call that place 'Borðeyri' ('Plank-spit'); on a valley that is widely-grown with willow-trees they bestow the name 'Víðidalur' ('Willow Valley'). Eventually, the landscape unfolding before them resembles that which the Finns described for Ingimundr; they reach the mouth of Vatnsdalur ('Water Valley'), and Ingimudr's wife calls a temporary halt to the travelling while she gives birth to a daughter. The baby girl is given the name Þórdís, and the birth-site is given the name Þórdísarholt ('Þordís's coppice').

Memorial stone to Ingimundr at Hof

The party continue on down the valley and stop on a grassy slope; here, Ingimundr decides to build his new home. Digging into the hill while building a large temple, Ingimundr finds the silver that had disappeared from his purse back in Norway...The farmstead is called Hof ('farm' or 'temple'). There is more naming around the local area: a female polar-bear and her two cubs who have washed up on Iceland on an iceberg give rise to the name 'Húnavatn' ('Young bear lake'); some sheep who disappear in the autumn and are then found the next spring are remembered in the place-name 'Sauðadalr' ('Sheep Valley'); a boar called Beigaðr gives his name to a hill on which he dies, 'Beigaðarhóll' ('Beigaðr's Hill').

The valley is settled widely over time, and the saga narrative proceeds. Ingimundr is killed in a fight by the river in the middle of the valley by a trouble-making outlaw to whom Ingimundr has offered protection; Ingimundr's sons avenge him and the saga then takes up their stories, and then the storie of their sons. Vatnsdæla saga is truly a multi-generational saga, though local knowledge seemed mostly to focus on Ingimundr, the first settler of the valley. In one vivid episode, one of Ingimundr's sons, Jökull, chases another local trouble-maker called Þórólfr down the valley, catching him up on a moor above the river; when Þórólfr sees that he will not escape, the saga states that ‘he sat down in the bog and cried; that place has been called Grátsmýrr (‘Weeping bog’) since’ (þá settisk hann niðr í mýrinni ok grét. Þar heitir síðan Grátsmýrr, Vatnsdæla saga ch. 30, p. 83). Jökull gains great renown for ridding the area of this dubious character.

Breiðabólstaður today

Vatnsdæla saga is thought to have been written by someone in the Benedictine monastery at Þingeyrar (founded in 1133) which sits on a raised open stretch of land in the mouth of Húnaflói, north of Vatnsdalur, and which is visible from miles around. Þingeyrar was the first monastery in Iceland; an event of great significance and with great literary ramifications had taken place in the area some 15 years beforehand, however. Over the winter of 1117/18, under the supervision of a powerful chieftain called Hafliði Másson who lived on a farm called Breiðabólstaður, the laws of the Commonwealth of Iceland were written down in the Icelandic vernacular, for the first time. A memorial stone at Breiðabólstaður marks this vital step in the ‘process of textualisation’ in Iceland, i.e., the shift from an oral culture (prior to 1117/18, the laws were recited by heart by the elected lög(sögu)maðr (‘law (reciting) man’), every summer at the National Assembly (the Alþingi), one-third at a time over 3 summers) to a literary/manuscript culture. Aspects of the oral culture never disappeared entirely though – and even fully modernised 21^st-century Vatnsdalur, something of that spirit still seems to live on. On Saturday afternoon, between 1 and 5pm, people met in the building in the local town Blönduós where the Vatnsdæla tapestry is being produced, and sewed away at the story of the people of Vatnsdalur as they listened to someone reading aloud from the saga and ‘re-oralising’ the very events their needles were weaving in and out of.

Þingeyrar church

Insult Verses and Death-By-Scissors: Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa

2011-10-02T19:33:00.000+01:00

Hítárdalur, looking north into the valley

In my last post, I wrote about the tragic love between Gunnlaugr ormstunga ('serpent-tongue') and the beautiful Helga in fagra ('the fair'), and about how after Gunnlaugr dies fighting his treacherous rival-in-love, Hrafn, Helga is remarried and eventually dies herself, gazing at a cloak Gunnlaugr once gave to her. The farmstead on which Helga died, Ytri-Hraundalur, is in the Mýrar district in north-west Iceland, close to a long valley called Hítárdalur -- the location of much of the action of another saga about a poet and tragic lover, Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa.

Bjarnar saga states that Björn was raised with his uncle at Borg: Björn's maternal grandmother was a sister of Egill Skalla-Grímsson, and Skalla-Grímr was Björn's great-grandfather (see my earlier post of 25th March on Egils saga and Borg). This makes Björn -- I realise for the first time myself now -- a cousin of Helga the fair, who was the daughter of Egill's son Þorsteinn...the Icelandic obsession with genealogy is starting to rub off on me... Beyond the genealogical overlap and the geographical proximity of Bjarnar saga and Gunnlaugs saga, the protagonists of these two sagas -- Björn and Gunnlaugr -- are both poets and the sagas share a common plot (a plot that is found in two further sagas about poetic protagonists, Kormáks saga and Hallfreðar saga, both of which will be covered soon): the tragic love-triangle. And now for some story-telling on a rainy Sunday afternoon...

Björn is a promising young man: snimma mikill vexti ok rammr at afli, karlmannligr ok sæmiligr at sjá (Bjarnar saga, ed. Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 3 (Reykjavík 1938), ch. 1, p. 112; 'very large in stature at a young age and physically powerful, manly and becoming in appearance'). He falls in love with the beautiful and noble-charactered Oddný eykyndill ('Island-candle') whom he visits on the island of Hjörsey where she lives -- and many people in the district reckon it will be a good match if Björn marries Oddný, with him being the finest of men and well bred. So Björn is engaged to Oddný -- but he longs to go abroad to make his name and fortune -- and thus the betrothal is fixed for a period of 3 years but if Björn doesn't return after that time, Oddný will be married to someone else, and Björn must send a message back to Iceland if he will not make it back.

Hítarnes, Þórðr's (and later Oddný's) home
(with view over to the Snæfellsnes peninsula)

All goes well and Björn is treated generously at Eiríkr jarl's court in Norway, where another poet from the north-west of Iceland is also visiting. Although previously in Iceland, Björn had been on the receiving end of a certain amount of mockery and abuse from this man, Þórðr Kolbeinsson, Björn and Þórðr are on good terms over the winter, and one evening as they drink together (Björn was more affected by the alcohol than Þórðr, the saga notes), the conversation turns to Oddný and the question as to when Björn intends to head home. Not immediately, says Björn -- which Þórðr says sounds unwise when he has such a treasure as Oddný waiting for him back in Iceland. Þórðr suggests he takes a token and a message back for Oddný from Björn -- the gold armband that the jarl has given Björn might do -- and Björn, after hesitating, agrees. In the morning, Björn rather regrets saying so much to Þórðr and thinks he may have trusted him overly...

And these misgivings prove -- after a few sentences and a voyage by sea -- to be all too well founded. Þórðr delivers Björn's message (that he still intends to return to marry Oddný) and gives her the ring -- but treacherously, he adds a false post-script to Björn's message and claims that Björn has made over the betrothal to him should he die or not return to Iceland. Meanwhile, Björn is sent to Russia where he wins a great duel but is badly wounded; by the time he gets back to Norway at the end of the next summer, three years have passed and he all the boats sailing to Iceland have left...Þórðr marries Oddný; Björn hears the news and won´t go back to Iceland now, preferring rather to go to England where he kills a dragon. Björn runs into Þórðr back in Norway on one occasion and vows to fight him next time they meet; only his respect for King Óláfr (who has come to power now) prevents him from challenging Þórðr to a duel immediately. Eventually, Björn does return home (as, 1000 years later, do most Icelanders abroad, unless they are útrásarvíkingar on the run). And the feud between Björn and Þórðr -- the subject of the rest of the saga -- begins in earnest.

At first, this feud is conducted verbally and the two men exchange insult verses in which they communicate accusations of cowardice and deviant sexual behaviour or origins, with escalating seriousness. On one occasion, a local man and his farmhand discuss the relative insulting value of the verses Björn and Þórðr have composed about each other while busy with the outdoor task of charcoal-burning. Björn had composed a poem called 'Grámagaflím' ('Grey-belly Satire') in which he describes how Þórðr's mother had eaten a slimy rotten fish she found by the side of a lake and thereby conceived Þórðr. The farmhand has never heard anything to rival this poem in the gravity of its insult but his master thinks the poem that Þórðr composed about Björn and which is known as 'Kolluvísur' ('Cow Verses') is worse. He won't recite it at first despite the farmhand's urging since if Björn hears anyone perform it aloud he will kill them without having to pay compensation, since the transmission of such insult 'níð' verses in medieval Iceland was prohibited by law. Eventually he gives in -- only for Björn to leap out from behind a tree and strike him a deadly blow...tantalisingly, we, as the readers of the saga, never get to judge the which of the two poems is the more scurrilous for ourselves.

The red track to Hítarvatn (looking south)

Eventually – after a series of physical confrontations, various characters’ deaths, and some bad dreams which trouble Björn and anticpate his approaching death – Þórðr and a band of men travel to the end of Hítárdalur where Björn’s farm, Hólmr, is situtated beside the lake (Hítárvatn). I spent a night here, following a winding up-and-down, and sometimes bright red, track past the last farm in the valley and through lava-fields and bare sandy stretches. It’s sheep round-up time in the saga (as it was when I was in the area) and Þórðr’s men divide up into three groups of six, not knowing which route Björn will be taking, but covering each path. Björn decides to go out to trim the manes on some horses: he won’t let his bad dreams dictate his actions and he ignores his wife’s pleading to stay at home. Björn and a boy cross the river where it runs out of the lake and walk the path towards where the horses are, at Hvítingshjalli (so-named after one of Björn’s horses, Hvítingr; ‘-hjalli’ is a shelf or ledge along a mountain-side – I looked over towards this place from where I parked the ambulance overnight). The boy sees six men come towards them; “I’m going to hunt that bear (björn) that we all want to catch”, cries one of the men.

Björn won’t run and he sends the boy away after the horses; there is a bloody fight and Björn defends himself strongly killing some of his opponents. Other attackers arrive, including Þórðr (and a boy, who is nominally Þórðr’s and Oddný’s son, but actually fathered by Björn), and Björn continues to fight using the shears he brought out with him to cut the horses’ manes. I wonder whether Björn was the prototype for Edward Scissorhands... All marvel at Björn’s valiant defence but eventually Þórðr causes Björn to fall and he then chops off Björn’s head. It was sobering to think of such merciless violence being conducted in this now-deserted place; thoughts about Björn’s death, coupled with the slightly oppressive silence of the place, made the night I spent there a rather cold and dark one.

Þórðr, having decapitated Björn, ties the head to his saddle and rides back to Björn’s farm where he announces news of Björn’s death to his wife, and then to Vellir, about half-way down the valley, where Björn’s parents live. In a scene which has a close parallel with Grettis saga (and Grettir’s enemy throwing Grettir’s head at his mother’s feet, see post of September 11th), Þórðr casts Björn’s head before his mother. “I recognise the head,” says Björn’s mother, “And you may recognise it too because you were often terrified by the same head before, when it was attached to its body” (“Kenni ek höfuðit ... ok kenn mættir þú, því at fyrir inu sama höfði gekktu optliga hræddr, meðan þat fylgði bolnum”, Bjarnar saga ch. 33, p. 205). When Oddný hears of Þórðr's killing of Björn she grieves and dies herself shortly afterwards...

Hítárvatn; Hvítingshjalli on the left-hand shore

Driving back down Hítárdalur the next morning, I stopped to walk along the river in search of some stones that form a chain across the river known variously as 'Grettisstikklur' or 'Grettisstillur' (‘Grettir’s stepping- or leaping-stones’). In chapter 19 of Bjarnar saga, and chapter 61 of Grettis saga, mention is made of how Grettir, on the run as an outlaw, spends time hiding out in a lair ('Grettisbæli') on the mountain Fagraskógarfjall, on the western side of Hítárdalur, not far from Vellir, where Björn lived when he was not further up the valley at Hólmr. Björn and Grettir try each other’s strength and are said to be equally strong; on one occasion, they entertain themselves by hauling these stones into the river ‘which have never been moved since, neither by the power of flooding water, nor ice-floes, nor glacial flooding’ (er aldri síðan hefir ór rekit, hvárki með vatnavöxtum né ísalögum eða jöklagangi, Grettis saga, Íslenzk fornrit 7, ed. Guðni Jónsson, p. 188). A note in the edition of Grettis saga comments that these huge stones could never have been arranged thus by humans and must be a natural phenomenon – but then again, for better or worse, they don’t make men like Grettir or Björn nowadays...

Grettisstillur/Grettisstikklur?

Saga-Steads Documentary!

2011-09-27T18:17:00.000+01:00

I am pleased to announce that Patrick Chadwick's documentary about my project, "Memories of Old Awake", was released by the University of Cambridge yesterday as part of their 'Cambridge Ideas' series. It was filmed in May in the West Fjords, and focuses on Gísla saga Súrssonar.

A short press release accompanies a link to the film on the University website here http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/video-and-audio/cambridge-ideas-memories-of-old-awake/

Or you can go straight to Vimeo to watch it here http://www.vimeo.com/29594820

Or to YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4_BhW1sI8

Enjoy!

Autumn colours and mosses on Hallmundarhraun

Romeo and Juliet of The North: Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu

2011-09-25T17:38:00.000+01:00

View towards Grímsstaðamúli (and Ytri Hraundalur), Borgarfjörður

'Þat var helzt gaman Helgu, at hon rekði skikkjuna Gunnlaugsnaut ok horfði þar á löngum. Ok eitt sinn kom þar sótt mikil á bæ þeirra Þorkels ok Helgu, ok krömðusk margir lengi. Helga tók þá ok þyngð ok lá þó eigi. Ok einn laugaraptan sat Helga í eldaskála ok hneigði höfuð í kné Þorkatli, bónda sínum, ok lét senda eptir skikkjunni Gunnlaugsnaut. Ok er skikkjan kom til hennar, þá settisk hon upp ok rakði skikkjuna fyrir sér ok horfði á um stund. Ok síðan hná hon aptr í fang bónda sínum ok var þá örend' ('Helga's greatest joy was to spread out the cloak 'Gunnlaugr's gift' and gaze on it for a long time. At one time, a great sickness came to Þorkell's and Helga's farm, and many succumbed to this wasting disease for a long time. Helga became ill but couldn't stay in bed. One evening Helga sat in the hall and her head sunk onto her husband Þorkell's lap, and she had the cloak 'Gunnlaugr's gift' sent for. And when the cloak was brought to her, she sat up and spread out the cloak in front of her and gazed on it for a while. And then she sunk back again into her husband's arms and breathed her last'; Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, ed. Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, in Íslenzk fornrit 3 (Reykjavík, 1938), ch. 13, pp. 106-107).

Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu ('The Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-tongue')-- is one of the most romantic and tragic of the Íslendingasögur. It was one of the most popular and well-known sagas in Britain in the 19th century on account of its subject-matter, comparatively short and simple plot, and small cast of characters; William Morris's 1875 translation of the saga into English made it widely available to the British and American public. The story is, in essence, one of doomed love: Gunnlaugr ormstunga Illugason falls in love with Helga in fagra ('the beautiful') Þorsteinsdóttir and she is promised to Gunnlaugr for three years while he travels abroad to acquire honour and wealth. Another Icelander, Hrafn Önundarson, also loves Helga and asks her father for her hand. When Gunnlaugr doesn't return, Helga is -- unwillingly -- betrothed to Hrafn; Gunnlaugr finally arrives back in Iceland on the night of Helga's and Hrafn's wedding, too late. Gunnlaugr and Hrafn fight a public duel at the National Assembly (the Alþingi) the following summer; the result is disputed and duelling is subsequently banned in Iceland.

Helga dies in Þorkell's lap; from a Danish
translation of the saga (1900)

So Gunnlaugr and Hrafn agree to meet in Norway to fight again. The two men rendezvous at the agreed place: "Þat er nú vel, er vit höfum fundizk" ("It's good that we have met now"; Gunnlaugs saga ch. 12, p. 101) Gunnlaugr states. The two men fight; Gunnlaugr chops off Hrafn's leg but Hrafn uses a tree-stump to prop himself up. Hrafn asks Gunnlaugr to fetch him some water and promises not to betray Gunnlaugr by attacking him if he uses his helmet as a vessel; Gunnlaugr removes his helmet and fills it with water for Hrafn. Hrafn reaches out with his left hand to take the helmet, and strikes Gunnlaugr a terrible blow on his head with his right hand. "You have betrayed me evilly now, and ignobly, when I trusted you" says Gunnlaugr ("Illa sveiktu mik nú, ok ódrengiliga fór þér, þar sem ég trúða þér", Gunnlaugs saga ch. 12, p. 102); "That's true," answered Hrafn, "but this forced me to it, that I will not grant you the embrace of Helga the fair" ("Satt er þat ... en þat gekk mér til þess, at ek ann þér eigi faðmlagsins Helgu innar fögru", Gunnlaugs saga ch. 12, p. 102). The fight continues and Hrafn dies; Gunnlaugr dies three days later from wounds he sustained. Back in Iceland, the fathers of both men are visited in their dreams by their blood-drenched sons; later, confirmation of the outcome of the fight is brought to Iceland. Helga is married to a man called Þorkell Hallkelsson and bears many children by him but she never stops loving Gunnlaugr. She holds on to him and his memory by gazing at the cloak Gunnlaugr gave to her -- a cloak that Gunnlaugr received when at the court of King Aðalráðr (Æthelred) of England as a reward for a praise-poem composed in Aðalráðr's honour.

Gilsbakki today

"The story of the tragic fate of the lovers is a northern counterpart to Romeo and Juliet", wrote William Gershom Collingwood in his 1899 book A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland (at p. 48). Collingwood -- and William Morris, ahead of Collingwood in the 1870s -- visited Gilsbakki in Hvítársíða/Borgarfjörður where Gunnlaugr was born: "The present church and parsonage lie among rich meadows on a height overlooking the valley with its lava field and thick copsewoods, and beyond, a fine panorama of glacier-clothed mountains. On both sides of the site deep gills entrench it -- whence the name, and perhaps in ancient times added some strength and security to the position. They are at any rate richly picturesque -- a fit setting for the love story whose memories haunt the place", wrote Collingwood (A Pilgrimage, p. 48). It seems that the farm buildings at Gilsbakki have always been more-or-less on the same site (the site was dug by archaeologists from Brown University in the USA a couple of years ago; photos of the excavation can be seen here); the spot where according to the saga Gunnlaugr, aged 12 and longing to travel abroad, laid out goods he took from his father's storehouse only to be denied them and permission to travel by his father, must have been somewhere up behind the present farm-house.

The 'gil' or gully at Gilsbakki, looking south

Today, the turf-roofed-farmhouse that Collingwood and Morris would have found, and that Collingwood painted (a b/w image of Collingwood's picture can be found here, bottom left), has been replaced by modern stone buildThe ings; the fine views across the lava-and birch-carpeted valley below the farm (and the sides of the gil or gully on which account the farm is named Gilsbakki, 'bank of the gully') have not changed much, though the glacier Langsjökull is said to have diminished, and the glacier on the mountain Ok has all but disappeared. Mild September sun was lighting up the valley when I visited Gilsbakki and the colours now are stunning: rich oranges and deep reds contrasting with the greyish-green mosses that enfold the flattish outcrops of lava. Inside the farmhouse, a copy of Collingwood's painting of the old farm hangs on the wall, and a copy of the small watercolour portrait Collingwood produced of the then farmer's three-year-old daughter is in a photo-frame on a bookshelf. When the Icelandic photographer Einar Falur Ingólfsson visited Gilsbakki to photograph the place as part of his project following in Collingwood's footsteps, he photographed the current farmer's then six-year-old daughter as well as the farm from the same spot chosen by Collingwood to paint his picture: this continuity regarding the significance of the place as a 'saga-stead' or site, from the 'Saga-Age' when the events in the saga are said to have happened (the late 10th and early 11th centuries) to the 19th century, and over into the 21st century, delighted me.

Helguhóll

There are no place-names on the Gilsbakki land that commemorate Gunnlaugr; the one place-name there that is associated with Gunnlaugr and his story rather commemorates his brother Hermundr, who according to tradition -- not the saga -- was buried in the so-called Hermundarhóll ('Hermundr's hill'). Directly to the west of Gilsbakki, however, in Hraundalur in Borgarfjörður, there is a striking hill called Helguhóll ('Helga's hill'). This place is not named in Gunnlaugs saga -- but it is not far from the farm to which Helga moved (Hraun(s)dalr, now Ytri-Hraundalur, a summer-house rather than a working farm) after marrying Þorkell, and on which she died. Local tradition there, at some point in time, for some reason, connected Helga with this hill...a short article by Bjarni V. Guðjónsson about the hill that I was pointed towards suggests that perhaps it was a place where Helga found refuge, where she sat on summer evenings looking out over the plains below and over to Borg (where she was born -- being the daughter of Egill Skalla-Grímsson's son Þorsteinn; see posts of 20th March, 25th March, 2nd April on Egill, Egils saga, and Borg), where she might have found some peace from the trials of love she suffered in her life...

A slightly lighter-relief rendering of the saga (Gunnlaugr's and Hrafn's final duel) can be found here...you've got to love these saga re-enactments on YouTube...

Grettir´s Head...and his Family´s Strandir Origins

2011-09-18T22:29:00.000+01:00

Rune at work photographing Eiríksjökull

My pursuit of the outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson and his trails across and around Iceland has been continuing over the past week. I remember first reading Grettis saga as a BA student at Cambridge -- parts of his saga and a good number of the many verses in it were then set-texts for the Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature paper -- and I remember enjoying the saga especially then. It's an endlessly rich and entertaining read: Grettir is a magnetic figure, a giant amongst saga-protagonists, not just for his troll-wrestling and swimming feats and prodigious verse-composition and the frequent recourse he makes to pithy proverbs, but for his weaknesses too (his fear of the dark despite his superlative physical strength is poignant) and for the way that he is, simply, unlucky, in the way that events seem to conspire against him.

