The UTTermosT
WesT
If today’s elves sent Christmas cards, most of them would probably have ships drawn on the front. The ship was one of the most frequently depicted religious symbols of the Nordic Bronze Age, and it was especially important at the winter solstice when a longboat carried the sun out of the dark depths of the underworld. If you were lucky enough to receive one of these cards, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the image for a menorah. The Bronze Age longboat, as it has been painstakingly pecked out on the rock surfaces over and over again, looks like a low-slung candelabrum, the vertical strokes resembling Hanukkah candles more than they do oarsmen.
Where were all these ships going? J. R. R. Tolkien believed they were traveling west. It was not on a whim that he placed the Blessed Realm to which his own elves were bound across the sea in the Uttermost West of his cosmology. He felt very strongly that the ship iconography which persisted from the Bronze Age through the Viking Age reflected a desire to travel to some perfect, lost land in the west. He went so far as to say that it might not have been just a belief but the memory of such a land.
Of course, if you paddle west from Denmark you’re going to end up in England. Before Germanic people began to settle in Britain in earnest in the early centuries AD, they did regard the British Isles as a sort of mist-shrouded land of the dead. If not for the influx of peoples moving westward into Europe from the steppes and setting off the Migration Period, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes might have continued to avoid the island of Britain, and I might now be writing in a Celtic-laced Romance language instead of a Germanic one.
When the displaced Germanic tribals did arrive on British shores, they apparently still felt that it was a land not quite of this world. One would have expected them to exploit the impressive ruins the Romans had left behind, but the first Anglo and Saxon settlers gave the deserted villas and bath houses with their mosaic floors a wide berth, preferring to build their own houses of withies, wattles, and clay, just as they had done in the old country.
Perhaps because they had come later and did not stay as long, the Danes maintained the idea of England as a kind of Elfland into the thirteenth century. Remember Young Svejdal who rode “through darksome wood” in the first chapter of this book? After he broke out of the woods, his horse carried him over the sea to the magical land of England, where he rescued an otherworldly maiden who had been imprisoned in a tower for seven years. And as for a “lost land,” Britain was that too. In 10,000 BC you could still walk dry-shod from Schleswig-Holstein to Lincolnshire, but the melting glaciers soon put them out of reach of each other.
For those who settled there permanently, the British Isles turned out to be no more or less blessed a realm than Jutland had been. In fact, the native Celts had their own stories of strange countries beyond the open waters of the west. No, I don’t believe that anyone from prehistoric Europe made it all the way across the Atlantic, alive or otherwise, to give birth to the Native American peoples. For one thing, by the time any Europeans could have fetched up on American shores, the so-called New World had already been settled for tens of thousands of years. Besides, our Old Elflanders just didn’t have the boats for it. But I’m sure that some of them, after gazing longingly at the sea while they lived, would have been ready to take up posthumous careers in some Elfland of the West.
The woods, wetlands, and backyards among which I grew up in northern New Jersey certainly felt like Elfland to me at times. How I would have liked to know when I was a child that the name of my street, “Fairmount,” was an abbreviation of the older “fairy mount” or that a haze of apple blossoms was the first thing Irish sailors saw when they reached the legendary Blessed Isles in the west. You see, an apple tree was central to my childhood. It belonged to the old German couple who lived next door to us. Well, not quite next door; there was an open field between our house and theirs. A single apple tree stood in the middle of the field, as dignified as any heirloom apáldr. The tree belonged to the Kohlers, as did the field, but my sister and I were allowed to swat the apples down with our badminton racquets when they were ripe. Just like the apples of Old Elfland, they weren’t the best for eating, but they made good applesauce.
The field was known to those whose properties bordered it as “Kohler’s Meadow,” after the old couple. Assuming Mr. Kohler had lost an umlaut on his way over from Germany, he must have come from a long line of Köhler, “charcoal burners,” and, if only I had known, I could have counted him as a descendant of the dark elves. (If he never had an umlaut, then his ancestors were probably cabbage farmers.)
