CHAPTER 2

Ransacking the Past

As they were looking through Einar’s wares, a woman passed by the open doorway. “Who is that beautiful woman?” asked Einar. “I have never seen her here before.”

“That is my foster-daughter, Gudrid,” replied Orm. “Her father is Thorbjorn of Laugarbrekka.”

“She’d make me an excellent wife,” said Einar. “Has she had any offers?”

“Indeed she has, my friend,” replied Orm. “She’s not to be had just for the asking.”

—The Saga of Eirik the Red

 

The other version of Gudrid’s story begins not with a shipwreck but with this glimpse of Gudrid through a young man’s eyes. Here is the scene: On the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting from the west coast of Iceland sat a small Viking longhouse. Turf-clad, except for one wooden door, the house looked like a low hill in the jewel-green field. A turf wall encircled it, keeping the horses from grazing in the manured homefield. Toward the sea, the land dropped off into ragged cliffs alive with nesting seabirds. Seals sunned on the seaside rocks. A knarr and a six-oared fishing boat, both clinker-built and tarred black, lay beached in a tiny harbor of black sand. Behind the turf house rose a pyramidal black hill, then the clean white flank of the glacier called Snaefellsjokull, “Snow Mountain’s Glacier.” Beneath the glacier hid a volcano, known to the inhabitants of the house only from a pleasant side effect: Water hot enough for washing bubbled up from the ground not far away.

The knarr belonged to Einar, a young and ambitious Icelander with a fondness for fancy clothes. He had spent the winter in Norway, whose king was fostering a new plan—towns—and a new merchant class. Einar, though his father had been a Viking’s slave, aspired to this class. His ship came home loaded with luxuries impossible to find in Iceland. Stacked in Orm’s shed, where Einar was setting up shop, were bales of linen and silk and fine wool dyed bright blue and red. He brought lumber, both oak and ash. Pine tar for preserving ships’ timbers. Barley and hops for brewing beer. Honey to make into mead. Perhaps even beeswax, for many of the Viking folk along this coast were Christians, and had been taught they must worship by candlelight.

Orm owned the longhouse. He kept cows and sheep and was loyal to the chieftain who had granted him land. Gudrid was the chieftain’s daughter. Since her mother died, she had been raised by Orm’s wife. She was about fourteen when she passed the open doorway of Einar’s shop. Something about her—her looks, her dress, the way she walked or smiled—impressed the young man. Despite Orm’s warning, he decided to ask for her hand.

His suit was denied. Gudrid’s father wouldn’t marry his daughter to the son of a slave. Orm’s hint that the young merchant’s wealth could be of use offended the chieftain. Ashamed that his money troubles were talked about, Gudrid’s father swapped his farm for a ship and took his daughter to Greenland to start a new life. Orm shrugged his shoulders and, loyally, went with him.

 

The saga does not describe Orm’s farm, where young Einar unloaded his ship, it names it: Arnarstapi, “Eagle Peak.” I can imagine the green field and the cliffs and the harbor and paint the scene because I have driven down that long peninsula, under the eye of Snow Mountains Glacier. I have sat where Gudrid as a girl might have sat, watching the white birds circle and waiting for a ship to come in.

Yet, daydreaming in the low summer sun, imagining what the place must have looked like when Einar unloaded his wares a thousand years ago, I bump up against the barrier faced by every reader of the sagas: Is it true?

There are werewolves in the sagas, and trolls. Soothsayers, and warlocks who rule the weather. Ghosts who walk and strangle their foes—or give their widows charitable advice. Like Homer’s Iliad, the sagas were based on old tales told around the fire to enliven the long winter nights. Generations of storytellers can be counted on to elaborate—and to overlook.

Who was there to write down what rich Einar said when he first saw Gudrid? Einar and his fancy clothes are never mentioned again, in this saga or in any other Icelandic source. Nor is Gudrid’s father reckoned among the chieftains in the other tales that take place on this peninsula. If Einar did not ask for Gudrid’s hand, if Gudrid’s father was not ashamed his money troubles were so well known, if he did not, therefore, up and move to Greenland—if this whole scene is fictitious—is the rest of The Saga of Eirik the Red fiction, too? Did Leif Eiriksson discover America? Did Gudrid live there and give birth to her son? Did she see Norway and Rome? Was she as plucky and capable, as adventurous and adaptable, as the stories imply? Are the sagas a true witness to the Viking world?