In the last post (September 11th) I wrote about Drangey and how Grettir met his death there in the 19th year of his outlawry. There are probably more place-names around Iceland -- rocks, caves, other landscape features -- with his name in them than any other character in the sagas. Many of these commemorate moments or episodes during his long period as an outlaw: places where he is said to have hidden out, where he tested or showed off his strength by heaving huge boulders around... One place I wanted to explore was Arnarvatn, north of Eiríksjökull and in the north-western part of the Highlands: Grettis saga states that 'Grettir went up onto Arnarvatnsheiði and built a hut there, the remains of which can still be seen, and lived there because he wanted do something other than rob, and got himself a net and a boat and caught fish to feed himself. He thought it very dreary on the mountains because he was so afraid of the dark' ('Grettir fór upp á Arnarvatnsheiði ok gerði sér þar skála, sem enn sér merki, ok bjósk þar um, því at hann vildi nú hvatvetna annat en ræna, fekk sér net ok bát ok veiddi fiska til matar sér. Honum þótti daufligt mjök á fjallinu, því at hann var mjök myrkfælinn', Grettis saga ed. Guðni Jónsson (Reykjavík 1936), ch. 54, p. 178). In the notes of the edition of the saga I've been using, I read that the outlines of this hut beside the lake can still be seen -- over 700 years or so after the saga was written down -- and the place-names Grettistangi (a long spit that protrudes into the lake) and Grettishöfði (cliffs which loom over the lake) testify to the tradition that Grettir dwelt there for a time.

Grettisskáli, with Grettistangi behind

I met up with Norwegian photographer Rune Molnes who's been travelling around Iceland taking photos -- and we headed off together south down Miðfjörður (past Grettir's home, Bjarg, about which more anon) and up onto Arnarvatnsheiði. There were stunning views of Eiríksjökull along the way, and a beautiful herd of horses grazing by a river. We got to the lake, followed the track around and -- as dusk drew on -- combed the stretch of land beside the lake where the outlines of 'Grettisskáli', Grettir's hut, was said to be. I ran from one hummock to another and to the end of Grettistangi and back, the evening-sunshine blinding me and my hopes being raised again and again as I thought I'd found the spot, only to be dashed on closer examination... finally though, we stumbled on the outlines of something that was clearly man-made. Elated, I tried to take pictures in the failing light -- credit is due to Rune here for stepping in as a human tripod when I needed to be taller than my natural 5'4". Was this 'Grettisskáli'? I wanted to believe it was -- and maybe it really was -- though as always, the question of the relationship between places such as these and their identification with mentions in the sagas reared its knotty head. Equally, the grassed-over foundations of what then turned out to be 2 huts could have been shelters built by later hunters... Whatever the 'truth', I still find the extent that, all over Iceland, there are such traditions associating saga-characters with specific places in the landscape and borne out by place-names, riveting.

Grettisþúfa at Bjarg

Grettistak at Bjarg...the big rock, that is...

Grettir's head -- which his enemy Þorbjörn Öngull hewed off his corpse to parade in front of people as proof of his deed -- is said to be buried at Bjarg, Grettir's home, under a stone that is known as Grettisþúfa ('Grettir's tussock'). I knocked on the door at Bjarg, met the present farmer and his brother, talked about Grettis saga with them and was shown the striking memorial to Grettir's mother, Ásdís, raised on Bjarg land in 1974 and incorporating four cast-iron plaques by the artist Halldór Pétursson which depict scenes from the saga featuring Ásdís. Grettir's mother was a strong woman: the saga describes how Grettir's relationship with his father was always strained but how Ásdís was always supportive of Grettir, giving him a family heirloom, the sword Ættartangi (which comes into another saga set in the area, Vatnsdæla saga -- to be covered in a blogpost soon), when he was first outlawed and had to leave home. I walked up onto the heath above the farm at Bjarg to seek out an enormous 'Grettistak' boulder which Grettir is said to have lifted...it must be about twice my height; one of the two farmer-brothers at Bjarg told me how they used to climb up onto it for fun as kids. Some of these 'Grettistök' are more likely than others...Grettir would have had to have been a giant to have lifted this one. I took up the offer of a bit of physical exercise by helping the Bjarg farmers round up their sheep...and laughed at the collection of stones at the foot of the outdoor staircase up to the front door which they joked are their exercise stones.

Kaldbak

It was Grettir's great-grandfather Önundr who settled first in Iceland, after emigrating from Norway following a battle against King Haraldr hárfagri in which he lost his leg and gained the nickname 'tréfót' ('peg-leg'). Önundr didn't establish the farm at Bjarg, but landed in the east on the Langanes spit, sailed west into Húnaflóa, and finally claimed land on the eastern stretch of the West Fjords known as Strandir after staying with Auðr/Unnr in djúpúðga of Laxdæla saga fame (see post of 24th April). Önundr built a farm at Kaldbak, lookng south over a small bay called Kaldbaksvík -- north of Bjarnarfjörður. Kaldbak is the name of a mountain on the southern lip of Kaldbaksvík; Grettis saga describes how Önundr looked over at this mountain, which was covered in snow, and spoke a verse lamenting how he has left behind his family, and exchanged his Norwegian land and inheritance for this cold landscape. Early chapters in the saga describe events that took place along the Strandir coast: a dispute over the rights to a beached whale that is found on a skerry called Rifssker (just off the Reykjanes peninsula north of Kaldbak), and how the bay called Trékyllisvík got its name after some merchants were wrecked and lost their ship, a broad-bottomed boat called Trékyllir.

Looking into Kaldbaksdalur over Kaldbaksvatn

Tréfótshaugur, in shadow left of river

When he died, Önundr was buried in a mound at the end of Kaldbaksdalur -- the mound is named Tréfótshaugur ('Peg-Leg's Mound') in Grettis saga and he has one of the funniest epitaphs in the sagas: 'he was the most bold and agile one-legged-man in Iceland' ('hann hefir fræknastr verit ok fimastr einfættr maðr á Íslandi', Grettis saga ch. 11, pp. 25-26). I drove up the Strandir coast to find Peg-Leg's grave... Autumn is very much in evidence here -- the leaves on scrub and bushes on the hillsides are turning all bright fiery shades of orange, red, pink, yellow, and sheep were being rounded up here too this weekend. Hiking in to the end of the Kaldbaksdalur valley took longer than it might have done...on account of the vast quantities of beautiful blueberries that kept presenting themselves to me (I was surprised by this, as it's been cold the past week and most berries have perished in the overnight frosts). Eventually I reached the end, and ate my sandwich in the sunshine looking over at the mound -- in fact, there seemed to be two. One was enormous, a great pointed pile of rock and rubble; the second smaller (though still not inconsiderable) and more believably man-made...again, I wondered whether the story about Önundr's burial here might have been attached to the place at some point after his 'real' or historical death and burial...

It wasn't only Grettis saga that was directing my footsteps along Strandir though -- several places along the coast come into a number of other sagas and I have been enjoying the challenge of working out the overlap between them in terms of their geography, genealogy, and the events they relate. A character called Finnbogi inn rammi ('the strong') -- another saga character renowned for his strength -- ended his life at a place called Finnbogastaðir in the Trékyllisvík bay, whence he moved after being driven from the Víðidalur valley in Húnavatnssýsla by the sons of Ingimundr inn gamli ('the old'). Finnbogi's story is told in Finnboga saga; that of Ingimundr's sons in Vatnsdæla saga; both sagas describe the feud. Much of the action in Vatnsdæla saga takes place in Vatnsdalur -- where events in two further sagas, Kormáks saga and Hallfreðar saga, also take place...but these sagas are for future posts; for the present I will sign off and enjoy the luxury of a one-off night in the cosy hotel at Djúpavík...a belated birthday present to myself, for I am now 32 and my aging bones could not resist the temptation of a night reading and writing *inside* a real house on my way back south down Strandir...

Looking over to Finnbogastaðir in Trékyllisvík

Sheep Past and Present, and Grettis saga

2011-09-11T22:33:00.004+01:00

Sheep may safely graze...my breakfast companions this morning

Rounded-Up Sheep

Last weekend, I helped round up the sheep in one part of Eyjafjarðarsveit (in the north of Iceland) -- something I've done each autumn for the past four years. Farmers send their sheep up into the mountains early in the summer to graze, and they're rounded up and driven down in September...to fill freezers for the winter and be turned into all kinds of sausage/pate/smoked- pickled- or minced-meat goodies... The sheep-roundup is a co-operative local operation and in this and in other ways, I don't imagine the basic methods have changed for hundreds of years, though communication on the hillsides and moors is made easier now thanks to walkie-talkies, and some ride quad-bikes or motocross bikes rather than horses or walk. Those rounding up the sheep will string out over a designated area and move forward together in a line, shouting and whistling to drive the sheep down and into a herd; this herd is then driven into a sheep-fold and the individual sheep are then sorted by the farmers according to the identification tag in their ear. It's a big local community event and many people turn up to watch or get involved in the sheep-sorting part of the process, if they weren't out there rounding up the sheep to begin with.

Sheep being sorted in Vatnsdalur

The sound of hundreds of sheep bleating away together, and the sight of them hopping along in a woolly mass, makes for a hugely entertaining spectacle: they are funny creatures. My delight at sheepish behaviour is nothing new however: the famous saga outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson seems also, at times, to have had a soft spot for sheep though more often he rustles them from local farmers for his supper. There is a rather pitiful description of a dusky-coloured wether in the remote Highland valley Þórisdalur, whose lamb Grettir takes and eats in his 8th or 9th year as an outlaw: after 'Mókolla' loses her lamb, she goes up to Grettir's hut every night and bleats, so that Grettir cannot sleep; Grettir regrets killing the lamb on account of this disturbance ('En er Mókolla missti dilks síns, fór hon upp á skála Grettis hverja nótt ok jarmaði, svá at hann mátti enga nótt sofa; þess iðraðisk hann mest, er hann hafði dilkinn skorit, fyrir ónáðum hennar', Grettis saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 7 (Reykjavík 1936), ch. 61, p. 200).

Drangey and Kerling, looking north

Grettir spent the final three years of his life on the island of Drangey in Skagafjörður; when he arrived on the island (with his younger brother Illugi, and a thief/servant called Glaumr), Grettis saga states there were around 80 sheep grazing there, belonging to local farmers. After a couple of years, Grettir and the others have eaten their way through all of these, but they allow one ram to live -- as a source of (presumably badly-needed) entertainment. This ram was 'hösmögóttr at lit ok hyrndr mjök. At honum hendu þeir mikit gaman, því at hann var svá spakr, at hann stóð fyrir úti ok rann eptir þeim, þar sem þeir gengu. Hann gekk heim til skála á kveldin og gneri hornum sínum við hurðina' (Grettis saga ch. 73, p. 237; 'grey-bellied in colour and with big horns. They had much fun with him, for he was so tame that he stood outside and ran after them wherever they walked. He went home to the hut in the evening and rubbed his horns against the door').

Uppgönguvík

Grettir survived longer as an outlaw than any one else in Iceland and there are countless places around the country where he is said to have hid out in a cave or built a shelter, or demonstrated his strength by lifting a large rock (known as a 'Grettistak' or 'Grettishaf'). According to the saga, Grettir installed himself on Drangey after his sojourn in Bárðardalur, where he fought two trolls/giants (see my previous post of 30th August). Grettir's younger brother Illugi is determined to accompany him; their mother Ásdís, on saying her farewells, knows she will never see her sons again, and that they will be overcome by treachery. Drangey is a perfect defensive stronghold: 'hon var grasi vaxin, en sjábrött, svá at hvergi mátti upp á komask, nema þar sem stigarnir váru við látnir, ok ef upp var dreginn inn efri stiginn, þá var þat einskis manns færleikr, at komask á eyna' (Grettis saga ch. 69, p. 225; 'It was grown over with grass, but with steep cliffs down to the sea, so that noone could come up onto it except where the ladders were, and if the upper ladder was pulled in, then noone had the strength to get onto the island'). The island rises up sheer in the middle of Skagafjörður, with the rock-stack Kerling to its south.

Grettisbrunnur

Grettir, Illugi and Glaumr built a hut on a grassy patch at the south-eastern end of the island: this part of the island is now known as Kofabrekka ('Hut-slope'). Other place-names on the island commemorate Grettir's time there: the only water source on the island is called 'Grettisbrunnur' ('Grettir's well'), a certain cliff-face is called 'Grettissteinar' ('Grettir's stones'), and another cliff-face, Hæringshlaup ('Hæringr's leap'), is said to be where a Norwegian assassin named Hæringr, who had amazingly managed to scale the cliffs, ran back and fell off the cliff down to the rocks below after Illugi approached to fight him. Grettir had an ally who lived on the farm at Reykir on the Reykjaströnd shore (the western side of Skagafjörður) and rowed him out to the island secretly: on one occasion, when the servant Glaumr carelessly lets the fire go out, Grettir swims to the mainland to get fire...and warms up after his swim in the natural hotspring at Reykir.

Reykir from the sea

Sign at the hotpot at Reykir

Today, this hotpot is known as Grettislaug ('Grettir's Bath'), and a boat departs from Reykir to the island in the summer. I stayed at Reykir last night in the Embulance: there were northern lights, after a pink and grey sunset in which I lost myself while soaking in Grettislaug, and I woke this morning to a pearly sunrise over Skagafjörður and the sound of breakers crashing on the shingle a few metres from where I'd parked the van. And most exciting of all, I joined a short tour out to the island this morning...something which I have been waiting and hoping for for days. William Gershom Collingwood describes how he 'steamed into the fjord, rolling in the swell of the open sea after rough weather, [as] the sunset died away in purple and rosy light on the hills, and gave place to a cold twilight, with a moon that silvered the snowy summits. Drangey stood grim and grey upon the water, seeming unapproachable, with bare sides and bare top, the most inhospitable of abodes' (A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland, 1897, p. 169). It's an island that has exerted a great hold on the saga-saturated imagination for centuries.

We didn't go up onto the island -- which I will have to do next summer now -- but it was remarkable to sail around it and examine it up close. Although it looks like a solid mass from the mainland, in fact its contours and cliffs are not at all regular and, particularly on the western side, there are a number of small headlands or peninsulas that jut out into the water and form a couple of bays (one of which is known as Uppgönguvík, literally 'Climbing-Up-Bay', where one ascends the island via ladders and a small track). The colours struck me too -- warm honey-yellows, thick white crusts of birdshit, a black seam that runs on a rough horizontal through some of the cliff-faces, the green of the grassy slopes on the island's crown. The water-source, Grettisbrunnur, is visible from the sea, being on a small grassy ledge, accessed by a ladder and with a sheer drop to the sea below; one can see too the slope where Grettir's hut is said to have been...tantalising.

The southern end of Drangey;
Kofabrekka is the higher grassy slope

Grettir died on Drangey -- but only after a witch cast a spell on a log which washed up on the island, and off which Grettir's axe glanced into his leg when chopping it up for firewood. The wound Grettir sustained caused his leg to swell up monstrously and turn black; this rather incapacitated him when his enemies finally managed to get up to the top of the island. 'Hösmagi [the grey-bellied sheep] is knocking at the door, brother', said Illugi; 'and is knocking rather hard and without mercy', said Grettir; and at that moment the door burst open' ('Þá mælti Illugi: "Knýr Hösmagi hurð, bróðir," segir hann. "Ok knýr heldr fast," sagði Grettir, "ok óþyrmiliga;" ok í því brast sundr hurðin', Grettis saga ch. 82, p. 259). Grettir is overpowered despite his brother's valiant attempt to defend him; 'there was no defence from him, because he was already near dead from the leg-wound; the thigh was suppurated all the way up to his guts; they dealt him many wounds, but little or no blood came from him ('Varð þat engi vörn af honum, því at hann var áðr kominn at bana af fótarsárinu; var lærit allt grafit upp at smáþörmum; veittu þeir honum þá mörg sár, svá at lítt eða ekki blæddi', Grettis saga ch. 82, p. 261). Grettir's principal enemy Þorbjörn Öngull cuts off Grettir's hand to plunder his famous short-sword Kársnaut (acquired after fighting a trollish zombie in his burial mound in Norway), and then cuts off his head with the same sword. Þorbjörn later presents Grettir's mother with Grettir's head at the family farm at Bjarg (I head there tomorrow), and is eventually killed himself by the same sword by another of Grettir's brothers in Constantinople.

The closing words of the saga present the verdict on Grettir's life as formulated by Sturla lögmaðr ('lawspeaker') Þórðarson, who lived in the 13th century and was a poet and writer as well as a key political figure of his time. Grettir was the greatest of all outlaws, for three reasons, Sturla proclaimed: first, he was the wisest of all outlaws, because he survived longer than any other outlaw and was never overcome while he was healthy; second, he was the strongest man in Iceland of his time and better at dealing with the walking dead and other monsters than other men; finally, because he was avenged in Constantinople, as no other Icelander has been, and this by his brother Þorsteinn drómundr who was an exceptionally blessed/lucky man. Bedtime now for me -- with my hair stiff with sea-salt, a bright moon shining over the Embulance, and my head full of thoughts of Grettir; the story of his encounter with another revenant-troll, Glámr, will be told in the next instalment.

Drangey and Kerling

A Highland Horseback Excursus (and a Mention of Grettis saga)

2011-08-30T01:14:00.000+01:00

Horses in a makeshift corral somewhere in the Icelandic Highlands

Time to break the silence that has reigned over this blog the past couple of weeks by posting a short update about my recent activities... I'm currently in town (Reykjavík, that is) and getting over the shock of being catapulted into urban life after an exhilarating 7 days on horseback, touring with Sigurður Björnsson's Riding Iceland outfit (Siggi also organised the highly-recommended Njáls saga horseback tour I participated in in June, see post of 6th July 2011).

The trip was over the central Icelandic Highlands, mostly following the centuries-old Sprengisandur route from the north-east to the south: a distance of around 300 kms. It's impossible to travel across the interior for most of the year -- and even in the summer the conditions can be difficult. The weather can be unpredictable and the logistics with regard to feeding the horses required for such a trip have to be worked out carefully...bags of hay planted in strategic places in advance, since there is almost nothing for the horses to graze on otherwise for long stretches.

Grettir Ásmundarson
(as depicted in a 17th-century
Icelandic manuscript)

We set off from Bárðardalur: a long, shallow valley in the north which is mentioned in the saga about the outlaw-hero Grettir Ásmundarson (Grettis saga), being the location of one of Grettir's several troll/monster combats. Grettir hears of the destruction being wreaked on farms in Bárðardalur and travels there to relieve the locals of their trollish troubles. One particular farm, at Sandhaugar, has suffered attacks by a mysterious troll-woman on two consecutive Christmases, with first the farmer and then a farmhand disappearing. Grettir arrives at Sandhaugar on Christmas Eve, carries the widowed wife and daughter from the farm together on his arm over the swollen river so they can attend the Christmas service in church, and waits back at Sandhaugar for the monster's annual. A huge wrestling match inside the house ensues; the fight spills out of the splintered house and continues all night, with Grettir finally managing to chop off the troll-woman's right arm on the edge of a great chasm. She plunges into the chasm and disappears behind a waterfall. After Christmas, Grettir decides to return to the place of the troll-woman's disappearance in order to see what is behind the waterfall and to prove the veracity of his account of the fight, which has been doubted by the local priest: the priest accompanies Grettir and agrees to watch the top of the rope Grettir uses to let himself down with.

Grettir dives through the waterfall and finds a great cave which is lit by a log fire and contains an enormous recumbent giant. Grettir seizes a pike and attacks the giant, spearing him in the stomach so that his guts spill out of the cave and into the river beyond the waterfall. The priest assumes the worst, abandons his position, and after finishing off the giant, Grettir is forced to haul himself back up the rope...taking with him the bones of two men he finds in a bag. He deposits the bones in the church, together with a stick on which he has carved two runic verses describing what had happened. Grettir is hidden by the people of Bárðardalur that winter, and heads out to the island of Drangey in Skagafjörður in the spring -- where he eventually loses his life...more on this to come in a future post.

Trusty packhorse

And so back to the horsetrip...We stayed in isolated mountain huts and sheep-round-up shelters, sometimes travelling with minimal kit loaded onto a couple of packhorses, at other times with a well-provisioned car meeting us at pre-arranged locations. We were 8 riding, with a herd of nearly 50 horses: this many because it's necessary to change horses regularly (every two hours or 20 kms or so) on account of the terrain being so challenging. I will never cease to be amazed at the stamina, strength, and willingness of the Icelandic horses -- and their physical beauty. There can be few sights more captivating than riding at the back of the herd (the horses follow those mounted up front, running loose, and are driven on and rounded up when necessary by the riders at the back): the long string of them, all imaginable shades of rich colours with thick tails and manes flowing free, trotting ahead into the far distance. Or, when the mist rolled in one afternoon, the sight of them disappearing into the enfolding greyness, so that from my position at the back, after a short time, it wasn´t possible to see more than 2 or 3 horses ahead.

Horses grazing at Eyvindarkofi

It was mesmerising as well to experience the Highland landscapes in this way and at this pace: to watch far-off mountains come into closer focus, appear and disappear as we rode over plains and up and down hills. Through monochrome valleys that were punctuated by shockingly vivid stripes of neon green moss fringing streams or rivers; over vast stretches of flat compacted rock inlaid with the tiniest growths of stubborn hardy-leafed plant; the central glacier Hofsjökull to our right in the west, and the great glacier Vatnajökull to our left in the east; the sudden appearance of lush meadows strewn with wild flowers where the ruins of a remote shelter built by the 18th-century outlaw Fjalla-Eyvindur can be seen; the rainbow-tinted Kerlingarfjöll mountain range appearing to the south-west of Hofsjökull, with the peaks of the mountains Loðmundur and Snækollur highlighted by evening sun. And the round ringing clop of horses' hooves as striking dry rock after crossing a river or stream.

Tomorrow, back up north for a reunion with the Embulance (abandoned in Eyjafjörður while four wheels were exchanged for four legs); a bit of autumnal sheep-rounding up next weekend, and then back on the saga-steads trail...summer break now officially over here, so more sagas and saga-related reports here shortly.

