CHAPTER 10

From Witch to Nun

But Karlsefni told the tale of these voyages better than anyone else . . .

—The Saga of the Greenlanders

 

The world was changing in other ways as well, those years when Gudrid ran the farm at Glaumbaer. Not only was wealth now counted in ells of cloth, not ounces of stolen silver, but the Otherworld was not attained in a clinker-built longship laden with beds and brassbound buckets, iron skillets, whistles, looms, bells, brooches, merchants’ scales, oxen, horses, and dogs.

By then, almost all of the Western world was officially Christian. In the north, the last Viking land to abandon the old gods was Greenland, through Leif Eiriksson’s efforts in the year 1000. In the east, the Hungarian Magyars—as much a scourge of the Church as the Vikings were—asked the pope to bless their leader: Vajk was crowned King Stephen I in that apocalyptic year and remembered by posterity as St. Stephen. In the south, the grand Muslim city of Cordoba in Spain, with its library of 400,000 books of Arabic science and Greek philosophy, was sacked and burned in 1013; by 1035 Sancho the Great would call himself King of Spain, by the Grace of God (despite the fact that Muslims would control large areas of the Iberian peninsula until 1492).

A woman could not buy her way into Heaven by being buried with her treasures in a splendid ship. But she could earn entrance through godly deeds, the best being a humble pilgrimage to a holy site—-Jerusalem (the way made safe by St. Stephen), Santiago de Compostela (Sancho of Spain’s especial care), or Rome, where in 1027 Conrad II, king of Saxony, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor with Knut, king of England and Denmark, and Rudolph III, king of Burgundy, by his side.

At about that time, Gudrid’s son Snorri, born in Vinland, reached manhood and married. Gudrid handed off her housewife’s keys—and the heavy work of weaving homespun—to her new daughter-in-law and decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Whether it was to salve her soul or to serve her wanderlust we’ll never know. It would be her seventh sea-crossing.

She may have had good company. According to Laxdaela Saga, a handsome young son of Gudrun the Fair set off in about 1025 for Constantinople to join the Byzantine emperor’s Viking bodyguard. Their route much of the way would have been the same: from Iceland to the court of King Olaf the Saint in Trondheim, Norway. From there south by ship to Roskilde, Denmark, where King Svein ruled for his father, Knut the Great. There Gudrid would have seen the beginnings of the first stone church in the North, commissioned by Knut’s sister Estrid, and completed in 1027. From Denmark, Gudrid and her companions headed south on foot, as was customary, on the Pilgrim Way. They lodged in hostels kept by monasteries and were protected not only by their numbers but by the Pax Dei, the Peace of God, which threatened excommunication to anyone who robbed a pilgrim, broke into a church, struck a priest (if he was unarmed), or harassed a virgin, child, or widow. (A few years later, merchants and their goods would be added to the list.)

No saga says what Gudrid may have seen on her yearlong sojourn south through central Europe. Certainly she would have been astonished by the cathedrals built of stone and wood in the stark Romanesque style, with their columns and arches and arcades, the high clerestory windows of stained glass, the towers and belfries, the frescoes of Christ’s miracles, the candlelight and incense. She may have seen the books made in the scriptoria: the radiant Gospels with their illuminations in violet, red, blue, and green of fantastical birds and beasts and chimeras creeping through golden foliage, or of the Christ Child greeting the Three Wise Men under a sky of pure gold and a silver star streaming with colors. She would have marveled at the lifelike Madonnas carved from Greenland walrus tusk. And she would have descended into the sacred crypts beneath the sanctuary floor, where the relics—the foot of St. Andrew, a nail from the True Cross, the sponge held to the suffering Christ’s lips, a shred of His coat, a scrap of His crown of thorns, a drop of His blood, the cord of Mary’s dress—were kept in gold caskets encrusted with jewels. She may have met black-clad monks who lived simply, were kind to the poor, and never laughed. She may also have met the monks that Richer, a tenth-century French historian, described as “colored like peacocks,” wearing habits so tight “that they exhibit the shape of their arse,” and carrying “little mirrors on top of their shoes so that with each step they can admire themselves.” She may have seen Princess Sophie, who ruled the convent of Gandersheim; there, a few years before Gudrid’s birth, the nun Roswitha wrote plays modeled on the Latin comedies of Terence and an epic poem honoring the emperor. She may have stopped at Reichenau, on Lake Constance, where the crippled monk Hermann was working on his treatises on music, on astronomy, and on how to build an astrolabe. Finally, Gudrid would have heard, for the first time in her life, hymns and antiphons chanted in counterpoint by choirs, and the resounding chords of the pipe organs, whose design Pope Sylvester II had brought from Islamic Spain some fifty years before.

She crossed the Alps in the footsteps of Hannibal and his elephants, as well as Charlemagne and his knights, by the pass of Mont Joux. At the base of the mountains she probably met Bernard of Menthon, for whom the pass would soon be renamed the St. Bernard Pass. As archdeacon of Aosta, Bernard had for many years tended to travelers accosted on the pass by Saracens, who exacted murderous tolls. Gudrid may have sought protection by traveling in the train of one of the kings—Knut, Rudolph, or Conrad—on their way to Rome for Conrad’s coronation as emperor. Or she may have crossed after Knut and Rudolph, annoyed by the harassment of their people, banded together to wipe out the Saracen fort and replace it with a pilgrim’s hospice under Bernard’s care.

