CHAPTER 4

The Terror from the North

One evening as Grettir was getting ready to go home, he saw fire blaze up from the end of the ness below Audun’s farm. Grettir asked what it could be. . . .

“There’s a barrow there,” said Audun, “where Kar the Old was buried. . . .”

“You were right to tell me,” said Grettir. “I’ll come in the morning, so have some tools ready. . . .”

Grettir broke open the mound, though it took a great deal of effort. He did not let up until he struck wood. By then it was well on toward evening. He broke through the wood. Audun tried to stop him from going into the barrow. Grettir told him to hold the rope. . . .

Grettir went into the mound. It was dark and the air was foul. He poked around to see how things were arranged. He found some horse bones, and then he bumped into a chair on which a man was seated. Gold and silver lay piled up there, and a chest full of silver was under the man’s feet. Grettir took the treasure and carried it to the rope. But before he could climb out of the barrow, he was seized fast. He dropped the treasure, and they grappled and wrestled with no holds barred . . . but finally the barrow-wight fell backward with a great crash. Audun let go of the rope and ran away, certain that Grettir was dead. Grettir now took his sword Jökulsnaut and cut off the barrow-wight’s head. He set it by his buttocks. Then Grettir went to the rope with the treasure and . . . climbed up hand over hand. He had tied the treasure to the rope, and drew it up after him.

—Grettir’s Saga

 

In 1995 I was on the Isle of Lewis in the outer Hebrides of Scotland, visiting an area that tradition links to Olaf the White, the Viking king of Dublin, whose failings as a war leader and a family man would shape Gudrid’s life. The windswept machair, a sandy, grassy mix of peat lands and sheep pasture, gave way on the west side of the island to buttressed cliffs and arcs of yellow beach. Small islands made a sheltered harbor big enough for a Viking fleet. A shallow river wound for a mile through tidal flats before reaching a gap between two headlands. The place was called Uig, from the Norse word for bay, vík, from which comes our word Viking.

The Lewis chessmen, a cache of ninety-three late-Viking Age chess pieces exquisitely carved out of walrus ivory, had been found here in 1831 when a cow fell into a hole. A grave had eroded out of a sand dune nearby in 1979, providing a pair of spectacular gilded-bronze “tortoise” brooches—examples of the massive oval ornaments that Viking women used every day, like buckles or safety pins, to clasp the shoulder straps of their gowns. Six more Viking graves, adults and children, were found near Uig in the early 1990s.

One day, as I was walking back to my lodging across the sands beside the turquoise-colored tidal lagoon, I spotted two oddly shaped hills on a headland. I asked my host if anyone had excavated them. “A postdoc from Glasgow poked into one last summer. She found the prow of a ship.” He added immediately, “It’s just a modern wreck covered with sand.” I wished I were more like Grettir the Strong: I would have asked to borrow a shovel and a rope.

For to understand Gudrid’s desire to go to Vinland—why sailing west off the edge of the known world seemed to her a reasonable thing to do—we need to know first how and why her ancestors left their own homes in the late 800s and created a new society in Iceland. Some of the answers were here, on the Hebrides and across the rough waters of the Minch on mainland Scotland. According to the sagas, Unn the Deep-Minded—a Norse chieftain’s daughter, and the discarded second wife of Olaf the White, king of Dublin—set sail for Iceland from one of these coves. Gudrid would have known the story of Unn the Deep-Minded as thoroughly as her own genealogy, for in Unn’s ship, fleeing from Scotland, was a Gaelic boy, Vifil, who was Gudrid’s grandfather. All her life, she would have kept Unn in mind as an example, a paragon of women.

To the Vikings, the Hebrides were the Hafborðey, the “Islands on the Edge of the Sea,” or they were the Southern Isles, being south of Shetland and the Orkneys on the direct sea route from Norway to Ireland. That voyage took about a month, with an island rest-stop each evening. Well before 841, when the Norse established a trading post at Dublin, the route had become routine, and the havens along the way were in friendly hands, known by Norse names. No one knows if the first Norse settlers married into native families, or found no one there, or drove them out: The Viking homesites that have been excavated in this part of the world show signs of all three approaches. In Orkney, archaeologists found a Viking building that had been erected on top of an earlier Gaelic house, but the artifacts inside—particularly a distinctive style of bone dress pin—remained Gaelic. In Caithness, on the Scottish mainland, there is no sign of any settlement for a century before the Vikings came. But in Uist, everything Gaelic was destroyed when the Norse arrived—evidence, said the archaeologists, “as conclusively in favor of conquest as we are ever likely to get.”