Two greys on a plain

A North Icelandic Antidote to Saga-Steads Romanticism: Reykdæla saga

2011-08-15T12:56:00.000+01:00

Cairns and landscape somewhere between Egilsstaðir and Mývatn

Recently, I was musing on how more often than not in this blog I seem to stress the continuity and connections between the time-period that the sagas describe (roughly, from the latter decades of the 9th century to the mid-11th century) and the present-day landscapes of Iceland... Although one of the major premises of the project builds on the fact that there is continuity, it occurred to me that posting something of an antidote to this assumption might be a good and useful corrective to tendencies towards rose-tintedness. And conveniently, in accordance with the serendipitous way in which this project continues to unfold and grow, one saga, Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu, presented itself as a perfect case study to this end.

Time, natural forces, and the activities of man, have of course brought about all kinds of change to the landscapes around Iceland. I have touched on some of these in previous posts: erosion of different kinds, rivers changing their courses, road-building and the modern building of reservoirs to harness hydro-electric power. The sagas themselves hint at how the landscape in the 13th century had, apparently, changed over the preceding three or four centuries following the settlement of the island -- as those who established themselves there had cleared land of trees, begun to cultivate it and built farmsteads, and introduced livestock. Over the past 1000 years, volcanic eruptions in different parts of the country have altered its physical appearance to differing degrees. And over the past century or so, major changes have been wrought on the landscape by the movement of people from individual farms scattered across the countryside to rapidly expanding urban centres. Urban demographics in Iceland are fascinating: in 1801, the population of the capital Reykjavík was around 600; by 1901 it had grown to over 6000; by 2001, to over 110,000 (this figure not including the Greater Reykjavík Area...add another 100,00 or so). The population of Siglufjörður, which was a tiny village in the north until the herring industry took off, exploded to over 3000 permanent residents (plus several thousand more annual summer workers) during the first half of the early 20th century when the place became the biggest herring-fishing boom-town in Iceland...and then shrunk again dramatically when the herring industry collapsed: the present population of the town is around 1300.

Bubbling mudpot at Hverir

The region around the great lake Mývatn ('Midge Lake') in the north of Iceland is one of the country's biggest natural attractions. It is situated on the boundary of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates and is a highly volcanic area. One can spend days exploring the betwitching and seemingly-bewitched pillar-like lava formations at Dimmuborgir, tephra craters such as that at Hverfjall, boiling mudpools and bright sulphurous deposits at Hverir, and the Krafla caldera and geothermal area... Mývatn is also the region where much of the action of Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu ('The Saga of the People of Reykjadalur and of Killer-Skúta') takes place. It's a saga which tells of petty acts of thievery, disputes over honour, acts of unscrupulous cunning in order gain political and social ascendancy -- and much though I hate to admit to this, it´s not a saga that I find the most interesting or engaging...When I arrived at Reykjahlíð, a village on the northern shore of the lake, my spirits sank.

Skútustaðir from Skútustaðagígar

I had visited Mývatn and stayed in Reykjahlíð a few years ago...in September, when it was relatively quiet; more recently, I drove through it in January. This time round with the tourist-season in mid-swing, it was hardly possible to cross the road without being mown down by a never-ending procession of shining white campavans; everywhere, sturdily booted and outdoor-gear-suited tourists clutched cameras and guidebooks. I had no idea where the Settlement-Age farm Reykjahlíð which is mentioned in the saga was located amongst the built-up environment (hotels, 2 campsites, cafes, supermarket, petrol station, bank, tourist information centre etc) of the place now... At Skútustaðir (at the southern end of Mývatn), where the character named in the saga's title, the chieftain Víga-Skúta, is said to have established his farm, there are several farms, some kind of community centre, two hotels, a petrol station, a cafe, and a large carpark for those exploring the psuedo-craters that border the lake (these are known as 'Skútustaðagígar'). I was delighted to see a short mention of Killer-Skúta on an information board...though I wondered whether the choice fact about him, that he owned 'the famous axe Fluga', might be rather puzzling to anyone who does not know the saga. I followed the trail around the pseudo-craters, stumbled over a small girl who was having a wee in a ditch, waved my camera around a bit and nodded at others diligently snapping away. I wondered what Víga-Skúta would have made of the place as it is today, and also thought about how the early settlers explained the odd geological formations in the area...

Leyningsbakki

The saga is in two parts, and the first part takes place to the north-west of Mývatn in the Reykjadalur valley and follows events in the life of Víga-Skúta's father, the chieftain Áskell goði. The highly-principled Áskell lived at a place called Hvammr by the river Laxá ('Salmon River' -- which runs from Mývatn along a north-western axis through Laxárdalur, and out into the sea), and the saga describes how, foreseeing his imminent death on account of a local feud, Áskell tells his followers precisely where he wished to be buried -- because he likes the lie of the land there. Ok nú fara þeir, þar til er þeir koma þar, sem heitir Leyningsbakki. Ok þá mælti Áskell, at þar vildi hann vera grafinn, þá er hann andaðisk, ok þótti þar vera gott landslag, ok sagði, at hann vildi ekki fé hafa með sér. Nú svara þeir frændr hans, at þess skyldi langt að bíða, at hann þyrfti niðr at grafa (Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu, ed. Björn Sigfússon, Íslenzk fornrit 10, Reykjavík 1940, ch. 16 p. 198; 'And they travel on now until they come to a place which is called Leyningsbakki ('Hidden Bank/Slope'). And then Áskell said that he wanted to be buried there when he died, and he thought the landscape there was good, and said that he didn´t want any belongings buried with him. Now his kinsmen answer that it would be a long time before he needed to be buried').

Power station at Laxá on the site of Hvammr

I drove to Reykjadalur, and knocked on the door of the farm at Presthvammur, where Áskell's farm Hvammr is thought to have been located. I learnt from the current farmer at Presthvammur that the farm had been moved at some point in the late middle ages...and that the grown-over foundations ('tóftir') of the earlier farm -- which editorial notes to the saga claimed were still visible -- were now somewhere under the Laxá hydro-electric power station that was built at some point in the 20th century besides the river. Ahh... The farmer knew of the place-name Leyningsbakki, however, and pointed me towards a place downstream from the site of the power-station, which is roughly where Leyningsbakki is thought to be...though the river has changed course and eaten away at the land. There is still a steep bank there, so I wasn´t hopelessly disappointed.

Whale-watching tour boats, Húsavík

Back besides Mývatn, after a frustrating episode in which the Embulance carkeys were locked inside the cab (I took the driver-side door apart a few weeks ago to fix the window which had got stuck when rolled completely down...since then the door has taken to locking itself from the inside which can be inconvenient; thankfully on this occasion a local farmer with a coathanger came to my rescue) and just when I was feeling that this saga was a hopeless case, things turned around. One chapter in the saga amused me -- and included some potentially fruitful place-name material. Three Norwegian brothers arrive on a ship that puts in at Húsavík (now the whale-watching capital of Iceland...) and spend the winter with the troublesome Þorbergr although a man called Glúmr Geirason (who lived at another farm besides Mývatn called Geirastaðir), had invited them to stay with him. Each one of these three brothers owned a valuable and famous weapon from which their nicknames were derived: the first brother Vagn possessed a spear and was known as Vagn 'spjót'; the second, Nafarr, had a short sword and was called Nafarr 'sax'; the third, Skefill, had a sword and was called Skefill 'sverð'. Þorbergr stirs up conflict and in an attempt to frame Glúmr and his father Geiri, accuses the father and son of theft. The matter blows up into a pitched battle in which the three Norwegian brothers are killed and buried with their weapons -- which are subsequently dug out of the men´s graves and find their way into new hands.

These weapons are in one sense the focus of this part of the narrative: and local place-names around Geirastaðir which are not mentioned in the saga commemorate the men and their deaths. Local tradition says that Vagn died at Vagnabrekka ('Vagn's slope'); Nafarr died at Nafarssker ('Nafarr's skerry'); Skefill died at a place called Skefilshólar ('Skefill's hills'); and all three were buried in Kumlabrekka ('Burial-mound slope'). I knocked on the door of the farm at Geirastaðir -- and, goldmine! Finnbogi, in his 80s, who was born and grew up there, and had moved back to the place after some decades in Akureyri, took me on a guided tour of the area, showed me the sites of each of these four places, chatted about some of his theories regarding them, and passed on an astonishing amount of information about the names and explanatory anecdotes of almost every other rock/slope/natural feature in the vicinity. He was a remarkable source of knowledge and exactly the kind of character that is making this project so rewarding and enjoyable, and the sagas so much more than narratives that exist within the covers of printed editions. Even when things seem bleak, it´s only a matter of time before I chance upon someone like Finnbogi and all excitement is rekindled. In addition, a great deal of archaeological excavation has been going on recently around Mývatn (particularly at Skútustaðir, and at Hofstaðir: follow the links to read excavation reports) -- and this adds another dimension to my attempts to connect sagas with their landscapes. This was, then, in the end, an enlightening and encouraging journey of discovery -- to begin with, things were not quite what I expected or hoped but thanks to Finnbogi, Reykdæla saga redeemed itself and even if the events it describes still do not fully capture my imagination, certain parts of it and the local places associated with these parts have taken on a colour and life that they did not have for me before. So a happy ending!

I´m off on Tuesday/Wednesday on an extended horseback trip across Sprengisandur, the north/south route over the central Icelandic highlands...blogging will resume at the end of August with a report about another northern saga, Svarfdæla saga, since I most likely won't manage to hook up en route...

A monument where a hydro-electric dam
on the river Laxá was blown up in 1970 by local farmers

Circles and Rounds-about Vápnfirðinga saga Country

2011-08-10T17:18:00.000+01:00

Iceland's Coat of Arms

Vopnafjörður, in north-east Iceland, is famous on several counts, both medieval and modern. It is home to one of Iceland's four mythical guardian spirits or landvættir, the dragon (the other three are a great bird which resides in Eyjafjörður in the north, a bull based around Breiðafjörður in the west, and a mountain giant who roams around the south-west): all four creatures are pictured on Iceland's coat of arms, and on the obverse of Icelandic coins. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Vopnafjörður was the port from which the greatest numbers of Icelanders set sail for America and Canada after the terrible hardships of life in the east at that time became impossible to endure any longer. Most recently -- and at the opposite end of the financial spectrum -- Vopnafjörður, or the rivers in the area and the salmon in those rivers, have attracted figures such as Prince Charles and George Bush as well as numerous other high-profile tourists...

Looking north-east from Hof

The saga that is set around Vopnafjörður, Vápnfirðinga saga ('The saga of the people of Weapon-Fjord') was the last of the eastern sagas on my list to work through. I have written in recent posts about some of the connections -- genealogical, geographical, narrative -- between these eastern sagas and Vápnfirðinga saga is no exception here. One of the two key places in Vápnfirðinga saga, Krossavík, is where Grímr Droplaugarson of Droplaugarsonar saga hid out after murdering Helgi Ásbjarnarson (see post of 29th July). A local man who was born and grew up on the farm at Krossavík came with me for a spin about the countryside in the Embulance and pointed out the places associated with Grímr around Krossavík land, as well as passing on countless other anecdotes attached to local places.

Krossavík
(the land slopes down to the sea to the left of the photo)

Vápnfirðinga saga is not a very long one and it deals for the most part with the close friendship, and subsequently deadly enmity, between two brothers-in-law: Brodd-Helgi Þorgilsson who lives at Hof, and Geitir Lýtingsson who lives at Krossavík. The rift between the two men comes after a Norwegian merchant is murdered: Brodd-Helgi and Geitir at first divide the Norwegian's possessions between them, but the goods are later taken from Brodd-Helgi and Geitir by another man who delivers the possessions to the dead Norwegian's family. It is unclear what becomes of two precious things (a gold arm-ring and a casket), however, and the friendship between Brodd-Helgi and Geitir is poisoned by mutual suspicion. Tension is compounded when Brodd-Helgi abandons his terminally-ill wife (Geitir's sister) and announces his betrothal to another woman. The two men take different sides in various local disputes and eventually, one thing leads to another, and Geitir kills Brodd-Helgi. The feud is passed down to the next generation and Brodd-Helgi's son Bjarni then kills Geitir (who was his foster-father) in order to avenge his father's death...then Geitir's son Þorkell tries to kill Bjarni in order to avenge his father´s death...

Hof (the white building to the right of the frame),
from Guðmundarstaðir, looking south-west across the valley

At a battle that takes place on a peninsula along the coast to the south of Vopnafjörður, both Bjarni and Þorkell sustain wounds -- but the battle is halted after women run out from a nearby farm and throw cloths over the weapons men are wielding. Bjarni offers a settlement package to Þorkell which he accepts, and so the saga ends, at least, with reconciliation...

I had the pleasure of being shown around other saga-sites in Vápnfirðinga saga by another local, Cathy -- who (together with her husband Sverrir) came to my rescue after somewhat alarmingly, the Embulance brakes seized up from chronic over-heating as I was descending the infamously steep and long Hellisheiði mountain pass into Vopnafjörður. A terrible smell of burning brakes culminated in a rather dramatic handbrake stop amidst clouds of dust...but all ended happily, thankfully, and the Embulance and I lived to tell the tale and continue to travel. It was an amazing road -- I took no pictures en route as all my energy was focused on staying on the road and negotiating the countless hairpin-bends -- I´d love to drive it again some time...but perhaps in a slightly lighter and more easily manouverable vehicle! Cathy is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being her history: her grandparents were amongst the many 'Western' Icelanders who emigrated from Vopnafjörður to the United States, which is where Cathy was born and lived...until she visited Iceland in order to explore her family past, and moved back east for good. A story of emigration come full circle...

Surprised sheep at the abandoned Guðmundarstaðir,
another farm in Vápnafirðinga saga

Cathy is part of a local group which came together over the winter and, as part of a course on local tourism, read Vápnfirðinga saga and put together a very informative brochure about the saga. The brochure can be picked up in the tourist information and cultural centre (housed in an old merchant warehouse building called Kaupvangur) in Vopnafjörður, and it includes a map on which all of the farms mentioned in the saga are marked. Interestingly, it seems that the formation of this group has ignited a spark of local interest in the saga which wasn´t widely present before. On asking various people, it seemed that knowledge of, and interest in the saga hasn´t particularly been a part of life in Vopnafjörður for past generations... Now though, the saga is taught in the local school, and various Vápnafirðinga saga-related projects and activities are afoot. I spent a delightful hour leafing through a pile of pictures produced by school-children illustrating scenes and characters from the saga: one of my favourites was a brightly-coloured picture of a local farmhouse -- a farm which features in the saga, and on which the grandparents of the artist live today. The next post -- on Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu -- will be something of an antidote to the all-too-often romantic temptations of seeing continuity between past and present in Iceland as far as the sagas and the places in them are concerned...but I left Vopnafjörður musing on how this saga, at least, seems to be one that has come full circle too, as far as its place in local consciousness is concerned.

Cairns on Sandvíkurheiði, on the way north from Vopnafjörður

Þorgeirr Hávarsson: A Headless Footnote

2011-08-02T17:54:00.000+01:00

Fóstbræðra saga ('The Saga of the Sworn-Brothers'), which is set for the most part in the West Fjords and which I wrote about earlier this year in May when I was there (see post of 14th June), tells the story of two immensely strong and brave warriors and friends (Þórmóðr Kolbrúnarskáld Bersason and Þorgeirr Hávarsson) who swear to avenge each others' deaths...

One place I could not visit when I was exploring Fóstbræðra saga locations around the West Fjords was the site where Þorgeirr fought his last battle, died, and was buried...because this place is in north-east Iceland, on the peninsula called Melrakkaslétta ('Arctic fox plain'). Þorgeirr is attacked by his enemies there in the bay/harbour called Hraunhöfn, on board his ship: there is a violent battle and Þorgeirr kills 14 men before eventually being overcome. Once fallen, Þorgeirr's head is chopped from his trunk by a man called Þórarinn ofsi ('the overbearing').

Hraunhafnartangi, looking south
Þorgeirsdys is to the left of the lighthouse as pictured

The saga narrator tells us how further bodily mutilation is inflicted on Þorgeirr's corpse out of anatomical curiosity: 'Some men say that they cleaved him to the heart and wanted to see what it was like, him being the courageous man he was, and men say that his heart was rather small; and some men believe it to be true that the heart of a courageous man is smaller than that of a coward, because men say there is less blood in a small heart than a big one, and say that the amount of blood in a heart is concomitant with fear, and men say thus the heart of a man drops/throbs in the breast when the blood and heart is stirred up in a man' (Svá segja sumir menn, at þeir klyfði hann til hjarta ok vildu sjá, hvílíkt væri, svá hugprúðr sem hann var, en menn segja, at hjartat væri harla lítit, ok höfðu sumir menn þat fyrir satt, at minni sé hugprúðra manna hjörtu en huglaussa, því at menn kalla minna blóð í litlu hjarta en miklu, en kalla hjartablóði hræzlu fylgja, ok segja menn því detta hjarta manna í brjóstinu, at þá hræðisk hjartablóðit ok hjartat í manninum; Fóstbræðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 6, Reykjavík 1943, ch. 17 pp. 210-11). In the version of the saga found in the manuscript called Hauksbók, Þorgeirr's heart is said to be no bigger than a walnut, hard as a callous, and without any blood in it...

After the battle, Þórarinn ofsi rides off to Eyjafjörður with Þorgeirr's head in a bag: Þórarinn and his men amuse themselves en route by taking the head out and mocking it...until they take fright at its horrible appearance (its eyes stare back at them, open-wide, and the tongue lolls out of the open mouth) and they bury it not far from a place called Naust. Back on Melrakkaslétta, local men clear up the aftermath of battle, burying the men who have fallen right there because the nearest church at that time was a long way away.

Þorgeirsdys looking east

There is a lighthouse on Hraunhafnartangi ('Lava-harbour-point') now, and not far from it is a huge stone cairn, known as Þorgeirsdys ('Þorgeirr's cairn'). The peninsula is bleak and windswept, grey boulders piled up high along the shoreline and endless driftwood and tangles of old fishing-nets that have been washed ashore. I walked out to the cairn, after having read a small notice that explains why the cairn is so huge: it is a tradition to add a stone to the cairn, and then to walk clockwise around it, making a wish for others' happiness and good luck while doing so. My stone added, and my wishes sent up to the sky, I wandered back to the Embulance -- thinking about Þorgeirr and the distance between his head and body, and feeling somewhat vulnerable as far as my own head was concerned as angry arctic terns (kría in Icelandic) dive-bombed and screeched angrily at me for disturbing their otherwise completely uninhabited patch...

From the foot of Þorgeirsdys

From Eastern Parts II: Brothers in Arms, or Droplaugarsona saga

2011-07-29T13:24:00.001+01:00

Two sons, Helgi and Grímr, were born to a couple (Þorvaldr and Droplaug) who lived at a place called Arneiðarstaðir (today Arnheiðarstaðir) on the western side of the long lake Lagarfljót, in the east of Iceland (the present-day capital of the east, Egilsstaðir, sits on east of the northern end of this lake, in which Iceland‘s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, the Lagarfljót serpent or Lagarfljótsormurinn, is said to reside...). Helgi, the elder, was ‚a large man, promising and strong, cheerful and self-assertive‘ who was not interested in thinking about farming, but the best of men as far as skill with weapons was concerned (mikill maðr vexti ok vænn ok sterkr, gleðimaðr ok hávaðasamr. Hann vildi ekki um búnað hugsa. Vígr var hann manna bezt, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 2, p. 140, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit XI, Reykjavík 1950). The younger son, Grímr, was also large and strong but silent and composed, and a good farmer (mikill maðr vexti ok afrendr at afli, hljóðlátr ok stilltr vel. Hann var búmaðr mikill, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 2, p. 142). These two men were thought to have the greatest potential of all the young men in the district.

The old farmhouse at Arnheiðarstaðir

The saga of these two brothers, the ‚sons of Droplaug‘ (who was their mother, and whose name they take rather than that of their father‘s, on account of their father dying early in their lives) takes place for the most part around the Lagarfljót lake – which, at 25kms running on a north-east/south-west axis, is one of the longest lakes in Iceland. At the ages of 13 and 12, respectively, Helgi and Grímr kill a man called Þorgrímr torðyfill (‚dung-beetle‘) who had been spreading slander about their mother. They travel to a farm called Eyvindarár on the other side of the Lagarfljót lake, where their aunt lives, rise up early in the morning, and when their aunt asks where they are off to, they answer „We shall hunt ptarmigan“ („Rjúpur skulum vér veiða“, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 3, p. 145). On their return to Eyvindarár a little later, when their aunt asks what they hunted, they answer „We hunted down a certain dung-beetle“ („Vit höfum veitt torðyfil einn“, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 3, p. 146). This killing does not go down well with a local man called Helgi Ásbjarnarson, since the dead Þorgrímr dung-beetle was one of his men. The greater part of the rest of the saga tells of the escalating feud between the brothers and Helgi Ásbjarnarson: tense local politics, disputes over missing sheep, conflict over the courting of a married woman and other episodes all contribute to the escalating tension and enmity between the two sides.

Lagarfljót from the western side

Both sides gather support and have spies out about the area to watch on each other‘s movements; eventually, Helgi has a dream in which it seems to him that the brothers travel exactly the route they are embarked upon in reality, down into Eyvindardalr (on the north-eastern side of Lagarfljót) to a place called Kálfshváll – where it happens that Helgi Ásbjarnarson is hiding nearby, waiting to ambush the brothers. Helgi dreams that the brothers are attacked by 18 or 20 wolves, one of which is bigger than the others, another of which leaps up at Helgi‘s chin and mouth...at which point Helgi wakes up. The dream is interpreted as being a sign that a band of men (with Helgi Ásbjarnarson as their leader) are lying in wait for the brothers; Helgi Droplaugarson refuses to turn back, however.