Coming into Italy, Gudrid passed the white marble city of Luna, sacked in the 800s by Vikings who mistook it for Rome and, in 1016, by Saracens—an attack from which the city never recovered; in 1058 the last of its citizens abandoned it. Her route intersected the Pilgrim Way to Santiago de Compostela, and the number of travelers increased. They walked through the famous chestnut forests of Lunigiana and the vineyards of Montefiascone. They ate lamb and olives and beans and onions, bread baked from chestnut flour, mushrooms, sheep’s-milk cheese, salami, and sweet cakes flavored with spring herbs.

Gudrid came to Rome during one of the few periods in the tenth or eleventh centuries when the holy city deserved the pilgrim’s song: “O Rome, noble thou art and of the world ruler, / Of all other cities in glory exceeding.” Pope John XIX was known for lavish spending, for courting kings and musicians, and for helping the Abbot of Cluny rein in the excesses (like those mirrored shoes) of monks. John XIX was not a priest and had no Church training. But like his brother, who was pope before him, he was a good statesman and a sensible man—a vast improvement on many popes of the time. John XII, for example, was a debauch, spending his days hunting with hawks or hounds, drinking, and playing dice. He so neglected the churches of Rome that rain dripped onto the altars. Female pilgrims shunned the city; the lascivious pope, they heard, would force them into his bed, whether wives, widows, or virgins. Boniface VII had two rival popes strangled or starved, robbed the Vatican treasury, and fled to Constantinople. Benedict IX, elected to the papacy as a teenager, sold the office to a priest so he could marry—then changed his mind and raised an army to take the papal throne back.

But the rot at the core of Rome would not have been apparent to Gudrid. Like her countryman, the monk Nikulas, who wrote a traveler’s guide in the mid-1100s, what would have stayed in Gudrid’s mind was the immensity of the stone and marble city. Four miles long and two wide, the city on the hill was a splendor of churches, sanctified Roman ruins, and the glittering bazaar, thronged with people dressed outlandishly and babbling in dozens of tongues.

If she spoke to Pope John or told her tale of Vinland to any churchman, we have no proof of it, although more than one writer has imagined a secret record of just such a conversation hiding in the Vatican archives.

 

When Gudrid returned to Iceland from this last eye-opening voyage, she found that her son Snorri had built a church at Glaumbaer—perhaps at her request—and she settled in as a nun. A few years later, on the nearby island of Drangey, Grettir the Outlaw was killed by Thorbjorn Ongul, aided by his fostermother’s witchcraft.

People despised Ongul, the saga says, for depending on a witch’s spell. His own brother-in-law scolded that the killing was “not altogether of a Christian nature.” The man who had outlawed Grettir refused to give Ongul the reward, saying, “I would rather see you put to death for your sorcery and witchcraft than pay you anything.” At the yearly assembly, the Althing passed a new law forbidding witchcraft on pain of exile—Isleif, a chieftain’s son who would become the first native-born bishop of Iceland in 1056, urged that the penalty be death—and Ongul was banished from Iceland forever.

The author of Grettir’s Saga swiftly frames the moral of this story when Ongul first crashes into Grettir’s hut and confronts the outlaw:

 

Grettir said then to Ongul, “Who showed you the way onto the island?”

Ongul said, “Christ showed us the way.”

“But I think that wicked old woman, your fostermother, showed you the way,” said Grettir, “for you have always put your trust in her.”

“It will be all the same to you,” said Ongul, “whichever one we trusted in.”

 

But not all the same, the Christian audience of the saga would have understood, to Ongul.

Grettir’s Saga was one of the last classic sagas to be written, but behind its carefully crafted text lies a memory of the early eleventh century, when potential heroes didn’t know where the path to honor lay. Ongul is truly astonished at his reception at the Althing: Instead of being praised for killing a notorious murderer and thief, he is outlawed?

Gudrid would have known Ongul and the other men who helped him kill Grettir. They were her neighbors, the chief men of her district; she was related to many of them through Karlsefni. She would have known Ongul’s foster-mother, Thurid.

But to know what Gudrid the nun may have thought of old Thurid the witch, we need to understand what the Vikings believed in before they accepted Christianity—and how their beliefs changed. Unfortunately, not much remains to tell us about the old ways. Images carved on standing stones in the pagan eighth to tenth centuries seem to illustrate some of the entertaining stories Snorri Sturluson collected in the Christian thirteenth century in his Prose Edda, which modern writers have used to re-create a Norse mythology. These myths tell of the great ash tree, Yggdrasil, that linked the Nine Worlds, of the gods riding up the rainbow bridge to sit in counsel, of quests into Giantland after an enormous ale pot or a giant bride, of the thieving trickster, Loki, who pawned the golden apples of youth, of Thor’s great strength and how Odin sold his eye for knowledge, of the eight-legged horse and the ship that folds up into a pocket, the gold ring that drops eight rings of equal value every ninth night, and the sword that wields itself. The myths are funny, shocking, and mind-bending, with their doors to other worlds—but how did a true pagan interpret the gods’ quarrels and adventures? What did she think about Ragnarok, the end of the world, when good and evil would destroy each other and everything in between?

Take the story of Thor and the Midgard Serpent. One day, the burly, red-haired, and somewhat dim-witted Thunder God went fishing with a giant. They rowed so far from land that the giant was afraid. Thor baited his hook with the head of a bull and soon got a bite. He fought and fought with his catch, until finally he dragged its head up to the boat’s gunwales—and found staring him in the eye the Midgard Serpent, the evil sea monster that encircled the earth like a living equator, biting its tail. Thor raised his hammer to slay the monster, but the terrified giant cut the fishing line and the serpent escaped. The moral of this story is . . . unknown.

