But now that the water’s piped, we will never know what it sounded like.
They passed Glaumbaer at the close of the day ... and when they had gone on a short way, a man came to meet them. He was tall and thin, and had a big head. He was poorly dressed. He greeted them and they exchanged names. He said his was Thorbjorn. He was a wanderer, not one to work much, always chattering and boasting. Some people thought him amusing. He was very friendly and started telling funny stories about the people of the nearby farms. Grettir thought him great fun. Thorbjorn asked if they didn’t need a man to work for them. “I would gladly join you,” he said. He told such good stories that they let him tag along....And because he was such a talker and joker he’d earned himself a nickname and was called “Glaum,” or “Noisemaker.”
—
Grettir’s Saga
O
F ALL THE HOUSES GUDRID LIVED IN DURING HER LONG
and adventurous life—at Arnarstapi under the Snow Mountain’s Glacier; in Greenland at Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid and farther north, at Sandnes; at L’Anse aux Meadows in Vinland and somewhere near the Miramichi River on the Gulf of St. Lawrence; at Reynines with her haughty mother-in-law—the house at Glaumbaer was her only true home. The others were owned or overseen by someone else. Glaumbaer was hers, unfortunately, alone.
The sagas say almost nothing about the years she lived at Glaumbaer, only that she raised her two sons alone. Karlsefni died before the eldest, Snorri, came of age. Chances are that Karlsefni was lost at sea soon after his second son was born—otherwise, we could expect Gudrid to have had more than two children. Nor, this time, did Gudrid inherit a ship. Perhaps Karlsefni was caught in a storm on a routine trading run from Norway, and sailed his ship down somewhere in the icy North Atlantic. Gudrid never remarried.
But barring loneliness, her life at Glaumbaer was not a difficult one. She remained wealthy enough to fund her final adventure—a pilgrimage to Rome, essentially a grand tour of Europe that would have taken at least a year to accomplish—with enough money left over to let Snorri, in her absence, build her a church on their property. And, like all of her neighbors, her only source of income was the cloth she could make from the wool of her sheep.
By tallying the sexes and ages of sheep’s bones and teeth, archaeologists concluded that the sheep in Iceland in the Viking Age were not kept mainly for milk and meat, as they are now. Instead of being culled young, as tender lambs, males were gelded and allowed to become “aged,” as one archaeologist puts it—up to eight years old. These wethers were “valuable assets,” another expert writes. “They were the kind of property which the farmer could keep from one year to the next with limited risk.” Sturdy enough to graze outdoors in most weather, they could be turned loose and essentially forgotten until shearing time, when they would yield twice as much wool as a ewe that was being milked. At the two farms studied, 20 percent of the flock was tall, wool-heavy wethers: the Viking cash crop.
One day I remarked to Sirri about the amount of pasture in the area. “Is that why Glaumbaer was such a good farm when Gudrid lived here?” I asked her.
“
I
don’t think Gudrid did live here,” Sirri said, “though she may have died here. I think Gudrid lived in Reynines for a decade or two while Snorri was small. Reynines was Thorfinn Karlsefni’s heritage. It was the best farm in the district. I think Gudrid and Karlsefni lived there, but also owned Glaumbaer. Eventually their family owned the whole area. Snorri was the first farmer at Glaumbaer, but you can’t tell when he started to farm—at age fifteen or at twenty-five—no one knows when Karlsefni died and Gudrid became a widow. Nobody will
ever
know that.
“But to answer your question,” Sirri continued, “Glaumbaer must have been a very good farm when Snorri lived here. It’s a very easy farm. You can cut grass wherever you like, everywhere in the area. You have good fodder for the animals all year long, even if you don’t make hay. In normal years you didn’t need hay. But of course you had to make it just in case.
“I suppose Gudrid would not stay at Reynines after Karlsefni’s death,” Sirri added, picking again at the old problem. “The saga says something about her mother-in-law not liking her. But this is just my theory. I have no way to say she lived at Glaumbaer or not.”
“Doesn’t the dating of the house John found suggest that she did?”
“No.” Sirri pursed her lips, turning very serious. “All we can say, when archaeologists find something, is that the saga takes place at the same time. It’s wonderful to see the old turf house that you found under the hayfield, because now we have the first generation of turf house down in the field and the last generation of turf house up on the hill, and people can see what has changed and what has not in a thousand years. The two houses are
real.
