Sami Tales Told "By the Fire"

The Sami of northern Sweden "felt such a personal connection to the trees whose wood they burned, mostly birch and pine, that they chopped 'eyes' in the firewood, so the pieces of wood 'could see they were burning well.'"

I learned this in a delightful book called By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends. Collected and illustrated by Emilie Demant Hatt, and translated by Barbara Sjoholm, it includes 70-some tales, along with Demant Hatt's introduction, selections from her fieldnotes, and an essay by Sjoholm.

The nomadic reindeer-herding Sami of the far north often appear in the medieval Icelandic sagas, which provide the source material for most of my own books. The Vikings traded with the Sami for skins, furs, feathers, and walrus ivory, and several Norwegian kings and chieftains forced them to pay tribute--that is, protection money. Sami men and women also appear in the Icelandic sagas as sorcerors and shamans, able to shift their shapes, foretell the future, and find lost things.

As a student of comparative literature, I am intrigued by how similar some of Demant Hatt's Sami tales are with other folklore I’m familiar with. For example, Cinderella-type stories are found among the Sami, with evil stepmothers, handsome princes, too-small-slippers that require the chopping off of heels or toes, and all.

As in Icelandic folktales, the Sami speak of Hidden Folk or elves, here called the Haldes. In one story, for example, the evil stepmother tells the girl to spin yarn "at the edge of a gorge, at the bottom of which there was a deep spring. The ball of yarn rolled away from the girl, and when she tried to snatch it, she fell into the spring. But down there she met the good Haldes." The Haldes hire the girl to tend their cows, and eventually let her return home, carrying her wages in gold and silver.

But what I really enjoy reading folktales for are the differences—the things I have not heard before and would not have thought of myself.

Along with the Sami chopping "eyes" in their firewood, for example, in By the Fire I learned about the evil Stallo. A kind of people-eating troll, Stallo "goes around whistling all the time so one can hear when he is in the vicinity. All whistling is taboo among the Sami: the sound of it is absolutely connected with the Evil One and with sorcery."

In Sami language, you can be deaf as Stallo, large as Stallo, or have Stallo's skinny legs. If you had a large head--a small, round head was key to the Sami concept of beauty--you had a Stallo head. If you ate alone, you ate like Stallo. If you had a child with a man you didn't care to marry, that child was Stallo's child.

Stallo also explains the landscape: A single standing stone marks a Stallo grave. A ring of stones is a ruined Stallo tent.

And while Stallo is usually presented as evil, his belt is decorated with a silver star bearing three faces; if you find (or steal) a Stallo-star, you can cure many diseases.

Unlike most folktale collections from the north, as translator Barbara Sjoholm points out, By the Fire contains stories told to Emilie Demant Hatt "as part of other conversations, ethnographic and social, that took place 'by the fire' in tents or turf huts or out in the open air."

Demant Hatt was the first ("and for a long time the only," Sjoholm adds) Scandinavian anthropologist to take an interest in the lives of women and children. Most of the stories she recorded were those that women told among themselves as they worked--sometimes answering Demant Hatt's questions, more often giving conscious performances to entertain the group. In these stories, girls outfox their attackers, girls save their people--and murdered babies come back to haunt their parents.

By the Fire is beautifully illustrated with Demant Hatt's bold and eerie linocuts. Trained as an artist, Demant Hatt first went to northern Sweden in 1904 as a tourist. Inspired by Sami culture, she returned to live with them for many months in 1907. She studied Sami language at the University of Copenhagen, soon becoming fluent, and taught herself ethnography. From 1910 through 1916 she spent her summers with the Sami, first by herself, then bringing along her husband, a graduate student in cultural geography, who sometimes took notes for her while she conducted interviews. Her field notes fill 500 typed pages.

Demant Hatt wrote a memoir of her early adventures, With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman among the Sami, 1907-1908, which has been edited and translated by Barbara Sjoholm. Sjoholm also wrote her biography, Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer. Two more books to add to my reading list!