One scholar interprets it as a clash between civilization (Thor) and the destructive forces of nature (the Midgard Serpent). Another sees it as the reverse: Thor is threatening the balance of nature and the giant must stop him. The fact that we can’t agree whether Thor is good or bad in this tale provides us with one key to the Viking worldview: “Order and chaos, good and evil, may be opposite aspects of the same things, precariously balanced,” as one scholar says. The gods may exist to give the chaos of nature some “shape and direction,” says another. They create culture by taking things found in nature (or in the cave of the giants) and giving them meaning. In this way the gods gave men poetry and ale. But the Norse gods are strangely like their enemies, the giants. They have “limited powers. They are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. To know what is hidden from them they have to consult wiser beings,” such as the mysterious old hag who lives at the Well of Knowing. And they are not to be trusted. They are grasping, duplicitous, vain, and brutal. Worse, they cannot defend themselves—or us—against the traitor among them, the half-god, half-monster Loki, blood-brother to Odin, who will lead the ranks of evil at Ragnarok. Then, says the poem “Words of the Seer,” Thor and the Midgard Serpent will battle to the death. One—the poem isn’t clear which—“mauls in his rage all Middle Earth . . . Now death is the portion of doomed men.”

In Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, Thomas DuBois shows how this mythology of doom could be converted into everyday rules to live by. All people, he says, citing Karl Luckert’s American Tribal Religions, divide the elements of the world, seen and unseen, into three sets: less than human, equal, and greater than human. The less-than-human are “handled.” Animals, in Gudrid’s culture, were generally less than human. The greater-than-human—Thor and the Midgard Serpent—evoke awe and surrender. Reports from Christian missionaries give some sense—distorted by the writers’ disgust—of how people in pagan times expressed their awe. Adam of Bremen in 1070 describes a festival at Uppsala in Sweden, held for nine days every ninth year during the spring equinox, in which nine male animals of each kind were sacrificed, with the blood used to “placate the gods” and the carcases hung up in the trees of the Sacred Grove. “A Christian informant,” Adam writes, told him that he once counted seventy-two carcases—of dogs, horses, and even humans—in the trees. Such sacrifices seem to be borne out by archaeologists’ excavations, but these views through the eyes of outsiders cannot tell us why the Vikings conducted them.

According to DuBois, the elements of the world equal to humans are the ones that mattered most in Gudrid’s time. People then, DuBois writes, “had a vast array of equals—human, nearhuman, and nonhuman, mobile and immobile, visible and invisible—with which they shared and competed on a daily basis.” Among them were the dwellers in the mounds: the elves, the land spirits, the Hidden Folk. Mountains were declared “holy” and were not to be climbed by the unwashed, though beneath them the illustrious dead could be buried. Guardian spirits lived in caves and stones. “Some women are so unwise and blind about their needs,” wrote a medieval Christian author, “that they take their food and bring it out to heaps of stones and mountain caves and consecrate it to the spirits of the land and thereafter they eat it in order to make the spirits of the land friendly and in order to have more luck with their farming than before.”

In two sagas of the conversion to Christianity, the first missionary to come to Iceland, a Saxon bishop named Fridrek, made a bargain with a farmer: If Bishop Fridrek could drive the farm’s “steward” from his stone, the farmer would agree to be baptized. This steward, the farmer said, was a good friend: He protected the cattle and gave helpful advice. The bishop advanced on the stone. He sprinkled it with holy water while singing psalms. That night the steward appeared to the farmer in a dream and cried: “Ill have you done to let that awful man pour boiling water into my house, so that it scorches my children. Oh, how hard it is to hear the screeches of my little ones!” He begged and threatened for two more nights, but the farmer held to his bargain with the bishop to see who proved more powerful, the elf or Christ. After the third night, the stone broke apart, and the steward was heard from no more. The farmer was baptized, believing that his new invisible friend, Christ, was stronger than his old one.

It was their belief in holy mountains, sacred groves, and inhabited stones that made the concept of pilgrimage so appealing to the Vikings (besides the fact that it was so similar to “going a-viking”). The holy city, the saint’s shrine, were understood in terms of the steward’s stone: a place inhabited by the new stronger “friend.” At home, traditional holy places were resanctified by the addition of a cross or the mere blessing of a bishop. Gudmundur the Good, bishop in the twelfth century, erected a cross in a field. According to his saga: “People go there as they do to holy places and burn lights before the cross outside just as they would inside a church, even if the weather is bad.” The reverse had happened in the early days of Iceland’s settlement. When Unn the Deep-Minded and her Christian crew came to Iceland from the Hebrides, they marked their land-claim with a cross on a hill. There Unn prayed. Later, according to The Book of Settlements, “her kinsmen worshipped these hills.” They built a pagan temple there, in which their chieftains were sanctified, and “believed they would go into the hills when they died.”

The pagan belief in fortune-telling was also neatly co-opted into the Christian worldview, with soothsaying becoming a talent of Christian saints. Olaf Tryggvason, the missionary king of Norway credited with converting Iceland and Greenland, was baptized by such a one. When Olaf asked the hermit how he knew so much about the future, the hermit replied that the god of Christian men told him whatever he wanted to know.

In the old days, a person in difficulty would naturally turn, not to a bishop or holy hermit, but to a witch like Ongul’s foster-mother. The sagas name seventy-eight witches, half of them male and half female. They are sometimes portrayed as good and useful neighbors, sometimes as wicked and hateful interlopers (who nonetheless had their supporters). One saga explains: “As Christianity was new to the country and had not fully taken hold, many people considered it an advantage that a person was skilled in magic.”