Vopnalág in Eyvindardalur, where Helgi
Ásbjarnarson is said to have hidden
(the hill with the scooped-out centre)

The brothers come down into Eyvindardalr and head towards the ford by Kálfshváll; it is still winter and the river is frozen. 18 men run towards Helgi and Grímr who turn off the path and up towards the edge of a gully: a great battle takes place and Helgi demonstrates his agility and prowess with weapons. A man called Hjarrandi hews at Helgi‘s face and hits him on the mouth: „Aldri var ek fagrleitr, en lítit hefir þú um bætt“ (Droplaugarsona saga ch. 10, p. 164; „I was never good-looking, but you haven´t helped much“), quips Helgi. Helgi takes his beard in his mouth and bites on it; he looks over and sees that his brother has fallen, is hit by a spear, and dies himself. The brothers‘ aunt hears of the battle, and sends her son to the battle-field to recover Helgi‘s and Grímr‘s bodies. Helgi is buried at Eyvindarár in a mound but it turns out that Grímr is not actually dead, and he is nursed back to life...to exact vengeance on Helgi Ásbjarnarson for the death of is brother.

Grímr hides out in various local places and then strikes, killing Helgi Ásbjarnarson in his bed on his farm at Eiðar. This scene is an interesting one – and many of the details concerning how Grímr sneaks into the farmhouse at Eiðar (how he ties together the tails of the cattle in the cowshed in order to inhibit people‘s pursuit of him later, for example, and is clad lightly in a shirt and linen underclothes without shoes) have very close parallels in the description in Gísla saga Súrssonar of how Gísli kills Þorgrímr at night in his bed. There is certainly some close textual relationship between the two sagas here – but scholars have debated which of the two sagas borrows from the other and recasts the scene. After killing Helgi, Grímr flees north to a farm at Krossavík in Vopnafjörður where his kinsman Geitir Lýtingsson lives. He hides out there for a while, then escapes to Norway, and then dies from a wound he picks up while fighting a viking called Gauss...

Grímsbás (under the rock overhang)

I was shown, and told about, various places around Lagarfljót where Grímr is said to have hidden, and which contain the element ‚Grímr‘ in them. Grímstorfa ('Grímr's turf') can be seen when driving out along the road from Egilsstaðir/Fellabær, on a mountain called Hafursfell, where a number of trees grow out from the rock high up. This place is not named in the saga, but it´s mentioned in a folk tale – though this folk tale also records an alternative tradition that the place-name is associated with a different Grímr. I climbed down to another Grímr-place, Grímsbás ('Grímr's stall') – a low overhang of rock forming a cave by a waterfall, with what seems to be a man-made wall running along the outer mouth of the cave. The slopes by the waterfall were studded with birch trees, and grasses and wild flowers grew high and abundantly.

Outlaws and heroes on the run seem to capture the imaginations of past generations of Icelanders almost more than anything else, if the number of place-names around the country associated with these characters‘ hideouts are anything to go by...From Lagarfljót I travelled north up to Vopnafjörður with the dual aim of visiting Krossavík and finding Grímr‘s hideouts there (there‘s a gully known as Grímsgjá, in which Grímr is said to have hidden, a large stone halfway up the mountain behind the farm called Tjaldsteinn (‚Tent-stone‘) which Grímr is said to have used to construct a woollen tent with, and a slope on the same mountain called Grímsbyggðir (‚Grímr‘s settled area‘), and taking on the saga that is set in Vopnafjörður, Vápnfirðinga saga, in which Krossavík features too. But these Grímr-place-names notwithstanding, Droplaugarsona saga doesn´t seem to be a saga that has a central place in many local people‘s consciousness today. There is an information sign beside the road that leads out of Egilsstaðir and towards Fagridalur, close by where the battle of Eyvindardalur was fought but little else around the area. The saga was closer to the hearts and in the imaginations of people who lived in the area one or two generations ago though: south of the farm at Arneiðarstaðir where the brothers were born and grew up is a farm called Droplaugarstaðir...which was built in 1942, and on which, at one time, lived two cousins who were both called Droplaug...

Upper panel of the famous medieval carved door panels
at Valþjófsstaðir church, in Droplaugarsona saga territory
(the originals are in the National Museum)

And another link with the saga-age past has been put forward by a local historian (Helgi Hallgrímsson, whose parents built Droplaugarstaðir). In the summer of 1980 the biggest silver hoard ever found in Iceland was uncovered on a farm called Miðhús, on the outskirts of Egilsstaðir, not far from Eyvindarár. It had been a hot summer and the family had been building a new house: a muddy patch by the house had dried up cracked open and on her way out to call the family in for food, Edda, who lives there still, stumbled on something stuck in the ground. When her family came in, their hands were filled with bracelets and twists of silver. Was this the silver that Arneiðr – from whom the farm Arneiðarstaðir takes its name, a woman of noble Shetland descent who was captured and enslaved, then bought and married by one of the first eastern settlers and the first person to be named in Droplaugarsona saga, Ketill þrymr – found buried in Norway, as Droplaugarsona saga and Fljótsdæla saga recount?...

For further reading on Grímr-place-names, and on Arneiðr and the silver hoard, see

· Helgi Hallgrímsson, 'Grímshellir og Grímsbás', Múlaþing 15 (1987), 117-31

· Helgi Hallgrímsson, ‚Arneiður og Droplaug: Frásögn af tveimur fornkonum á Austurlandi‘, in Greinar af sama meiði, helgaðar Indriða Gíslasyni sjötugum (Reykjavík, 1998), pp. 359-74

· Þór Magnússon, ‚Silfursjóður frá Miðhúsum í Egilsstaðahreppi‘, Árbók hins íslenska fornleifafélags (1980/1981), 5-20 (available online here, with photos of the hoard http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pageId=2054967)

From Eastern Parts I: Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða

2011-07-21T19:06:00.000+01:00

The most famous saga set in the east of Iceland is Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða. The saga is relatively short and its plot is simple; with regard to interpretation, however, it is a highly ambiguous saga in many ways and more has been written about it—and what its ‚message‘ may be—than about many other sagas put together. It is a narrative about power, certainly, and what it takes to hold on to power, but it is by no means a black-and-white picture...

Aðalból today, looking south down Hrafnkelsdalur

The eponymous Hrafnkell establishes a farm at a place called Aðalból, in Hrafnkelsdalur (to the west of the long narrow lake Lagarfljót, at whose head is the modernday capital of the east, Egilsstaðir). He is a devotee of the god Freyr, becomes a powerful and overbearing chieftain (and acquires the by-name ‚Freysgoði‘, or Freyr‘s priest‘), and owns a horse which he names Freyfaxi. Hrafnkell vows he will kill anyone who rides this horse. Einarr, the son of a poor neighbour, is employed as Hrafnkell‘s shepherd: Hrafnkell tells him he may ride any one of his horses except Freyfaxi—doing so will result in death. ‘Forewarned is forearmed‘, comments Hrafnkell („Eigi veldr sá, er varar annan“, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða ch. 3, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit 11, Reykjavík 1950, p. 102).

Faxagil, south of Aðalból

One day, however, Einarr cannot find the sheep. He decides to make use of a horse to search for them, but all of the horses run off with the exception of Freyfaxi. Einarr mounts Freyfaxi and goes off to look for the sheep, which he eventually finds back at the place where he started his search. Freyfaxi runs home to Aðalból, sweating and foaming at the mouth; Hrafnkell sees the horse has been ridden, and kills Einarr to avenge this. Einarr‘s cousin Sámr takes on the legal case against Hrafnkell—Hrafnkell laughs at this—but after gaining the support of powerful brothers from the West Fjords, Sámr wins the case at the Alþingi (the national assembly) despite being very much the underdog. After returning to the east, Sámr subjects Hrafnkell and his men to gruesome torture at Aðalból (tying them together and hanging them up by means of threading a rope through their hamstrings, until the blood runs out of their eyes), and Sámr then gives Hrafnkell the choice of death or keeping his life but moving out of the district. Hrafnkell chooses to move away, and Sámr takes up residence himself at Aðalból. Hrafnkell moves east and establishes a new farm which is called Hrafnkelsstaðir. Freyfaxi is driven over a cliff and drowned in a pool; Hrafnkell‘s temple to Freyr is destroyed.

Looking north up Hrafnkelsdalur

Hrafnkell prospers on his new farm and builds up his power again; he abandons his devotion to the god Freyr. Some years later, Sámr‘s brother Eyvindr returns to Iceland after a stint abroad. Hrafnkell learns that Eyvindr is travelling to visit Sámr at Aðalból; pursues him, and kills him in order to exact vengeance on Sámr. Sámr finds his dead brother, raises a burial mound over him. Hrafnkell goes home to Hrafnkelsstaðir, calmly has a meal, and then sets off to Aðalból where he gives Sámr the same choice of options that Sámr offered to him before: to die, or to live (with shame) and move out of Aðalból. Sámr chooses the latter and moves back to his farm at Leiksskálar. Hrafnkell dies of sickness and is buried in a mound at Aðalból; his sons take over his chieftancy and become powerful men themselves. ‚And there concludes what there is to say about Hrafnkell‘ (Ok lýkr þar frá Hrafnkeli at segja, Hrafnkels saga ch. 10, p. 133).

The saga has long been a test-case in the debate over whether the sagas are essentially 13th-century fiction, or have their origins in oral traditions about historical events that were passed down from one generation to the next and finally inscribed on parchment several hundred years after the times these events are said to have taken place. Much scholarly ink has also been spilt over the extent to which the presentation of local topography in Hrafnkels saga ‚fits‘ or can be reconciled with what is to be found in the local area in modern times.

Hrossageilar, above Aðalból, where Sámr and
his men left their horses before going down
to Aðalból to torture Hrafnkell??

There are a number of occasions in the saga where place-names are explained as having come into existence after certain events: the saga notes, for example, how places around where Sámr‘s brother Eyvindr was killed by Hrafnkell are known variously as Eyvindartorfa (‚Eyvindr‘s turf‘),Eyvindarfjöll (‚Eyvindr‘s mountain‘) and Eyvindardalr‘ (‚Eyvindr‘s valley‘) (Er þar ok kölluð Eyvindartorfa ok Eyvindarfjöll ok Eyvindardalr, Hrafnkels saga ch. 8, p. 130; ‘That place is now called Eyvindartorfa and Eyvindarfjöll and Eyvindardalr‘). The spot where Sámr and his men concealed their horses above the farm Aðalból before driving Hrafnkell away ‚has since been called Hrossageilar (‚Narrow glen/lane of horses‘)‘ (heita þar síðan Hrossageilar, Hrafnkels saga ch. 5, p. 119). And the spot from where the horse Freyfaxi was driven to his death ‚has since been called Freyfaxahamarr (‚Freyfaxi‘s cliff‘)‘ (Heitir þar síðan Freyfaxahamarr, Hrafnkels saga ch. 6, p. 124).

Many of the places named in Hrafnkels saga—individual farmsteads, shepherd‘s cots, natural features such as rivers and gullies—can be found on a map, though as always, it is possible to debate whether the identification of these places today corresponds with where they were (or were thought to be) at the time when the saga was written, and again, at the time when the events that the saga describes took place. The farm at Aðalból itself is one example of this—was the Aðalból of the saga located where the modern Aðalból is today, or was it originally somewhere further south in the valley? Some of those who have written about topography and Hrafnkels saga have questioned the ‘fit‘ between the saga‘s description of the natural features around Aðalból, and the lie of the land in which the present Aðalból is set. Others are certain that the saga Aðalból was located where the modern Aðalból is, though the valley has not been continuously inhabited from the saga-age to present times, due to volcanic ash falling at different times (after the volcano Hekla erupted in 1185, for example, the valley seems to have been deserted until the late middle ages when it was resettled).

Basalt formations with moss

The present Aðalból was dug by Sigurður Vigfússon in the late 19th century and identified a mound there which may or may not be Hrafnkell‘s mound...it is said to be his, at any rate (and Sigurður wrote that the human bones found in it must be Hrafnkell's). Other sites in the valley have been excavated too: archaeologists have identified a total of 20 dwelling places from early times, 16 of which were apparently abandoned after the 1185 Hekla eruption. Some places named in the saga cannot be (or have not been) identified at all—though local people and scholars of the saga have walked hill and dale to find them. One site that was long sought out was the location of the shepherd‘s cot Reykjasel, mentioned in Hrafnkels saga in conjunction with the shepherd Einarr‘s fated searching for Hrafnkell‘s missing sheep. A local man who had been pondering the location Reykjasel for many years finally stumbled upon it, literally, while rounding up sheep in an autumn fog, shortly before construction (or destruction, depending on one´s perspective) work begain on the infamous Kárahnjúkur dam and reservoir in 2005. The site was excavated hurriedly in 2005 before the land was flooded and turned into the Hálslón lagoon that feeds the Kárahnjúkur hydro-electric power-plant. Other examples are Eyvindartorfa (where Eyvindr was buried, see above) and Freyfaxahamarr (where the horse Freyfaxi met his death, see above).

The saga continues to draw people to the remote Hrafnkelsdalur valley, however—on the present farm there is accommodation, a petrol pump, and a bar which goes by the name of ‘Sámsbar‘...and in which I am writing up this post. When I asked the owners why the bar is named after Sámr and not Hrafnkell, they replied that they found him to be a more sympathetic character...and so he is in many, though not in all, ways (here I think of his hamstringing of Hrafnkell). But the victory of the underdog turns out to be short-lived—perhaps it would have been more enduring had Sámr killed Hrafnkell as he was urged to do by others...but this is an uncomfortable equation/conclusion. „Svona er lífið“ (‚Such is life‘), an Icelander might say...

From the southern foot of Hrafnkelsdalur

For those who want to read more about Hrafnkels saga and place-names, one place to start is with an article by O. D. Macrae-Gibson, ‘The Topography of Hrafnkels saga‘, published in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society 19 (1974-77), 239-63, and accessible online at http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Saga-Book%20XIX.pdf. Further references to previous scholarship can be found therein.

Njáls saga II: The burning at Bergþórshváll

2011-07-15T22:28:00.001+01:00

A week or so ago, the bridge over Mýrdalssandur in the south was swept away by a flash glacial flood. While repairs are underway, all traffic heading east of Vík must therefore either follow the ring-road north and around in a clockwise direction, or else must take on the Nyrðra-Fjallabak back route which, via Landmannalaugar, skirts through the highlands north of Mýrdalsjökull, and rejoins the main road at the eastern end of Mýrdalssandur. The Embulance is a Land Rover, after all, so I thought I´d take on this challenge... It was challenging -- I lost count of the number of rivers I had to ford (4-wheel drive very much engaged, diff lock on...cue alarming clouds of steam rising out of the bonnet and from the underside of the vehicle). But we made it. And the drive was spectacular, though I was concentrating so hard for the most part that I didn´t have the energy to take many photos en route. We shall see now what the east has to offer: sagas to hand for this next stint are three, namely Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Droplaugarsona saga, and Vápnfirðinga saga.

I´m on my way east here...but the weather is dreary and dim and damp and I´ve stopped at a campsite at a place called Stafafell in Lón, near the eastern tip of the vast Vatnajökull glacier...While I wait for brighter weather to come along, I thought I´d put up a short Njáls saga Part II post as promised in my last one, this time focusing on the dramatic high-point of the saga -- the burning of Njáll's farm at Bergþórshváll, which is said to have taken place exactly 1000 years ago.

Bergþórsvhvoll today; Þríhyrningur to the right

After the narrative about Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi and his death (related in the last post), the saga focuses on Njáll’s sons. Njáll’s eldest son, Skarpheðinn, is amongst the most vividly-drawn male characters in the sagas: he is described as mikill maðr vexti ok styrkr, vígr vel, syndr sem selr, manna fóthvatastr, skjótráðr ok øruggr, gagnorðr ok skjótorðr, en þó löngum vel stilltr. Hann var jarpr á hár ok sveipr í hárinu, eygðr vel, fölleitr ok skarpleitr, liðr á nefi ok lá hátt tanngarðrinn, munnljótr nökkut ok þó manna hermannligastr (Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 25, p. 70, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit XII, Reykjavík 1954; ‘a large man and strong, well skilled in arms, who could swim like a seal, the most swift-footed of men, rash in resolving disputes and fearless, straight-speaking and quick-speaking, but composed most of the time. He had curly chestnut hair, good eyes, was pale-coloured and with sharp features, hook-nosed and his teeth stuck out prominently, he was rather ugly in the mouth but nevertheless the most warlike of men’). One of the most sharply-depicted battles in Njáls saga describes how Skarpheðinn kills a man called Þráinn Sigfússon – by gliding across the ice-covered Markarfljót river with breathtaking speed (fór hann svá hart sem fogl flygi, Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 92, p. 233; ‘he travelled as fast as a bird flying’) and sinking his axe into Þráinn’s head. As part of the subsequent settlement, Njáll fosters Þráinn’s son Höskuldr and arranges Höskuldr’s marriage to a woman called Hildigunnr, and a new chieftancy is created and bestowed on Höskuldr who gains the nickname ‘Hvítanessgoði’ (‘chieftain of Hvítanes’).

Skarpheðinn kills Þráinn on Markarfljót

Höskuldr is later killed by Skarpheðinn (accompanied by the other Njálssynir and Kári Sölmundarson) when one of the few truly evil characters in the sagas, Mörðr Valgarðsson, sows seeds of discontent between Njáll’s sons and Höskuldr. Höskuldr’s widow, Hildigunnr, keeps Höskuldr’s blood-encrusted cloak and thrusts it at her uncle Flosi when he comes to visit. It was Flosi who gave Höskuldr the cloak in the first place and Hildigunnr’s act lays responsibility for avenging Höskuldr’s death on Flosi, who is not optimistic about this task: ‘Þú ert it mesta forað ok vildir, at vér tækim þat upp, er öllum oss gegnir verst, ok eru köld kvenna ráð’ (Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 116, pp. 291-2; ‘You the greatest monster and want us to take that course which will be worst for all, and the counsels of women are cold’). Attempts at legal reconciliation at the Alþingi (the national assembly) fail; Flosi gathers support, and a band of 100 men travel to Bergþórshváll to carry out the act of vengeance.

Various supernatural portents anticipate the momentous act of the burning of Bergþórshváll and poignantly, Njáll´s wife tells the family to choose what they want to eat for their last supper. Njáll tells everyone to go inside the farm in order to defend themselves when the attackers arrive, but they have no chance against fire; typically, Skarpheðinn would rather be outside, having no wish to suffocate like a fox in a lair’ (‘Em ek ófúss þess at láta svæla mik inni sem melrakka í greni’, Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 128, p. 326). Though Njáll and others are offered truce and the chance to leave the blazing house, they remain inside. Njáll, his wife Bergþóra, and a young boy they are fostering retire to bed, pulling an ox-skin over them and crossing themselves in God’s name. Kári Sölmundarson (who is married to one of Njáll's daughters) manages to break through burning rafters and escapes: he extinguishes the flames that have taken hold of him in a nearby ditch (which the saga notes is subsequently called Káragróf (‘Kári’s pit’) – one of the few instances in Njáls saga of events being used to explain place-names) and disappears under the cover of smoke. It is Kári who later pursues Flosi in order to avenge the burning and deaths of those who were inside: this comprises the final part of the saga. Skarpheðinn is trapped between the roof and the gable-end and cannot move; from outside, as the flames fire up and die down, a verse is heard from inside. Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi’s son Grani asks: ‘Hvárt mun Skarpheðinn hafa kveðit vísu þessa lífs eða dauðr?’ (Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 130, p. 337; ‘Has Skarpheðinn composed this verse alive or dead?’). Everyone in the house dies and the burners leave the site, and ride to the mountain Þríhyrningr to watch movements around the district for 3 days. Flosi comments on the deed: ‘Now we have brought about a great loss of lives. We may also know now, those who have brought it about, what ill-luck we have’ (‘Nú höfum vér fingit mikinn mannskaða. Megu vér nú ok vita, er þetta hefir at borit, hvert heillaleysi vér höfum’, Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 130, p. 338).

Skarpheðinn

When the remains of the burnt farm are examined, Njáll (and Bergþóra and the boy) are found to be unburnt underneath the ox-skin, though one finger on the boy which had stuck out from beneath the skin is charred: a miracle. Skarpheðinn is found burnt from the feet up to his knees, but not above: ‘he had bitten through his lip. His eyes were open and not swollen. He had driven his axe so hard into the gable that it had sunk in up to the middle of the blade, and had not softened’ (Hann hafði bitit á kampi sínum. Augu hans váru opin ok óþrútin. Hann hafði rekit øxina í gaflaðit svá fast, at gengit hafði allt upp á miðjan fetann, ok var ekki dignuð’, Brennu-Njáls saga ch. 132, p. 343). When Bergþórshváll was dug by archaologists in 1883, 1855, 1927-28, 1931, and finally 1950-52, various artefacts came to light. On one occasion, a kind of white powder was found...and was explained as the remains of the skyr (a kind of yoghurt made of whey that was a staple part of Icelandic diet since early times) that Bergþóra had called to be poured over the flames...

Approach to Bergþórshvoll
(modern house is to left, out of the frame)

Collingwood described Bergþórshváll as standing ‘on its twin hillocks among marshes, the broad Affall winding between it and the sands of this harbourless and surf-beaten shore, with the Westman Islands rising sharply from the sea-line, twelve miles away, and Eyjafell standing nobly over the flats to eastward‘ (A Pilgrimage to the Sagasteads of Iceland, p. 24). He has little else to say about the place other than it being the site of the tragic burning; William Morris, on the other hand, writes of exploring the area and gives free rein to his imagination. ‘The longest of the three mounds, which lay west from the house, rightly or wrongly, gave one strongly the impression of having been the site of Njal´s house: it was about 200 feet long and sloped steeply away into the flatter slope of the field: from its top one looked south across the grey flats with a thin greyer line of sea and the Westman Isles rising out of it‘ (Journals of Travel in Iceland 1871-1873, p. 43. Morris is shown ‚the traditional places about the stead‘—‚Flosi‘s Hollow‘ and ‚Kári‘s Garth‘—and he notes ‘how much the present Icelanders realise the old stories‘ (Journals, p. 45).