Historians have debated this point since at least 1772, when the British explorer Sir Joseph Banks brought the literature of Iceland to the attention of the English-speaking world. There’s just so little to go on. No one in Gudrid’s society could read or write. Literacy did not come to Iceland until the Christian Church, made the official religion in the year 1000, set up schools in the 1030s. The first book in Icelandic was The Book of the Icelanders, a brief and sober history written by Ari the Learned in the early 1100s, based, he says, on the recollections of wise old women and men.

The peak of saga writing came a century later. Thousands of fireside tales about kings and mythological heroes, about Iceland’s first settlers, and about men and women who had made names for themselves in one way or another were collected and gathered into manuscripts, some by masters of the literary art, others by beginners. Gudrid’s story is not found in the great sagas, the ones Jane Smiley places at the heart of human literary endeavor. It fills most of The Saga of Eirik the Red, which can be read aloud in less than an hour. Gudrid also appears in The Saga of the Greenlanders, which is even shorter and contradicts The Saga of Eirik the Red on several important points, especially concerning Gudrid’s early life.

I think of the two girls as Red Gudrid (the one in The Saga of Eirik the Red) and Green Gudrid (from The Saga of the Greenlanders). Red Gudrid left for Greenland as a pampered, protected daughter, too good for young Einar’s offer of marriage. She sailed in her father’s ship, surrounded by his belongings and connections. Then her fairy tale ended. The ship wandered at sea all summer. The food and fresh water ran out. Sickness set in. Gudrid watched many of the people she knew and loved, including Orm and his wife, die miserable deaths. She undoubtedly grew up. Yet her social status was relatively unaffected. The ship made a safe landfall in southern Greenland just before winter, and Gudrid and her father were welcomed as guests by Eirik the Red’s cousin, who farmed there.

At this point in the story comes an example of the antiquarianism in the sagas that so attracted Victorian writers like Sir Walter Scott. That winter, we read, the hunting was poor and meals were scanty. To learn how to alleviate the household’s hunger (or perhaps to take their minds off it), the farmer decided to hold a séance. Though the saga was written at least two hundred years after the event, the seer is described in wonderful detail. She wore a long blue gown and a black lambskin hood lined with white cat’s fur. She had catskin gloves, too, with the fur inside, and carried a brassbound staff. Both her gown and her staff were adorned with jewels. She could eat only the hearts of animals, one of each kind, cutting them up with her ivory-handled knife and picking them up with her brass spoon. She could sit only on a cushion stuffed with hens’ feathers. To invoke the spirits, she needed a helper to sing certain magic songs. Only Gudrid knew them, and she sang them expertly. Charmed by her singing, the spirits gathered and revealed many things, among them Gudrid’s future: “Your path leads to Iceland, and from you will come a large and worthy family, for shining over your descendants I see bright rays of light”—a reference, scholars believe, to her two great-grandsons and one great-great-grandson who served as bishops in Iceland in the 1100s.

The next summer Red Gudrid and her father sailed farther north to Eirik’s settlement at Brattahlid (“Steep Slope”). Fifteen years earlier, before Eirik had been banished from Iceland and went off to settle Greenland, he and Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn, had been best friends. Their reunion was joyful. Gudrid and her father joined Eirik’s household until their own house could be built, on a piece of land Eirik gave them, right across the fjord. They ended up with a farm as good as or better than the one they had left in Iceland, all the goods they had brought on their ship plus whatever had belonged to the people who had died, and the ship itself. By the standards of the day, they were quite well off.

Green Gudrid, on the other hand, was alone and destitute after having been shipwrecked and plucked off the icy rock by Leif Eiriksson on his way home from discovering Vinland. She was said to be the wife of the captain of the ship, a Norwegian merchant named Thorir. In return for the rescue, Leif took for himself everything that could be salvaged from the wreck. He invited Gudrid and her husband to stay with him, but that winter sickness set in. Gudrid’s husband and most of the other people Leif rescued died—as did Leif’s father, Eirik the Red. Leif became the leader of the Greenland colony. Gudrid, with no one else to turn to, became his ward. She owned nothing. There is no mention of her singing or her bright future (though that will come).

Strangely, for both the Red Gudrid and the Green, the rich and the poor, the result was the same: She soon married Leif’s younger brother Thorstein.