A witch was a “fence rider,” one who straddled the barrier between the fields and the wild lands, civilization and chaos, natural and supernatural, good and evil. (Over time, the fence turned into the broomstick on which our cartoon witches ride.) A saga witch could bring snow or fog to hide a hunted man. She could change the course of a river. In famine, she could fill a bay with fish or summon a whale. She could turn herself (or someone she loved) into a goat, a boar, a spindle stick, a walrus, a bear, or a bull’s-hide bag filled with water. She could provide a shirt no sword could pierce and a helmet of invisibility. She could find a lost horse or family heirloom.

These otherworldly talents, too, were translated into the Christian world. Christ could raise the dead, turn water into wine, calm the storm, and feed the multitude. The early Christians highlighted not only Christ’s miracles, but those of His followers as a way to prove God’s might and His concern for His creation. Bishops of Iceland would become famous for ending a long winter or a drought, providing a calm breeze so young boys could sail home safely, turning aside a flood-swollen river to save a farmhouse, and causing a midwinter thaw so bodies could be buried properly at church. They found lost things, treated frostbite, cough, insomnia, and toothache, lessened womens labor pains, and healed crippled or broken limbs. One priest was said to be able to turn a bone into a horse that could carry a rider over the sea. Another had a whistle that could call up troops of demon workers to fetch in the hay before it was ruined by the rain.

The magical stones and potions and amulets a witch might have pressed on a client were replaced with saints’ relics and holy water and all sorts of crosses, from silver pendants to two sticks tied with yarn. Even the story of a saint could be potent. In a small manuscript book of the saga of St. Margaret, the letters have been almost rubbed away on some pages. Such books were held against the legs of a woman in labor to ease her pains. The magical pagan songs that Gudrid sang so beautifully to call the spirits in Greenland, and the elaborate ritual surrounding the séance—the seer’s jeweled blue dress and white catskin gloves, her cushion of hen’s feathers, her meal of animal hearts—were replaced by equally beautiful and elaborate Christian prayers and rituals. The farmer who made the bargain with Bishop Fridrek had had no interest in Christianity—no desire to evict the farm’s steward from his stone—until he witnessed a mass:

 

But when he heard the ringing of bells and the fair song of priests, and smelled the sweet fragrance of incense, and saw the bishop clothed with splendid vestments, and . . . the fair shining of wax tapers . . . then all this pleased him rather well.

 

It was easy for the Norse to put a Christian gloss on their old ways. In the saga of the Christian king Hakon the Good, who ruled Norway in the mid-900s, the king is at a pagan feast held by some rebellious nobles, and the sacred ale has just been brought out.

 

When the first cup was poured, Sigurd the Jarl spoke before it and blessed it in honor of Odin and drank to the king from the horn. The king took it and made the sign of the Cross over it. Then Kar of Gryting said: “Why does the king do that? Will he still not sacrifice?” Sigurd the Jarl answered: “The king does as all do who trust in their might and main; he blesses the cup in honor of Thor. He made the sign of Thor’s hammer over it before he drank.”

 

What’s important here is not that the T-shape of Thor’s hammer looked like the sign of the cross, but the similarity of the beliefs and rituals of the cults on a deeper level. Writes DuBois: “The shared assumptions reflect a tradition of comparison, in which the Christian Lord appears at first as just one more deity of the sky, vying with the others for the best of adherents.”

Christian doctrine does not allow for any other gods. Christ cannot be “just one more deity.” Yet both archaeology and history imply that the Viking world failed to grasp this essential tenet of the new religion for at least a hundred years, well after Gudrid’s death. Burial customs changed very slowly, with Thor’s hammers and Christian crosses sometimes found in the same grave. Thor and his hammer appear on a Swedish baptismal font, alongside Christ and the cross. A jewelry mold found in Denmark could simultaneously cast a cross and a hammer. In one of the earliest Christian Norse poems, dated to circa 1000, Christ sits beside the Well of Weird next to the three pagan goddesses of Fate. The names of the days of the week were not changed in Icelandic until the 1100s—and were never changed in English: We still honor the gods Tyr (Tuesday), Odin (or Wodan, Wednesday), and Thor (Thursday), and the goddess Frigg (Friday).

Nor was the Christ who came to the Vikings the suffering, broken, abandoned, blauður Christ of Good Friday. He was the glorious, invincible, hvatur Christ of the Last Judgment, separating the righteous from the damned. He was the Christ in the letters of St. Paul, the “young hero” and “victor over evil.” He was, in fact, “virtually a picture of Thor under the name of Christ,” as one scholar writes. Crucifixes made in the newly converted North never show the dying, human Christ, but always Christ Triumphant, standing bolt upright, his feet on a footrest, his head held high and his expression regal, wearing a crown of gold, not thorns. In Old Norse poetry, he is called “creator of heaven and earth, of angels and the sun, ruler of the world.” He is “king of the heavens and the sun and angels and Jerusalem and Jordan and Greece, master of apostles and saints.” Wrote the poet Markus, “Alone the ruler of men, Christ can control all things.” Said his colleague Eilif Kulnasvein, “The sun’s king alone is finer than all other true glory.”

One Icelander whom Bishop Fridrek tried to convert declined, saying he would hold to the beliefs of his foster-father who “believed in the one who made the sun and ruled all things.”

The bishop answered, “I offer you the same faith.”

 

What the sagas call the Change of Ways came to Iceland in the year 1000, while Gudrid was on her way to Greenland. The island was converted by parliamentary decree, with the Althing essentially blackmailed by the crusading King Olaf Tryggvason, who held many Icelanders and their precious ships captive in Norway until the outcome satisfied him. All Icelanders were to be baptized, but sacrificing to the old gods was not outlawed—if it was kept quiet.

