CHAPTER 3

A Very Stirring Woman

Karlsefni and Gudrid sailed to Iceland the next summer, home to his farm at Reynines. But his mother would not have Gudrid in her house that first winter. In her opinion, Karlsefni had not married well. Though later on she would learn how remarkable a woman Gudrid was . . .

—The Saga of Eirik the Red

 

John Steinberg’s archaeological crew descended on the Glaumbaer hayfield in early July 2005 and spent most of a week trying to make the new tækni—ground-penetrating radar—work.

The gadget, when it had arrived, looked like a baby-jogger. A sealed plastic box, 18 inches square and fluorescent orange, protected the electronics, which send pulses of microwaves into the ground and pick up their echoes. The box was fixed between two bicycle wheels. A sturdy frame provided a handle and supported the data recorder, its computer screen shielded from the sun (or more likely, here, the rain) by a blue canopy. Dean Goodman, a California-based computer scientist who had written GPR-Slice, the best software to interpret ground-penetrating radar data, had come to Iceland to show off its capabilities. His was the movie of Emperor Trajan’s eel pond. He had mapped tombs and castles in Japan, and Native American ruins from Louisiana to Martha’s Vineyard. He looked jaunty in a Greek fisherman’s cap, pushing the gizmo up and down the hayfield as if he were mowing the lawn. Problem was, haymaking hadn’t started yet in northern Iceland. The GPR jogger could hardly roll through the knee-high grass. John duct-taped a two-by-four to the front, and yoked himself up like an ox to assist. The grass was wet, and in short order he and Dean looked as though they had waded a stream.

Worse, the data was lousy. The wheels made too much noise, each bump across the lumpy ground registering as an electronic burp. So they shucked the wheels, set the orange box into a white plastic tub, duct-taped on the two-by-four, and let John play ox while Brian Damiata walked behind, working the data recorder. Until the data recorder was in his hands Brian—who is as quietly critical as John is exuberant—had been invisible. Suddenly he was in control. Although Dean objected that doing things Brian’s way would mean tons more work for only a tiny improvement in data quality, Brian could not be dissuaded. He was here to get good data, and he would get it if he had to walk this field day and night. And since darkness never really falls in high summer in Iceland, he could—and did.

Over the next two weeks, Brian and John made several discoveries—each at the cost of a five- to ten-mile hike back and forth across a hayfield. For instance, water off the tall grass, pooling in the white tub, caused the microwaves to “float,” scattering sideways instead of penetrating the ground. John discarded the tub and gave the orange box a more aerodynamic profile by duct-taping on two rounded “fenders” he had carved from a green plastic watering can with his utility knife. Even without the wheels, the box bumped and bounced too much. John duct-taped a soccer-ball-sized rock to its top to add weight. The antenna wasn’t shielded. If Brian’s knee hit the cable that tethered him to the orange box, as he walked behind John carrying the data recorder, the microwave receiver saw it as data. When the battery was changed the data recorder was prone to reprogramming itself to its standard settings—which were completely wrong for Iceland’s wet soils. To enter the data manually, Brian had to click “Enter” at every meter mark. But the buttons on the recorder were close together, and instead of “Enter,” his finger might hit “Stop.” Then they had to start the line over.

And how do you walk in a straight line for a hundred meters, the length of a football field? First we marked opposite sides of the field with colored plastic survey flags spaced a meter apart. Then we advanced a hundred-meter measuring tape from flag to flag, meter by meter across the field, as a guideline. On calm days, after the hay was cut, two of us—one on each end of the tape—could handle it and have ample time to count the horses grazing along the river or the round bales accumulating in the neighbors’ hayfields, to admire the dramatic sky over the glacier-carved mountains, or to watch a pair of swans drive two interlopers away from their nest by the brook. On the day the wind hit gale force, it took six of us, staggered along the guideline, to pull the tape out taut and keep it more-or-less straight, holding it down with our toes.

By the end of the first week, John decided the crew needed an excursion. After supper we would go to Grettir’s Bath, a hot spring beside the ocean a half-hour’s drive north, walled up for bathing since saga times. The name honored Grettir the Strong, a saga character renowned for his superhuman strength and his fear of the dark, a killer and a troublemaker who lived as an outlaw for nearly twenty years, hunted from place to place until he came to Drangey, a grass-topped rock in the middle of the inlet that gave the valley of Skagafjord (“Bay of the Headlands”) its name. Tall, lone, and visible for hundreds of miles, this island had been a crucial resource for the local farmers in Viking days. They trapped seabirds and gathered eggs on its sheer cliffs, and hoisted sheep to its top to graze the rich grass there. When Grettir hauled up the rope ladder and declared the island his own, he was in essence raiding their pantry. All the farmers along the fjord could see the smoke of his cooking fire and know Grettir was feasting on their meat.