 

A little book written in the 1970s, called in English The Saga Mind, explains how to accommodate such additions and contradictions. The saga writers, says the Russian literary historian M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, “strove simultaneously for accuracy and for reproduction of reality in all its living fullness.” Or, as Icelandic saga scholar Vesteinn Olason wrote more recently, in Dialogues with the Viking Age, when a saga writer added something from his imagination, he was not “inventing” something new, but “finding” something that had always been part of the story.

This concept of truth mingles our ideas of history and of art—the record of what actually happened with the truth a good novel can tell you about yourself and the world around you. The Old Icelandic word saga mingles them, too: It was applied indiscriminately to tales that sound like sober history and to ones we can easily peg as fiction. Saga-truth assumes that both Vinland tales are at bottom “accurate,” based on stories passed down from generation to generation from Gudrid’s day to the 1200s.

Memories are not myths, points out Gisli Sigurdsson, who teaches folklore at the University of Iceland. In 1988 Gisli published the controversial Gaelic Influence in Iceland; the Gaelic “gift of gab” led him to explore other storytelling cultures for his 2004 book, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. Though tales change with their tellers—bits left out, others embellished (as the description of the seer obviously was)—they still must ring true to their audience. “They’re still within limits,” he told me, regarding the two young Gudrids. “You must fill in the gap somehow. The basic idea is that she comes to Greenland, and soon enough there’s a problem. She has to make a fresh start. She has to get involved with Eirik the Red’s family, since in order to become somebody there, you had to make friends with Eirik.

“The only way we can explain these written texts,” he continued, “is that you first had stories about separate events and characters. I think people were telling these stories in a mishmash, without the beginning and end that we know. They were very regional. They were stories about disputes, about the qualities of the land, about someone’s misbehavior. They had a very clear ethical message, both about how you as a farmer should behave, and about how a chieftain should react. These stories were being told to reinforce that ideology.”

The written sagas were a way of systematizing the oral stories. “When people in Iceland in the thirteenth century saw the long written narratives they were getting in books from abroad, they realized they could use these old stories in that new form. They learned to write them down chronologically. That’s not what you would do with oral literature. When you told these stories, you just told them from event to event and key word to key word. The Icelanders in the thirteenth century were fascinated with chronology, with this new way of systematizing knowledge, just like we’re fascinated by computers. They weren’t saying anything new, they were just putting it into a different form.”

To work chronologically, to follow a set of characters through time, a writer needed to build bridges, to fill in gaps, to connect one oral tale to another. These bridges could be drawn from another tale, or come from the writer’s general knowledge about the area in which the story took place. The differences between the two Vinland sagas, then, can be set down to their writers’ interests, intentions, and abilities, but also to which tales they had heard, what memories they shared, what bridges they needed to build, what audience they were addressing. The Saga of Eirik the Red has been traced to a nunnery in northern Iceland, whose abbess was Gudrid’s seven-greats granddaughter: Gudrid was presumably an exemplar, a role model for young Christian women. The Saga of the Greenlanders comes down to us as disjointed chapters in a long saga of the kings of Norway. The discovery of Vinland, rather than Gudrid, lies at its heart.

 

When it comes to Gudrid, the memory both sagas seem to be based on is this: Gudrid had a suitor who was a merchant, plying the sea routes from Norway. She may or may not have married him, but he soon passed out of her life. She went to Greenland. She had a bad voyage. Her first winter there was hard, with hunger and sickness. By spring she had lost most of the people she loved. But she was remarkable in some way that was not dependent on her being wealthy, and she married Eirik the Red’s son, Thorstein, becoming Leif Eiriksson’s sister-in-law. Thorstein attempted to sail to Vinland, but failed. He and Gudrid lived for a time in Lysufjord, a lonely spot remote from their fathers’ farms, and there, after a terrible illness, Thorstein died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iceland’s odd earth does hold one advantage over Denmark’s: Whatever you do find can be easily dated. Dig a trench in an Icelandic hayfield, and the trench walls will be conveniently stratified, striped like a layer cake with volcanic tephra—a term for anything that spews out of a volcano and is light enough to travel through the air some distance. Tephra has a different color and texture from soil or sand. When you run the edge of your trowel over it, it rings out, as if you had tapped a glass bottle. It feels grittier, almost spiky on your fingertips or, if you’re not certain, on your tongue. (Archaeologists taste a lot of things they pick out of the dirt: Putting a sample on your tongue is also the best way to tell pottery from bone.) In northern Iceland, the tephra layer from an eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104 is particularly thick: It looks like a line of white icing between the dark cakes of soil. Equally obvious are two honey-brown lines from eruptions two thousand and four thousand years ago, well before the first people came to the island. An eruption from about the year 1000 left a greenish-gray layer that can be traced in most spots. A darker line, often swirled with charcoal or organic matter, marks the settlement of Iceland in the year 870. Archaeologists call this tephra the Landnám or Settlement Layer; they have found no signs of human culture beneath it. The historical dates—870, 1000, 1104, plus or minus a year or two—are quite secure. Not only is the 1104 catastrophe mentioned in church records (it wiped out several farms in the south of Iceland), signs of all three eruptions can be seen in the cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheets to study climate change. It’s a lucky accident that the eruptions in 870 and 1104 frame the Viking Age in Iceland.