Anthropologist Agnar Helgason, on the other hand, finds “conquest” more likely closer to Norway—in Orkney—than as far south as Uist. Agnar, whom I met at DeCode Genetics in Reykjavik, compared the genes of modern people living in Scandinavia and the British Isles with those from the Shetlands, Orkneys, Hebrides, and Iceland. He found DNA markers, harmless mutations, that labeled a person “Norse” or “Gaelic.” Tracking these markers in the mitochondrial DNA (passed down from mother to daughter) and in the Y chromosome (father to son), he could tell from which side, sword or distaff, the mutations had come. Men and women in the Orkney Islands, he found, are 30 percent Norse. In the Hebrides, the men are 22 percent Norse, but the women are only 11 percent Norse. The Orkney Islands, Agnar concludes, were settled by Viking families. In the Southern Isles, Viking men at loose ends took Gaelic mates.

Whether or not the women were willing, the genes cannot say, but once the Vikings were in the islands, we can assume they acted as they had in Norway. They were loyal to their king and considered anything in another kingdom fair game. Given that the coast of Norway alone had seven or eight “kingdoms” in the 700s, that made for some fairly loose rules. Strandhögg—literally “beach strike”—was a common practice: A party of Norsemen would row over to the next fjord, run their lapstrake boats up onto the beach, round up the cattle, slaughter them, load the boat, and row home. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it in his classic History of the Vikings, “Robbing your richer neighbors was a simple way of redressing the injustices of nature.”

Sometimes these raids had aims other than cattle. Jones tells the story of Gudrod the Hunting King, who took a fancy to Asa, the daughter of another king in Norway. When his suit was refused, Gudrod gathered his men, descended on the kingdom, killed Asa’s father and brother, and “carried her off with much booty.” He then made her his queen. When their son was a year old, Queen Asa took her revenge: She furnished a servant boy with a weapon. “King Gudrod perished of a spear-thrust one dark evening,” writes Jones, “gross and full of beer.” The queen was not punished. Her son ruled both kingdoms in his time, and his son, Harald Fine-Hair, unified all of Norway’s many kingdoms into one—his—and curtailed the local practice of strandhögg.

Conveniently, Norse shipwrights had by then solved the puzzle of how to make their light and efficient rowing boats carry a sail. With a wider beam, a deeper keel, and more draft, these first true Viking ships were carrying parties of Norsemen to strandhögg on farther shores. In Queen Asa’s day, they made their infamous raids on the monasteries of Lindisfarne in northeastern England and the Holy Island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. They sacked churches in Wales, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. In 789 they were at Portland on the south coast of England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 792 says that “seagoing pagans with roaming ships” were harassing Kent, by the Straits of Dover. Vikings were plundering towns in France, Germany, and along the shores of the Baltic Sea in the early 800s, especially after the death of Charlemagne in 814, which left a power vacuum. By midcentury they had sacked Paris, Rouen, and Hamburg. They sailed south to Islamic Spain and sacked Seville (unwisely), then did the same to the Mediterranean port of Luna, which they mistook for Rome. They established bases in Russia along the routes to Constantinople (which they also attacked) and Baghdad.

They fought just as much among themselves. Vikings from Norway raided the shores of Denmark, and vice versa, while in the 850s, the “Black” Vikings drove the “White” Vikings out of Ireland (only to be evicted by that Olaf the White, king of Dublin, who married Unn the Deep-Minded).

 

That we can distinguish the Norwegians from the Danes from the Swedes (in order to say who gets credit for founding Dublin or Kiev or Normandy) in all this sacking is a fallacy, given the medieval penchant for using the names interchangeably. Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070, for instance, states helpfully: “The Danes and the Swedes, whom we call Norsemen . . .” That the monks throughout the Western world were chanting a furore Normannorum, libera nos Domine (“From the fury of the Norsemen, deliver us, O Lord!”) is equally a myth. The closest thing any manuscript expert has found—and they’ve looked most diligently—is ab incursione alienigenarum, libera nos Domine (“From the invasion of foreigners, deliver us, O Lord!”)

Even the famous entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle about the destruction of Lindisfarne in 793 never names names. It reads:

 

In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria and sadly affrighted the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine followed soon upon these signs, and a little after that in the same year on the ides of June the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.

 

That this entry, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, is universally classified as “history” and therefore more true—in spite of its fiery dragons—than such “literary sources” as the Icelandic sagas is a debate I won’t get into here. But the Vikings’ reputation in the modern mind as paragons of brutality does need some qualifying. They may have been the Terror from the North, but there were many terrors in those days, both heathen and Christian, foreign and native. The Hungarian invaders of Germany, Adam of Bremen writes, “were burning churches, butchering priests before the altars, and with impunity were slaying clerics and laymen indiscriminately or leading them into captivity.” The Irish Annals record at least thirty attacks on churches before the first Viking sailed “west over sea” from Norway; in 807 a fight between the monks of Cloufert and those of Cork ended in “an innumerable slaughter of the ecclesiastical men and superiors of Cork.” In 878, Pope John VIII excommunicated Count Bernard II of Toulouse for ravaging church property.