Many of the Vikings’ most ingrained values did not need to be Christianized. Men were praised for being peaceable, popular, and calm. They strove to be generous, hospitable, faithful, healthy, clean living, and tolerant. Among the advice in the pre-Christian poem Hávamál, or “Words of the High One” (the “high one” being the god Odin), are these stanzas:

 

Mock not the traveler met on the road,
Nor maliciously laugh at the guest:
Scoff not at guests nor to the gate chase them,
But relieve the lonely and wretched.

 

Never laugh at the old when they offer counsel,
Often their words are wise:
From shrivelled skin, from scraggy things
That hang among the hides
And move amid the guts,
Clear words often come.

 

With a good woman, if you wish to enjoy
Her words and her good-will,
Pledge her fairly and be faithful to it:
Enjoy the good you are given.

 

These things are thought the best:
Fire, the sight of the sun,
Good-health with the gift to keep it,
And a life that avoids vice.

 

As Russian saga scholar M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij complains, “What is taken for a Christian trait in the family sagas is usually ‘Christian’ only in the sense that it continued to exist after the introduction of Christianity.”

The Change of Ways wrought no huge upheaval in society. Those who had been in power, remained in power. As Gunnar Karlsson puts it in The History of Iceland, the chieftains “just changed gods but went on with their social roles as far as they possibly could.” The chieftains built churches as a mark of status. According to one saga, a chieftain could take as many of his followers with him to Heaven as could fit in his church. The chieftains declared themselves “priests”—rather like the pope, with no Church training (though when such training became available in the 1100s, they took it). Trade in wine and wax candles probably increased. According to Icelandic historian Helgi Thorlaksson, not until the 1100s did the Icelanders all learn to say the Lord’s Prayer, cross themselves properly, and act “with reverence” in church. As late as 1150, the archbishop in Norway was still putting pressure on the Icelanders to “sanctify” marriage, by condemning out-of-wedlock births, the keeping of mistresses, and divorce—all ways to rein in that “aggressive authority” by which women in the sagas pursued their sex lives.

“It has been argued that Christianity was a disaster for women,” writes Anne-Sofie Graslund, an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In the old days, women were at the heart of the rituals. Housewives took the offerings to the “heaps of stones and mountain caves” and asked the spirits of the land to bless the farm. Women saw into the future, healed the sick with charms and potions, and prepared the sacred ale for feast days. Two women in The Book of Settlements are named gyðja, “priestess,” though we do not know what their role entailed. Christianity, by contrast, has no goddess, and the Church is headed by men. When the Christian Church became fully established in the 1100s, these housewives and priestesses were shut out of the spiritual life, while wise women like Ongul’s foster-mother were declared “of little use” and told to abandon their witchcraft. Many episodes in the sagas support this view; archaeology seems to show, instead, that women of Gudrid’s day saw Christianity not as a threat to their social status, but as an attractive set of beliefs. After examining runestones and burials throughout the Viking world, Graslund believes that Viking women were the first converts.

During the time Gudrid was a nun, Christianity, Graslund says, was a religion of joy and sisterhood. Rather than limiting women’s sexual or spiritual power, it enhanced their sense of worth. “Christ made no distinction between men and women,” Graslund says. “His attitude toward women meant nothing less than a revolution.” No longer was a woman’s worth, high or low, defined by marriage or childbearing. Abandoned, orphaned, barren, kinless, a woman still owned a soul and a place in the world: She had rights from birth to death. A Christian father could not decide to set his baby girl outdoors to die. (Exposure had always killed more girls than boys in Viking Iceland, in spite of womens high status.) Shortly after the conversion, this practice, along with the eating of horsemeat (an essential part of pagan ritual), was declared taboo.

Graslund sees evidence of this new regard for the individual in the burial practices of early Christians. In the old days, families were buried together, under a holy mountain or on the boundaries of a farm, where their shades could watch over their successors. In the new churchyards, families were broken up: Women were buried to the north of the church, men to the south. By stressing the individual, not the family, notes Graslund, Christianity offered “the possibility of salvation for everybody. If you were a good person, you could affect your own fate and afterlife.”

For women like Gudrid, this question of the afterlife—the Otherworld—might have been the biggest attraction of the new religion. Valhalla, the glorious feast hall of Odin, was open only to men killed in battle. Several other gods had halls that welcomed certain dead, but most women (and men who died of old age or illness) could look forward only to a cold, damp, dark, dreary, and depressing eternity ruled by Hel, the halfgiant daughter of Loki. Hel’s brothers are the Midgard Serpent and the wolf that will swallow the sun. Her hall, unappealingly named “Damp-with-Sleet,” has “extraordinarily high walls and huge gates.” Her plate is named “Hunger,” her knife, “Famine.” What woman would not choose Heaven—described in the Old Norse Homily Book as “delight and joy and all sorts of beauty . . . glory, and happiness without end”—over this?

In medieval Christianity, the Last Judgment—Doomsday—was just as cataclysmic as Ragnarok. In one Old Norse sermon, The burning fire shall flow forth from Heaven and out of that fire the wide world shall burn. Hills and stones will then run as hot wax. . . . The stars will fall from the sky. But in the Christian world, the men and women of Middle Earth were not doomed to die with their gods. Christ would walk through the destruction, leading His followers to eternal bliss, regardless of sex or status.