Tolkien did not write off the elves once they had sailed west, and neither will I. On the contrary, he was eager to know what they had been up to in the New World. At one point, he reportedly pumped an American student for folkloric tidbits from his native Kentucky, where much of English folk tradition has been preserved. If I could sit down with Professor Tolkien over a bowl of pipeweed, I might ask him what he made of the name “Ellendor,” a train station on the Gladstone Line between my own Murray Hill Station and the next stop, Berkeley Heights. It certainly sounds like the kind of place where elves, or at the very least hobbits, might change trains. The most intriguing thing about Ellendor is that it’s no longer there. Not only is it no longer there, but there’s not even a trace of a foundation. It must have been absorbed into Elfland all of a piece.
I might also tell the professor about Fort Nya Elfsborg, which was built by the Swedes in Salem County, New Jersey, in 1643. It’s gone now, and no one seems to remember exactly where it once stood. And did he think there could be a connection between the Irishman who was attacked by a gang of burley-playing fairies on the island of Aranmore 69 and Rip Van Winkle, who stumbled upon the grim ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew playing nine-pins in the Catskills? The Irishman recovered from the beating and emigrated to America some time in the late 1800s. I wonder if he happened to read the tales of Washington Irving after he got here? (Incidentally, my Webster’s Second Edition doesn’t acknowledge “burley” as a game, only as a kind of Kentucky tobacco.)
More recently, M. T. Anderson has imagined a sort of Elfland in New England where his fictional Norumbegans have crafted some very sophisticated robots and even published a runic newspaper, just as one would expect modern elves to do. The first time I read The Game of Sunken Places, I assumed Mr. Anderson had invented the kingdom of Norumbega, but it is, in fact, a real imaginary place.
Norumbega is a “paper colony” somewhere in New England. The only evidence we have for its existence is its name on sixteenth-century maps, though sometimes it’s referred to as “Oranbega.” The name is probably rooted in one of the native Algonquian languages. Unlike the lost colony of Roanoke in Virginia, whose inhabitants mysteriously disappeared, Norumbega never officially existed in the first place. That, however, did not stop a handful of explorers from stumbling on it and gawking at the gold and crystal pillars adorning the facades of the houses. If Norumbega was a Viking settlement, as some nineteenth-century Bostonians insisted, those Vikings must have done very well for themselves.
In their heyday, the Vikings had pushed both east and west, dropping stone spindle whorls in Newfoundland and moonlighting as security guards in Byzantium all at the same time, but the elves have been moving consistently from east to west. Some of Iceland’s hidden folk were indigenous to the birch woods and lava flows, but others, like Koðran’s spámaðr, may have immigrated from Norway and elsewhere. Like the Vikings, they were probably looking for a new home where they didn’t have to worry about bishops scalding them with holy water. When Iceland accepted Christianity as a nation, many of the elves packed their bags again. Where else was there for them to go but west?
The Celtic fairies, too, demonstrated a westward drift. The Welsh fairy tribe, the Twlyth Teg, lived on islands that could be seen from Pembrokeshire but only if you stood on a piece of sod that had been cut from the yard of St. David’s Cathedral. Men tried to sail out to those isles, but as soon as they neared the shores, the islands winked out of existence.
The Irish abbot Brendan, later St. Brendan, claimed to have spent both Easter and Christmas of AD 512 among the islands of a fogged-in archipelago in the Atlantic. By AD 513, the islands had disappeared again, though Portuguese monks continued to keep an eye out for them off the coast of West Africa through the eighteenth century. Though Brendan and his companions had only a small coracle-like vessel to sail in, it’s not impossible that they had reached Iceland as other Irish monks soon would. It’s tempting to identify one of Brendan’s islands, which was full of grapes, as the Vikings’ North American Vinland, or “Wineland,” but Brendan’s islands are probably nothing more than Christianized versions of the distant western isles to which Bran, son of Febal, voyages under fairy spell and whose adventures were later recorded in the medieval Irish work Yellow Book of Lecan.
Even in the nineteenth century, when everyone knew very well what lay to the west, the Norwegians maintained stories of islands just beyond the Lofotens, occasionally visible, more often not, and rarely reachable. The island of Sandflesa could be counted on to move about. Sometimes it was just a sandbank, sometimes it sank wholly under the sea. Wherever it happened to be, there were always lights blazing and music playing. Utröst was the realm beyond Röst, outermost island of the Lofotens. It was a land of sunshine and rippling fields of barley. There were no gold or crystal pillars on Utröst; it was more like a Technicolor version of the more ordinary Norwegian islands, and it only appeared to a select few.