For more book recommendations, see my lists at Bookshop.org. Disclosure: As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

The Year 1000

I’ve written a lot about the year 1000. The Far Traveler charts the voyages of a Viking woman to North America (and later, to Rome) around the year 1000. The Abacus and the Cross profiles the pope in the year 1000, Gerbert d'Aurillac, the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day. My latest book, The Real Valkyrie, tells the story of a woman warrior who died a little before 970, and whose adventurous lifestyle would have been less likely after the North was Christianized in the year 1000.

In The Year 1000, Valerie Hansen, a professor of history at Yale, covers all that in her first 100 pages. She then proceeds to open up a medieval world I had no idea existed.

What was the "Viking Age" like in Sri Lanka? Who was the world's richest man? (Hint: He lived in Africa.) Who were the "far travelers" of the Pacific? What was the "most globalized place on earth"? (China.)

For me, Chapter Three on "The Pan-American Highways of 1000" was the most exciting. It begins, "In the year 1000, the largest city in the Americas was probably the Maya settlement of Chichen Itza, with an estimated population of some 40,000."

That's about the estimated population of the entire country of Iceland at the same time. Just think if we had as many stories about the people of Chichen Itza, in modern-day Mexico, as we have about the Icelanders.

Some 40 Sagas of Icelanders exist, written down on parchment in Old Norse in the 1200s or later. These sagas provide much of what we know about daily life in the Viking Age. They also chronicle the Vikings' travels from the Scandinavian homelands east through modern-day Russia and Ukraine to Istanbul and maybe even Baghdad, and west into the Gulf of St Lawrence and possibly much farther,

What the Maya left behind were pyramids and ball courts and temples, decorated with wall paintings depicting Maya conquests. And it's here that Hansen's history made my eyes pop. She writes:

"Across a doorway in the Temple of Warriors is a truly unusual painting. Although it's on the same wall that shows the conquest of a village, it depicts people totally unlike the warriors in other murals because they are so lifelike.

"With yellow hair, light eyes, and whitish skin, one victim has his arms tied behind his back. A second has beads woven into his blond hair, as is common for captives in other Maya paintings (both are shown in the color plates). Yet another, also with beads in his hair, floats naked in the water as a menacing fish, mouth open, hovers nearby. The artist has used Maya blue, a pigment that combines indigo with palygorskite clay, for the water. These unfortunate prisoners of war have all been thrown into the water to drown.

"Who were these light-skinned, blond-haired victims?

"Could they have been Norsemen captured by the Maya?"

Scholars have debated that identification since the paintings were discovered in the 1920s. Currently, the answer is tipping toward "yes," even though no verified Scandinavian artifacts have been found in Mexico or, indeed, anywhere else in North America south of Newfoundland.

Notes Hansen, "This isn't as serious an objection as you might think; the archaeological record is far from complete."

At L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a Viking-style bronze pin clearly identified the site. Lacking a similar "diagnostic artifact," scholars will continue to debate how far the Vikings penetrated the Americas. But for now, Hansen says, "we have to conclude that the Vikings could have arrived in the Yucatan."

They had the means: When the replica Viking ship Gaia sailed down the American east coast in 1991, it made it all the way past the mouth of the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

And there is, indeed, a story in the Icelandic sagas about a voyage to what might be Mexico, according to the 1999 research of Icelandic historian Þórunn Valdimarsdóttir, which she recently posted in English here: http://thorvald.is/. It is further discussed by Alex Harvey of the University of York here: https://theposthole.org/read/article/486.

In Eyrbyggja Saga, the famous Bjorn the Breidavik-Champion sails west from Iceland to avoid a feud and is not heard from again until, many years later, another Viking ship sailing west is blown off course, coming to land in an unknown country. There, the Vikings are captured, bound, brought before a council, and doomed to death or slavery.

They are saved by a grand old man, to whom the locals defer, who speaks to them in Norse. Before sending them back out to sea, he singles out the Icelanders in their crew and asks for news. He refuses to give his name, but sends home with them a sword and a ring for a boy and his mother in Iceland.

He tells them not to let anyone try to find him, for (in the translation of Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards), "This is a big country and the harbors are few and far between. Strangers can expect plenty of trouble here unless they happen to be as lucky as you."