In the graveyard at Birka, the Viking market center in Sweden, Graslund notes, nine cross pendants and one pendant reliquary were found. All were in women’s graves, and the fact that several are “very simple, plain, and carelessly made” indicates that they were prized as symbols rather than as jewelry. Elsewhere in Sweden, Graslund found prayers to the Virgin Mary—always referred to as “God’s Mother”—on runestones memorializing a woman or raised by a woman in memory of her dead. The Church encouraged bridge building and road maintenance so that priests could keep in touch more easily with their bishops and archbishops and, ultimately, Rome. For these good and pious deeds, sins would be forgiven, paving the way to Heaven. A Viking Age “bridge” was not the arching span we’re used to, but merely two stones marking a passable ford on a river. In both Uppland and Sodermanland, Sweden, runic inscriptions show that more than half of the bridge stones were erected by, or for, a woman. Based on this and other evidence, Graslund believes women were “prime actors” in the Change of Ways.

 

Among these prime actors in northern Iceland might have been Gudrid the Far-Traveler, just returned from Rome and living as a nun, tending the church her son built her.

John Steinberg speculates that we may have seen signs of Snorri’s church without recognizing them when we excavated the house at Glaumbaer. Poring over the maps and drawings a year later, John noticed a similarity between the “strange alley” we had found in the southwest corner of the house, where the walls seem doubled with no space in between for a room, and something on the plans at Hofstadir. There, as Orri Vesteinsson and his colleagues at the Icelandic Institute of Archaeology indicate in their excavation reports, a plank-walled room was built, around which a protecting turf wall was later added—a construction method thought to have been used in the earliest Icelandic chapels. In the case of Glaumbaer, the two structures—house and chapel—seem to have been so close that the late-coming turf wall was snug against the house.

The chapel would have been quite small. The interior of Thjodhild’s church at Brattahlid in Greenland is only 6½ feet wide and less than 12 feet long. In the center of the churchyard Gudny Zoega investigated at Keldudalur was a small, rectangular space free of graves. A few postholes were all that remained of the wooden church building, but if it were protected by outer turf walls, it could not have been larger than Thjodhild’s church. Twenty or thirty people, “closely packed together,” says one archaeologist, could worship inside these tiny candlelit rooms. Gudrid’s chapel, built for a solitary nun, might have been even tinier, just a private space to light a candle before a simple cross and close a door on everyday cares.

Gudrid is one of only six Icelandic women called nuns before the first Icelandic nunnery was founded in 1186, and what the sagas mean by “nun” is a mystery. The Icelandic word translated as “nun,” einsetukona—“woman living alone”—implies that she enjoyed the independence she undoubtedly had grown used to between Karlsefni’s death and Snorri’s coming of age. She may even have retained control of some of her wealth, instead of becoming her son’s dependent. In later years, at least, when a church or chapel was built, all or part of the farm and its income were dedicated to it, with the proviso that the owner could continue to live on and manage the property. On a more personal level, Gudrid as a nun could not be expected to remarry and bear more sons, as Gudrun the Fair had done at age forty. Nor was she brushed aside as a hornkerling, the superfluous old hag sent to sit in the corner and be ignored—the fate Hallgerd Long-Legs had feared at age forty-five.

Being a solitary nun may have supplied Gudrid with a respectable—if unusual—position in society, one well in keeping with her history as a remarkable woman. It was not quite unprecedented. According to the sagas, Gudrun the Fair was the first woman in Iceland to learn the Psalter and call herself a nun; Gudrid the Far-Traveler followed her in less than five years. In Laxdaela Saga we have a brief glimpse of how Gudrun the Fair enacted the role of holy woman. She spent hours in her church at night by candlelight, on her knees, reciting her prayers so strenuously that a witch buried beneath the floorboards had cause to complain to Gudrun’s granddaughter in a dream: “She twists and turns all night on top of me, and burns me all over with hot drops. I’m telling you because I like you a little better—even though there’s something strange about you, too.” When the church floor was dug up, Gudrun’s people found some blackened bones, a brooch, and a staff. They reburied them far away, and peace returned to the church.

Gudrid the Far-Traveler may have learned to recite the Psalter—the 150 psalms, the Credo (“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth . . .”), the Paternoster (“Our Father . . .”), and perhaps other prayers and hymns. This was the first step in religious education and, as the sagas say, Gudrid was a good singer with a memory for poetry. But unlike Gudrun the Fair—who shamed her husband into killing his own cousin and foster-brother, the man she loved most—Gudrid had no great sins to atone for by grinding her knees into the church floor every night. According to historian Helgi Thorlaksson, “Gudrid was always Christian, behaved with great circumspection, and lived a thoroughly respectable and dignified life in a hazardous world.” But what does this mean, to be “always Christian”? The Saga of Eirik the Red says she was raised a Christian, yet before the Change of Ways there were no churches in Iceland, and no priests to hear confession or perform mass.

No one knows what form of Christianity Gudrid might have practiced—or, for that matter, what form Unn the Deep-Minded brought with her from the Hebrides in the late 800s. It was “a strange and battered Christianity,” says one historian; other scholars tend to name it Celtic Christianity. Early churches in Ireland and Scotland were surrounded by circular churchyards like those found at Thjodhild’s church and at Keldudalur. Norwegian churches of the time had rectangular churchyards. But what the difference in shape signifies, no one knows. We don’t know how Gudrid prayed, or if wax candles, bells, and incense were as central to the rite as the sagas would have us believe. What little we do know about the church of St. Patrick puts it in direct competition with Rome. Already for hundreds of years, Rome had been trying to suppress what it saw as an offshoot of Druidism. When the British monk Pelagius debated theology with Augustine in the fourth century, the sticking point was free will. The Celtic Christian believed Divine Grace did not require the physical trappings of a church, or uniform rites such as mass, confession, extreme unction, and absolution; an individual with free will could achieve grace through his or her own actions. Such a theology would have appealed to an independent-minded woman like Gudrid.