People really lived there. The sagas are not real.
“But it’s quite entertaining to have them both,” she added, smiling.
“You
can believe it was her house if you want. We have given her a place. And you can certainly place Snorri here. The saga says he built the first church here—though some people doubt that, too.
“But whether they are true or not, the sagas have a meaning for people. Icelanders have listened to them for a thousand years. They have the soul of the people in them, the image of the people. They name people, they name places. You can use them to learn genealogy, geography, history, to teach your children how to behave—”
“How do you use the saga of Grettir the Strong to teach children to behave?”
Sirri laughed, then sighed. “Oh, yes, Grettir. He did everything wrong. He was bad to animals, bad to people, he stole, he drank. He was in many ways crazy, an antihero. Many people would like to do what he did, but they don’t dare.”
The overarching theme of
Grettir's Saga
is that the Viking Age is over. The Viking values that Grettir embodies no longer apply: He was stronger than anyone, courageous to a fault, even a good poet, but his tragic flaw was hubris. Only when he learned to live humbly and love his brother was he happy. Until then he had no luck. He was outlawed in both Iceland and Norway for a good deed gone wrong: Seeking help after a shipwreck, he was mistaken for a troll, got into a brawl, and burned down a house, murdering several men. With a price on his head, he hid in caves and wilderness camps until his fear of the dark grew overwhelming, then convinced his fifteen-year-old brother IIlugi to accompany him to Skagafjord to the island of Drangey, whose steep cliffs couldn’t be scaled without a ladder.
It’s on their journey through Skagafjord on a snowy day that Grettir’s saga intersects with that of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, for at Glaumbaer they picked up a companion. He was a funny-looking fellow called Thorbjorn Glaum, meaning “Noisemaker” or “Chatterbox,” and although his name might imply he had a connection to Gudrid’s farm, he called himself a wanderer and spoke of the people there with no affection. He was a gossip and a boaster. His low status is clearly relayed by the phrase “he was poorly dressed.” Clothing, in fact, seems to obsess him.
“When you went by Glaumbaer, not even wearing a hood in this blizzard, they were pretty amazed,” Glaum said. “They were wondering if being so cold-hardy made you any braver. These two farmer’s sons, such big, strong men—when the shepherd told them to come out and give him a hand with the sheep, they couldn’t pile on enough clothes, they thought it was so cold.”
Grettir said, “I saw one youngster in the doorway. He was pulling on his mittens. And the other one was going between the cowshed and the manure pile. I wouldn’t be scared of either of them.”
The two farmer’s sons being lampooned would be Snorri and Thorbjorn, his younger brother. The year is about 1028, making Snorri twenty-three and master of Glaumbaer. Gudrid could have been away on her pilgrimage to Rome, for the years 1025 to 1028 saw a brief interlude of peace in the wars between Norway and Denmark, and King Olaf the Saint of Norway was encouraging Christianity in Iceland.
In these few words, the saga gives a good sense of the working farm of Glaumbaer a thousand years ago: two young men, a shepherd, sheep, a cowshed, a manure pile, work to be done on a cold winter day, and a painful awareness of the importance of hoods, mittens, and other warm clothes.
As
Grettir’s Saga
continues, we get a wider picture of the neighborhood around Gudrid’s farm. Grettir and his two companions walked on as far as Reynines, where Gudrid’s mother-in-law may still have been in charge. She must have been generous and discreet, as well as haughty and capable, for the travelers spent the night there (without making any snide comments about it), and the next day traveled on up the coast to the farm with the hot spring now known as Grettir’s Bath. There, by greasing a palm, the outlaws got a man to row them out to the island. They climbed up, secured the ladder, and settled in.
Grettir and Illugi were content on Drangey for five years. They had plenty of sheep to eat, with seabirds and gulls’ eggs for variety, and they were safe as long as they hauled the ladder up each night. The only unhappy one was Glaum. He got the blame when the fire went out—causing Grettir to swim the four miles to the mainland, warm himself up in the hot spring, and rape the serving maid.
And how was Glaum to know that the great driftwood tree trunk he lugged home for firewood one night had been cursed by a witch? Her spell turned Grettir’s axe, and he struck his own leg while chopping the log. The wound festered and turned black. While the hero lay feverish, Glaum forgot his duties once again and left the ladder down. Forewarned by the witch, Grettir’s enemies clambered up and killed them all.