To make use of this tephrochronology, John’s colleague Douglas Bolender, a doctoral student at Northwestern University, devised a soil-sampling protocol. He and his assistants walked back and forth across each modern farm-field on the Langholt ridge in Skagafjord, an area that encompasses both farms named in Gudrid’s saga: Reynines (now called Reynistadur, or “Rowan Stead”) and Glaumbaer. They logged their coordinates with GPS, reading off two satellites and a transmitter on a lighthouse offshore. They flagged each site, creating a grid of colored plastic flags 50 meters (a little more than 50 yards) apart. At each flag, they punched in their steel soil-coring tube and recorded the depth and quality (including tephra layers) of the soil. If the soil was shallow, they passed it by—only deep soil will preserve a turf house. Shallow soil means the wind has already eroded everything of interest. They examined pockets of deep soil (20 inches is as deep as the corer goes; poking it in twice, you can sometimes reach 40) for marks of a kitchen or garbage midden: flecks of charcoal, peat ash, or burned bone. If they found these below the white 1104 tephra layer, the spot was worth testing further. (Logical on paper, this protocol broke down somewhat in reality: A farmer making hay mowed down the plastic flags before the soil samples could be taken; a bull chased the soil corers through two fences and into a muddy drainage ditch, fouling all their equipment, though they preserved the precious data sheets.)

To places with interesting soil cores, John and Brian Damiata, a UCLA geophysicist, brought a variety of machines that can see beneath the earth. Adapting these remote-sensing devices to Iceland’s wet soils was tricky, as was adjusting any magnetic effects for the nearness of the North Pole. The gadget that finally did work was originally designed for plumbers to detect problems in buried pipes. Called the EM-31, it measures how well the soil conducts electricity. It is unwieldy (a 12-foot-long tube carried by a strap over the shoulder), heavy (30 pounds), and temperamental.

“You have to get all the neighbors within half a mile to turn off their electric fences,” John said. “Sometimes they gave me a pretty short window.” At one farm, a band of young stallions seemed to know exactly when the current to their electric fence was off and would break through the wire to rumpus with the mares.

The results were disappointing. “We’re making these maps,” John said, “and we couldn’t see anything on them.” But then Tim Earle, John’s mentor, now teaching at Northwestern in Chicago, suggested John “rough up the data.” John wrote a computer program to look at the differences among readings and discovered a series of anomalies. On the new map, each showed up as a colored cluster of squiggles that stuck out from its surroundings. Choosing one, they dug a test trench. The hole came up empty: no sign of a turf house.

“Later,” said John, “we found out that this machine’s coordinates were one meter off”—about a yard. (John, like all scientists, thinks in meters; I still see things in inches, feet, and yards.) Once they corrected for that yard-long error, they started finding things in their trenches. “We got a lot of landslides. Then one of these anomalies wasn’t a landslide, it was a wall. Once we identified that signal—that it was a turf house—we were flying high!”

The buried turf wall was in the hayfield behind the Skagafjord Folk Museum at Glaumbaer, a collection of historic houses on a busy road that runs the length of the valley to the town of Saudarkrokur, population 2,600. Beside the road is a stone statue of a stout-armed woman balancing a tiny boy on her shoulder—Gudrid and Snorri, the first residents—but the museum was not established to honor them alone. On a low mound, beside a trim white church that is still active, is a rambling turf farmhouse, its walls and roofs of sod forming a jumble of lumps much like a collection of hobbit holes connected by tunnels. Its wooden gables and doors are painted mustard yellow. A house has been on this site, the history books say, since saga times, a thousand years ago. The current structure, begun in 1750, was lived in continuously until it passed to the museum in 1948.