The saintly actions available to her, as a nun at Glaumbaer, would have included caring for travelers and helping the poor. Along with these fairly obvious good deeds, however, Gudrid could also have sought Heaven by sharing her experiences. Wisdom is one of the four pillars of the Church, according to the Old Norse Homily Book, and the early Church in Iceland shows a surprising reverence for the wisdom of old women.

Christianity is a religion of the book, and one of the first and greatest changes the new faith introduced was this new technology; it was as essential to the making of a Christian society as the technology of shipbuilding was to the Viking voyages to Vinland. In addition to the Latin alphabet, the Church taught the Icelanders how to transform the skin of a light-colored calf into a smooth vellum writing surface, how to create a long-lasting ink out of boiled bearberry and willow twigs, how to cut a goose feather to make a quill pen, and how to fold and sew the pages into a binding of wood or sealskin to make the book durable and portable.

The alphabet was not a new concept to the Vikings, merely an expansion of the runes they had used for centuries to mark their names on tools or trade goods, to keep tallies, to cut bridge markers and memorial stones, and to work magic. Perhaps because of their experience with runes—difficult to cut, difficult to read, limited to bulky materials like wood, bone, and stone—the Vikings were not immediately impressed with the technology of literacy. The human memory can file prodigious amounts of information. In storytelling cultures, people compose and share stories and poems, establish laws, preserve histories and genealogies, and investigate the sciences of medicine, mathematics, navigation, geography, and astronomy, all without books.

When the technology of the book came to Iceland in the 1030s, with the first Church schools, it had little effect outside religion. Says folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson, “The art of speaking and telling did not change, nor the art of composing poetry, and learned men continued to hold their honored position in society—at least to start with. It took a long time for people to accept the precedence of the written word over the testimony of the wise.”

Gudrid, whose voyages had taken her from one end of the Viking world to the other, would have been counted among the wise. She had one grandson and three granddaughters whose names we know, and I can imagine the stories she told them: of the rich young merchant with the fancy clothes whose suit her father turned down; of the harrowing voyage to Greenland; of the séance and the songs she sang to raise the spirits, Christian though she was; of her marriage to Thorstein Eiriksson, their frustrated voyage to Vinland, and his spooky death at Sandnes; of Thorfinn Karlsefni and their three years exploring the New World, where Snorri was born and Gudrid tried, but failed, to talk to a Skraeling woman.

In 1118 Gudrid’s great-grandson Thorlak became the bishop of Skalholt and, with his colleague, the bishop of Holar, commissioned Ari the Learned to write a history of Iceland. Íslendingabók, or “The Book of the Icelanders,” was the first book written in the Icelandic language—not Latin—a critical step that made the Icelandic sagas possible.

Reading Ari’s brief and sketchy book (only twelve pages in a modern translation) is nothing like listening to the lively tales Gudrid could have told her granddaughter Hallfrid, Bishop Thorlak’s mother, as she sat spinning yarn by the fire, watching the younger woman weave. Ari cites his sources, making it clear that he got his information in the time-honored way—from the lips of old men and women—but his style is altogether new. It shows its Church origins in many ways. It’s sprinkled with Latin words. It begins with a table of contents, and its ten sections (not counting a prologue and appendix) have subject headings: one on the settlement, one on the laws, one on the wise man who figured out why “the summer was moving backward into spring” (the old calendar had 364 days in the year). Local events are fitted into an international chronology. Iceland was discovered the same year that St. Eadmund, the English king, was killed, we learn, and that “was 870 years after the birth of Christ.” Serious and straightforward to a fault, Ari only very occasionally lets a little gossip sneak in, such as when he refers to the Norwegian king as “Olaf the Fat” rather than “Olaf the Saint,” or when he explains that Greenland got its name because Eirik the Red thought “people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name.”

Three of Ari’s six named sources knew Gudrid and could have told him about her travels. But although The Book of the Icelanders contains the first mention of Vinland in Icelandic, the discovery and exploration of the New World did not fit into Ari’s tight outline. Unlike the Greenland colony, to which Ari devotes three paragraphs, Vinland had no effect on Iceland’s history. He drops just one casual remark: In Greenland, he says, Eirik the Red and his settlers found some stone tools and the remains of dwellings that made them think that “the same kind of people had traveled through here as lived in Vinland, the ones called Skraelings.” Ari assumes his readers know all about Vinland and its Skraelings, and Bishop Thorlak, who corrected a longer draft of the book (now lost) and made suggestions on shortening it, presumably agreed.

It would be left to another descendant of Gudrid, another bishop, to begin collecting Gudrid’s stories into a book more than a hundred years after her death. Brand Saemundarson was bishop of Holar from 1163 to 1201. By his time, many books had been written in Icelandic, including books of law, sagas, and genealogies. The first sagas were lives of saints or translations of Latin works meant to inspire virtue. According to Icelandic literary scholar Olafur Halldorsson, who has made the Vinland Sagas his specialty, Brand compiled a life of his predecessor, the Bishop Bjorn Gilsson—also a descendant of Gudrid—when Bjorn became a candidate for sainthood. In addition to compiling a list of Bjorns miracles, Brand needed to show that Bjorn had suitable ancestors and “saintly” bones. These were dug up and washed to see if they were bright and sweet-smelling—just as the prophecy said Gudrid’s progeny would be.