I found Bergþórshváll to be a strange place and I found it hard to match the violent scene of the burning with the location as it is today: a modern house now stands on one of the hills and there was noone around to ask where Káragróf, for example, is thought to be. An information board describes the burning as told in Njáls saga and notes the archaeological investigations conducted there, but the place felt empty. My sense that the time has passed for Njáls saga as a narrative that lives in the landscape (something I mentioned in the last post) seemed to be confirmed by a number of people I met and talked to, for various reasons. Of course there are people in the area who know the saga back-to-front, but as a piece of written literature rather than as living local stories. The poignancy of this time passing was driven home when I ventured into the old age home: one or two old people there told me how in previous times, *everyone* talked about Njáls saga, in all kinds of contexts, and addressing all kinds of Njála-related issues. I left Njáls saga country feeling a little sad.

Landmannalaugar

Petrol stations and priests...

2011-07-07T13:16:00.000+01:00

...A short piece on petrol stations and priests -- and their place in my project -- broadcast earlier this morning on the BBC R4 programme 'From our own Correspondent'...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292v1 (at 00:10:58 into the programme).

The South: Country of Burnt Njáll

2011-07-06T12:13:00.001+01:00

Njáls saga. Where to begin with the saga that is reckoned to be the jewel in the saga crown? In addition to its peerless reputation, at over 450 pages in the Íslenzk fornrit edition (Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Reykjavík 1954), it is by far the longest of the Íslendingasögur: the logistics of mapping this saga onto and around the landscapes of the south of Iceland (where the greater part of its action unfolds) filled me with no small sense of trepidation.

A circular email was sent round some months ago advertising a 4-day ‚Njáls saga on horseback‘ tour organised by a company called Riding Iceland, and led by Dr Jón Karl Helgason, a professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland. I signed up for the tour...and thus took on the challenge of Njála.

The tour proved to be a physically exhilarating and immensely thought-provoking experience. I supplemented the Njáls saga days with an inital 3 days helping to drive the herd of horses south from a farm between Geysir and Gullfoss to Vellir (the farm on which Njáls saga begins), where the tour commenced, and back north again for another 3 days after the tour had formally come to an end. Amongst other river encounters, this involved half an hour of riding through the mighty glacial river Þjórsá at a ford called Nautavað -- a crossing point for over 1000 years on account of the riverbed there comprising lava rather than sand which is constantly displaced by the currents. Grey waters churn around the herd of loose horses who instinctively strike off downstream with the current and must not be followed; I contemplate the extraordinary dizzying sensation and feeling of not moving forward at all when looking down at the swirling waters enveloping me and my horse, this suspicion being simultaneously contradicted by my horse‘s steady muscular exertions and the gradual nearing of the opposite bank.

The itinerary took us from one Njáls saga site to another – but not by adhering to the chronological progression of chapters and events in the written saga. In this, I was struck even more by the way that the events that make up any one saga can be ‚read‘ very differently through the physical exploration and familiarisation of the landscapes in which they are set, as opposed to an armchair or desk-based linear reading of that saga from the first chapter through to the last. Specific places in a local area bear three-dimensional witness to the narrative that has written itself into and around the topographical features of the landscape, become embodied in grassy slopes, rocky screes, open plains, riverbanks. As one moves around a district, this leads one to a sense of any one saga as a much more flexible entity – a narrative whose component parts can be processed mentally in any order, as individual places one encounters present their stories and associations – and I am beginning to think that this is a different and very powerful theoretical framework within which to understand the sagas, or at least a means of gaining insights into understanding how local Icelanders might have received or processed the saga set in their district from the medieval period onwards.

In terms of its structure, Njáls saga can be said to be formed of three main narratives: firstly, that of Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi (one of the most perfect of saga heroes) and his eventual feud-related death at the hands of enemies; then that of Gunnarr‘s close friend, the wise Njáll of Bergþórshváll, and his and others‘s deaths when their farm is burned by a band of men lead by Flosi Þórðarson; and finally, that of Kári Sölmundarson and his pursuit of vengeance for the burning of Bergþórshváll, both in Iceland and abroad.

Þríhyrningur from the north at Reynifell

The landscape of Njáls saga is dominated by the single mountains and mountain-ranges that come in and out of one´s line of sight in varying panoramic configurations as one rides around the area: the volcanic Hekla, snow-streaked, not mentioned in Njáls saga but a powerful presence; Þríhyrningur (‚Three-Corners‘) which is a pivot around which much Njáls saga action revolves; the strange isolated Stóra-Dímon which rises jagged from the flats of the Landeyjar region, beside the wide shifting sands and streams of the Markarfljót river; then to the east the ranges of Tindfjallajökull and the infamous Eyjafjallajökull. These features have remained a constant in the landscape of this part of the south, though much else has changed significantly over the millennium between the events of Njáls saga and the present day. The course of the Markarfljót river has shifted continuously over time; volcanic eruptions over past centuries have left their lava-sprawling marks across the region; deforestation, erosion, and modern drainage have altered the prospect of great stretches of land; endless violet-blue lupins introduced to halt erosion in recent decades now carpet hillsides, plains, lava-fields.

Markarfljót from the top of Stóra-Dímon,
looking east into Fljótshlíð/Eyjafjallajökull

On the green slopes at Hlíðarendi, from where one looks south down across the Landeyjar plains and over to the Vestmannaeyjar – when cloud or volcanic ash caught in the winds isn't shrouding the distance -- Gunnarr lived with his wife Hallgerðr. Hallgerðr is exceptionally and troublingly beautiful and note is made several times throughout the saga of her long blonde hair. On gazing on her as a young girl, Hallgerðr‘s uncle Hrútr Herjólfsson (who plays a part in Laxdæla saga) wonders how ‚thieves‘ eyes‘ have come into the family: a detail which later becomes significant. Hallgerðr is a hard woman who had been married twice before Gunnarr, and had lost both husbands to the axe of her dastardly foster-father Þjóstólfr. The first husband was killed with Hallgerðr‘s approval, the second was a great loss to her. Chapters after Hallgerðr has married Gunnarr narrate the growing tensions and conflict between Hallgerðr and Njáll‘s wife, Bergþóra: insults and the initiation on both sides of a series of eye-for-eye killings do not destroy the deep friendship between Gunnarr and Njáll, however. Famine prompts Hallgerðr to send a slave to steal cheese and butter from a neighbouring farm; when Gunnarr finds out, he slaps Hallgerðr for this greatest and most shameful of crimes.

Hlíðarendi today, looking north from the road

Collingwood writes of the way in which at Hlíðarendi, „scenery and romance are inseparable...no modern traveller can fail to note that the one place of all the world where a man, in those distant and rude days, chose deliberately to die, rather than go out into exile from it, was so magnificently situated“ (Pilgrimage, p. 30). Gunnarr is exiled by law for a period of 3 years as the consequence of a feud; he prepares to leave the country and rides south from Hlíðarendi with his brother Kolskeggr. Chapter 75 of the saga describes how the brothers ride towards the Markarfljót river: þá drap hestr Gunnars fæti, ok stökk hann ór söðlinum. Honum varð litit upp til hlíðarinnar ok bæjarins at Hlíðarenda ok mælti: „Fögr er hlíðin, svá at mér hefir hon aldri jafnfögr sýnzk, bleikir akrar ok slegin tún, ok mun ek ríða heim aptr ok fara hvergi“ (Brennu-Njáls saga, p. 182; 'Then Gunnarr‘s horse stumbled, and he fell from the saddle. He looked up to the slope and the farm at Hlíðarendi and said: „Fair is the slope, such that I think I have never seen it so beautiful, pale fields and mown homefield, and I will ride back home and not travel on“'). A place – or a stretch of land -- called Gunnarshólmi is the spot from where local people believed Gunnarr looked back at his homestead: Gunnarr‘s remark is one of the most poignant and famous phrases in saga literature.

Gunnarr, by Snorri Arinbjarnarson

Shortly afterwards, Gunnarr is attacked in his farm by his enemies after they learn he is alone apart from Hallgerðr‘s and his mother‘s company. Gunnarr puts up a superlatively heroic defence and the passage describing the fight incorporates some classically sardonic saga humour. Þorgrímr Austmaðr gekk upp á skálann; Gunnarr sér, at rauðan kyrtil berr við glugginum, ok leggr út með atgeirinum á hann miðjan. Austmanninum varð lauss skjöldrinn, ok spruttu honum fætrnir, ok hrataði hann ofan af þekjunni, gengr síðan at þeim Gizuri, þar er þeir sátu á vellinum; Gizurr leit við honum ok mælti: „Hvárt er Gunnarr heima?“ Þorgrímr svarar: „Vitið þér þat, en hitt vissa ek, at atgeirr hans var heima.“ Síðan fell hann niðr dauðr (Brennu-Njáls saga, p. 187; 'Þorgrímr Austmaðr (The Norwegian) went up onto the hall; Gunnarr sees that a red kirtle appears at the window, and thrusts through it at (Þorgrímr‘s) middle with his long-spear. The Norwegian dropped his shield, and lost his footing, and tumbled down off the roof; he goes over to where Gizurr and the others were sitting on the field. Gizurr looked at him and said: „Is Gunnarr at home?“ Þorgrímr answers: „You may find that out for yourselves, but I know that his spear was at home.“ Afterwards he fell down dead').

Gunnarr holds off his enemies until his bow-string breaks. He asks Hallgerðr to give him two locks of her famous hair which she and his mother can twist into a replacement bow-string. ‚„Does anything depend on it?“ she says. „My life depends on it,“ says Gunnarr, „because while I make use of my bow they will never be able to attack me.“ „Then I shall,“ she says, „remind you of the slap, and I don´t care whether you defend yourself for a long or a short time.“ „Each has their own mark of distinction,“ says Gunnarr, „and I won‘t ask you any longer for this“‘ („Liggr þér nokkut við?“ segir hon. „Líf mitt liggr við,“ segir hann, „því at þeir munu mik aldri fá sóttan, meðan ek kem boganum við.“ „Þá skal ek nú,“ segir hon, „munu þér kinnhestinn, ok hirði ek aldri, hvárt þú verr þik lengr eða skemr.“ „Hefir hverr til síns ágætis nökkut,“ segir Gunnarr, „ok skal þik þessa eigi lenga biðja“, Brennu-Njáls saga, p. 189).

Collingwood describes how, in 1897 when he visited, he was shown ruins said to be those of Gunnarr‘s hall beside the then-modern farmhouse, though Collingwood expresses doubts over the attribution on the basis the „slope is so steep that it is hardly likely they [the ruins] can mark the site of the principal residence“ (Pilgrimage, p. 30). There is no farm at Hlíðarendi today, though a church stands on the land. There was no-one around to ask about the location of Gunnarr‘s howe or mound, sketched by Collingwood (and which the saga relates opened up on a couple of occasions when the shepherd and serving-maid were passing by, revealing Gunnarr singing and reciting verses happily), nor the smaller mound said in past times to mark the grave of Gunnarr‘s faithful Irish hound Sámr. The manager of the local ‚Njáls saga‘ museum in Hvolsvöllur said that he had met the last farmer of Hlíðarendi in the late 1970s and been shown these spots and others connected with the saga; this farmer is no longer living, and it seems that local knowledge about Hlíðarendi (and other places around the district associated with the saga) has diminished to the point where in many cases, such extra-saga place-names and locations are not much more than shadowy remembrances or the subject of speculation.

It seemed remarkable to me that this should be the case given the acclaimed place of Njáls saga in the canonical Íslendingasögur; in the next post, something of Njáll and Bergþórshváll will be presented, along with further notes considering the extent to which Njáls saga seemed, to me, to be alive in the local landscapes in which it is set. But if the precise location of Gunnarr‘s mound—or a mound said to be Gunnarr‘s, at any rate—has been lost, his reputation as one of the most peerless of saga heroes still lives on. Thus Hávamál: Deyr fé, / deyja frændr, / deyr sjálfr et sama; /ek veit einn, / at aldri deyr: / dómr um dauðan hvern ("Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself will die too; I know one thing that never dies: the honourable reputation of each dead man").

Lupins, beside Gunnarssteinn

Wild Westerners: Fóstbræðra saga and Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings

2011-06-14T08:31:00.001+01:00

My Gísla saga pilgrimage concluded, I set off on the trail of the other sagas set around the West Fjords, namely Fóstbræðra saga, Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, and Gull-Þóris (or Þorskfirðinga) saga. There is some geographical overlap between Fóstbræðra saga and Hávarðar saga: apart from this being convenient as far as my route-planning was concerned, charting this 'on the ground' added to my growing sense of how the sagas can usefully be read in ways other than as linear narratives which unfold page-by-page, from Chapter 1 to The End. Before embarking on this mobile research trip, more often than not I just did not make connections between sagas with regard to places that reoccur in more than one saga, though I always found the way that a certain event or scene sometimes crops up in multiple sagas of interest. It is a great luxury to have the opportunity to explore Iceland in such a leisurely fashion and travelling around Iceland could never be anything but an adventure, sagas or no sagas. However, there is no doubt that the map of the country I am building up in my head while I travel is a vital resource for my further study of the sagas, and my awareness of exactly how various places in individual sagas are related to each other, and how individual places are important in multiple sagas, is constantly being strengthened.

Fóstbræðra saga is a little different from some other sagas in a number of ways. Rather than focusing on one protagonist, it deals with the lives of two protagonists simultaneously, Þorgeirr Hávarsson and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld Bersason, following their joint and individual exploits. The narratorial voice throughout the saga is especially distinctive too--and from time to time, to a degree unusual in the sagas, this voice communicates judgements or comments on events, sometimes even observations about human anatomy. Þorgeirr is born at a place called Jökulskelda, on the eastern shore of Mjóvafjörður (this fjord cutting inland on a north/south axis on the southern side of Ísafjarðardjúp); Þormóðr is born at a place called Dyrðilmýri, along the Snæfjallaströnd shore on the northern side of the Ísafjarðardjúp. Þorgeirr is first described as being bráðgörr maðr ok mikill vexti ok sterkr ok kappsfullr; hann nam á unga aldri at hlífa sér með skildi ok vega með vápnum (Fóstbræðra saga, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit VI, ch. 2, p. 123; 'A man developed at a young age, large and strong and very vigorous; at a young age he learned to protect himself with a shield and fight with weapons'); Þormóðr is þegar á unga aldri hvatr maðr ok hugprúðr, meðalmaðr vexti, svartr á hárslit ok hrokkinhærð (Fóstbræðra saga ch. 2, p. 124; 'At once, at a young age a bold man and stout-hearted, of medium height, with curly black hair'). Early in the saga, the two swear an oath of blood-brotherhood: 'They thought more indeed about honour in this world than about glory of joys of the other world. Thus they made a firm agreement that the one of them who lived longer should avenge the other' (Meir hugðu þeir jafnan at fremð þessa heims lífs en at dýrð annars heims fagnaðar. Því tóku þeir þat ráð með fastmælum, at sá þeira skyldi hefna annars, er lengr lifði, Fóstbræðra saga ch. 2, pp. 124-5).

Dyrðilmýri (looking east
along Snæfjallaströnd)

Dyrðilmýri (in the sunlight,
looking west along Snæfjallaströnd)

Þorgeirr in particular is a trouble-making character and gets involved in many local conflicts: the powerful chieftain Vermundr inn mjóvi at Vatnsfjörður attempts to bring some peace to the area by ordering both Þorgeirr's and Þormóðr's families to move to Borgarfjörður and over to the Laugadalur valley (on the peninsula between Skötufjörður and Mjóvarfjörður), respectively. After various adventures (more often violent than not) around the West Fjords (particularly the Hornstrandir peninsula) and abroad, Þorgeirr is killed and Þormóðr takes on the task of vengeance--a course of action which takes him over to Greenland in pursuit of Þorgeirr's killer, a man called Þorgrímr trolli Einarsson.

I wanted more than anything to walk for a few days around Hornstrandir and especially to get to the vast cliffs at Horn to look for Þorgeirstó ('Þorgeirr's Tuft') which is where, according to one text of the saga (in the Flateyjarbók manuscript) Þorgeirr, while gathering the herb/plant angelica, has a brush with death when the ground under his feet crumbles away. He grabs the root of an angelica plant and hangs 60 fathoms above the rocks on the shore below; out of pride, he will not call on Þormóðr to save him though to fall would mean a certain death. When Þorgeirr does not rejoin Þormóðr, Þormóðr goes to look for him and shouts out whether Þorgeirr hasn´t yet gathered enough angelica: Þorgeirr svarar þá með óskelfri röddu ok óttalausu brjósti: "Ek ætla," segir hann, "at ek hafa þá nógar, at þessi er uppi, er ek held um." (Fóstbræðra saga ch 13, p. 190; 'Þorgeirr answers then with a steady voice, fearless in his breast: "I think", he says, "that I'll have enough when this one, which I´m holding onto, is uprooted"). Þormóðr finds Þorgeirr and pulls him to safety.

The edge of a snow precipice above Bolungarvík

I didn´t get out to the northern fringe of Hornstrandir--impossible endless winter weather conditions and my being on my own meant that this would not have been the most sensible of expeditions. But I did hitch an afternoon boatride from Bolungarvík over to a bay on the western tip of Hornstrandir called Aðalvík, with a few people who were heading off for short stints in their summer houses, so I had the chance to marvel at some of the sheer cliffs, teeming with screaming birds, and to look down along Jökulsfirðir along which some scenes in Fóstbræðra saga take place. Collingwood wrote that 'this inhospitable coast' is--or was, at his time--inhabited by 'the least known and most forlorn of Icelanders' (Pilgrimage, p. 113). It is the least accessible part of Iceland now, sometimes described as the last 'wilderness'; the last permanent settlements were abandoned around the mid-20th century and the whole area is now a nature reserve. I will return!

View north from Laugaból

I drove down the southern shore of Ísafjarðardjúp following the road in and out of each of the seven narrow fjords that branch off it, and then back along the northern shore of Djúpið ('The Deep') as far as Dyrðilmýri, Þormóðr's birthplace. The views across Ísafjarðardjúp were breathtaking: dark heavy layers of cloud hanging along the flat-topped and still snow-covered mountains, mirroring their horizontal plane. A little further west of Dyrðilsmýri are the grassed-over foundations of Hávarðsstaðir--the second home of the eponymous Hávarðr of Hávarðs saga. Hávarðs saga turns on vengeance too--but that of a father (Hávarðr) for his son Óláfr, who is killed by the overbearing and villainous chieftain Þorbjörn illi Þjóðreksson. Þorbjörn illi, at the time when Hávarðar saga takes place, lived at Laugabóli in Laugadalur--the farm to which Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld and his family move on the orders of Vermundr, as told in Fóstbræðra saga, and a nice example of the kind of geographical saga-stead overlap that I´m becoming more aware of as I travel, as explained above. I spent a night at Laugaból with the remarkable and heroic woman who has lived there for the past 80-odd years: her life-story is one of tragic family losses and personal fortitude that makes for a powerful modern-day saga, and which has been told by Reynir Traustason (see here).

Outline of the Viking Age hall
and central hearth,
Vatnsfjörður

Vatnsfjörður, where Vermundr lived, was a stop en route--and here, I found much to examine. The church-and chieftain-site was an important place from the Settlement period until the Reformation in the mid-16th century, and it has been thoroughly dug by archaeologists over the past few years. Excellent signs have been set up with details about the buildings excavated so far, and various notable finds uncovered. One can walk amongst the outlines of the Viking Age farm complex (hall and outbuildings), and those from the second area of occupation which dates from the later Middle Ages; information about the site, which is still being investigated, can be found here.

Grettisvarða at Vatnsfjörður,
(the modern church below to the right;
the excavated site is to the left)

Vermundr was married to an exceptionally strong woman (a kvenskörungur mikill) called Þorbjörg in digra ('the stout'), sister of Kjartan Óláfsson of Laxdæla saga; she had notable forebears on both sides, being the daughter of Óláfr pá (himself the son of the Irish princess Melkorka and Höskuldr Dala-Kolsson; see Laxdæla saga) and Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir (daughter of Egill Skalla-Grímsson; see Egils saga and Laxdæla saga). There is a neat example of saga-character and material overlap here, with regard to Vatnsfjörður, Fóstbræðra saga and Grettis saga (which I will write about in full in a future post), and also another place that features in Fóstbræðra saga, Reykjahólar where Þorgeirr spends periods of time with his kinsman Þorgils Arason (now Reykhólar, on the Reykjanes peninsula at the bottom south-east end of the West Fjords).

The beginning of the Hauksbók text of Fóstbræðra saga tells the story of how Þorbjörg digra saved the outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson from execution by local farmers in the Vatnsfjörður area. On the hill-side above Vatnsfjörður stands a large cairn which is known as Grettisvarða ('Grettir's cairn')--and the stepped or terraced hill-side itself is known as Grettishjalli (a 'hjalli' is a shelf or ledge on a mountainside): local tradition attributes the building of the cairn to the outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson though in all probability it is younger and was built as part of a wider defensive network. The story about Grettir's capture is found in Grettis saga too, in which saga there is also an episode which tells how Grettir and the two blood-brothers Þorgeirr and Þormóðr spend a winter with Þorgils at Reykhólar...and the tension between Þorgeirr and Grettir. On one occasion, the three are row out to an island to collect an oxen for their host. The going is difficult on the way back with all three rowing (Grettir in the stern, Þorgeirr amidships, and Þormóðr in the bow) and there some sharp wordplay between Þorgeirr and Grettir: 'Frýr nú skutrinn skriðar', says Þorgeirr to Grettir--'Now the stern is hanging'. 'Ekki skal skutrinn eptir verða ef allvel er róið frammi', answers Grettir--'The stern will not be left behind if the rowing amidships is good'... How I could have done with these three--or even one of them--to convey me around the tip of Hornstrandir and around to Horn...