Nor were the Vikings unbeatable war machines. Caught off guard, they suffered from the same brutal treatment as did their victims. That unwise sacking of Seville? When the Muslims retook the city, they hanged all their prisoners, two hundred Norsemen, from palm trees. When the Vikings harried the coastline by Constantinople, the emperor sent Greek fireships to meet them. As Luidprand of Cremona wrote in the mid-900s, “The Greeks began to fling their fire around, and the Rusi”—yet another medieval name for Vikings—

 

seeing the flames threw themselves in haste from their ships, preferring to be drowned in the water than burned alive. Some sank to the bottom under the weight of their cuirasses and helmets . . . some caught fire even as they swam among the billows; not a man that day escaped save those who managed to reach the shore. . . . These were all beheaded.

 

In England, in 794, just a year after the raid on Lindisfarne, the Vikings had a stunning failure. They attacked the monastery of Tynemouth, but, says Simeon of Durham:

 

St. Cuthbert did not allow them to depart unpunished; for their chief was there put to death by the cruel Angles, and a short time afterward a violent storm shattered, destroyed, and broke up their vessels, and the sea swallowed up very many of them; some, however, were cast ashore and speedily slain without mercy.

 

The English had no compunction about killing Norse women and children, either. In 1002, shortly after paying a Viking horde 24,000 pounds of silver in so-called Danegeld (essentially a bribe to go away), King Aethelred II issued an edict that every Dane in the country was to be rounded up and killed on St. Brice’s Day (November 13). Historians have had some trouble believing that a civilized Christian king would define “Dane” to mean every man, woman, or child, craftsman or noble, merchant or homesteader, especially since by 1002 the Danes and all other Vikings were officially Christian. But in a royal charter issued a few years later, King Aethelred promises to pay for the rebuilding of the church in Oxford, England, which was burned by citizens pursuing Danes who “were to be destroyed by a most just extermination” and, “striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ.”

Among the murdered, according to the much later history of William of Malmesbury, was Gunnhild, the sister of King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark, and her son, “a youth of amiable disposition,” whom she watched die “transfixed with four spears.” Though modern historians doubt William’s account, it does seem as though Svein wanted revenge: He sent his army to ravage England during the next ten summers. In 1009 Oxford was leveled. By 1013 Svein was king of England. In 1018, when his son Knut the Great was proclaimed king of England and Denmark, the peace treaty was signed in Oxford. Knut ruled England until 1042, and there was only one other truly English king (Edward the Confessor) between him and the Norman Conquest in 1066. In the two battles that year that defined the future of England—at Stamford Bridge between Harald Hard-Rule of Norway and Harold Godwinsson of England, and at Hastings between Harold Godwinsson and William the Bastard (later known as William the Conqueror) of Normandy—both sides in each battle could claim Norse ancestry.

Still, the Norse legacy in the British Isles is mainly linguistic. Thousands of towns have Norse names like Derby, Kirby, Wadbister, Isbister, Winskill, Skaill, Laimiseadar, Lacsabhat, Heylipoll, and Kirkapoll, while from Norse the English language gained such words as egg, ugly, ill, smile, knife, fellow, husband, birth, death, cast, take, kettle, steak, leg, skin, lost, mistake, law, and brag. Not to mention ransack.

 

Why did Viking hordes suddenly descend on the Western world (and some of the Eastern) between 793 and 1066? The smart answer is because they could: They owned the best ships on the seas. But what was driving them? What inspired their technology?

Modern historians have not come up with any better explanations than did the medieval monks trying to see God’s purpose in the burning of their churches. According to Adam of Bremen:

 

On account of the roughness of its mountains and the immoderate cold, Norway is the most unproductive of all countries. . . . Poverty has forced them thus to go all over the world and from piratical raids they bring home in great abundance the riches of the lands. In this way they bear up under the unfruitfulness of their own country.

 

He adds, charmingly, that “since accepting Christianity”—which came to Norway in the late 900s—“they have already learned to love the truth and peace and to be content with their poverty.” Dudo of Normandy, writing about fifty years before Adam, in 1020, thought the problem was population pressure caused by lack of morals (as well as land). The Vikings, he says:

 

. . . insolently abandon themselves to excessive indulgence, live in outrageous union with many women and there in shameless and unlawful intercourse breed innumerable progeny. Once they have grown up, the young quarrel violently with their fathers and grandfathers, or with each other, about property . . .

 

Those that are driven away fight in other lands for a place “where they can live in continual peace,” he concludes. The Icelandic sagas also explain the Norse exodus as a response to violent quarrels “about property,” not within families, but between political factions. When Queen Asa’s grandson, Harald Fine-Hair, determined to become king of all Norway, he dispossessed a number of other kings and chieftains and noblemen. Some went to Denmark, some to Sweden and farther east. Others became sea-kings, hoping to outlast Harald and retake their old estates (without luck: Harald reigned a long time, from about 870 to 930). Others went to the British Isles or took a chance on the empty new island in the west: Iceland.