Two other historical buildings were moved onto the museum grounds in the 1990s. One houses a coffee shop and galleries. It had been built in 1886 to be a girls’ school (though “this never came to pass,” a museum brochure relates). The other building, a little white wood-framed house with a green grass roof, provides office space for the museum staff. Its claim to fame is its track record: The house had been dismantled and moved six times since it was built in 1862, logging over 120 miles by ice, sea, and road. Arriving at Glaumbaer in 1996, it was very nearly placed on top of the turf wall yet to be discovered beneath the hayfield.

That wall, John found, was topped by the shiny white tephra from the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104. Curious, John angled a soil corer into the mound on which the 1750s turf house sits, right in front of the mustard-yellow kitchen door, where the family would have thrown their fireplace ash and scraps. “That ash sits exactly on the 1104 tephra layer, and under that is sterile soil,” he said. “For the house we found down below in the hayfield, everything is under the 1104. So the main house at Glaumbaer moved about 1104.”

John’s Icelandic colleagues, including museum curator Sigridur Sigurdardottir and archaeologists Gudny Zoega and her supervisor at the time, Ragnheidur Traustadottir, were skeptical. They asked Gudmundur Olafsson to come up from the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik to take a look. Gudmundur, who has excavated more Viking Age longhouses than anyone else, spent several days on the site, dug a long trench, and was also not convinced.

No one doubted that John had found something made of turf and older than 1104. But was it a longhouse? None of the histories, censuses, or tax records showed a house there. And even if a longhouse did exist in the Glaumbaer hayfield, another line of reasoning went, it was just an oddity. In general, both history and archaeology agreed, turf houses didn’t move. When fashions changed, the new house was simply built on top of the remains of the old. John argued, on the other hand, that if there was one invisible Viking house in the valley, there might be many.

The Icelanders suggested they take another farm—one not mentioned in the sagas—and survey it using both methods. John chose the farm of Stora Seyla (“Big Marsh”), about three miles south of Glaumbaer. Its turf house had stood until the 1920s atop a complicated mound cut through by a stream, and the nearby fields had not been bulldozed flat or plowed. With the historical records in hand, the Icelandic archaeologists marked every feature on the landscape that looked man-made. John’s team tested each by taking soil cores: According to the tephra lines, none of the features was older than 1104. “So then we cored the whole place on a 50-meter grid,” John told me, “past the modern boundaries of the farm Stora Seyla until we hit the fjord. One core came up with charcoal, and an adjacent one had some very deep soil.” They tested that area with the EM-31.

John paged through the 2005 grant proposal to the EM-31’s output: a map of Stora Seyla from the surface to six feet down, color-coded by how well the soil conducted electricity. “If you fuzz your eyes,” he told me, “you see a tract of light blue and dark blue. We imagine this is the limits of a structure.” It was 115 feet long. Based on this map, John’s team dug test trenches. They found a turf wall, a floor, hay, and a burned birch-bark roof, perfectly preserved—and older than 1104. The main house at Stora Seyla had also moved.

John was, he admitted, a little too pleased with their results. “I was pretty arrogant,” he said with a rueful smile. “I essentially attacked the Icelanders for being incompetent.”

But if this technique—soil coring on a grid combined with the EM-31—worked so well, I asked, why was he bringing a new remote-sensing device—the untested ground-penetrating radar or GPR—to Skagafjord in 2005?

“Because I’m not an Icelandic archaeologist,” he said. “I don’t want to spend years excavating these sites. I have a few basic questions. How big is the farm? How much hay did they store? I want a shortcut to digging. GPR is the best remote-sensing technique available to archaeologists. What we need it for is to not have to excavate.

“Now we can find sites with the other technique, but we can’t tell what were looking at without digging into them. And we keep chewing into the wrong places. This pisses off the Icelanders no end. It’s hard to convince them I’m even sort of competent. I don’t know which wall is which. I can’t answer all this ambiguity in the remote-sensing data. We’ve learned that the biggest anomaly is usually a corner, but we’ve learned that only by chewing into it—and we just about destroyed that corner of the house.”

“You mean Gudrid’s house?”

“The house at Glaumbaer. But it had to be done. There was no other way. We had to calibrate our readings.”