The story of Grettir’s Bath begins on a night when the outlaw’s fire went out. Grettir, who was built like a bull seal, determined to swim to the mainland to fetch live coals. The distance is four miles. The temperature of the sea is a few degrees above freezing. (Lately it’s become fashionable for extreme swimmers, in wet suits and Vaseline, to try to match Grettir’s feat; Sirri at Glaumbaer has lost track of how many have tried it, but she assured me that none had drowned.)

John Steinberg, who wanted his crew to get the full Icelandic experience from their visit to the hot spring, opened a translation of Grettir’s Saga and began reading:

 

He swam strongly, and made Reykjanes by sunset. He walked up to the farm at Reykir and took a bath, for he was feeling very cold. He basked in the warm pool for a good part of the night, and then he went into the hall. It was very hot there, for a fire had been burning earlier, and the room had not cooled off. Grettir was exhausted and fell fast asleep; he lay there until the following day.

Late in the morning the household got up, and the first people to go into the room were two women, a maidservant and the farmer’s daughter. Grettir was asleep, and his cover had rolled off down to the floor. The women saw and recognized who he was. The maidservant said, “What do you know, dear, here is Grettir Asmundarson, and lying there stark naked. He is certainly big enough in the chest, but it seems to me very odd how small he is farther down. That part of him isn’t up to the rest of him.”

The farmer’s daughter said, “Why do you keep running off at the mouth like that, you silly little fool? Keep quiet!”

“I can’t keep quiet about this, dear,” said the maid, “since I never would have believed it, even if someone had told me.”

She kept going over and peeping at him, and then running back to the farmer’s daughter and bursting out laughing. Grettir heard what she was saying, and when she ran across the room again he seized her. . . .

 

The saga proceeds with a pair of dirty poems that Grettir composed on the spur of the moment—puns on swords being prominent—and a cheerful rape scene that had the male scientists howling with laughter while the women snickered and looked at each other askance. When things quieted down, someone asked, Was this scene typical of the sagas?

Love scenes there are in plenty—enough that historian Jenny Jochens needed a dozen pages of her book, Women in Old Norse Society, to explain how a woman became pregnant. First the man “placed her on his lap . . . and talked with her so all could see it,” talk that was visible as kisses and caresses. Then he might stretch out with his head in her lap and let her pick lice out of his hair. (Another sure sign of love is a woman offering to sew a man’s wide shirtsleeves tight around his wrists, a daily task before buttons became common.) After a bit he might take her by the hand and lead her to a more private spot; an illegitimate baby was variously called a “forest child,” a “corner child,” and a “cowbarn child.” There, says Jochens, the Vikings assumed the missionary position, the man “romping on” the woman’s belly. For married couples such scenes take place in the crowded skáli, the main room of the longhouse, where the whole household slept on the wide benches that lined the walls on either side of the longfire and could listen in while spouses who were at odds “settled the matter between them as though nothing has happened.” High-class couples like Gudrid and Karlsefni might have plank walls and a door separating their sleeping space from that of their farmhands and family, but for most couples, the only privacy in a longhouse was provided by the dark.

What is striking about the love scenes in the sagas is how often sex is proposed by the woman—and not exclusively to her husband. Grettir’s rape scene—the only one I can remember in the forty major sagas—is so out of the norm that a later poem lampoons him by claiming, in some four hundred lines, that he had sex not only with girls, widows, and “everyone’s wives,” but with farmers’ sons, deacons, courtiers, abbots, abbesses, cows, and calves. In fact, the “maiden in distress” is notably missing in the Icelandic sagas. Instead we meet, as scholar Carol Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, puts it, “women who prosecute their lives in general, and their sex lives in particular, with a kind of aggressive authority unexpected in a woman and unparalleled in any other European literature.”

 

Four or five years before Gudrid was born, says one saga, there lived on the north side of Snow Mountain’s Glacier two middle-aged widows who were competing for the favors of the same young man. This fellow, Gunnlaug, had “a lust for learning.” From his father’s farm under the glacier, he would ride to visit Geirrid at Mavahlid, the seaside estate she shared with her grown son and his wife. Halfway, he would stop at the hut of the second widow, Katla, to pick up his friend, her son Odd. On the way home, Katla always invited Gunnlaug to stay the night, but he always declined.