When I first read
Grettir's Saga,
I wondered if this miserable creature known as Thorbjorn Glaum was really Thorbjorn of Glaumbaer, Gudrid’s second son. An impressionable eighteen years old, irritated by his older brother’s authority, had he remembered how Grettir refused to do farmwork? Had he pulled on his mittens and run after the ill-starred hero, looking for glory? Had he joked about himself and his brother to cover his tracks? What finally convinced me the name was an odd coincidence—or a scribe’s mistake—was the saga-writer’s remark that the chatterbox was “poorly dressed.” No matter how lazy or boastful, no son of Gudrid, living on the grass-rich farm of Glaumbaer, would be poorly dressed.
A housewife’s chief duty was to see that her menfolk wore good clothes. Clothing was the most visible mark of her family’s status, the main outlet for her creativity and industry, and the foundation of Iceland’s economy. The sagas say little about such everyday tasks as cloth making, but this gap in our knowledge of Gudrid’s daily life has recently been filled in by experimental archaeologists, like two I met at the University of Copenhagen. Using tools Gudrid might have owned, they make cloth that matches, thread for thread, the samples dug up from Viking houses and graves.
To clothe her family, Gudrid started in early summer, just after the lambs were born, with shearing the sheep. Their thick double-coated fleece could be pulled off by hand—called rooing—or snipped with iron shears, partial pairs of which have been found in several archaeological sites. Wool samples from the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland showed both rooing and shearing were done at the same time; no one knows which was better, or why. At Copenhagen’s Center for Textile Research, Linda Martensson spread a full, sheared fleece, mottled black and gray, on the conference table. Beside it she lay a partial one in the rich, rusty color called “moor-red,” after the tint bog-water takes on from iron ore. Eva Andersson, who is in charge of the Center’s “Tools and Textiles” program, ran a hand over the gray fleece, as if it were a cat that had jumped into her lap.
“The process,” Linda said, “is first you shear the sheep. Then you sort the wool.”
The best wool, I had read, came from the neck, the sides, and the back; the worst from the belly and the legs. In between best and worst was a medium grade. To get a uniform thread, you would spin wool from only one grade at a time.
Linda touched the gray fleece delicately here and there, poking, squeezing, petting, fluffing. “The back leg is coarse and dirty,” Linda said. “The back is a little dry. The sides I would see as a good quality to spin with. The front legs and neck are very felted. I would put that in another group.”
“After you sort the wool,” continued Eva, “you have to wash it.”
She plucked a handful from the moor-red fleece and gave it to me. It was greasy with lanolin and slightly gritty. The washing step, I knew, we weren’t going to get into here, in a glass-walled conference room. The Vikings washed wool in barrels of stale urine. When heated, urine, being alkaline, acts as a detergent—and it was certainly available. One scholar suggests that after the big milk tubs in Viking larders were emptied of
skyr
or whey during the winter, they were refilled with urine, little by little, especially on cold, windy days.
Modern sensitivities should not preclude the proximity of functions in the past now regarded as insanitary, such as the storage of urine and food in the same room,
he chides, noting,
it is less than a century since Yorkshire women used the chamber-pot contents to wash their face and hair.
The washed wool would be laid in the sun to dry, then stored in a wool crib until winter, when the work Eva and Linda were about to demonstrate would occupy every woman’s day.
Linda had begun combing a hank of red wool with her fingers, teasing apart the mats and tangles, stretching it like taffy. “You can do a lot of work by hand, separating the different kinds of wool and hair, and opening it up.” The handwork also warms the wool, softening and spreading the lanolin. She piled the fuzzier, woollier bits on the table, leaving the longer hairs in her hand. “Long hairs make a stronger yarn than short hairs. The warp of a loom is long hairs, but for the weft you can use short ones.”
“You can’t do too much by hand, though, or you start to make felt,” Eva said. She got out a pair of wood-handled combs shaped like small rakes, with one row of four-inch-long metal teeth—reconstructions of Norwegian Viking finds. “You put them next to the fire to heat the teeth. That melts the fat while you comb.” She placed the worked hank of wool in one comb, the teeth through the woolliest part, the long hairs hanging down, and passed both combs to Linda. Keeping the loaded comb still, cocked up to provide tension, Linda used the other to brush out the strands.