Ketil Flat-Nose, the father of Unn the Deep-Minded, was one of those who sailed “west over sea,” taking the sea route through the Southern Islands toward Ireland. “He knew the country well,” one saga says, “for he had raided there extensively.” It isn’t clear when or why he quarreled with Olaf the White, king of Dublin, but Unn the Deep-Minded might have been the “peace cow” that brought these two Viking sea-kings to terms; her marriage to Olaf was certainly not a love match. A few years later, Olaf put her aside to marry the daughter of Kenneth mac Alpin, king of the Scots.

So it was not to Olaf that Unn turned when their son Thorstein the Red died in about the year 900, leaving her in charge of his six daughters and one son. According to the Icelandic Book of Settlements, which was written at the same time as the sagas but is considered to be more “historical”:

 

Thorstein became a warrior-king. He joined forces with Sigurd the Rich, son of Eystein the Chatterer, and they conquered Caithness and Sutherland, Ross and Moray—altogether more than half of Scotland. Thorstein became king of the Scots. But they betrayed him, and he died in battle. Unn was in Caithness when she learned of Thorstein’s death. She had a ship built in secret, and when it was ready . . . Unn went in search of Iceland. She had in her ship twenty free-born men.

 

By this manly act, an elderly grandmother set in motion the events that make up many of the Icelandic sagas.

Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid’s husband, traces his lineage to Unn the Deep-Minded, as do Hallgerd Long-Legs, Olaf the Peacock, Chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, and three of Gudrun the Fair’s lovers (Bolli, Kjartan, and Thorkel Eyjolfsson), along with many, many more saga characters. The Book of the Icelanders, the first history of Iceland, written in the early 1100s, calls Unn the Deep-Minded one of the four chief founders of Iceland.

Visiting the Hebrides, I could see at once why Unn had fled. The bleak, open landscape so close to enemy territory left nowhere to hide, nowhere for a cast-off Viking queen and her royal grandchildren to live in freedom from fear—the reason Karlsefni would give, a hundred years later, for leaving Vinland. Walking that landscape, I understood, too, why Iceland would have felt so homey to Unn and her shipmates once they reached it. In both places, the sky is the element in which people live. The views are immense—or shut off by fog. The wind is constant. Life and death hang on the balance of frost and sun. But what I most wanted to know about Unn the Deep-Minded could not be found here, nor in the histories written by monks and so painstakingly dissected by modern historians. What I wanted to know was this: What did she take in her ship when she sailed to Iceland about the year 900? What did she wear? I had a possible answer only because someone had eyed an oddly shaped hill and imagined that something was buried in it. Like Grettir the Strong, he got a shovel and started digging.

 

The hill was in Norway, on the farm of Oseberg in the Oslo Fjord. Eighteen feet high and over 70 feet long, it was known as the “Foxes’ Mound.” In 1903 the owner of the property took a shovel to it. Unlike Grettir, he paused when he hit wood. The piece he pulled out was elaborately carved in a twisted, fluid, snakelike style. It occurred to the farmer that he might have something more significant here than a fox’s den. Twenty years earlier, a mound on the farm of Gokstad along the same fjord had produced the grave of a Viking chieftain, complete with a splendid ship. The farmer at Oseberg took the bit of wood to the director of the museum at the University of Oslo, who agreed: They had a ship burial on their hands.

Oseberg, says historian Judith Jesch, is “undoubtedly the richest and most sumptuous burial known from the Viking Age.” The two skeletons found in the ship were both women. Because the name Oseberg could mean Asa’s Fortress, the burial has been linked with Queen Asa, who revenged so completely her rape by the Hunting King. Tree-ring analysis of the wooden burial chamber, along with pollen found inside, tell us that the women died in the autumn of 834. (The ship was built in 820.) But we have no firm dates for Asa—the story was written down hundreds of years after she died—so no one can say for sure whether this was her grave.

Nor can we tell if the queen was the young skeleton or the old one, whose feet were swollen with arthritis. One or the other, scholars believe, was a servant who chose (or was chosen) to accompany her queen to the Otherworld. Neither skeleton was found in the burial chamber amidships. The large, carved bed, made comfy with blankets and feather pillows and eiderdown, and surrounded by wooden chests and a chair, lay empty. Someone like Grettir—someone who knew exactly what he was looking for—had dug into the mound long before the farmer. A hole had been cut into the chamber’s roof. One of the three ironbound oak chests had been smashed open and emptied. The bodies had been hauled down the length of the ship to the entrance shaft that the robber had dug. There, where perhaps the light was better, they were stripped of their jewels and the old woman’s right hand cut off, presumably for its rings. No royal treasure remained when archaeologists uncovered the Oseberg ship. But just as Grettir had no interest in the horse bones or the chair the barrow-wight sat in, the Oseberg robber left behind the very things that give us the greatest insight into the lifestyle of a Viking queen.