“So,” said Katla one day, “you’re off to Mavahlid again to pat the old hag on the belly.”

Gunnlaug laughed. “Are you so young that you can make fun of Geirrid’s age?”

“That may be so, but she’s not the only woman around here who knows a thing or two.”

That night, as Gunnlaug was getting ready to leave Mavahlid, Geirrid said, “There are too many sea spirits on the loose tonight, and you have an unlucky look about you. You should stay the night with me.”

Gunnlaug said no thanks, and he and Odd rode off.

Katla had already gone to bed when they reached her hut. “Ask Gunnlaug to stay tonight,” she said, as her son Odd came inside.

“He insists on going home, Mother,” said Odd.

“Then let him get what’s coming to him.”

Late that night, Gunnlaug’s father found him lying outside the family house, unconscious. He was scratched all over, the flesh ripped to the bone. People said he had been “witch-ridden.”

In the same saga, we meet Gunnlaug’s stepmother, Thurid, who was just as lusty as the two old witches. Gunnlaug disappears from the story after this night (although we’re told his wounds did heal), and his father was killed quarreling with the people of Mavahlid, leaving behind a very young widow. Thurid quickly got married again, at the insistence of her brother Snorri, the chieftain of Helgafell. But her fat merchant husband soon had complaints. A young buck named Bjorn, who lived on the south side of the glacier, had begun coming by unusually often, and “people said he and Thurid were fooling around.” Anyone who has read Jenny Jochens’s description of sex in the Viking Age would agree. Thurid and Bjorn sat close together and “talked,” while Thurid’s husband made it a practice to interrupt his farmwork frequently to come inside and check on them.

Once, though, he left them alone all day.

“Take care on your way home, Bjorn,” Thurid warned. “I think my husband means to put a stop to your visits. He’s probably lying in wait for you on the path, and I don’t think he intends to fight fair.”

Bjorn was indeed ambushed on his way through the mountains. Outnumbered five to one, he managed to kill two of his attackers, and the others fled. He limped home, badly wounded, and his father patched him up. At the next assembly, Bjorn was banished from Iceland for three years for killing the two men. He joined the most famous band of Vikings, the Jomsvikings, and made a name for himself plundering the rim of the Baltic Sea.

Meanwhile, Thurid gave birth to a son.

When Bjorn returned from his Viking voyage, he saw mother and son at a fair and remarked to a friend of his, “The boy looks exactly like me. Too bad he doesn’t know who his father is.”

“Stay away from her,” said his friend. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I know it is. But my heart says otherwise.”

Thurid apparently agreed, for she and Bjorn picked up where they’d left off. And although her husband didn’t like it a bit, the saga says, he couldn’t do much about it, since Bjorn had such a reputation now as a fighter.

Another woman who found herself married to the wrong man is Oddny Eykindill (her nickname means “Island-Candle,” as in “Light of the Land”). Oddny’s childhood sweetheart is also named Bjorn. He and Oddny were betrothed, but like most Icelandic boys in the Viking Age, Bjorn wanted to go off to Norway first to make a name for himself. She agreed to wait three years for him—four if he sent word.

At eighteen, Bjorn took Norway by storm. Another Icelander at the king’s court, a thirty-three-year-old poet named Thord, became jealous. He buddied up to Bjorn, got him drunk, and heard all about Oddny Island-Candle. That summer Thord sailed home and rode to see Oddny. He delivered a message and a gold ring from Bjorn, then added—falsely—that Bjorn thought she should marry Thord if Bjorn didn’t come home. The next year, word came that Bjorn was wounded in a duel; Thord put it about that Bjorn was dead. Oddny insisted on waiting the full four years, but Bjorn didn’t come home. By the time he had recovered enough to travel, the last ship of the year had sailed. When he heard, later, that Oddny had married Thord, he decided not to go home at all.

Oddny and Thord had eight children and seemed to be happily married until one day Bjorn did come home. “Have you heard any news today, Thord?” Oddny said.

“No, but I’m supposing you have.”

“Yes, I’ve heard something I’d call news. I’ve heard that a ship has come in, and the owner is Bjorn, who you said was dead.”

“Well, you might call that news.”