The tongue of Drangajökull, as seen at the end of the Kaldalón fjord

Gísla saga 2: The Outlaw Years

2011-06-06T12:24:00.000+01:00

In the last post, I mentioned some of the events described in Gísla saga Súrssonar that lead up to the point in the saga when Gísli Súrsson becomes an outlaw... Forced to leave his farmstead in Haukadalur, the saga relates how he survived on the run for 13 years before finally being hunted down and killed by his enemies. Gísli‘s outlaw years are the subject of the second half of the saga, which is an intriguing mix of almost slapstick-style or fabliaux comedy on the one hand, as Gísli gives his pursuers the slip through pulling off various cunning tricks, and on the other, heightened and doom-driven prose as Gísli‘s final hour approaches. The prose is punctuated by verses uttered by Gísli, often about the frequently blood-drenched nightmares that disturb his sleep. Poignantly, Gísli comes to be afraid of the dark (as is another famous outlaw, Grettir, after he is cursed by the revenant Glámr...a post on Grettis saga will appear at some point over the summer months!).

Geirþjófsfjörður

Gísli relies on friends and family to support him as an outlaw and he spends periods of time in different places hiding out. Help is not always forthcoming, however: the consequence of a spell that the sorceror Þorgrímr nef conjures, on the orders of Börkr—who must capture Gísli in order to avenge the death of his brother, Þorgrímr, at Gísli‘s hands. One place where Gísli spends summers in hiding is in a fjord south of Dýrafjörður (where Haukadalur is) called Geirþjófsfjörður, which branches off the bigger Arnarfjörður. Geirþjófsfjörður can only be accessed by walking down from the heath above it, or from the water by boat. Its remoteness made my expeditions down into it to explore the places named in the saga even more of an adventure into the unknown.

Gísla saga tells of how Gísli‘s wife, Auðr, had a farmstead in Geirþjófsfjörður—and grassed-over mounds known as Auðartóftir (‚Auðr‘s ruins‘) where this farm stood are marked and easy to find, on the level plain at the end of the fjord. I had a packed lunch (together with a local Gísli expert, who came with me for the first trip down into the valley, and my filming Cambridge Ideas companion) with my back up against one side of Auðartóftir, the sun (welcome, after days of snow and sleet and minimal visibility) shining down on us. There is a modern farmhouse not far from Auðartóftir—but the last inhabitants left some time in the 1950s/60s, and the fjord and valley have been deserted since then. It must have been a remarkable thing to have lived and farmed down by this fjord, with places associated with Gísli‘s last years and death visible on all sides, both those that are named in the saga, and other places that incorporate his name in some way and testify to a tradition of engagement with the saga beyond the printed page. It‘s a beautiful valley—and its gentle contours, as well as the rivers and waterfalls that fall from the heaths above and run down noisily through huge gullies into the fjord, took me by surprise. I had imagined a much starker, darker, grimmer, silent backdrop for Gísli‘s last fugitive months.

One of Gísli´s hideouts

The saga describes how Gísli had various small hideouts around the valley—two of these are marked, and a third, unmarked but clearly visible, was pointed out to me. I stood IN one of Gísli‘s hideouts and listened to birds calling, and water gurgling. According to the saga, Gísli only spent time in Geirþjófsfjörður over the summer—when the leaves on the birch and rowan trees—though these trees do not grow to a great height—would provide greater cover. But it struck me that this must have been a precarious security since a spy—such as Njósnar-Helgi in the saga, who is sent into Geirþjófsfjörður by Börkr‘s sidekick Eyjólfr inn grái to ascertain Gísli‘s whereabouts—looking down on the valley, might quickly notice the shaking of greenery in one spot or another... And after pushing through some of these tangled thickets for a short spell, I appreciated that being chased through such woods (as Gísli is, at certain points in the saga) would not have been a simple matter either.

The saga‘s account of Gísli‘s last hours and his final battle is a powerful piece of narrative. His end is nigh and utterly inevitable, but the narrative tension is nonetheless built up and up right until the climax of his last fight, which itself is dramatically staged and presented. It is the last night of summer and Gísli is with his wife Auðr and their foster-daughter at the farm but he cannot sleep, so the three of them walk from the farm to one of the hide-outs, to the south of the farm and beneath some cliffs. The weather is close and there is a heavy dew: as they walk, their cloaks leave trails behind them, and Gísli lets shavings from a runestick that he is carving fall unheeded too. When they get to the hideout, Gísli tries to sleep but dreams of two loon-birds fighting each other, covered in gore. The voices of approaching men are heard—it is Eyjólfr with a band of 15 men and they have followed the trails from the farm to the hideout. Gísli, Auðr and the girl run up onto the cliffs—these now bear the name Kleifar, and are marked with a sign—and Eyjólfr and his men attack from below.

Auðr has armed herself with a wooden club and beats Eyjólfr, driving him back down; she is captured and Gísli utters the memorable words ‚I have known for a long time that I married well, though I did not know just how well married I was. But you helped me less than you might have done or intended to, although your attack was good, because they would both have gone the same way now‘—i.e., had Gísli attacked Eyjólfr, he would have killed him as he has others (‚Þat vissa ek fyrir löngu, at ek var vel kvæntr, en þó vissa ek eigi, at ek væra svá vel kvæntr sem ek em. En minna lið veittir þú mér nú en þú mundir vilja eða þú ætlaðir, þó at tilræðit væri gott, því at eina leið mundu þeir nú hafa farit báðir‘, Gísla saga ch. 34, p. 112). The attackers press on and up and Gísli kills two more men—four are now dead. When least expected, Gísli runs off and up onto a rocky outcrop close by, called Einhamarr, and defends himself from there.

Einhamarr, view north from the top

Men climb up and ‚er atsóknin þá bæði hörð ok áköf, ok fá þeir nú komit á hann sárum nökkurum með spjótalögum, en hann versk með mikilli hreysti ok drengskap. Ok fá þeir svá þungt af honum af grjóti ok stórum höggum, svá at engi var ósárr, sá er at honum sótti, því at Gísli var eigi missfengr í höggum‘ (Gísla saga ch. 35, p. 114; ‚the attack was both hard and furious, and they manage to wound him somewhat with spear-thrusts, but he defended himself with great courage and valour. And they receive such a heavy onslaught of rocks and blows from him that none was unwounded of those he attacked, because Gísli was not inaccurate with his blows‘). Gísli is speared in the stomach and his guts spill out; he gathers them up in his shirt and ties them in with his belt. Then he calls for a pause, states that they will get the end they want, and then speaks his last verse—in which he claims his courage comes from his father. After this, Gísli leaps from the rock and drives his sword into the head of one of the attackers, cleaving him down to the middle, and dying himself.

I sat on top of Einhamar and read all of this—in the sunshine, looking down onto the plain where Auðartóftir are, and over to Kleifar. I found it hard in some ways to reconcile the details of the scene—violent shouts, clashing of weapons, blood and guts—with the peace of that rock as I sat, read, thought on it...I wondered if I was falling into the trap of reading the sagas—and imagining episodes within them—as though they are history rather than narratives that occupy the hazy space between history and fiction.

Certainly, it seemed to me that for local people, Gísla saga was more history than fiction—and Gísli might have died only decades ago rather than many centuries, in some cases. I think it would have been impossible to find a local person who did not know something of Gísli—that he lived in Haukadalur, at the very least—and many in the area know Gísli‘s story not necessarily through reading the saga, but because of his presence in the landscape, and the way that the events in the saga play out in local places, and the way that people have always passed on stories about Gísli in these landscapes. And this is not a passive tradition in present times either—in different ways, local people still actively engage with the saga and see it as their local heritage. There have been concerted efforts to present the saga to those unfamiliar with it and new to the area in the form of very well-made information boards raised at key places mentioned in the saga, for example. But most absorbingly, I experienced the spontaneous composing of verses about Gísli and places in the saga at first hand—in a perfectly natural context, not an artificial one. And I had to compose a verse about Gísli myself, in return...and thus found myself engaging with Gísli and Gísla saga creatively in the way that Icelanders have for many hundreds of years—and in some places, still do.

A joke in/by nature...or perhaps created by Gísli?

From Snæfellsnes to the West Fjords: Gísla saga Súrssonar

2011-05-29T14:28:00.000+01:00

I promised a second post on Eyrbyggja saga and the Snæfellsnes peninsula -- but events have taken various turns the past couple of weeks and time is flying...and so I have made an executive decision to move straight on with a post on Gísla saga so as not to leave you all too far behind as I move on! More about Eyrbyggja (and there is so much to say) will be worked into the book...

On the geography of Iceland and the location of the West Fjords (Vestfirðir), William Gershom Collingwood wrote, delightfully: „The map of Iceland has been sometimes drawn by school-boys as an eider-duck, quacking with wide opened beak; the head whereof is that great peninsual of the north west between Breidifjord and the Arctic Ocean, and its lower mandible Snæfells-nes. In our pilgrimage we have now got into the duck‘s mouth: next we propose to make the tour of the head before returning to the neck for further explorations over the ruffled quills of the back“ (A Pilgrimage to the Sagasteads of Iceland, p. 107).

This upper westernmost part of Iceland that stretches its many clawlike fingers out into the Atlantic is one of the most visually spectacular and dramatic parts of Iceland: I approached and entered the region from the water, via the ferry that runs across Breiðafjörður from Stykkishólmur to Brjánslækur on the southern coast of the Vestfirðir, a journey of a little over 2 hours or so. The roads that follow the shorelines of the many fjords that comprise this western peninsula and wind their way, hairpin-bending, up over the heaths and mountain passes between valleys (often with great deep drifts of snow still – though the dark night hours have been banished by now, spring is still slower to show itself here than it is further south) are for the greater part unsurfaced and it is challenging driving in places. Though Icelanders comment frequently on the fact that the Embulance is a left-hand-drive vehicle, i.e. with the steering wheel on the right, and call it ‚silly steering‘, this actually has proved a rather useful feature as I can keep an eye on the edge of the road to my right much more easily...and make sure that I don´t fall off it when negotiating tight bends or passing oncoming vehicles.

View along Dynjandisvogur into
Árnarfjörður from Dynjandi

From Brjánslækur I headed straight up north over Dynjandisheiði, spending the night beside the great waterfall Dynjandi en route to Dýrafjörður, where the outlaw-hero Gísli Súrsson and his family established their homestead(s) after emigrating from Norway around 952 C.E.. Dynjandi – true to its name – thundered mightily like so many lanes of motorway traffic through the night; I walked up the waterfall (or waterfalls, since there is a series of them, each kicking up sparkling spray), the only soul there, at 11pm and looked west along into Arnarfjörður where low clouds in faint pinks and smudgey greys were building up and catching the light from the late evening sunset. After reaching Hrafnseyri on the northern shore of Arnarfjörður the next morning (the home of the 13th-century chieftain Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, whose life is outlined in the contemporary saga Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar), I took the road north up over Hrafnseyrarheiði and down into Þingeyri, which sits on the southern shore of Dýrafjörður.

After refuelling I drove straight on west along the fjord, to Haukadalur, which was only 10 minutes or so further on. The weather was bright and the sky blue – and my arrival in Haukadalur was an intense moment to which I had long looked forward. I wrote my PhD thesis on Gísla saga – but until now, had never made it out to the Vestfirðir to explore the actual places where the saga unfolds. A couple of sentences in a book about the history and settlements in the Vestfirðir that I looked at while I was in Haukadalur made a strong impression on me: ‚Úr fornsögum er Haukadalur í Dýrafirði betur þekktur en flestir aðrir staðir í Vestfjörðum því allir þræðir í Gísla sögu Súrssonar mætast hér í einum punkti‘ (‚Haukadalur in Dýrafjörður is better known from old stories than most other places in the West Fjords because all the threads in Gísla saga meet here at one point‘, Kjartan Ólafsson, Vestfjarðarit I: Firðir og fólk 900-1900. Vestur -Ísafjarðarsýsla, 1999).

Looking south down Haukadalur

Gísla saga is not overly long – about 80-odd pages in the Penguin Classics translation; structurally and stylistically, the narrative is articulated with consummate artistry. It is one of the more widely-read sagas in Iceland on account of its being on the school-syllabus for several decades; a famous (famous at least in Iceland, and in the world of Old Norse/medieval Icelandic saga studies...) film of the saga was made too, by the director Águst Guðmundsson in the 1980s too – the only film of a whole saga of which I am aware. Gísla saga is sometimes described as a medieval murder mystery: at the heart of its plot are two violent murders. The Scandinavian crime novel phenomenon (Arnaldur Indriðason, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir to name but two world-popular Icelandic crime-writers) is not a new one...

Gísli and his family build a farmstead at Sæból in Haukadalur after arriving from Norway; Gísli‘s sister Þórdís is soon married to Þorgrímr ‚Freysgoði‘ Þorsteinsson (there‘s a connection here to Eyrbyggja saga, Þorgrímr appearing therein; Þórdís eventually ends up on the Snæfellsnes peninsula too—Snorri the chiefain in Eyrbyggja saga is Þórdís and Þorgrímr‘s son), Gísli to Auðr, and Þorkell to Ásgerðr. Þórdís and Þorgrímr take up residence in Sæból, and Gísli and Þorkell (together with their wives) build a second farmstead at Hóll and live together there. Gísli is hard-working and conscientious whilst Þorkell is less inclined to work, and one morning Þorkell lies down after breakfast and overhears a conversation between his wife Ásgerðr and Gísli‘s wife Auðr in which he learns that his wife has feelings for – and is possibly having, or had an affair with -- Auðr‘s brother, Vésteinn. Þorkell and Ásgerðr move out of Hóll over to Sæból where Þorgrímr and Þórdís live, and a rift grows between the brothers and the two households; a damage-limitation attempt by Gísli to bind the four men (Gísli, Þorkell, Vésteinn, Þorgrímr) together with a blood-brotherhood oath fails. Vésteinn returns from a trading voyage and arrives in Haukadalur to visit his sister and Gísli; that night, an unnaturally violent storm blows up and while Gísli and his men go out to rescue the hay, Vésteinn is murdered while he lies in his bed by an unidentified intruder who then escapes.

The spear is left in Vésteinn‘s corpse and Gísli pulls it out and recognizes it as the reforged fragments of a cursed family sword that Þorkell took with him when he parted with Gísli and moved to Sæból. Gísli is obliged by virtue of his marital ties to Vésteinn, and his blood-brotherhood bond, to avenge Vésteinn‘s death. The evidence suggests that the murderer must have come from Sæból: thence Gísli goes by cover of night some time later, wading down the stream that runs beside both farms so he does not leave tracks in the snow. On entering Sæból, and making his way silently into his sister and brother-in-law Þorgrímr‘s bed-closet, Gísli, in turn, impales Þorgrímr with the same spear Grásíða that he pulled out of Vésteinn‘s dead body. After Vésteinn‘s death, winter-ball games on the frozen pond at the mouth of the valley were held by the Haukadalur men; Vésteinn was buried in a mound at the western end of the pond. Þorgrímr is buried at the eastern end of the pond, and the ball-games are again held on the pond. After a clash with another player, Gísli pauses for a moment, looks up at Þorgrímr‘s mound, and recites a riddling verse in which he acknowledges his responsibility for Þorgrímr‘s death. Þórdís, who is now married to Þorgrímr‘s brother Börkr, overhears Gísli‘s verse, remembers it, unravels it, and reports its substance to Börkr – who now must kill Gísli in order to avenge Þorgrímr‘s death.

Seftjörn, looking west down Dýrafjörður

The pond, Seftjörn, is still there at the fjord-end of Haukadalur, with a natural bank separating it from the beach and sea just below. It has silted up considerably but green shoots of the rushes which the inhabitants of Sæból and Hóll gathered to strew on their hall floors were pushing out of their pale, winter sheaths; the rushes will grow to over my height, I was told. Great numbers of birds – gulls, oyster catchers, geese, ducks -- flew up into the air calling shrilly as I walked down to the pond. The two mounds aren‘t visible now though Vésteinn‘s was, partially at least, when the Icelandic archaeologist and antiquary Sigurður Vigfjússon examined the valley in the early 1880s. A house, enclosed by trees, stands on the site where Vésteinn‘s mound rose (now called Vésteinshólt); at the other end of the pond, where Þorgrímr‘s mound was, the concrete/stone foundations of buildings put up there in the late 19th/early 20th century can be seen. At one point, the population of the valley numbered over 100 and there were a couple of shops or trading centres, a small school, and the first ice house in the west of Iceland.

Now, one elderly but completely independent woman lives in the valley; I also met a farmer who keeps his horses and sheep there (lambs were tripping around outside in the field beside his barns); the remaining few houses are used as summer-houses. A grassed-over track runs down to the ruins of the 19th-century settlement by the pond – it must have been on this slope that Þórdís sat and overheard Gísli‘s fateful verse; the mouth of the river (Haukadalsós) where the family put in with their boat and belongings on first arriving in Iceland, and where subsequent voyages were concluded, is just to the east. And the other side of the Haukadalsós is Saltnes, the small promontory between Haukadalur and the neighbouring Meðaldalur where the sorceror Þorgrímr nef and his witch-sister were stoned to death.

Gíslaaugu ('Gísli's Eyes')

What struck me most forcibly was the size and dimensions of the valley, and how densely settled it must have been with all of the farmsteads named in Gísla saga standing (6 in total, according to the saga: Sæból and Hóll, and four more at points either side of the central river, up the valley), compared with other ‚saga‘-valleys I´ve explored elsewhere in Iceland. The valley is not a large one: it's approximately 5 kms long, and 500-800 metres wide at its broadest points; at its southern end, the highest mountain in the Vestfirðir, Kaldbak (998m), rises starkly. It would have taken a matter of minutes to walk from Sæból to Hóll or vice versa: the strained relations between the two households take on an immediacy that I had not appreciated when reading and thinking about the saga up until this point--and the valley is so bare, with very little cover for any kind of private activity.

The faint foundations of the three buildings that comprised Sæból (a hall, cow-barn, and hof) are just traceable in the middle of a hay field south of Seftjörn; the farmer‘s son says that his tractor bounces over them when he ploughs/mows the field. The site of Hóll was on a low hill south-west of Sæból, which is now known as Gíslahóll. In fact, there are two hills: the southernmost and slightly higher one has the clearly visible foundations of a couple of modern (19th/20th century) cow-sheds on its crown; the lower, northern one is where Gísli‘s farm Hóll would have stood. It is a good spot with visibility up, down, and across the valley. Back down Gíslahóll, in the field below to the north of it, are a couple of pools where water wells up: the stream that this water fed ran north to the pond past Sæból and was the stream that Gísli waded along the night of his murder of Þorgrímr. The pools have the slightly sinister name of Gíslaaugu (‚Gísli‘s eyes‘) now; the stream no longer runs its natural course, having been diverted into a ditch, but a slightly sunken channel betrays where it lay.

I followed the stream--or the traces of its original course--as far as I could, thinking about Gísli watching over the valley through the two Gíslaaugu pools, over 1000 years later. Gísli is outlawed after his riddling verse admitting his murder of Þorgrímr is unravelled by Þórdís -- and the second half of the saga describes his 13 years on the run while pursued by Þorgrímr's brother Börkr, whose responsibility it is to avenge Þorgrímr's death. The past few days have been spent visiting some of the places Gísli hid out as an outlaw (while filming for the 'Cambridge Ideas' series--very exciting--the documentary will be beautiful and will be released in August!)...so in the next post, I´ll be following Gísli's outlaw tracks.

Looking north over Seftjörn at Mýrafell

Eyrbyggja saga I: Berserkers and bathhouses on the Snæfellsnes peninsula

2011-05-19T23:02:00.002+01:00

„This, even more than Thingvellir, is the saga-pilgrim‘s classic ground“ wrote William Gershom Collingwood of the Þórsnes peninsula (at the northern end of which now is the town of Stykkishólmur), located on the inner northern shore of the Snæfellsnes ‚arm‘. „Its associations are richer even than those of Lythend [where Gunnar of Njáls saga lived]: its history is fuller and more varied than any other Icelandic neighbourhood“ (Pilgrimage, p. 82). The Snæfellsjökull glacier at the western end of Snæfellsnes is perhaps most famous for being the entry-point of the German Professor Otto Lidenbrock‘s, Axel‘s (the Professor‘s nephew), and Hans‘s (the guide) journey to the centre of the earth as related by Jules Vernes in his 1864 novel of that name. The stories told in Eyrbyggja saga (‚The saga of the Ere-Dwellers‘), however, set 1000 years before Jules Vernes‘s fiction, are just as absorbing and at times as outlandish as Vernes‘s flights of fancy—if not more so, and with their kernel in historical characters and events. There is everything in this saga—politics, heroics alongside dastardly behaviour on the battle-field, love, the walking dead... it is a saga whose plot and substance I have found difficult to hold as a whole in my head in the past, and some pieces of academic criticism on the saga have judged its structure to be wanting in cohesiveness at times. But reading the saga in its landscape somehow clarified it for me—both its component narrative parts, and the saga as a whole narrative: the stranger episodes seemed even stranger, the romance more romantic and more painful, the often dark or dry humour sharper.

Dritsker, Hofsstaðir

The vividly-named Þórólfr Mostrarskegg (‚Mostr-beard‘, Mostr being an island in Norway) was the first settler here: the beginning of Eyrbyggja saga describes how he left Norway, sailed to Iceland, cast his seat-posts (with a likeness of the god Þórr carved onto them) overboard and established a homestead and a temple to Þórr at Hofsstaðir, on the inner northern shore of Hofstaðavogur, into which the seat-posts were washed ashore—Þórólfr gave Breiðafjörður (‚Broad fjord‘) its name sailing in to it from the west and claiming it for himself. Þórólfr worshipped Þórr steadfastly and, in addition to naming the nes or peninsula in honour of Þórr and building a temple to him at Hofsstaðir, the place where the seat-post likeness of Þórr had landed became the local assembly site. This place was so holy that no-one was permitted to desecrate it by shedding blood or by defecating there—this latter necessary activity was to be carried out on a close-lying skerry which took the apt name of Dritsker (‚Dirt-skerry‘).