Trouble, perhaps, like that experienced by the blond and blue-eyed men depicted on the wall of the Temple of Warriors in Chichen Itza: bound, decorated with beads, and drowned.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World--and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen was published in 2020 by Scribner. Be sure to take a look at those color plates. (Or see http://valerie-hansen.com for some examples.)

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

The Real Valkyrie: The First Reviews Are In!

“Stirring,” “passionate,” “entertaining,” “well-researched,” and (I like this one best) “convincing.”

When you’ve worked on a book for four years—as I have on The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, coming to bookstores on August 31—those are really nice adjectives to see in the book's first official review. And from the notoriously hard-to-please Kirkus Reviews, no less.

You can read the full review here.

"If Nancy had told me in advance what she intended to do I would have been skeptical," an early reader told my editor, "but she has pulled it off wonderfully.

"The Real Valkyrie is magnificent," she continued. "It captured me from the very first page. Brown manages to take the limited but startling information that one of richest graves of any Viking warrior ever discovered was that of a woman and paints a stunning tapestry of what life must have been like for a bold, brave woman in medieval times. Drawing upon her deep knowledge of Viking history, she creates an unforgettable character."

Wow! This reader, Pat Shipman, a friend and fellow author, might be my perfect reader.

Like me, she writes about ancient history, anthropology, and spunky women. One of my favorite Shipman titles is To the Heart of the Nile, about a young woman who escaped slavery and set off to explore Central Africa, searching for the source of the Nile. Pat has also written about archaeopteryx, the Missing Link, Mata Hari, and, in The Invaders, how humans and their dogs drove the Neanderthals to extinction--a topic she returns to in her current project, Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs.

Pat was right to be skeptical. I was skeptical too. The first draft of The Real Valkyrie was much less bold. The "valkyrie" of the title, the woman warrior buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden in the mid-900s, was (as my editor rightly pointed out at the time) only a shadowy character when I turned in my manuscript, on deadline, in late 2019.

Then the pandemic hit. My publishing timetable got set back more than a year, and my editor at St. Martin's Press turned crisis into opportunity by giving me three precious gifts: time, space, and support. Take as much time as you want, and add as many more words as you need, she said. And don't be afraid to break conventions.

Like unraveling a sweater and reknitting it in a different pattern and size, I took apart Draft #1. I completely restructured the book, adding an entirely new thread to the story.

First, I gave the woman whose bones were buried in Birka grave Bj581 a name: Hervor, after the warrior woman in a classic Old Norse poem.

Then--following the style of Snorri Sturluson, writing hundreds of years after the events he described in his sagas of the kings of Norway--I wove together poems and sagas and things experts told me to imagine her life.

It was the only way. The events that shaped the warrior woman buried in Bj581 will always be hidden. All we have are her bones and the things buried with her.

So to bring Hervor’s story to life, I began each chapter as historical fiction, then stepped back and explained my sources, being particularly careful to make clear what was historical fact and what was my own speculation.

The result, I realized when I had nearly finished the draft, was like the documentary film I was interviewed for in 2018 about another exceptional Viking woman, the subject of two of my previous books, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman and its fictional spin-off, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. The filmmaker, Anna Dís Ólafsdóttir of Profilm in Iceland, combined interviews with experts and dramatic stagings of scenes from Gudrid's life, taking care to make the settings and costumes as historically accurate as modernly possible.

Pat Shipman's comments were not the only ones that convinced me (and my editor) that this new approach worked.

One of the scholars whose work I relied on while writing The Real Valkyrie was Marianne Moen. When I first began researching the roles of powerful women in the Viking Age, I was particularly influenced by her 2010 master's thesis from the University of Oslo, The Gendered Landscape: A discussion on gender, status, and power expressed in the Viking Age mortuary landscape.

I was lucky that Marianne's doctoral thesis, Challenging Gender: A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape (also from the University of Oslo), came out in 2019--in time for my second draft.

You can find Marianne's work on her academia.edu page, here.