“It certainly is news!” said Oddny. “And now I know the kind of man I married. I thought you were a good man, but you are full of lies and deceit.”

Thord invited Bjorn to spend the winter with them. “That will fix things up between us,” he told Oddny.

“You’re lying again if you think that.”

The visit did not go well. Oddny and Bjorn spent as much time together as they could, talking and laughing, and, in Thord’s opinion, “adding one insult to another.” He flew into a rage and slapped Oddny, kissed and fondled her in front of Bjorn, refused to let her into his bed, snooped around trying to catch the lovers in the act, and generally made everyone miserable. Soon the two men stopped speaking to each other, except to trade insulting verses, into which Bjorn always managed to slip a mention of his love for Oddny.

“Quit making verses about me, you two,” said Oddny. “None of this was my idea.”

Bjorn left when the winter was up, but the feud went on for years and years, escalating from nasty verses to the killing of servants and followers. Finally Thord ambushed Bjorn in his horse pasture. Dying, Bjorn spotted Oddny’s young son Kolli in the mob. “You shouldn’t be fighting me,” Bjorn said.

“Why should I show you mercy?” said Kolli.

“Ask your mother.”

Girls like Thurid and Oddny Island-Candle were often married off at fourteen, presumably to keep them from choosing someone grossly unsuitable (such as a Romeo on the wrong side of a family feud). Yet, even so young, some had definite ideas of what they wanted in a man and took steps toward getting it. A girl named Thorgunna, for instance, thought she’d made a good catch when the young Leif Eiriksson, on his first voyage to Norway, was driven off course and forced to shelter from a storm in the Hebrides off Scotland. They fell in love, and she became pregnant. When the winds changed and Leif got ready to sail, Thorgunna said she wanted to go home with him to Greenland. But Leif had neither the pluck to elope (“there are so few of us,” he said of his crew, anticipating a sea chase) or the maturity to make a formal offer to her noble father. He gave her presents instead: a gold ring, a wool cloak, and a belt of walrus ivory. Like many of the Gaelic women in the sagas, Thorgunna is a little uncanny. Fixing him with a cold stare, she warned, “You’ll wonder later on if you’ve made the right choice.”

“I’ll take my chances,” he said brightly, but Thorgunna had more to say: “Your child will be a boy. I’ll send him to you in Greenland as soon as he can travel. And I expect you’ll be as happy to see him come as I am to see you go.”

Unfortunately, the saga never tells us if the boy came or not.

 

About the time these stories were being written down in Iceland, the most popular tales in France and Britain were those of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Chretien de Troyes wrote the romance Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart in the late 1100s. In it, the beautiful Queen Guenevere is kidnapped and Sir Lancelot must ride to her rescue. Once at the castle, he convinces the kidnapper to behave honorably by returning the queen unsullied to King Arthur, and they all have supper and go to bed. Then, Sir Lancelot sneaks into the queen’s room and they have sex (not for the first time). They are found out, and the rest of the tale involves the tangle of lies and trials and duels needed to clear the queen’s name. It remains for a later writer to suggest that Guenevere be burned at the stake for adultery.

Robert de Boron, writing in the early 1200s, however, has just such a scene in his three-part romance about the quest for the Holy Grail. A young and pious maiden abandons herself to despair after her father loses his fortune, and a demon corrupts her. When her subsequent pregnancy reveals itself, she is jailed for refusing to identify her lover, and is to be burned at the stake when her child reaches eighteen months (and presumably no longer needs a mother). Fortunately, that child is the precocious Merlin, who goes to court as his mother’s lawyer and proves that the judge himself is illegitimate and therefore unfit to sit the bench. Case dismissed.

Characters akin to the two lusty Icelandic witches, Geirrid and Katla, might appear in the Arthurian romances, but the honorable saga women—like Thurid, Thorgunna of the Hebrides, and Oddny Island-Candle—are in a different class altogether from Queen Guenevere and Merlin’s mother. For one thing, they couldn’t care a whit if everyone knew who they were sleeping with, before or after marriage. For another, in all cases, it’s the man and not the woman or her child who is punished for “fooling around.” If she had lived in the Iceland of the sagas, Queen Guenevere could have enjoyed her love affair with Lancelot as openly as Thurid did hers with Bjorn, leaving it to her husband to challenge the hero to a fight if he didn’t like it. Or she could have sued for divorce. One saga wife left her husband because he was impotent and didn’t “satisfy” her. Another didn’t give her reasons. She just walked out, dumping her husband’s clothes in the urine barrel so he couldn’t chase after her. Both women got back their dowries, which was a substantial sum, often the value of a farm.