The belief in a paradise out at sea was at work already in the Nordic Bronze Age. When Tolkien recalled how “many would bury their dead in ships, setting them forth in pomp upon the sea by the west coasts of the ancient world,” 70 he may have been thinking of the famous ship burials of the Viking Age, but he was also spot-on for Bronze Age Denmark. So preoccupied were the mound people with their ships that the mounds themselves start to look like embarkation points, especially where they appear in long rows on the west coast of Jutland. The German islands of Sylt and Amrum off the west coast of southern Jutland have mounds too and would have been good places to push off from if one wished to look for some paradise in the west.
I haven’t been to Amrum, but I’ve been to Sylt. I was really too young to be there. All I remember are sheep, dunes, and my mother pointing out a distant barrow and telling me it had been built by “ancient people,” whom I pictured looking a little like Australopithecus afarensis, clumsily piling stones one on top of another. Apparently, though I was familiar with the human ancestor “Lucy,” I had no idea that the “ancient people” of Europe’s hinterlands had worn woven clothing and bronze and gold ornaments, thought complex thoughts, and expressed them through language and art. And I never would have guessed that they had anything to do with the elves I was reading about in The Hobbit.
Unlike the Grey Havens from which the elves depart for the Blessed Realm in The Return of the King, the spirits of the mound people set off from bright and open shores. The last time I was on the North Sea coast, it was cold and rainy—and that was July!—but for much of the golden age of Old Elfland, the sun would have sparkled on the wavelets. It could not have been only the aristocrats who preoccupied themselves with thoughts of a land of ease beyond the sea. I imagine the members of what P. V. Glob termed the “numerous subject class,” 71 the people who tended the sheep, tilled the fields, and physically raised the mounds, would also have gazed longingly at the play of sun on water and dreamt of getting away from it all as their descendants, the Vikings, would eventually do.
My own immediate ancestors followed them, boarding ships that would carry them to such fabled places as New York, New Jersey, Panama, and Brazil. Our family has long ago lost touch with the branch that my great-grandmother’s sister Anna carried with her to Rio de Janeiro in the late 1800s. Perhaps Tante Anna did not immigrate to that Brazil at all but to the phantom “Brasil” or “Hy-Breasil” of Irish legend. On a clear day, you can see the ghostly isle of Hy-Breasil from the west coast of Ireland, but only once every seven years. There’s no point in sailing out to it, for by the time you reach its shore, it will have disappeared.
If the mound people had wanted to go looking for a lost land in the west, what kind of ship would they have traveled in? The ship pictures that they spent so much time pecking out on every available rock surface give us a pretty good idea. I’m sure you can easily summon the vision of a dragon-prowed Viking longship, so let’s work backward from that. The Nydam Boat, which was found sunk in a bog on the Danish–German border, was built of oak around AD 315, about four hundred years before anyone went a-viking. Like the Viking longship, it was built of overlapping planks that were nailed in place like the siding on a house. I’ve had the opportunity to walk all around the Nydam Boat, where it stands in its own building on the grounds of Gottorf Castle in Schleswig-Holstein, and it is long: over seventy-five feet, enough room for thirty rowers bristling with spears. It has no sail now nor did it back in AD 315.
Built way back around 350 BC, the Danish Hjortspring Boat is the oldest plank-built boat to be found in or anywhere near Old Elfland. The planks are of linden wood, sewn together with linden bast, the inner fiber of the bark. There are no nails, nor do the planks overlap. The body of the boat is made up of only three major pieces: a plank for the bottom and one on either side. The last two were steamed so they could be gently bent and sewn together at stern and prow. Extra pieces sweep up from the water at both ends just as they do on the boats in the rock pictures, making them look a little like skate blades.
The Hjortspring Boat was recovered in pieces, but there was enough of each component left that they could be positioned in their proper places on a metal frame and also so that a reproduction could be made: the Tilia Alsie. After paddling around in the waters of the Baltic, a crew of kayakers deemed the Tilia Alsie heartily seaworthy. She made eight knots.