Marianne, too, was generous enough to read The Real Valkyrie in manuscript. She summarized it this way: "In this forceful, engaging, and much needed book, Brown is telling a different story from what we're used to hearing. It rests on assumptions and educated guesses, but so do all stories of the past, and hers is no less valid than the classic ones we're so used to hearing: that's why it's such an excellent counterpoint, because it shows how a shifting of the gaze can reveal a completely different outcome. It’s a compelling read. I enjoyed it immensely."

I hope you will too. And please let me know what you think by leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you like.

The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women will be available from your favorite bookseller on August 31. If you want to give a little extra support to the author, buy it from my Bookshop.

(Disclosure: As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.)

That Stern High World

"Icelandic studies may be more than a mere cultural discipline; they may contribute to the positive exaltation of those who pass through them into that stern high world where our forefathers lived and died with fearless eyes and undefeated hearts." – Watson Kirkconnell, OC FRSC (1895–1977)

When the Icelandic-Canadian newspaper Lögberg-Heimskringla sent that snippet of wisdom out over its Facebook page last November, it struck a chord--though one with a bit of dissonance.

I do rather like the idea that my many years of studying Icelandic sagas have resulted in my "positive exaltation," and I think I know what Kirkconnell means by "that stern high world."

It's rather like what J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis characterized by the term "Northernness." As I wrote in Song of the Vikings, these writers of high fantasy were not only drawn to the Norse mythology's dragons and dwarves, fair elves and werewolves, wandering wizards, and trolls that turned into stone, but to their portrayal of men with a bitter courage who stood fast on the side of Right and Good even when there was no hope at all.

According to Tolkien, this theory of courage was "the great contribution of early Northern literature." It is a "creed of unyielding will," the heroes refusing to give up even when they know the monsters will win.

For that is the big difference between the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win. They have no hope of winning. They are doomed and they know it.

There's a "shadow of despair" about these heroes, Tolkien noted, an "intense emotion of regret" as in his own fantasy world. For even if Middle-earth is saved from the evil forces of Sauron, the elves must leave; magic will dwindle. Still men and elves, dwarves, wizards, and hobbits fight and die for the Good and the Right.

But there's a big gap--a Ginnungagap--between Kirkconnell's "fearless eyes and undefeated hearts" and Tolkien's despair and regret.

In the introduction to his new translation of the poems of the Poetic Edda (Hackett Publishing, 2015), Jackson Crawford attempts to bridge that gap, pointing out that many of these heroic and mythological poems allude to "the belief that each person has an inevitable, fixed date of death, decided by the shadowy goddesses of fate called the Norns."

Sigurd is not afraid of fighting the dragon Fafnir because nothing he can do (or not do) will change the date of his death. If he kills the dragon, it was fated to be so. If the dragon kills him, ditto. All he can do is "manage his own wealth / till his fated death-day"--with all the good things in life wrapped up in that one word "wealth."

Likewise Sorli can shrug off losing the battle by saying, "But we fought well, /... We earned honor here, / though we are fated to die today-- / a man will not live one day longer / than the Norns have decided."

Writes Crawford, "The characters in these myths are marching toward their doom, unable to change course or to step off their predetermined path even if they fight it the entire way." But are they hopeless? despairing? We, the readers of these myths, may despair for them, but "the gods and heroes alike are actively engaged in courageously combating the inevitable," Crawford writes. "This code of boldness and the defiance of fate must have stirred something in the Norse audience in their barren farmsteads ... just as it may stir a modern audience faced with the seemingly hopeless circumstances of life in the crowded, postindustrial world of today."

We may no longer believe in the Norns, but it's still true that each one of us is fated to die. It does no good to live in fear of it. Why not instead spend our days earning honor? Our methods may be a little different than Sorli's or Sigurd's or Frodo's, but it's still a stern high world out there.

Viking Women Were "Very Stirring"

What were Viking women like? Were they really as tough and macho as Lathgertha in the History Channel's "Vikings" series?

The Icelandic sagas, although written hundreds of years after the Viking Age people and events they describe, can give us some hints--especially if we examine their descriptions word for word.