Virginity and illegitimacy were also nonissues (as they’remain in present-day Iceland). Olaf the Peacock, one of the richest and most powerful men in the sagas, was illegitimate, but no one would dare tell him he was unfit to be a judge because of it. In general, bastards were treated the same as the rest of a mans brood. When Njal’s illegitimate son was killed one night, his mother rode to Njal’s house and woke him up, shouting, “Get out of my rival’s bed and bring that woman and her sons, too.” She led them to where the boy lay dead. While the men were muttering about who might have done the deed, Njal’s wife remarked, “You men are ridiculous. You run off and kill someone over next to nothing, yet when something happens that cries out for vengeance, you stand around talking it over.” Duly chastened, her sons ride off to avenge the death of their half-brother.

In a romance like the King Arthur tales, a young woman is “occupied” throughout most of the plot with protecting her virginity, “her principal claim to an identity,” saga scholar Robert Kellogg noted at a conference in Reykjavik in 1999. A young saga woman, by contrast, “is far more straightforward and grown up than this, with a sure sense of who she is that is quite independent of any subtleties of anatomy.” Thorgunna of the Hebrides was in no danger of being burned at the stake, only of being burned in love.

Why do saga women have more sexual freedom than their counterparts in Arthurian romance? Scholars muse that women were more highly prized in Viking Iceland because they were rare. If Iceland was settled by Viking bands disgruntled with the king of Norway, there might not have been enough young women to go around. Yet a wife was essential to running a farm. There were certain things no self-respecting Viking man would do, such as weaving or sewing. No man would milk a ewe or make cheese. No Viking would cook, unless aboard ship, and even then it was considered demeaning. Without a woman (wife, mother, sister, or daughter), a man could not be king of his own hill. The wife taught the children their duties and obligations, which required an exact knowledge of family ties and degrees of kinship—this is what the dying Bjorn suggested young Kolli ask his mother about. (Kolli immediately put down his sword and walked away. There is no shame worse than being a father-killer.) The wife, in many sagas, determined when blood-money would be accepted for a man’s death, and when the killing demanded revenge instead. She hired and fired servants and was in charge of the food—preserving it, preparing it, and sharing it out. In those years when winter lingered and supplies dwindled, the wife decided who starved. The wife made the farm’s only marketable product—cloth—and she may also have done the selling, which, in a land with no towns, meant bargaining one-on-one with the captain or crew of a trading ship from Norway. In the grave of a wealthy wife in Kornsa, Iceland, dated to Viking times, was found a set of copper scales to weigh money, alongside the more usual womanly goods: kettle, shears, and cooking spit of iron; a comb; some brooches and beads; tweezers, a knife, and a bronze bell; her dog and her horse.

In Iceland, as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, love was not a prerequisite for marriage. Marriage was a social arrangement, a merger of two families, a matter of economics. Most marriages were arranged, and the girl had little or no say in it. Yet most marriages turned out like Oddny Island-Candle’s: She was content; she had eight children and a fine, rich farm. “People thought things had turned out even better for her than if she’d married Bjorn,” the saga says. Then Bjorn came home, and she learned that she had been deceived. The moral of the story, for this and many other sagas, is that a marriage founded on trickery or coercion can lead to chaos, and whole families—a whole society—can come crashing down because of one unhappy wife.

 

This pattern is most clearly seen in Njal’s Saga, the one saga almost everyone in Iceland knows, it having been required reading in grammar school for generations. It was popular in the Middle Ages, too: There are more manuscript copies of Njal’s Saga in existence than of any of the other sagas. From a historian’s point of view, it is the best. Unfortunately, Njal’s Saga is also the most misogynistic of the major sagas. Whereas the sexy aggressiveness of other saga women is simply magnificent, that of Hallgerd Long-Legs, the central female figure in Njal’s Saga, has an evil sheen to it. She is petty. She is also hungry, literally and metaphorically. She is a woman of power who doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.

As a girl she was outraged at being married without her consent. As a young wife, she was wasteful and extravagant. Once she went so far as to call her husband stingy. He slapped her face—and was killed for it by her foster-father, whom Hallgerd then sent to hide out with a wizard known for brewing up wild storms. Her beloved second husband was also killed for slapping her, but this time she avenged him, sending her foster-father to his own death.