The year 350 BC still only gets us as far back as the Germanic Iron Age, but the Hjortspring Boat and her reincarnation look just like the pictures the mound people left behind. The Hjortspring Boat is about ten feet shorter than the Nydam Boat, but it would still have caused quite a sensation when it drew up to the wharves of Old Elfland. The oldest picture of an Old Elflandic ship was found not on a rock but scratched into the blade of a bronze sword that was pulled out of a potato patch on the west coast of Zealand. It has been dated to around 1600 BC. The ship is just barely there, no more detailed than a three-year-old’s sidewalk drawing, but we can clearly see the upward scrolls at stem and stern. The sword, which is itself curved like the keel, bears some very fine geometric designs that would have been put there by the dwarvish sword smith. The scrawled ship was probably added by the sword’s owner and probably not for ornamentation’s sake. Perhaps it was a magical means of getting him off whatever dirt water island he’d been marooned on. “My kingdom for a ship,” he might have muttered, as he scratched it in with the tip of his paring knife. He wanted the works too, adding all of thirty-four crew strokes to the picture. Since the sword eventually ended up on the large island of Zealand, already cosmopolitan in 1600 BC, the magic must have worked.
The ship as a religious symbol and conveyance for the dead seems to have lost favor towards the end of the Bronze Age and into the insular Iron Age. I guess everybody was too busy digging up and working the local deposits of bog ore to think of traveling very far. During the Migration Period, which began around the sixth century AD, the wanderlust set in again and the prestigious dead were laid out on the decks of functional, seaworthy vessels or inside ship settings, long ship-shaped barrows outlined in stones, the kinds of tombs Tolkien was probably thinking of when he wrote his elves into the west.
Much as he would have liked to believe in a lost land across the sea, Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist, not a fantasist. He understood that the ultimate destination of those buried ships, ship settings, and even, perhaps, the canoe-like oak trunk coffins had never existed in the physical realm. The Old Elflanders would have understood that too. Of all those who had been equipped with cloaks, swords, tutuli, and mugs of milk and pushed off to drift into the sunshine of the otherworld, not one had ever drifted back.
CRAFT: Ship Candelabrum
By now you are acquainted with the votive chariot from Trundholm. Votive ships, too, would have been carried through the fields at festival time in Old Elfland. Human figures drawn on the rock faces at Bohuslän and Östergötland in Sweden are seen laboriously carrying ships of various sizes across the landscape, and we have some tiny ships made of bronze wire and gold leaf that were buried in a pot at Nors in Jutland at the close of the Nordic Bronze Age. The god Frey’s ship, Skiðblaðnir, forged for him by the dwarvish sons of Ivaldi, may be a memory of such ritual ships. When Skiðblaðnir was assembled, all the gods could fit inside it. Disassembled, it was small enough that Frey could fit it in his pouch or “wallet.” But Skiðblaðnir could not have been as fine as the precious golden Nors ships; its name seems to mean something like “made of slivers of wood.”
The tradition of the model ship as a religious object is not dead. To this day, whole fleets hang from the ceilings of many churches on the Baltic and North Sea coasts, especially those devoted to St. Nicholas, patron saint of sailors.
My little ship candelabrum does not pretend to be seaworthy. Rather than a real boat, it’s modeled on the thousands of ship pictures carved into the rocks of Old Elfland and on the early Iron Age Hjortspring Boat. The candles stand for the “crew strokes.”
You will need:
4"×2" piece corrugated cardboard
Black card stock
Scissors
White glue
Hot glue gun
Sand
3 of your homemade “elf candles” or Hanukkah candles (you could also use a tea light)
Use the template marked “bottom” to cut the bottom of your boat out of the corrugated cardboard. Cut out two “sides” from black card stock. Glue the ends of the two sides together with white glue. Slide them over the bottom and “caulk” the inside seams with the hot glue gun. This will not only secure the sides; it will prevent the sand from falling through.
Cut four end pieces out of the card stock. Glue the heads and necks of each pair together, then glue onto the ends of the boat. Glue on two extra strips of cardstock for the crosspieces.
Fill the boat with sand and insert candles.
SPELL BREAK: The Shield and the Sheaf
If you were made to read any part of Beowulf in high school, it was probably the part about the monster Grendel. If you have yet to return to the poem, then you are probably not acquainted with the hero Scyld Scefing (Danish: Skjöld), founder of one of Denmark’s longest running royal houses. Skjöld’s illustrious descendants include the kings Helgi, Hrolf, and Frodi, portions of whose stories you have already heard. But the founder of a dynasty is never himself royal, and Skjöld’s origins are obscure to say the least. He arrived in Denmark as a small child without pedigree, set adrift in a little boat. None of the sources call him an infant, but he was young enough to sleep through the bumping of his boat onto the shore.