Þórssteinn, Þingvellir

After a fight broke out between the Þórsnes-men and others over this rule at one spring assembly, and the sacrosanct land was defiled by bloodshed, the þing-site was moved to a north-eastern location on the peninsula—Þingvellir (‚Assembly-plains‘). Eyrbyggja saga describes this second assembly-site where, at the time of the saga‘s writing down, Þar sér enn dómhring þann, er menn váru dæmðir í til blóts; í þeim hring stendr Þórs steinn, er þeir menn váru brotnir um, er til blóta váru hafðir, ok sér enn blóðslitinn á steininum (Eyrbyggja saga, ch. 10, p. 18; ‚There one sees still the judgement ring, where men were doomed to sacrifice; in that ring stands Þórr‘s stone, where those men were broken who were to be sacrificed, and one sees still the blood-stain on the stone‘). There is a working farm at Þingvellir today: when I visited, the farmers were waiting for the imminent beginning of lambing and driving shit from the sheep-shed over the field where the judgement-ring was set those many centuries ago—and in the middle of which, Þórr‘s stone still stands. Collingwood noted the stains on the stone: „ upon it here and there a brown stain which may have been what the saga-man saw: not of blood but of iron in the stone“ (Pilgrimage, p. 95). More striking when I inspected the stone was a bright yellow lichen clinging and spreading tenaciously over the surface. It is almost certain that human sacrifice never took place in pre-Christian Iceland (as Collingwood himself noted)—and this must be understood as an antiquarian elaboration on the part of the saga-writer.

Helgafell, looking east

Þórólfr believed the hill on the Þórsnes peninsula that rises abruptly from the lower-lying land, and that from some angles resembles the hump of a beached whale, was especially holy: he named the hill Helgafell (‚Holy-hill‘) ok trúði, at hann myndi þangat fara, þá er hann dæi, ok allir á nesinu hans frændr (Eyrbyggja saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson, Islenzk fornrit IV, Reykjavík 1935, ch. 4, p. 9; ‚and he believed that he would go there when he died, and all his kinsmen on the peninsula‘). Slightly later in the saga, Þórólfr‘s son, Þorsteinn þorskabítr (‚cod-biter‘), goes out fishing; that night, a shepherd sees the hill-side opened up. A great fire is burning inside and he hears noises of great revelry and drinking and the welcoming of Þorsteinn (together with his companions), who is invited to sit on the highseat opposite his father. The next morning, men come back to the farm and announce the news that Þorsteinn had drowned while out fishing. Later in the saga, after a number of other local men are drowned while out at sea, they (or their reanimated corpses) return to their farmstead and sit, dripping seawater onto the floor, around the fire in the hall every night until they are subjected to a legal ceremony which bans them from occupying the house...

Berserkjagata, with Bjarnarhöfn at the foot of the
mountain behind

Helgafell becomes the seat of Þórólfr‘s great-grandson Snorri—a wily and powerful chieftain who figures prominently throughout the saga and is famous for dispensing clever, if ‚cold‘, advice—until in later age he swaps homes with Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir from Laxdæla saga (a photo of Guðrún‘s headstone at Helgafell is in the previous post of 10th May). At one point, Snorri helps a local man called Styrr who has got into a tight spot with a couple of imported Swedish berserkers. These men are proving difficult to keep under control and one of them expresses his wish to marry Styrr‘s daughter Ásdís. On Snorri‘s advice, Styrr sets the berserkers an impossible task in order to win Ásdís‘s hand—to clear, in three days, a path through the lava field between his farmstead at undir Hrauni (‚below the lava‘) and Bjarnarhöfn (on the peninsula to the west of that of Þórsnes; originally the homestead of Björn Ketilsson inn austræna (‚the easterner‘) who is a brother of Auðr/Unnr in djúpúðga of Laxdæla saga). This the berserkers manage to do—but meanwhile, Styrr builds a bathhouse, into which he then lures and locks the berserkers, and when they try to break out after the bathhouse becomes unbearably hot, Styrr deals one of them his deathblow, and the other is driven back into the bathhouse and dies there. Their bodies are taken out into the lava and in a sunken valley therein where nothing can be seen but the sky above, they are buried under a pile of rocks...and Ásdís subsequently becomes Snorri‘s wife. The path (‚Berserkjagata‘) is there today and can be followed from start to finish—as is the dys beside the path which marks the berserkers‘ final resting place; a local woman told me that the story must be true because noone but berserkers could have been strong enough to clear the path through the lava.

Berserkjadys (the rectangular stone structure)

The colours in the landscape made a deep impression on me as I explored the Snæfellsnes peninsula (there will be a second post on the saga shortly...). The gleaming white of the glacier with its crooked horns, the dusty greys of the thick moss that grows over the lava—itself sometimes dark and black, sometimes magenta or russet or mauve—the bright vivid luminous green of wet moss. I drove from the northern shore of the peninsula south up over the Fróðárheiði and then west along the southern shore and around the glacier almost reeling at times from the visual impact of the landscape on me. The Embulance, I‘m pleased to report, was not affected physically in the same way...and so the journey continues...

Snæfellsnes and Embulance

Ljósvetninga saga: Mighty fists and political wheeling and dealing in Eyjafjörður

2011-05-10T18:09:00.000+01:00

While I was up north on bovine business over the Easter period, free time between milking sessions were spent pondering and perambulating Ljósvetninga saga, 'The saga of the people of Ljósavatn'. The title of the saga would lead one to expect the action to be located around Ljósavatn which is east of Eyjafjörður, in Þingeyjarsveit, but in fact the central character, the chieftain Guðmundr ríki ('the powerful'), lived at Möðruvellir, which is some 25 kms south of Akureyri, in the Eyjafjörður valley on the eastern side of the Eyjafjarðará river. Ljósvetninga saga has a very different flavour to the sagas I've written about more recently (Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Harðar saga) and those which are to come in the next few weeks (Eyrbyggja saga, Gísla saga, Fóstbræðra saga...) being much more political in its focus -- and Guðmundr is not a saga 'hero' in the mould of Egill, Kjartan, or Hörðr. In fact, he is not painted in a positive light at all -- the saga narrates his social/political/legal wheeling and dealing with other local or northern chieftains, farmers, and slaves and while he often achieves the ends he wants from conflicts, he does not necessarily come out of these episodes with his honour and local standing enhanced.

Möðruvellir, with dog

Reading Ljósvetninga saga 'in the landscape' proved to be an experience akin to that of Flóamanna saga (see post from February) in some ways. Other than brief notes detailing where characters live and the occasional outline of a journey from one place to another, there is very little in the saga that links the action to the physical landscape, or sets it tangibly in it. As far as I could establish by talking to a number of local people, the majority of those who live in Eyjafjarðarsveit are not particularly familiar with the saga or with the details of Guðmundr ríki's life and career; nor are the farmsteads/sites in the saga marked with information boards or monuments in the way that those in Mýrar and Dalir are.

The turf-roofed church at Saurbær today
(Möðruvallafjall behind, the other side of the valley)

There are some highly entertaining scenes in the saga nonetheless. The description of how a certain Þorbjörn Rindill (a somewhat dubious character whom Guðmundr hires to carry out a vengeance mission on his behalf) meets his death is visual in an almost comic-book-like fashion: after eating a quick bowl of rather runny skyr (a kind of yoghurt that was a staple food)...var þar kominn Eilífr ok maðr með honum, -- þar varð fátt af kveðjum --, ok setti þegar kesjuna á Rindil miðjan, en skyrit sprændi ór honum ok upp á Eilíf (Ljósvetninga saga, ed. Björn Sigfússon, Íslenzk fornrit 10 (Reykjavík, 1940), p. 55; 'Eilífr had arrived and there was a man with him -- there weren't many greetings -- and at once he stabbed Rindill in his middle with the spear, and the skyr spurted out of him and onto Eilífr'). Guðmundr is told the news and, furious, he rides to nearby Saurbær where Eilífr and his companion have sought shelter from the old and blind Hlenni inn skakki ('the wry'). 'Are they here, those men of dire deeds, with you Hlenni? Eilífr and his companion?' 'They are here', he says, 'and it doesn´t seem a tragedy to me that Rindill is dead' ('Eru þeir hér, ódáðamennirnir, hjá þér, Hlenni, Eilífr ok förunautr hans?' 'Hér eru þeir,' segir hann, 'ok þykki mér engi harmsaga, þótt Rindill sé dauðr', Ljósvetninga saga, p. 55).

In a later scene, Guðmundr is staying at one of his follower's farmsteads: he takes the highseat, the most prestigious place; another chieftain called Ófeigr Járngerðarson is in the place inside of Guðmundr. When the table is laid for a meal, Ófeigr puts his fist on the table and a perfectly-paced passage of dialogue follows:

'Hversu mikill þykki þér hnefi sjá, Guðmundr?'

Hann mælti: 'Víst mikill.'

Ófeigr mælti: 'Þat muntu ætla, at afl muni í vera?'

Guðmundr mælti: 'Ek ætla þat víst.'

Ófeigr segir: 'Mikit muntu ætla, at högg verði af?'

Guðmundr segir: 'Stórum mikit.'

Ófeigr segir: 'Þat muntu ætla, at saka muni?'

Guðmundr mælti: 'Beinbrot eða bani.'

Ófeigr svarar: 'Hversu myndi þér sá dauðdagi þykkja?'

Guðmundr mælti: 'Stórillr, ok eigi mynda ek vilja þann fá.'

Ófeigr mælti: 'Sittu þá eigi í rúmi mínu.'

Guðmundr segir: 'Þat skal ok vera,' -- ok settisk öðrum megin

(Ljósvetninga saga, pp. 58-59; 'How big does this fist seem to you, Guðmundr?' He said: 'Certainly large.' Ófeigr said: 'Do you think there is power in it?' Guðmundr said: 'I think that certainly.' Ófeigr says: 'Do you think the blow that might come from it would be strong?' Guðmundr says: 'Very strong.' Ófeigr says: 'What do you think the damage would be?' Guðmundr said: 'Bone-breaking or death.' Ófeigr answers: 'How would a death like that seem to you?' Guðmundr said: 'Very bad, and I would not like to experience it.' Ófeigr said: 'Don´t sit in my seat then.' Guðmundr says: 'It shall be so,' -- and seats himself the on the other side.')

Beyond the challenges of imagining the action of Ljósvetninga saga in the landscape, certain aspects related to its transmission and its modern reception are of interest to me. Firstly, the saga survives in two versions which differ significantly in their length, phrasing, overall organisation or structure, and presentation of events with regard to specific detail. Scholars have debated which version is older/younger, closer to the 'original' etc, but have not reached a consensus. The fact that two such differing versions -- whose textual relationship is not clear -- exist, however, illustrates very well how the concept of an 'original' text is something of an anachronism as far as the medieval Icelandic Íslendingasögur ('sagas of Icelanders') are concerned. The sagas were authored anonymously, and their written composition was a process that involved moulding a great deal of material that must have been passed down orally from generation to generation into a carefully crafted literary whole. When scribes made new copies of individual sagas, they were free to alter the text they were copying from in the manuscript in front of them -- and did so, to varying degrees, in order to improve the style or 'correct' specific details. By examining the variant texts of any one saga, a picture can be built up of how that narrative or story was understood and interpreted by all those who were involved in transmitting it via hand-copied manuscripts, from the medieval period right up until the 19th and even early 20th century. In this way, the sagas are living literature, continuously being adapted and rewritten over time.

Secondly, Ljósvetninga saga is a nice example of how modern taste or aesthetics have changed over the past 150 years or so of saga scholarship -- and what people have thought makes a 'good' saga. Two 19th-century scholars wrote of Ljósvetninga saga that "owing to the absence of remaniement this work is not disfigured by the monstrous and exaggerated taste for blood, which has quite cumbered some sagas, that may once have been good stories, with aimless ill-told murders ... all [the characters] are finely and firmly limned with a quiet delight and an absence of exaggeration that is admirable indeed. Of all the Sagas, this is the nearest to Njála in style. It is incomparably the best Saga of the North" (Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, Origines Islandicæ vol. II (Oxford, 1905), pp. 349-50). Njála, or Njáls saga, is often described as the 'jewel in the saga crown' -- so this is high praise for Ljósvetninga saga indeed. But since the time of these scholars' verdict, very little has been published on Ljósvetninga saga, and what has been tends to be concerned either with its textual transmission (i.e. the versions and the relationship of surviving manuscript texts to each other), or has used the saga as a source for throwing light on social, political, and legal structures and dynamics in Settlement/Commonwealth times -- at least as far as portrayed by those in the 13th century, when the saga was thought to be written.

Finally, the more I read the sagas in close succession in situ here in Iceland, and follow up the connections between them physically moving from one place to another and from one region to another, the more I think that the sagas are best understood not as individual, discrete narratives, but as a network of interlinking and overlapping narratives. Characters and individual places in one saga often appear in other sagas; sometimes, specific events described in one saga are reported in one or more other sagas too. It´s interesting to see how the presentation of the same characters and events differs in these cases, according to the objectives of each saga‘s author, or their personal perspective. Ljósvetninga saga is a good example: Guðmundr ríki appears in over 10 other sagas—sometimes in a more positive light than he is portrayed in Ljósvetninga saga. But as William Ian Miller and Thedore Andersson (in the introduction to their 1989 translation of the saga, Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland: Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga) and Gísli Sigurðsson (in his 2007 article ‘The Immanent Saga of Guðmundr ríki‘, in a volume called Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: A Festschrift for Margaret Clunies Ross, ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop, and Tarrin Wills) point out, above and beyond the positive/negative attitudes towards Guðmundr in these sagas, there is a great deal of consistency in his portrayal—and moreover, as Gísli Sigurðsson puts it, ‘many of them [i.e. these sagas] seem to assume a level of prior knowledge of his character on the part of their audiences‘, and also ‚a prior knowledge of his external circumstances‘. Gísli writes also that ‚The tradition in fact offers a many-voiced and varied picture of characters, in all probability because it is based on memories of real people that were the subject of stories for several generations before it occurred to anyone to use them as material for written works of narrative‘.

Guðrún's grave at Helgafell

The past few days I´ve been touring around the Snæfellsnes peninsula on the trail of Eyrbyggja saga sites (post to follow shortly): next stop is the West Fjords (I‘m on my way there right now, on the ferry Baldur which runs between Stykkishólmur, Flatey, and Brjánslækur) and Gísla saga...There‘s a strong link between these two sagas that gives my progression from one to the other here a nice coherence. Gísli Súrsson‘s sister Þórdís–whose first husband was murdered by Gísli—later tried to avenge Gísli‘s death (masterminded in turn by her second husband Börkr, brother of the first husband), at Helgafell which is a central location in Eyrbyggja saga, being the home of Snorri goði (Þórdís‘s son from her first husband) by the time of that saga. Looking back to Laxdæla saga (which I read, travelled, and wrote about in April), Helgafell is the place where Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir ended up (having engineered a 'houseswap‘ with Snorri towards the end of her life) and died...her grave is marked today with a stone (see photo above). Amazing to think, looking at this modern memorial, that Guðrún died and was buried over 1000 years ago...

Saga Tourism in the 21st Century

2011-05-02T10:48:00.005+01:00

Krumskelda in Mýrar

In lieu of a pending report on a couple of the northern sagas -- Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga -- that I was working on over easter in between milking cows in Eyjafjarðarsveit, I thought a few remarks on 'saga tourism' in 21st-century Iceland might be of interest to those following this blog. This is something I've become increasingly aware of since beginning my project to read all of the sagas in situ around Iceland over the course of this year -- and I've been interested to see how local organisations have and are working hard at presenting 'their' saga to visitors to the area by marking sites or places connected to these sagas with information boards or monuments of various kinds. Around Mýrar, for example, a number of cairns have been set up at important places in Egils saga (e.g. the photo above -- the cairn at Krumskelda, where Skalla-Grímr is said to have buried his silver...watched over by some hardy horses when I was there in March).

Parchment being prepared
at Gásir's Miðaldadagar
2009
(photo from their gallery
at http://www.gasir.is/)

Last Friday, at a one-day annual conference hosted in Reykjavík by the 'Icelandic Saga Trails Association' ('Samtök um sögutengda ferðaþjónustu'), I had the chance to meet a number of people involved in the saga tourism business (and gave a presentation outlining my project). The Saga Trails Association comprises about 30 saga-related local museums and heritage sites around the country which engage with and present medieval Icelandic history and culture to tourists. A map showing the location of each of the members of the Association can be found here as part of the STA website. At some of these sites, medieval-themed re-enactment festivals are held in the summer -- and visitors can observe and participate in recreations of aspects of medieval life.

Iceland has typically been a destination for those attracted by the prospect of fire-and-ice-related adventure, but saga tourism is a growing business -- and the potential in Iceland to build on locally-based cultural projects and initiatives already established is great...as Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir (from the 'Promote Iceland' marketing division Íslandsstofa), emphasised in her opening presentation. 'Because the sagas remain a part of how Icelanders view rural landscapes, and indeed how Icelanders view themselves as a nation, saga-related travel is a way of meeting the local culture through environment' writes Kári Gíslason in a post on literary tourism in Iceland on his blog (the full post, from 27th August 1020 is here). Kári lectures in creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and publishes on the Icelandic sagas; his book The Promise of Iceland comes out in August this year...and will no doubt address the subject of saga tourism in Iceland amongst other lines of enquiry and reflection.

Detail from the Krumskelda cairn
(see photo top right)

But it is crucial that the development of saga-related tourism in Iceland must be done in a sensitive, informed, and responsible way however. Coming from the other academic 'side', I enjoy the different perspectives that re-enactment, for example, can bring to the study of history and culture but draw the line at attending 'Genuine Viking Feasts' and enforced communal horn-drinking feel and break out in a cold sweat thinking about the extreme manifestation of saga tourism -- Iceland being turned into one huge medieval theme park...not that this seems to be on the cards, thank goodness. One of the strengths of the Saga Trail Association, it seems to me, is the autonomous and local nature of the individual participating members: I have enjoyed seeing the different approaches and emphases at the museums/sites I have visited so far and look forward in the coming months to seeing what the sites I haven't yet made it to have to offer.

The Promise of Spring in Iceland has seemed something of a vain hope for much of the past couple of weeks. Though buds are visible on trees and the occasional daffodilly and crocus are valiantly unfurling their bright petals -- the 'first day of summer' (an official public holiday) was about 10 days ago -- several inches of snow fell in Reykjavík on Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday morning -- by which time it was the First of May. Hmm. I'm off to the West Fjords on Thursday for some Gísla saga action and a spot of filming which promises to be great fun...the Ljósvetninga saga report will come soon, and then an update from the Wild West... gleðilegt sumar to all reading meanwhile!

Laxdæla saga 2: Unnr the deepminded, the matriarch of Dalir

2011-04-24T23:03:00.000+01:00

Monument to Snorri Sturluson at Hvammur, looking north-west up Skeggjadalur

Unnr djúpúðga var á Katanesi, er Þorsteinn fell, sonr hennar; ok er hon frá þat, at Þorsteinn var látinn, en faðir hennar andaðr, þá þóttisk hon þar enga uppreist fá mundu. Eptir þat lætr hon gera knörr í skógi á laun; ok er skipit var algört, þá bjó hon skipit ok hafði auð fjár. Hon hafði brott með sér allt frændlið sitt, þat er á lífi var, ok þykkjask menn varla dæmi til finna, at einn kvenmaðr hafa komizk í brott í þvílíkum ófriði með jafnmiklu fé ok föruneyti; má af því marka, at hon var mikit afbragð annarra kvenna (Laxdæla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík, 1934), ch. 4, p. 7; 'Unnr djúpúðga 'deep-minded' was in Caithness [in Scotland] when Þorsteinn, her son, fell; and when she learned that Þorsteinn was dead, and her father deceased, then she thought there was no future to be had there. After that she had a knörr [a kind of cargo ship] built in secret in the forest; and when the ship was finished, then she loaded it and had a great quantity of wealth. She took away with her all her relations who were still alive, and men think there is scarecly a parallel to be found of a woman getting away in such war-torn times with an equal quantity of goods and companions; it may be seen from this, that she was greatly superior to other women').

View to the east from Dagverðarnes

As I wrote in my previous post, one feature of Laxdæla saga is that it presents one remarkable woman after another -- Unnr (sometimes called Auðr) is the first of these and in many ways the yardstick against which the other women in the saga are measured. Unnr was born in 834 C.E., the daughter of the Norwegian chieftain Ketill flatnef, and by the time of the passage above, the widow of King Óláfr hvíti, king of Dublin, who died fighting in Ireland. From Caithness, Unnr sailed to the Orkneys, from there to the Faroes, and thence to Iceland where, after her ship broke up on the southern coast, she travelled on with her party and goods to her brother Björn who had already settled in Breiðafjörðr. Most other sagas tell of male first-generation settlers and Unnr is an exceptional example of a female land-taker. She claimed a great swathe of land in Dalasýsla in the north-west of Iceland, established a homestead at Hvammr (at the southern end of Hvammsfjörður, on the northern shore), and gave extensive parts of the land she had claimed to her followers, many of whom were well-born themselves, and others whom she released from bondage.

Ch. 6 of Laxdæla saga tells, for example, of how she gave land to a certain Hörðr, to a man named Sökkólfr, to Hundi, and to Vífill amongst others. The names of many of the valleys in Dalasýsla -- Hörðadalur, Sökkólfsdalur, Hundadalur, Vífilsdalur respectively -- commemorate this first generation of settlers who came to Iceland with Unnr and the land-taking is thus recorded in, or written into, the landscape (a useful sketch/map of the area which includes some of these valleys can be found here). Other place-names in the area are associated in the saga with the journeying process of Unnr´s land-taking. Dögurðarnes ('breakfast' or 'main-meal-of-the-day-nes'; now Dagverðarnes, on the western tip of the northern shore of Hvammsfjörður) is so-called because Unnr and her party ate their morning meal there, and Kambsnes ('comb-nes', a wedge-shaped peninsula on the inner eastern end of Hvammsfjörður) acquired its name -- according to the saga -- because Unnr lost her comb there. An alternative explanation for this latter name that I heard from a local farmer is that when one looks over to the peninsula from the raised vantage point of Krosshólaborg, it tapers off at the end of the Laxárdalsháls ridge (which runs on a north-east/south-west axis) like a comb.