Gudrun the Fair, heroine of Laxdaela Saga, for example, is one of many saga women described as a skörungr. It's a word translators have serious trouble with--although the saga-writer clearly thinks it's a compliment. In modern Icelandic, the word means a fireplace poker. Concentrating on what a fireplace poker does, William Morris in the 1890s came up with "a very stirring woman." And Gudrun does stir things up, mostly trouble.

Yet a man labeled a skörungr Morris called "a shaper" or "a leader." Other early translators turned a female "poker" into "brave-hearted," "high-spirited," "noble," "of high mettle," "fine," "superior," "of great magnificence," and "a paragon of a woman." They might have done better to think what a poker looks like. For skörungr does, in the end, have to do with manhood. The root skör means an edge, like the edge of a sword.

Let's look more closely at Gudrun the Fair. The female characters in Laxdaela Saga are so strong and admirable that some readers suspect the story was written by a woman in response to some of the other, more male-oriented, sagas. We read of Unn the Deep-Minded, who emigrated from Scotland with all her kin, claimed a chunk of land "as big as a man's," parceled it out to her followers, and lived out her life as a chieftain in all but name, marrying off her grandchildren to make alliances. There is Melkorka, who comes to Iceland as a sex-slave: Melkorka pretended to be a deaf-mute, revealing nothing. Not until she was caught speaking Irish to her son, Olaf the Peacock, did she admit she was the daughter of an Irish king. After her status as a princess came out, her owner bought her a farm and set her up as an independent woman. Olaf married well and had five sons and three daughters. He offered to raise his half-brother's son, Bolli, to mend fences in the family, and with that we come to the crux of the saga.

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

Bolli was not lying; his crime was more on the order of wishful thinking. Still, while Kjartan was "talking" with the king of Norway's sister, Bolli wooed and wed Gudrun. Then Kjartan returned home. His sister counseled him to "do the right thing" and make peace with his friend and cousin Bolli. She introduced Kjartan to a fine woman of good family, and Kjartan was soon happily married.

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

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

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

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

Before anyone could draw a sword, Snorri of Helgafell stood up and laughed. "Now you can see what a skörungr Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us."

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

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

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

When the beautiful skörungr Hallgerd Long-legs called Njal, the hero of Njal's Saga, "Old Beardless," she was not saying he was funny-looking: She was saying he was blauðr--weak, cowardly, powerless, and craven. A loser.

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

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

The women who are mentioned in the sagas, the ones who are admired as skörungr, are the ones who have acquired that distinction. Among them is Gudrid the Far-Traveler, about whom I have written two books: the young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (2015), and the nonfiction book The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (2007), from which this discussion of skörungr was taken.

Read more about Viking women on my blog here:
http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/03/valkyrie-or-shield-maiden.html
http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2014/01/poet-maidens-and-shield-maidens.html

Vikings and the Edge of the World

If you liked my book Ivory Vikings, and want to learn more about the North Sea culture in the Middle Ages, then the next book on your reading list should be The Edge of the World by Michael Pye.

There's some overlap. Pye covers some of the same ground--or waters--as I did. We're both fascinated by the Sea Road that connected the cultures bordering the North Atlantic and permitted ideas and art, as well as people, to travel freely around the north. But while Ivory Vikings emphasizes Iceland, The Edge of the World is centered on Amsterdam and the lands that will become the Netherlands. Reading the two books back to back shows how two writers can tackle the same topic--and produce completely different, if complementary, stories.

Pye has a wider historical sweep, too. While I focus on the years 793 to 1266, he is fascinated by the 14th, 15th, and even 16th centuries. Sometimes his grander sense of time can be confusing. In a paragraph on the history of written laws, for example, he jumps from the birth of Christ to the 12th century.

And, from my perspective, Pye gets some things wrong. His understanding of Iceland and Greenland, particularly their settlement, is a bit outdated and contradicted by newer research, as is his discussion of the Viking voyages to the New World. I found myself putting a lot of question marks, and a few exclamation marks, in the margins of these sections.

But though I might quibble with a few of Pye's conclusions, I learned quite a lot from the book.

His chapter on Fashion is particularly fun. "The great sagas from Iceland have everything you expect," he writes: "heroes, killings, dragons, feuds, great voyages, and great horrors. They also have something less likely: they have dandies."