By the time Skjöld’s descendant King Hrolf was holding court in the sixth century, the royal seat of the Skjöldungs was at Lejre on the island of Zealand. If it was on Zealand that little Skjöld had washed up, then he would not have had all that far to drift, unless he had had to come rollicking down the Kattegat and into the Roskilde Fjord. According to Snorri Sturluson, Skjöld grew up to marry the minor goddess Gefjon who, in early days, had plowed the island away from the Swedish headland, so Lejre was probably his home base.
We know that a very grand hall stood at Lejre in the Viking Age and that it was only an improvement on the one that had been built there three hundred years earlier. The area abounds with royal mounds (though none of them containing the body of Skjöld) and horses were sacrificed there in the late Bronze to early Iron Ages. The place had been so important to the religious lives of the ancient Danes that in 1015 our old friend Thietmar of Merseburg was still complaining about the sacrifice of ninety-nine men there every nine years.
The Beowulf poet does not tell us why the Old English version of the hero’s name, Scyld, bears the epithet Scefing, but twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury says it is for the sheaf (Old English sceaf) of ripe grain that was found in the boat with him. The sheaf is not mentioned in the poem; it was an independent bit of oral history still floating around, waiting for William to set it down in writing. Scefing can mean “of the sheaf” or “son of Sheaf.” Either way, only a Nordic fertility god shows up out of nowhere in a boat with a sheaf of grain in his hand.
How long ago did this Skjöld live? According to Beowulf, Skjöld was the great-grandfather of Hrothgar, the king who ruled at Lejre when the poem’s action begins. Beowulf was written down in England sometime before the year 1000, possibly as early as the 700s, so that would put Skjöld no earlier than the 600s. There was once a Skjöldunga Saga, but only pieces of it survive here and there, encapsulated in other manuscripts. One of the pieces puts Skjöld twenty generations before Gorm the Old, who died in AD 940. That would date Skjöld to around AD 340. The Old Norse work Skáldskaparmál, however, has Skjöld’s grandson Frodi taking over the kingship at the time of the birth of Christ, but surely this is an intrusion into a much older story.
How far back might we take him? If we accept the idea that Skjöld was more than human, we’d have a lot more leeway. He was obviously born of the imagination of a people devoted to ships and the sea. There wasn’t as much of that during the Germanic Iron Age as during the Viking Age, and we’ve already dated him to well before the Viking Age, so let’s try the Nordic Bronze Age. Skjöld’s first name, the name he would pass down as a family name to the kings at Lejre, means “shield.” Did they have shields back in Old Elfland? Of course they did: the legions of stick figures on the rock faces can be seen defending themselves from axes, spears and swords with roundish shields that look a lot like sun wheels. Perhaps Skjöld’s was a special shield, a shield that shone like the sun.
The Skjöldungs may originally have been not so much a family as a priestly class who kept and assembled the pieces of the votive ships and performed other rituals to ensure that the grain flourished. If so, what became of them during the Iron Age? They may have ceased to be priests but maintained their identity within the family, passing on their now peculiar habits from father to son, continuing to propitiate the ancestral spirits in the mounds and to inhume their dead, while others began to look to Odin and the Aesir and to release the spirits of the dead into the sky through the medium of fire.
Another of those Skjöldunga Saga fragments states that Skjöld was a son of Odin, but we are not so easily fooled. By the early Middle Ages, it had become fashionable for kings to claim descent from Odin, so the Skjöldunga bard probably thought he should extend this courtesy to Skjöld too. More than a man, not quite a god, very like an elf, Skjöld is no sky god but a Van through and through. And, like the Vanir, the shield-wielding Skjöld was described not as an aggressor but as a fierce defender of his land.
After Skjöld dies, his adopted countrymen place him in a ship laden with treasure. In a scene worthy of Tolkien, who did in fact make his own translation of Beowulf in 1926, they return him to the sea from whence he came. The rich goods piled up around the mast are described as “gifts,” but they are not for the dead king himself; they are meant for “those that in the beginning sent him forth.” 72