The Vikings believed that a queen would be a queen in the next world, and a slave would remain a slave. (That Christianity declared all souls equal was one reason common people were attracted to the new faith.) So that the queen’s rank would be recognized, however, she needed to arrive in the realm of the dead in style. Thus the great dragonship in which she was buried, with its high coiled prow and the glorious carving all down its sides. Despite its beauty, it was a working ship, with thirty oars, a bailer, a sail (small bits of it remained, the ropes still attached), and a gangplank. Arne Emil Christensen, who directs the museum that was built around the Oseberg and Gokstad ships, calls it the oldest true Viking ship, the prototype of the rowing boat with a sail, the typical longship for raiders in the early 800s. Such a vessel could have made it to Ireland, in the summer, if the sailors were lucky with the weather.

But what if the queen’s last journey was not on water? Buried with the queen were a spoke-wheeled cart and four sleighs, all richly carved, and teams of horses and oxen enough to pull them all. The queen also had her saddle horse, with its tack, and two dogs on a leash.

Unn the Deep-Minded, fleeing to Iceland with her family seventy-some years later, would presumably have taken fewer animals (and those alive and probably pregnant), and she would not necessarily have had the sleighs on hand (they were not as useful in Scotland, where the snow cover was much less, as in Norway). But the rest of the gear packed for the queen’s death journey would just as likely have been on Unn’s ship and, in another hundred years, on the ship that took Gudrid to Vinland.

Many of the queen’s belongings were made of wood, exuberantly carved with beasts and faces and interlaced lines—and all crushed into muddy splinters when found. That this treasure can be seen, now, in the cathedral-like museum at Bygdoy, Norway, is a credit to the patience of the archaeologists in the last century who puzzled it back together. Besides the furniture in the burial chamber, they recovered two beds that could be taken apart and stacked for travel; two tents to set up for overnight stops; three large wooden barrels and several smaller ones, some sheathed with brass (probably used for serving ale); a bucket of wild apples and another, with a lockable lid, full of weaving tools; a kitchen stool; two iron cauldrons, one with a tripod; a kettle carved out of soapstone; an iron frying pan; a carved wooden trough more than six feet long and three smaller ones, one of which held bread dough; five dippers, four dishes, and some wooden spoons; more spoons made of horn; a carving knife and two choppers with wooden handles; and a bundle of spices, including cumin, horseradish, and mustard seed. Another leather bundle held cannabis—hemp seed, grown for rope—while a small box held seeds of woad, a plant that makes a blue dye. Some of these things were found in the oak chests. One chest was four feet long and 16 inches high, and decorated with iron plates and tin-headed tacks. It had an iron padlock, whose key the queen would have worn on a chain.

In addition to kitchenware, the queen’s heirs had sent her and her servant off with four looms on which to weave their otherworldly clothes, plus a set of square tablets made of antler, for braiding the elaborately patterned ribbons the Vikings favored as borders and hems. The queen’s tablet loom still held the threads of her last pattern, as if she might pick it up in a moment and finish her work. She also had scissors and spindles and flax beaters (for making linen), a yarn winder, and two yarn reels. Two carved wooden whistles and a bone comb are all that remained in a set of small caskets and boxes. Before the robbers came, the queen had most likely been well provisioned with trinkets and jewelry to buy her way out of difficulty.

This attitude toward death—that it was a mirror world in which a woman would need horn spoons and a frying pan, and enjoy weaving ribbons or playing the whistle—changed as Christianity entered the Viking world. The Church did not forbid grave goods (though it did ban the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and servants), but household furnishings were not necessary in the Christian heaven. The Christian dead were washed, wrapped naked in a linen shroud, and buried in a coffin, facing east—leaving us with much less information about who they were and how they lived. Happily, though, Christians also were never cremated. If this was why the Oseberg ship wasn’t burned, we’ll never know; similar ships were set on fire before being covered with earth. On the Ile de Groix off the coast of Brittany is a ship burial every bit as rich as Oseberg, with two male skeletons, one old, one young. It was torched. All we have to look at are bits of burned bone (including a six-sided die made of walrus ivory and a set of twelve gaming pieces), scraps of blackened metal, and one gold ring.