Following those two marriages, Hallgerd lived as a widow for fourteen years, running her own farm and raising her daughter. Then she met Gunnar of Hlidarendi. Gunnar was the best catch in Iceland—handsome, tall, accomplished, rich. He asked for her hand. Her uncle tried to talk him out of it. “It’s not an even match,” he said. “You’re a fine, capable man, but she’s rather a mixed bag, to be honest.”

When Gunnar defended Hallgerd, her uncle said, “I can see you’re madly in love. You’ll just have to face what comes.”

Most people think Njal’s Saga is about the close friendship between Gunnar, the man of action, and Njal, the wise negotiator. Or about the conversion of Iceland to Christianity and the changes it brought. Or about the conflict between law and justice in a land with no king. All of these themes are important. But there would be no saga, no tragedy, without Hallgerd’s unhappiness. Gunnar treats her as a pretty toy: His mother wields the power, running the household while Hallgerd gossips and flirts with the farmhands (who prove their devotion by killing people for her). Every decision Hallgerd makes, her husband undercuts.

At an autumn feast, Hallgerd and Njal’s wife, Bergthora, had a spat over who should sit in the seat of honor. Bergthora placed her young daughter-in-law there, instead of Hallgerd. “What do you take me for, a hornkerling?” said Hallgerd, meaning an old hag shoved off into a corner. Stung, she insulted Bergthora by making fun of Njal’s lack of a beard.

Said Bergthora, referring to Hallgerd’s first marriage, “Your own husband had a beard, I’m told, when you had him killed.”

Hallgerd roared for revenge, and Gunnar jumped up from the table. “You’re not making a fool out of me,” he told his wife. “I’m going home.”

Hallgerd soon had one of Bergthora’s slaves killed. Bergthora retaliated. When Gunnar told Hallgerd to stop antagonizing his friends, she answered, “Trolls take your friends.” Njal and Gunnar settled the six killings with blood-money, but their friendship was strained. One tight year, Gunnar tried to buy food from another neighbor—not Njal—and was rebuffed. Hallgerd sent a man to steal some cheese and burn down the neighbor’s storehouse. When the theft came to light, Gunnar slapped Hallgerd in the face.

“I’ll remember that,” she said.

The cheese feud led to Gunnar being outlawed from Iceland for three years. When his horse stumbled on the way to the ship, Gunnar leaped off and, looking back at his farm, spoke the most influential lines in all the Icelandic sagas—lines that awakened the independence movement in the nineteenth century and resulted in the country’s break with Denmark: “Fair are the hillsides, so fair as I have never seen them before, the pale meadows and just-mown hayfields. I am going home and I will never leave again.”

Gunnar’s enemies surrounded his house. He held them off until his bowstring broke. “Give me two locks of your hair, Hallgerd, and make me a bowstring.”

“Have you forgotten that time you slapped me?”

“Everyone has his own claim to fame. I won’t ask again.”

The saga is only half over when Gunnar dies. Hallgerd is seen once more, trading insults with Njal’s sons. The Njalssons are eventually trapped by their enemies in their burning house. Given permission to flee the flames, Njal chose to die with his sons, and Bergthora to stand by her man.

If The Saga of Eirik the Red took up three hundred pages in a modern paperback translation, as does Njal’s Saga, instead of only thirty, we might have an image of Gudrid the Far-Traveler to match that of Hallgerd Long-Legs. Instead we can only see Gudrid mirrored in other saga women. For instance, like Hallgerd, Gudrid is described as a skörungur, a word translators have serious trouble with—although the saga-writer clearly thinks it’s a compliment. In modern Icelandic, the word means a fireplace poker. Concentrating on what a fireplace poker does, William Morris in the 1890s came up with “a very stirring woman.” And Hallgerd does stir things up, mostly trouble. Yet a man labeled a skörungur Morris called “a shaper” or “a leader.” Other early translators turned a female “poker” into “brave-hearted,” “high-spirited,” “noble,” “of high mettle,” “fine,” “superior,” “of great magnificence,” and “a paragon of a woman.” They might have done better to think what a poker looks like. For skörungur does, in the end, have to do with manhood. The root skör means an edge, like the edge of a sword.