Alas, Bishop Bjorn was not declared a saint. No “Life of Bjorn” remains. But some of the stories Brand collected, Olafur believes, made their way into The Saga of the Greenlanders, written early in the thirteenth century. The only copy we have dates from 1387. It is tucked into the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason in the splendid manuscript called Flateyjarbók or “Book of Flatey,” named for the Icelandic island on which it was treasured until 1647, when its owner gave it to the bishop of Skalholt. It is a very large manuscript made from 113 calfskins. The Saga of the Greenlanders takes up the skin of just one calf.

Later in the thirteenth century, it became fashionable in Europe to make saints of common people who had lived exemplary lives. A Saga of Gudrid might have been thought the perfect way to celebrate the founding of the nunnery at Reynines, Karlsefni’s childhood home, by Abbess Hallbera—yet another descendant of Gudrid—in 1295. Olafur Halldorsson believes that the abbess’s Saga of Gudrid has come down to us, in part or whole, as The Saga of Eirik the Red. It exists in two vellum manuscripts and the two versions differ slightly; both were copied from a now lost original. The earlier of the two, Hauk’s Book, was the work of Hauk Erlendsson, an adviser to the king of Norway, who spent two years, 1306 to 1308, in a monastery on the Icelandic island of Videy. Videy had a fine library, and Hauk read widely. As scholars did in those days, he copied what he read there and elsewhere to add to his own collection. The massive manuscript he compiled over the course of his reading life reveals an eclectic taste. Hauk copied a history of the Trojan War and the saga of how Christianity came to Iceland. He chose a saga about an Icelandic poet who died for love, and another about two blood-brothers who fell out over a woman. He includes the practical travel guide for pilgrims to Rome, written by the monk Nikulas. The prophecies of Merlin, King Arthur’s mage, are paired with the prophecy of Ragnarok, the doom of the gods. Isidore de Seville’s seventh-century encyclopedia of natural history, Etymologiae (which describes the Unipeds, a one-footed African tribe), is balanced by the Algorismus, the first mathematical text to use Arabic numerals.

Hauk’s book holds one of five known copies of The Book of Settlements. The version Hauk copied had been compiled largely by his grandfather and, according to his critics, Hauk therefore felt free to embellish it with additional tales he had heard or read. Hauk also embellished The Saga of Eirik the Red. As well as smoothing out the style, he added two short passages. He did not add the strange account of Karlsefni seeing one of Isidore de Seville’s Unipeds in the wilds of Vinland. Nor did he add the antiquarian description of the Greenland séance. These stories were already in the text he copied. Hauk’s additions are plain and apparently factual. One traces Karlsefni’s genealogy back to King Kjarval of Ireland, on his mother’s side, and to the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Hairy-Breeks on his father’s, making Snorri, born in America, royal. The second new passage traces Snorri’s descendants through nine generations to Hauk Erlendsson himself.

For six hundred years, knowledge of the Vikings’ voyages to Vinland was preserved in these stories about Gudrid the Far-Traveler, passed down in one form or another by her descendants. Then it was almost lost. The bishop of Skalholt gave The Book of Flatey to the king of Denmark in 1656. Hauk’s Book and many other ancient manuscripts were considered worthless after printed books became available; they were torn to pieces and the stiff vellum was reused to make shoe soles, dress patterns, and bindings for newer books—one was even used to stiffen a bishop’s miter. Rescue came in the person of Arni Magnusson, a young man from the Dales in Iceland, where Unn the Deep-Minded had settled, who became a professor of history at the University of Copenhagen. In the early 1700s, while in Iceland calculating the tax value of the farms at the behest of Iceland’s Danish overlords, he picked up every scrap of manuscript he could find. These he reassembled, based on handwriting and other clues, into books: One sixty-page manuscript came from eight different farms. Of Hauk’s Book, Arni was able to find 282 pages out of an estimated 400-plus. The Saga of Eirik the Red was one story that survived.

Then came the Great Copenhagen Fire of 1728. Almost half the town burned, including the university. Arni and two other Icelanders saved the oldest manuscripts, including Hauk’s Book. The rest of Arni’s library was destroyed, as were all the saga manuscripts in the university’s main library. The fire died out before it reached the palace, and The Book of Flatey, in the king’s private library, was unharmed.

Legend has it that Columbus heard stories of Vinland before he sailed west in 1492, but the first serious attempts to locate the Viking colony began in the nineteenth century. The sagas containing the stories of Gudrid the Far-Traveler were then at the height of their popularity—they were translated into English more often than any other saga—due to the influence of such writers as Sir Walter Scott and the general romantic sense that “the old north was misty, mysterious, and sublime.” (Scott particularly liked the séance in Greenland, using it in his book The Pirate in 1821.) These new Vinland explorers, all men, did not think they were retracing the travels of Gudrid. They identified instead with Leif Eiriksson, son of the doughty Eirik the Red. But their search led directly to the discovery of the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows and to those three butternuts that sent Birgitta Wallace south to the Miramichi River and the probable heart of the Land of Wine. Because of the two Vinland Sagas, archaeologists have also looked for—and found—-Thjodhild’s church at Brattahlid; the two houses of Eirik the Red, in Iceland and Greenland; the farm of Sandnes, where Gudrid’s husband Thorstein died; and Gudrid’s own house at Glaumbaer.

Digging that summer at Glaumbaer, I didn’t find anything Gudrid had dropped. But as I explored the archaeology of Gudrid’s days, the economy of the farms where she lived, the technology of her time—how to make cheese, how to weave, how to sail a ship and build a wall—I learned new ways to tell Gudrid’s story, to pick up where the sagas leave off. Yet the last line of The Saga of the Greenlanders lingers in my mind. It sounds like Gudrid’s own voice, carrying across a thousand years: But Karlsefni told the tale of these voyages better than anyone else.