From Oseberg, we have not only wooden whistles and brass-covered buckets, but cloth. What did a Viking queen wear? Wool and silk and linen. Light, supple fabrics that clung to her form and draped elegantly, woven of several different textures in thread counts as high as 150 threads per inch. Norwegian archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad writes in a book on the Oseberg queen that some of the Oseberg wool fragments were “so fresh and bright it is hard to understand that they’ve spent over a thousand years in the ground.” Most, however, were caked together into stiff clumps and flakes made of many layers of different fabrics. Having teased these scraps apart, Ingstad found a “lovely red fabric” woven alternately of two different threads, one thick, one thin. “This must have been done on purpose, as it has given this fabric a beautiful muslin-like effect.” It was once appliqued onto another fine red tabby-woven wool; the gown had accents of silk, and all the seams were adorned with fine chains of embroidery. The other woman’s gown was bright blue.

Based on the evidence of other burials, under their wool gowns the women would have worn an ankle-length shift or chemise of finely pleated linen, pinned at the throat with a small bronze or silver brooch. Linen, being made of plant fibers, decays more readily than wool, and little of it remains. But traces of linen are often preserved pressed into the backs of brooches, where contact with the metal has protected them. Archaeologists have also deduced that the Oseberg queen wore a linen headdress—impressed into a clump of feathers on the bed was the shadow of a lacy, open weave. The linen could have been white and glossy; linen smoothers have been found in many other Norse women’s graves. Made by flattening a single fist-sized droplet of dark green glass, these smoothers were still used in Norway and Scotland in the nineteenth century instead of irons.

Some idea of the style of the gowns can also be learned from other finds. For many years, archaeologists thought a Viking woman’s wool overdress was always sleeveless, like a pinafore or jumper, the straps held up with two “tortoise” brooches. These brooches are the most common piece of jewelry in female graves throughout the Viking world, from Iceland to the Volga. They are found resting on the skeleton’s collarbones, not on the breasts—they were not nipple caps, like the bronze bustiers that costumers for Wagnerian operas favor. The brooches are oval, convex, intricately patterned, just like a small turtle’s shell. They were mass-produced, made of bronze using the lost-wax process (many broken clay molds have been found in Viking towns). For wealthier clients, the bronze was gilded, or etched with acid to make it silver-colored, or both. Silver wire was sometimes applied to highlight the pattern. “The overall appearance of these brooches must have been quite ‘baroque’ by modern standards,” says Michele Hayeur-Smith, who teaches “The Vikings and Their Art” at the Rhode Island School of Design. Gaudy gilded brooches “probably said a lot about the status, wealth, or family histories of the women who wore them.”

The Oseberg queen wears no oval brooches. They could have been taken by the robbers, but Anne Stine Ingstad thinks not—as if a grave robber today would cut off suit buttons. But if the queen didn’t wear a pinafore dress, what did she wear? Among the fabrics in the ship were scraps of tapestry. Many women are depicted, but only one is without a shawl concealing the details of her dress. She is large and prominent, leaning against a horse, and is dressed in what Ingstad considers queenly garb: “She is wearing a tight, full-length skirt. The upper body garment is another color, basically a faded red. This too is tight fitting, with long, tight sleeves. Around her waist she is wearing a wide, patterned belt. It is possible that we have here the Viking Age costume of the higher social classes. This costume seems strangely modern, but with a shawl over it, it would probably look just like the other costumes of these tapestries.”

Ingstad began studying the Oseberg fabrics in the 1970s. In 1979 archaeologists drained the harbor at Hedeby, a famous Viking market town from the early 800s. (After the Slavs destroyed Hedeby in 1066, the nearby city of Schleswig, Germany, was founded.) A crossroads of Danes, Frisians, Saxons, and Slavs, Hedeby is mentioned in many medieval travel accounts. In the early 1900s, archaeologists rediscovered its location; by the 1990s, with less than 5 percent of the town uncovered, the tally of artifacts was up to 340,000, not counting bones. In the mud of the harbor, the workers discovered bundles of torn-up clothing, well preserved by the water; they had apparently been used as rags for wrapping trade goods or for tarring ships. When pieced back together, the women’s garments seemed to justify Ingstad’s vision: They were tailored at the waist to emphasize the woman’s curves. Some were long-sleeved, with cuffs or plackets in a contrasting pattern or color. That some of these colors were bright—not the muted earth tones of natural wool—was discovered at York in England, when the Viking craftsmen’s quarters at Coppergate were excavated in the 1980s. Subjecting tiny samples of cloth to absorption spectrophotometry and thin-layer chromatography, Penelope Walton of the British company Textile Research Associates found that it had been dyed with the plants madder, woad, and weld to produce brilliant reds, greens, blues, yellows, and blacks. Analyzing cloth from other digs, Walton has found purples (made from lichens) and rich browns (from tannin; a pile of walnut shells excavated at Hedeby was probably meant for dye).

As Ingstad saw in the Oseberg tapestry, most women wore a cloak or a shawl for warmth. But at Hedeby were also found bits of a long-sleeved, ankle-length coat made of loden twill, a heavy wool fulled with a hairy nap to repel rain. The coat was quilted with down and trimmed with embroidered ribbons. Other wool coats found elsewhere were lined and trimmed with fur—or fake fur, a wool cloth with lengths of unspun wool knotted into it, giving it the texture of a shag rug. The sagas make several mentions of rain-shedding cloaks made out of this shaggy cloth.