Examine, for instance, a more likable skörungur: Gudrun the Fair, heroine of Laxdaela Saga. Many of the male characters from Njal’s Saga—such as Hallgerd’s father and uncle—appear in Laxdaela Saga, recognizably themselves. Yet the female characters in this second saga are so strong and admirable that some readers suspect the story was written by a woman in response to Njal’s Saga. We read of Unn the Deep-Minded, who emigrated from Scotland with all her kin, claimed a chunk of land “as big as a man’s,” parceled it out to her followers, and lived out her life as a chieftain in all but name, marrying off her grandchildren to make alliances. There is Melkorka, sold as a slave to Hallgerd Long-Legs’s father, Hoskuld: Melkorka pretended to be a deaf-mute, revealing nothing. Not until she was caught speaking Irish to her son, Olaf the Peacock, did she admit she was the daughter of an Irish king. After her status as a princess came out, Hoskuld bought her a farm and set her up as an independent woman. Olaf married well and had five sons and three daughters. He offered to raise his half-brother’s son, Bolli, to mend fences in the family, and with that we come to the crux of the saga.

Bolli was handsome and talented—second only to Olaf’s own son, Kjartan. The two boys were best friends. Both fell in love with Gudrun the Fair, who had already been widowed twice when she met them. Gudrun loved Kjartan. Like every Icelandic boy his age, he decided to go to Norway to make a name for himself, and asked her to wait the usual three years for him. She suggested he take her abroad instead. He refused. She refused to promise to wait. Three years passed, and he didn’t come home. But Bolli did, full of tales of the impression Kjartan had made on the king’s beautiful sister.

Bolli was not “full of lies and deceit,” like the man who tricked Oddny Island-Candle; his crime was more on the order of wishful thinking. Still, while Kjartan was “talking” with the king of Norway’s sister, Bolli wooed and wed Gudrun. Then Kjartan returned home. His sister counseled him to “do the right thing” and make peace with his friend and cousin Bolli. She introduced Kjartan to a fine woman of good family, and Kjartan was soon happily married.

Gudrun became insanely jealous. Sometimes she thought Bolli had tricked her into marrying him. Other times she believed Kjartan had spurned her and, when he had come home and made light of her marriage, had insulted her. And indeed, he did insult her after a golden headdress he had given his wife (a gift from the princess intended for Gudrun) was stolen. Kjartan gathered his men and surrounded Gudrun’s house, forcing everyone to go to the bathroom inside for several days with no indoor privy. Gudrun arranged his death and then deeply regretted it. As she told her son many years later, “I was worst to the one I loved best.” This is where she surpasses Hallgerd and becomes a heroine.

But for none of these deeds is Gudrun called a skörungur. That comes on the occasion of her fourth marriage. At the urging of her staunch supporter, the chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, and with the agreement of her young sons, Gudrun betrothed herself to Thorkel Eyjolfsson, a wealthy trader and friend of the king of Norway. Gudrun had extensive landholdings and the backing of many men who had been loyal to her recently deceased father. Since her brothers were all exiled after killing Kjartan, Gudrun’s husband would wield the influence of a chieftain.

As a mark of her power in the relationship, Gudrun insisted on holding the wedding at her own farm, bearing the cost herself. Among the 160 wedding guests, however, her bridegroom Thorkel recognized a man who had killed one of his friends. Thorkel grabbed the criminal and was about to put him to death when Gudrun stood up from her place at the women’s table, brushed her fancy linen headdress out of her eyes, and called to her men, “Rescue my friend Gunnar and let nothing stand in your way!”

As the saga so nicely understates it, “Gudrun had a much bigger force. Things turned out differently than expected.”

Before anyone could draw a sword, Snorri of Helgafell turned to Thorkel and laughed. “Now you can see what a skörungur Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

What quality is Chieftain Snorri admiring? Translators from 1960 to 2002 have called Gudrun and her saga sisters “exceptional,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” “determined,” “forceful,” “capable,” “brave,” “of strong character,” “one to be reckoned with,” and a woman “with a will very much her own.” These are better than the nineteenth century’s “high-mettled” and “very stirring,” but they’re still not quite right.

Jenny Jochens turns skörungur into “manly,” and the best equivalent is indeed man. Imagine if the situation were reversed. Gudrun spotted the killer of her friend on Thorkel’s side of the hall. Thorkel had the bigger fighting force. Chieftain Snorri, eager to make peace and see the wedding proceed (and it does), stepped in, laughed, and said to Gudrun, Now you can see what a man you’re marrying, when he gets the better of both of us.