“You destroyed the corner of Gudrid’s house?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I think the case for saying the longhouse at Glaumbaer is the referent for the story in the sagas is true,” he said. “Whether the story is true is another question.”

 

On a warm winter day in March 2005, we were in Iceland, on the site of the storied house, and John was looking even more uncomfortable.

“Why do you think you can use a backhoe here?” Sigridur Sigurdardottir, known as “Sirri,” rolled a heavy glass paperweight between her broad hands. She had served us tea and coffee when we arrived at her office at the Skagafjord Folk Museum, and had even unwrapped a box of chocolates; but now she was installed behind her desk, taking on the full authority of the book-lined office with its unsettling touches of practicality: refrigerator, microwave, spinning wheel. Her gaze was firm and unapologetic.

“He has already hired one,” Gudny Zoega told Sirri in Icelandic.

John backtracked in his ninety-second introduction to his archaeological protocol, vainly trying to rephrase his argument. With the backhoe he intended to quickly strip the top layer of turf off the hayfield. Using trowels and shovels, his archaeologists (and unskilled volunteers, like me) would then expose the tops of the buried longhouse walls to check if the remote-sensing devices had drawn the floor plan accurately. That would be it for the 2005 field season. John was in northern Iceland now to work out where his crew of fifteen would eat and sleep, where they could have lab space, whether he could get a free car for five weeks in July and August. He had been in the country only one day and had spent much of that time searching out a certain kind of Danish backhoe that he thought was excellent for archaeology. The previous afternoon, he had found just what he wanted. Though the owner spoke no English, and John no Icelandic, they hit it off right away. “He keeps his backhoe inside, he likes it so much,” John had crowed to Gudny, when we met her in her laboratory in Saudarkrokur later that evening. “It will be perfect.” He had already gotten permission, he confided to her, to use a backhoe at Glaumbaer. The director of the national Archaeological Heritage Agency, from whom he got his official permits, had said it would be okay.

Those permits, I could see now, were useless.

Sirri’s eyes narrowed. “I see,” she said in English, and John fell silent.

I wrote in my notebook: No backhoe.

“Isn’t it easily cut with a spade?” Sirri said, putting on her phone headset. She smiled at us and nodded toward the chocolate box, as if to say enjoy! Hospitality is a prominent cultural value in Iceland, as important now as it was in the saga days, so I leaned past Gudny and took a couple. Gudny took some, too.

After a rapid conversation in Icelandic, Sirri reported that two or three men could remove the turf in twenty-five hours. Her brother Helgi would arrange it.

“That’s as fast as a backhoe!” John said.

“Yes, I know.” Sirri’s smile was simultaneously smug and patient. “People who know how to do it are as fast as a backhoe. The people are a little bit expensiver, but not much. I like it better not to have a machine on the field. When do you want to start?”

That settled, Sirri went to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of cheese, crackers, and grapes. Gudny and I helped ourselves; John suggested a bit of show-and-tell. He had a movie about his latest remote-sensing device to show them, to explain the new procedure he’d be using that summer. He slipped his laptop out of its case and opened the lid. Nothing. He closed it, opened it, wiggled it. Still nothing.

Sirri took some cheese and crackers. “Tækni is good, if it works,” she said, and winked at Gudny and me.

“If I could hook it up to your monitor . . . ,” John said, and Sirri directed him to the computer in the outer office.

I’d seen this movie before. It showed how ground-penetrating radar had located and mapped in colorful 3-D a first-century Roman marketplace and the Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. I excused myself and went to find a window facing east. The weather was astonishingly mild for Iceland in March, and Pastor Gisli, who preached in the Glaumbaer church and worked the farm, had turned out his sheep. They were grazing on top of Gudrid’s house and had cropped the brown grass quite short, but I saw no vague, humped shape of a tumbled longhouse rising from the field. The ground looked quite flat. The sheep milled around the metal hay feeders and the red hay wagon parked in the center of the field, just where Gudrid’s hearth should be.

Sirri came up behind me—the tækni was still not working. “There are a lot of elves here,” she said, looking over my shoulder, “and trolls, too.” She was testing me. Coming out of the blue, that comment would have sounded strange to someone unfamiliar with the Icelanders’ love of old stories.

“People always are asking, Do we believe in them?” She laughed. “I give them the benefit of the doubt. The stories are good. A good saga will never die.”