She would have had long hair, the Viking queen in the Oseberg ship, loosely knotted at the nape and falling in loops and coils, as do the images carved on the sleds. Silver amulets found elsewhere, of Valkyries or goddesses, show the same hairstyle.

And she would have worn at least one bead necklace. In nearly every Viking grave, male or female, rich or poor—except Oseberg—archaeologists have found beads. Amber beads were favored by Freyja, the goddess of love. (Amber commonly washed up on the shores of the Baltic Sea.) But most beads were glass. They came in blue, green, yellow, red, or clear, in multicolor stripes or the mosaic-like millefiori, made by twisting glass rods of different colors together and then slicing them. The glass itself may have been recycled from broken drinking vessels, a famous trade-good of the Rhineland. Small cubes of brightly colored glass covered with gold leaf have been found near Viking bead-making workshops (marked by tiny blobs and threads of glass around a hearth); these tesserae were originally meant for Italian church windows. Strung along with the glass beads are charms and pendants and often silver coins. One famous necklace found in a Viking grave beside the market town of Birka in Sweden has been called “a microcosm of the town’s business interests.” Interspersed among its glass beads and circlets of silver wire are beads of rock crystal and the reddish gemstone carnelian; two pendants in the style of the Khazars, who lived along the Volga River; a fragment of an Arabian silver bowl; an English book-mount; two round pendants and a tiny silver chair (origin unknown); and a silver coin from the reign of Emperor Theophilus of Byzantium (829–842). Coins on other necklaces come from faraway Samarkand, Tashkent, and Baghdad, as well as from nearby Germany and England. It’s likely Queen Asa bore such sparkles on her neck, and the grave robbers relieved her of them. It’s likely, too, that the ironbound chest the robbers broke open was stuffed with silver coins, like the one Grettir the Strong fought the barrow-wight for.

 

Most Vikings didn’t get a send-off as lavish as Queen Asa’s, especially not those who went west. We find their graves not by poking into odd-shaped hills, but by chance. The only complete Viking cemetery in Iceland—with both Christians and pagans buried in the same area—was found in 2002 by a farmer with a backhoe.

Keldudalur, like many Icelandic farms these days, includes the tourist trade in its livelihood. It has thirty horses, fifty milk cows, ninety other cows, 160 sheep, and two summerhouses sleeping from fourteen guests (in beds) to thirty (on camping mattresses on the floor), breakfast optional. A “News” button on the farm’s home page leads to photos of prizewinning stallions and rams. There’s no mention that Keldudalur is also the site of a Viking Age graveyard, where one of the earliest Icelandic churches was built adjacent to an abandoned longhouse. It might seem tacky, since the church, graves, and longhouse are now under one of the guesthouses.

Digging the foundation for that house in August 2002, the farmer, Toti, saw a skull. By the time the third one rolled into his backhoe’s bucket he realized he had trouble.

Gudny Zoega, the archaeologist from the Glaumbaer museum, purses her lips and glares, just thinking about it. “The third skull, you know.” It was Gudny down on her knees in the mud that autumn, trying to prevent the skeletons from being further damaged by the elements. “It was raining, it was getting dark—it was not really ideal. We didn’t see much of anything related to the structure of the cemetery itself that year. We didn’t see the wall, or the church. It was a rescue operation. Unfortunately, that’s way too often the reason for excavating bones.”

She and her assistants dug thirty-four skeletons out of Keldudalur in two rainy weeks in 2002. They rescued an additional twenty, along with mapping the longhouse, church, and circular churchyard wall, in 2003, when Toti wanted to start landscaping around his new summerhouse.

“If you’re thinking of Gudrid and her time period,” Gudny told me, “these people would be her contemporaries.”

Gudny, whose speciality is forensic anthropology, would spend the next several years learning what secrets they had to tell, for the level of preservation of these bones—even those of infants—was excellent. All had been buried before 1300; most were found under the shiny white tephra layer from the eruption of the volcano Hekla in 1104. By the style of burial, almost all were Christian. They were buried in coffins in neat rows around the foundation of a small wooden chapel: men to the south, women to the north, infants tucked up right beneath the eaves of the church. None had grave goods.

A nearby hill contained three or four pagan graves. The backhoe had ruined the most complete, an old woman buried with her horse and greyhound. “We got her skull and some bones from the excavator,” Gudny said. To learn if she was related to those buried as Christians, Gudny has sent teeth from several skeletons off to a DNA lab.

The other pagan graves had been damaged much earlier. One was missing all but the heel bones. “You had the grave, nicely shaped, with a couple of beads in it and some horse bones, but only the heel bones of the skeleton.” The rest may have been moved into the churchyard when the Icelanders converted.