A Viking’s character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to weak, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser or, in the Old Norse terms, hvatur to blauður. Hvatur, always a compliment, means “bold, active, vigorous.” It appears to be related to the verb hvetja, a cognomen for our verb “to whet”—to sharpen (a sword), to put a good, sharp skör (or edge) on it. Its opposite, blauður, always an insult, means “soft, weak.” It is, says the standard dictionary, “no doubt a variant of blautur,” which means “moist.” Hard, sharp, and vigorous versus soft, yielding, and moist. Think dirty and you’ve got it.

When Hallgerd Long-Legs called Njal “Old Beardless,” she was not saying he was funny-looking: She was saying he was blauður—weak, womanish, effeminate, cowardly, powerless, and craven. A loser.

And when Chieftain Snorri praised Gudrun the Fair as a skörungur, and a better one than both himself and Thorkel Eyjolfsson, he was locating her far out on the male end of the power spectrum. He was calling her a winner.

“This is a world,” says Carol Clover, “in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman.” There was only one standard, only one way to judge a person adequate or inadequate. “The frantic machismo” of the men in the Icelandic sagas, Clover concludes, suggests “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.”

The women who are mentioned in the sagas, the ones who are admired as skörungur, are the ones who have acquired that distinction. And Gudrid the Far-Traveler is one of them.

 

One of the delights in reading the sagas comes from untangling the connections among them. Gudrid the Far-Traveler would have known Gudrun the Fair—they were born about five years apart, and Gudrid’s cousin Yngvild was married to a son of Chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, Gudrun the Fair’s adviser.

At about the time of Gudrid’s birth on the south side of Snow Mountain’s Glacier, Thurid was “talking” with Bjorn (to the dismay of her fat merchant husband) on the north side. Next door, the two witches were competing for the same young man. In the south of Iceland, Hallgerd Long-Legs had just refused Gunnar two locks of her hair to twist into a bowstring, consigning him to his death. Eirik the Red had been outlawed for killing a neighbor (although Gudrid’s father and Chieftain Snorri’s foster-brothers had tried to negotiate a settlement for him), and had set off to find Greenland. And the parents of Grettir the Strong had just wed.

Gudrid’s adventures—moving to Greenland, marrying twice, exploring the New World, and settling down to raise her sons at Glaumbaer in northern Iceland—took ten or twelve years, from the year 1000 to about 1012. Just before Gudrid arrived in Greenland, Leif Eiriksson was in the Hebrides, acting like a cad with pregnant Thorgunna. While Gudrid was in Vinland, Grettir the Strong was outlawed for the first time. The year Gudrid settled at Glaumbaer, Njal and Bergthora and all their sons were burned to death in their house.

The sagas are silent about Gudrid’s years at Glaumbaer. We don’t know when her husband Karlsefni died, only that Snorri, their son born in Vinland, was still young. But during the last few years of Snorri’s minority, Grettir the Strong found a haven in a cave on the lands of Bjorn, lover of Oddny Island-Candle. (Bjorn encouraged him to eat Oddny’s husband’s sheep.) And Gudrun the Fair married for the fourth time, proving herself a skörungur at her wedding.

What had Gudrid done to earn that title? The harrowing voyage to Greenland proved her spirit, and both Vinland sagas illustrate she had a mind of her own. The séance in The Saga of Eirik the Red is one example. Gudrid’s father denounced it as pagan nonsense, we’re told, and refused to stay in the house while the ritual was going on. Fifteen-year-old Gudrid did not leave with him. When she alone of the women in the house was found to know the ritual songs, learned as nursery rhymes from her foster-mother, she had second thoughts about playing so prominent a role. She was Christian, and it would be against her religion to sing them in this context. The wise woman in charge gave her another way of looking at her dilemma: It would be un-Christian of her to refuse. She said, “You could be some help to the people here. You’d be no worse a woman for that.” Gudrid thought about it and made up her mind, without consulting her father.

She is similarly strong-minded following the death of her husband Thorstein, Eirik the Red’s son, when, after a winter alone with an older, unmarried man, she emerged with her independence intact. For she was a good catch when Karlsefni came to Greenland the next autumn. The wealthy Icelandic trader was taken with her immediately and married her, with her consent, at Christmas. There’s no hint that Karlsefni had an eye for exploration before he met Gudrid, but he fell for her and let her talk him into sailing west. And it is Karlsefni’s mother—who initially thought her son had not married well—who finally labels Gudrid a skörungur, a very stirring woman: bravehearted, high-spirited, remarkable, capable, bold, a winner, a survivor.