Kambsnes is now a tiny airstrip; Dagverðarnes is at the end of several kms of rough and winding track which this time of year, presented various snow-drift, ice- and mud-related challenges when I negotiated it in the Embulance -- 4-wheel-drive and the diff lock were on all the way. There is a small church, a house, and some outhouses there now...and just enough mobile reception for me to let people know that I´d got there. The wind howled and rain pelted down overnight; eating my morning meal there -- with the sun breaking from the clouds, the countless islands and skerries that lie beyond the peninsula coming into sharper focus, the mountains that form a chain along the Snæfellsnes peninsula on the southern shore of Hvammsfjörður glittering white, and seabirds screaming -- was an intense experience.

Church and farm at Hvammur

Another noteworthy fact about Unnr is that she was baptised as a Christian prior to her arrival in Iceland. The majority of settlers held pre-Christian beliefs and worshipped the gods and goddesses in the Norse pantheon; Iceland was not converted to Christianity until the year 999/1000 C.E., when the lawspeaker at that time (the chieftain Þorgeirr Þorkelsson from Ljósavatn in the north of Iceland) decreed that the country should officially accept the Christian faith as their 'national' religion. Unnr's farmstead at Hvammr was an important place through Icelandic history: it was a chieftain´s farmstead in the Middle Ages, and later a priest´s residence; the famous politician/historian/poet Snorri Sturluson was born there in 1179, and Árni Magnússon (b. 1663) -- the great collector of Icelandic manuscripts -- grew up there in the 17th century with his grandfather Séra ('Reverend') Ketill Jörundsson, a priest who produced copies of a number of medieval parchment manuscripts.

The present church and farm at Hvammur are situated at the foot of Hólafjall, about 2kms inland from the water of Hvammsfjörður; by the shore, however, and not marked on any map I looked at but shown to me by another local farmer, are some grassy mounds and stones which are said to be very old and bear the name 'Auðartóftir' ('Auðr's toft/homestead'). Landnámabók is more explicit about Unnr's Christianity than Laxdæla saga, and notes that Unnr used to go up to the top of a nearby hill every day to pray: the rocky outcrop known as Krosshólaborg, on which an imposing (modern) stone cross commemorating Unnr and her Christian faith, is said to be this hill. One local woman suggested that Unnr might have made a daily habit of walking up this hill -- or perhaps one closer to Hvammr which might in fact have been the 'real' Krosshólaborg -- because it offers very good views in every direction and would therefore have been a useful vantage point from which this resourceful and powerful woman could see what was going on in the area.

The modern cross at Krosshólaborg
(looking towards the north)

The chapter in which Unnr's death is related in Laxdæla saga is an incredibly vivid one and there is a nice link between the report of her burial in the saga and a local tradition attached to a rock known as 'Auðarsteinn' ('Auðr's stone') that rises out of the water some metres from the shoreline of Hvammsfjörður, not far from Hvammur. Unnr has grown old but though she does not get up before midday and goes to bed early, her influence and standing has not diminished: she has married off her children and grandchildren and her final matriarchal act is to arrange the marriage of her favourite grandson, the promising Óláfr feilan ('little wolf', from the Old Irish fæl, 'wolf') Þorsteinsson to a woman called Álfdís.

Unnr prepares a lavish bridal feast and invites the leading men from other districts around Iceland to it. On the day of the feast, she sleeps even longer than usual in the morning but gets up when the guests arrive and greets them all with great honour and pleasure, thanking them for travelling such long distances. During the course of the feast, Unnr announces that it is her wish Óláfr inherit Hvammr and her land-holdings, and after this, she retires to her bed-closet. The saga states: Svá segja menn, at Unnr hafi verit bæði há og þreklig; hon gekk hart útar eptir skálanum; fundusk mönnum orð um, at konan var enn virðulig (Laxdæla saga ch. 7, pp. 12-13; 'Men say that Unnr was both tall and strong/stout; she walked quickly from the hall; people spoke about how the woman was still splendid'). Men drink through the evening after Unnr has retired and the next day, when Óláfr goes to Unnr´s bed-chamber, he finds her sat upright against her bolster, dead. 'It seemed to men remarkable how Unnr had maintained her honour until her death-day' (þótti mönnum mikils um vert, hversu Unnr hafði haldit virðingu sinni til dauðadags, Laxdæla saga ch. 7, p. 13).

Óláfr's wedding feast thus simultaneously becomes Unnr's wake, and Laxdæla saga relates how Unnr was buried on the last day of the feast. According to Laxdæla saga, 'Unnr's corpse was conveyed to that mound which had been prepared for her; she was laid in a ship in the mound, and a great deal of treasure was placed in the mound with her; afterwards the mound was filled in' (var Unnr flutt til haugs þess, er henni var búinn; hon var lögð í skip í hauginum, ok mikit fé var í haug lagt með henni; var eptir þat aptr kastaðr haugrinn, Laxdæla saga ch. 7, p. 13). There is a discrepancy here with the information found in Landnámabók regarding Unnr's burial which states that she 'was buried at the flood-mark, as she had instructed before, because she did not wish to lie in unconsecrated earth, as she was baptised' (var grafin í flæðarmáli, sem hún hafði fyrir sagt, því at hon vildi eigi liggja í óvígðri moldu, er hon var skírð). The stone, Auðarsteinn, that is said by local people to mark her burial place in the shallows just beyond Akursvík in Hvammsfjörður, would seem to correspond with the account in Landnámabók rather than that in Laxdæla...as with Kjartanssteinn (discussed in the previous post), we will probably never know whether or not this stone really does mark the burial place of Unnr djúpúðga, and whether she was buried in a mound or at the tide-mark under a rock. But perhaps, the very fact that alternative traditions with regard to Unnr's burial exist might be seen in itself as evidence of the far-reaching impact that Unnr -- both as an historical character and the figure as presented in written sources -- had on the construction of the settlement-period history of Dalir, and the hold that this 'founding mother' still has in local people's consciousness.

Love in a cold climate...

2011-04-11T10:55:00.005+01:00

The rune-stone at Borg
(a replica; the original is in the Þjóðminnjasafn)

In the churchyard at Borg in Mýrar, the district in which Egils saga is set -- said to be the oldest consecrated churchyard in Iceland, established in 1002 CE -- there is a narrow pentagonal basalt stone from Mount Baula, measuring approximately 125 cms. Along its length, it is incised with runes. In 1753, the stone was examined by Eggert Ólafsson and Bjarni Pálsson who were travelling around Iceland gathering information about the country on behalf of the Danish crown (their account was published in 1772 under the title Vicelavemand Eggert Ólafsson's og Landphysici Bjarni Pálsson's Reise igjennom Island; an English translation published in 1805 can be found online here). Eggert and Bjarni noted that the stone was in bad repair -- broken into three pieces -- and the runes were difficult to make out but they nonetheless concluded that they read 'Here lies Kjartan Ólafsson' and the stone marked the final resting place of this hero from Laxdæla saga, who died around 1003 CE and whose body was taken to Borg and buried there, according to this saga.

Detail from the rune-stone at Borg

An examination of the stone in modern times has revealed that it actually dates from the later part of the 15th century and the runes in fact read 'her : huiler : halur : hranason' ('Hér hvílir Hallur Hranason'; 'Here rests Hallur Hranason'). Nevertheless, on seeing the stone for myself, I decided that travelling north from Mýrar to Dalir, where Laxdæla saga unfolds and Kjartan died, would make a nice progression. Moreover, one of the principal characters in Laxdæla saga, Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir is (as her second name suggests) the daughter of Egill Skalla-Grímsson of Egils saga fame (see posts of Sunday 20th March, Friday 25th March, Saturday 2nd April); Kjartan Óláfsson was Þorgerðr's and her husband Óláfr pái ('Peacock') Höskuldsson's son -- and thus Egill's grandson.

Laxdæla saga has always been one of my favourite sagas. It is an immense, epic tale of tragic love; it is more 'romantic' in character and in its descriptive detail than many of the other sagas; and amongst the characters who feature in the saga, there are several remarkable and strong women. The portrayal of these women and the focus and presentation of the narrative has led some to argue that it must have been written by a woman...

Looking east up the Laxá

So I drove north from Egils-saga-territory to Hvammsfjörður in order to read the saga of the people of Laxárdalur. W. G. Collingwood writes that 'The valley of the Laxá ['Salmon-River'] is well-known to English readers from William Morris's [1870] poem of "The Lovers of Gudrun", which epitomises Laxdæla saga, and tells the tale of the family that lived at the two great houses of Höskuldstead and Herdholt' (Pilgrimage, p. 122). The 'argument' at the beginning of Morris's poetic retelling of the central part of the saga narrative (which was published as part of his work The Earthly Paradise) reads as follows: 'This story shows how two friends loved a fair woman, and how he who loved her best had her to wife, though she loved him little or not at all; and how one of these two friends gave shame to and received death of the other, who in his turn came to his end by reason of that deed' (The poem can be found online as a digital book here).

Höskuldsstaðir

Morris's 'two friends' are Kjartan Óláfsson and Bolli Þorleiksson. Kjartan was born at Höskuldsstaðir, on the southern side of the Laxá river. The saga describes him at length and with a string of superlatives: as well as being strong and the most accomplished of all men at sports and fighting, Kjartan was allra manna fríðastr, þeira er fæzk hafa á Íslandi; hann var mikilleitr ok vel farinn í andliti, manna bezt eygðr ok ljóslitaðr; mikit hár hafði hann ok fagrt sem silki, ok fell með lokkum ... Kjartan var hverjum manni betr á sik kominn, svá at allir undruðusk, þeir er sá hann (Laxdæla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík, 1934), ch. 28, pp. 76-77; 'the most handsome of all men who have been born in Iceland; he had exceptional features and a well-formed face, the best-eyed of men and light in colour; he had a great quantity of hair which was as beautiful as silk, and fell in locks ... Kjartan was better-formed than any man, so that everyone who looked at him marvelled'). Kjartan was brought up with his foster-brother and cousin Bolli Þorleiksson, who was also handsome, strong, and accomplished: the saga states that Þeir unnusk mikit fóstbræðr (Laxdæla saga, ch. 28, p. 77; 'the foster-brothers loved each other greatly').

The hotpot at Laugar, changing-room (with underfloor
heating) in the sweet turf-roofed wooden hut...

At Laugar in Sælingsdalur, on the inner northern side of Hvammsfjörður (which Collingwood describes as 'resembl[ing] a top boot, laid down, with its heel to the East and its toe to the North', Pilgrimage, p. 115), Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir grew up, 'the most promising of woman who had grown up in Iceland, both in appearance and in intelligence ... of all women, the most wise and most articulate' (hon var kvenna vænst, er upp óxu á Íslandi, bæði at ásjánu ok vitsmunum ... Allra kvenna var hon kænst ok bezt orði farin, Laxdæla saga, ch. 32, p. 86). There were -- and are -- natural hot springs at Laugar (I sat in the recently rebuilt hotpot, alone, in the rain, looking around at the snow-dappled mountain-sides and thinking about Guðrún), and the saga tells how the wise and prescient Gestr Oddleifsson stops off there on a short visit. Guðrún has had four strange dreams in which she throws an ill-fitting headdress into a stream, loses a valued silver ring in a lake, falls and in doing so breaks a cherished gold ring on a stone, and finally, loses a heavy gold helmet studded with gemstones which falls from her head into Hvammsfjörður. Guðrún describes these dreams to Gestr, hoping for his interpretation: Guðrún will have four husbands, and her feeling for the worth of each object -- and reaction to its loss -- symbolises the outcome of each marriage.

Some years later, Guðrún is back at Laugar with two marriages behind her, and Kjartan is a regular visitor there; Þat var allra manna mál, at með þeim Kjartani ok Guðrúnu þætti vera mest jafnræði þeira manna, er þá óxu upp (Laxdæla saga, ch. 39, p. 112; 'It was everyone's opinion that it Kjartan and Guðrún seemed to be the most equal match of those who had then grown up'). But Kjartan determines to go abroad to Norway, buys a ship, and makes his travel plans. Guðrún longs to accompany him but is refused... At the Norwegian court, Kjartan is held to be the most exceptional man ever to have come from Iceland...with Bolli a close second; they convert to Christianity, and eventually, Bolli goes back to Iceland though Kjartan remains in Norway and doesn't take up Bolli's offer to send any specific message back to Guðrún. Bolli marries Guðrún, and when Kjartan does return to Iceland, he marries a woman called Hrefna. Kjartan eschews Bolli's efforts to rekindle their closeness; jealousy and bitterness and petty-minded acts of theft and insult on both sides develop into open feud -- and Guðrún urges Bolli to avenge their household for the insults Kjartan has directed at them.

The scene is set for an ambush when Kjartan is riding through Svínadalur: Guðrún's brothers attack but Bolli stands by; Kjartan sets his back against a large rock and defends himself against the onslaught. "Bolli frændi, hví fórtu heiman, ef þú vildir kyrr standa hjá?" (Laxdæla saga, ch. 49, p. 153; "Cousin Bolli, why did you leave home if you wanted to stand still to the side?") calls Kjartan to Bolli, and Guðrún's brothers urge Bolli on to take action -- they will be deeply shamed if Kjartan escapes now. So Bolli draws his sword and turns on Kjartan. When Kjartan sees this, he throws down his weapons saying that though Bolli is about to commit a terrible kin-slaughter, he would rather receive his deathblow from Bolli ("Víst ætlar þú nú, frændi, níðingsverk at gera, en miklu þykki mér betra at þiggja banaorð af þér, frændi, en veita þér þat", Laxdæla saga, ch. 49, p. 154; "Certainly you intend now to commit a shameful deed, cousin, but it seems much better to me to receive death from you, cousin, than to grant the same to you"). Bolli deals Kjartan his deathblow without answering, gathers up the fatally-wounded Kjartan in his arms, and Kjartan dies on Bolli's lap.

Kjartanssteinn in Svínadalur

A short distance to the east of the road that runs north/south through Svínadalur, a little south of a gully ('gil') called Drífandagil, is a large stone. The stone stands on a small hill the other side of the stream that runs along the road; it is known as Kjartanssteinn ('Kjartan's stone'; photo to left, the dark silhouette against the snow in the upper right quartile of the picture). The stone is marked on maps of the area though I could not find out when it first acquired the name 'Kjartanssteinn'. Local people who I talked to all commented that the puzzle with regard to this stone is that its location south of Drífandagil does not fit perfectly with the details in Laxdæla saga concerning the ambush and killing of Kjartan. According to the saga, the ambushing party rides to Svínadalur and takes up position beside a gully called Hafragil. Kjartan rides south down the valley towards Hafragil -- and the attack takes place here, by a large stone.

But today, there is no large stone besides Hafragil, which is some 5kms south of the stone known as Kjartanssteinn. Is the saga 'right' in locating the fight by Hafragil -- where perhaps there once was a large stone which subsequently rolled away? Is the stone known as Kjartanssteinn today the 'right' stone, and did the attack 'actually' take place a little to the north of where the saga tells us it happened? Did the 13th-century saga author know of a stone in the area which in local tradition was connected in some way to Kjartan and his death, and which prompted him (or her...) to include the detail that Kjartan set his back against a large stone while he defended himself? Is the identification of the large stone south of Drífandagil as Kjartanssteinn a nice example of the natural human desire to locate a momentous event described in a powerful narrative physically in the landscape? "This is where the great hero Kjartan Óláfsson died! Right here, on this very spot..." The tragedy and pathos of the scene is focused and becomes concrete, the veracity of the narrative is confirmed by the landscape.

Who knows. Behind these questions are lines of debate that have been pursued by saga-critics throughout the history of saga scholarship; I do not hope or intend to answer questions revolving around the extent to which the sagas are 'true' or not, on the basis of their fit in the physical landscape. But what a deep thrill to sit in the hotpot at Laugar thinking of Guðrún and her dreams, and to walk up to Kjartanssteinn with the desperate image of Kjartan's death at the hands of his foster-brother and best friend in my mind -- the resonance of remarkable characters and events from a long-past era coming together with the present.

Egils saga in the past and present (2)

2011-04-02T12:57:00.000+01:00

Streetsign in Borgarnes

Streetsign in Borgarnes
(with Landnámssetrið behind)

It is impossible to spend any length of time in Borgarnes and the Mýrar area and to remain oblivious to Egils saga and its place in the region's history and identity. Most of the street names in Borgarnes commemorate characters in the saga and several large cairns (some with accompanying explanatory signs) have been raised at places which feature in the saga. Þorgerðr Brák was an ambátt ('bondwoman') in Skalla-Grímr's household who fostered Egill as an infant: she is described as being 'a large woman, strong as a man and well-versed in magical lore' ('hon var mikil fyrir sér, sterk sem karlar og fjölkunnig mjök', Egils saga, ed. Sigurður Nordal, Íslenzk fornrit II (Reykjavík, 1933), ch. 40, p. 101). The saga relates how, when Egill was 12 years old, the winter-time ice-hockey-like-game knattleikr was played just south of Borg, on the ice of the small bay Sandvík. Egill and his friend Þórðr Granason played against Skalla-Grímr and the game went their way while the day lasted; when the evening drew in, however, as Skalla-Grímr's inherited werewolf/shapeshifting traits came out, he grows in strength and seizes Egill's friend Þórðr, driving him down onto the ice with the result that he dies instantly. Egill is Skalla-Grímr's next target -- but at this point, Þorgerðr Brák steps in and exclaims 'Hamask þú nú, Skalla-Grímr, at syni þínum' (Egils saga ch. 40, p. 101; 'You're now taken by a fit of berserk-like rage towards your own son!').

Skalla-Grímr grabbed Þorgerðr, but she escaped his grasp and ran all the way down the Digranes/Borgarnes peninsula, chased by Skalla-Grímr. When she reached the end of the peninsula, the saga describes how she threw herself into the water to swim to safety; Skalla-Grímr cast a great stone after her and it hit her between the shoulders, 'ok kom hvártki upp síðan; þar er nú kallat Brákarsund' (Egils saga ch. 40, p. 102; 'and neither of the two came up afterwards; that place is now called Brákarsund ('Brák's Channel')). A cairn stands at the end of the Borgarnes peninsula marking the spot where this part of the saga narrative took place; a bridge now connects the peninsula with the small island, Brákarey, that lies just off the peninsula, and on which local buses are parked and a handful of workshops stand.

Egill composes Sonatorrek
(Statue at Borg byÁsmundur Sveinsson; on the left,
Þorgerðr hands a harp to Egill, on the right, with a
gaping hole where his heart and stomach should be)

There is no more in Egils saga about Þorgerðr Brák other than the short description of her quoted above and the few lines which outline the violent climax of the knattleikr. Her story, however, has been made into the subject of the one-woman play 'Brák' written and performed by Brynhildur Guðjónsdóttir and still showing at the National Theatre in Reykjavík. One creative idea that the play presents is that it was Brák who nurtured Egill's poetic talents. The prose of the Icelandic sagas is famously silent as far as the elucidation of saga-characters' inner thoughts and emotional responses is concerned. In the one-man play 'Mr Skallagrímsson', written and performed (at the Landnámssetrið in Borgarnes) by Benedikt Erlingsson, however, Egill's relationship with Þorgerðr Brák, with his father Skalla-Grímr, brother Þórólfr, and others in the saga, are explored from a sympathetic, human perspective, to the end that Egill -- nominated as 'Badass of the Week' on this um interesting website and whose throat-biting, vomiting, excessively violent behaviour in the saga is often unattractive to say the least -- might be seen almost as a tragic figure.

Egill the Poet, drawn by Guðmundur Þorbjarnarson
of Borg, aged 6/7. Egill's ability to touch his nose
with his tongue symbolises his poetic talent.

'Mr Skallagrímsson' is a two-hour tour-de-force and an outstanding demonstration of how the sagas (or their component narrative episodes) may have been passed down orally prior to their written composition in the 13th/14th centuries, and were certainly subsequently 'performed' from the manuscripts in which their texts were copied to the assembled members of farm-households, during the long winter evenings, right up until the early 20th century. Benedikt Erlingsson tells Egils saga -- which runs to around 300 pages in printed editions/translations -- with no props, no special effects, and without the expectation that the audience should know the saga well or at all. The energy in his performance when I saw the show was extraordinary and the audience were drawn in and held from start to finish, laughing unrestrainedly for much of the duration of the play -- sometimes at direct quotations from the saga itself. How about that for making the sagas accessible and immediate to audiences today...

Another way in which Egils saga is made immediate and concrete for those interested in the saga in the 21st century is through archaeological research connected with the saga that has been conducted (and is still ongoing) in the area, especially at Mosfell (back towards Reykjavík), the farm to which Egill moved in his old age, and where he died and was buried. Major excavations have been undertaken here by the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) team headed by Jesse Byock of the University of California in Los Angeles. A full outline of the project and reports covering the excavations so far can be found on the MAP website.

Egils saga relates how initially, Egill was buried in a pagan burial mound but when the country converted to Christianity a decade or so later, Egill was exhumed and his bones laid to rest in the newly-consecrated chuch at Mosfell. When a new and larger church was built 150 years later, Egill was exhumed for a second time by a famous descendant of his, Skapti Þórarinsson, a priest and a learned man. On this occasion, the unusually large size, weight, and appearance of Egill's skull -- the outer surface was ridged all over like a scallop-shell -- provoked interest: the saga describes how Skapti placed the skull on the churchyard fence and hewed at it with an axe to see how thick it was. Remarkably, the blow from Skapti's axe had no result other than that the skull turned white at the point of the impact. Not a bad thing for a viking to have such an indestructible skull, comments the saga...see here, however, for Jesse Byock's argument (published in the Scientific American) that Egill may have suffered from the bone condition known as Paget's Disease. Egill's bones have not yet been found and exhumed for a third time...presumably he is still resting in peace somewhere, and perhaps best to leave him be for the next millennium?