Another skeleton lay in an intriguing—and eerie—position: the skull next to the pelvis. Placing the head beside the buttocks is the traditional way to incapacitate a witch, or, as Grettir’s fight with the barrow-wight shows, to keep a ghost you’ve just robbed from coming after you. Resting on the skeleton was a delicate dragon-shaped bone pin.

This pin and three glass beads are all the grave goods Gudny found at Keldudalur. From the evidence of its 300-plus other pagan burials, Iceland never had a queenly burial like that at Oseberg. According to Laxdaela Saga, Unn the Deep-Minded was buried in a ship beneath a mound with “a load of treasure.” The more no-nonsense Book of Settlements, however, claims that Unn was “a devout Christian” and was buried at the high-tide line because “she didn’t wish to lie in unconsecrated ground.” Either way, we haven’t found her grave. The four ship burials found in Iceland so far were not dragonships but rowboats. Instead of richly carved sleighs to carry them to the Otherworld, most Icelanders had only their saddle horse, with their dog for a guide. The most lavish Icelandic burial was that of the merchant wife at Kornsa with her set of copper scales and her six-sided bronze bell, identical to bells from Viking graves in England and Scotland. A typical Viking woman’s burial, re-created under glass in the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik, is pathetically poor. A bronze trinket at her throat. A serviceable straight pin to close her cloak. Some scraps of iron that might have been a knife, and three large clamshells that she may have used as spoons.

Given the simple way they buried their dead, Orri Vesteinsson of the Archaeological Institute of Iceland concludes that the country’s founders had nothing to lose in pulling up stakes and moving to an empty land. The saga accounts give some sense of this. They tell of families like Unn the Deep-Minded’s, stranded in a hostile land, or warriors who found themselves on the losing side of a battle with Harald Fine-Hair or another ambitious king. Some had time to sell their land for silver, to fill their ships with buckets and looms and frying pans, to gather their livestock and children and friends, their servants and slaves, and to set a course for the west. Others were overseas when their Norwegian estates were confiscated.

The idea in the sagas that Iceland’s settlers were Norwegian noblemen—while not wholly wishful thinking, given the cost of such a venture—is not backed up by archaeology. Archaeologists have found little of the “imposing architecture, artwork and expensive consumables, rich burials, and evidence of large-scale planning” that Orri suggests they should if Iceland’s settlers had wealth or power. Queen Asa’s lifestyle was simply not possible in Iceland, where there was no timber to manufacture her ship and sleds and furniture and household goods. Nor could the Icelanders make even the simplest type of bronze tortoise brooch to fasten a womans pinafore dress. Assuming the craftsmen had a source of bronze (from old or stolen jewelry, perhaps; there is no tin or copper in Iceland), they still needed the materials to make molds and crucibles: clay, beeswax, and sand, peat, or manure. In Iceland you could count on the sand, peat, and manure, but the clay won’t stick together to make a jewelry mold. Beeswax also had to be imported: There are no honeybees in Iceland. Having to import even the simplest materials meant that the finest craftsman could hardly have turned a profit.

The witness of the graves agrees. “In Norway,” says Orri, “tools are frequently found in graves, while in Iceland they are as good as unknown. This suggests that specialized craftsmen could not make a living in Iceland in significant numbers, which in turn suggests that their patrons, the aristocrats, were absent as well.”

Who were these people, then, who founded Iceland? When anthropologist Agnar Helgason traced the ancestry of modern Icelanders through their DNA, he found that the men were 80 percent Scandinavian, but the women were 62 percent from the British Isles.

“How do you come to a situation where you end up with this discrepancy? You get people going from Scandinavia to the British Isles, raiding, then trading, then settling,” Agnar said. “These were younger sons, men who had nothing to lose and something to gain from going into uncertainty rather than staying at home. Usually it’s difficult for young males to convince females to accompany them into uncertainty.”

Irish and English sources, such as the annals kept by clerks in monasteries, corroborate the saga tales of fighting in the British Isles at the time Iceland was discovered. Vikings fought on both sides of these battles in the isles, and those on the losing side—whether native-born or Norse—had no choice but to flee. “One of them was Unn the Deep-Minded,” Agnar said. “Stories of individuals like her are illustrating the pattern going on. Probably many other people had the same experience.” For her father’s misdeeds, Norway was closed to her. Through her husband’s and son’s failed ambitions, Ireland and Scotland were no longer safe. Unn needed to find a new haven.

“Iceland got the chancers, the losers,” Agnar told me. “Going to Iceland was no package tour. It was not easy to go to a place with no infrastructure and where you had to start from scratch. The idea that they were chieftains who were miffed—that idea is wrong. There may have been some chieftains, but they were chieftains who were in trouble.”