Here he introduces one of my favorites, the future Earl of Orkney, Kali Kolsson. In Ivory Vikings, I discuss the references to chess in Kali's poetry; Pye zeroes in on his clothes. Fashion, he says, "is about choosing to reinvent yourself and your status."

How exactly were the Vikings reinventing themselves? To explain, Pye tells me about some archaeological finds I was unaware of. The port town of Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, he points out, burned down repeatedly in the Middle Ages, leaving treasures for today's archaeologists.

"In the layers from the 11th to the 13th centuries, there are shoes--shoes for women, men, and children--and a startling number of them are decorated with embroidery in silk. Now, Lucca [near Rome] was beginning to produce silk in the 12th century, and grumpy Paris clerics had begun to denounce the wearing of 'worm's excrement,' but silk still seemed a luxury to Southerners, mostly imported from the Middle East. In later illuminated manuscripts, embroidered shoes are worn by grand and powerful people to show rank and to show money. But the Bergen evidence does not come from the parts of town with castles or riches; it is everywhere. There are so many shoes, even grown-ups' shoes cut down for children, that it's clear that silk yarn was being brought in quantity to the Norwegian coast long before it was the mark of social-climbing persons in Paris..."

Finally, I have often wondered why Norway did not live up to its side of the bargain in the century after Iceland became subject to the Norwegian king. According to the agreement made at the Althing between 1262 and 1264, Norway was to send frequent ships carrying grain, timber, iron, and other staples Iceland needed: "Six ships are to sail from Norway to Iceland during each of the next two summers; from that time forth their number shall be decided according to what the king and the most judicious farmers in Iceland believe to be in the best interests of the country."

Yet in historical hindsight, this agreement seems to end Iceland's years of prosperity along with its independence. The Golden Age was over. Iceland descended into its own Dark Ages of colonial repression. Until about 1600 the island was known to the rest of the world only for its rich offshore fishing grounds, its barbaric, uncultured people (said to wash in urine and dine on candle wax), and its volcanoes, one of which—Mount Hekla—was known as the Mouth of Hell.

As Pye explains, it wasn't Norway's fault. The Norwegians, too, were short of food at the end of the 1200s.

"The Norwegian ports, Bergen in particular, were waiting for the last shipments of the things they needed for the winter: grain for bread and beer, peas, beans, malt and flour. They had come to depend on these shipments; their year was measured out by the ships from Lübeck that took away their butter and dried cod, their furs and their good axes, and brought back basics from around the Baltic—where there was land to grow things, not like their own narrow fields between mountains and fjords and forests. They had once done business with the English as well, but now they depended on the Lübeck merchants of the Hansa."

The merchants of the Hansa League, a loose confederation of trading towns in what is now Germany, "seemed to do business just as they liked." Having gained a monopoly, they refused to sell "the winter essentials"--grain, flour, vegetables, and beer--to Norway until the Norwegian king gave them better terms. They blockaded the Norwegian ports until they got what they want. "Everything the Norwegians did after that seemed only to make them more dependent on the Hansa," Pye writes. They didn't send ships full of grain to Iceland because they couldn't.

"Something is beginning on the edge of the world: the kind of multinational power that does not depend on where it is based, which flirts or fights in the modern world with the obvious kinds of political and state power, which usually gets its own way," Pye concludes. Something that brought the old Viking world to its knees. "The modern trade-off between politics and money had begun."

The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe by Michael Pye was published by Pegasus Books in 2015.

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker (November 2): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/briefly-noted-the-blue-guitar (scroll down)

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

America2Iceland's Sagas & Vikings Tour

Iceland is the hot place to go these days (pun intended). Every week, it seems, I hear from someone who just "did" the land of fire and ice.

Well, I've got news for you. You can't "do" Iceland in one trip. I've been going to Iceland since 1986--and the place isn't done with me yet.

It's not only that I've missed whole quadrants of the country. The places I know still astonish me. Each year, I notice something new or--paradoxically--very old, like the Viking Age longhouse that was discovered under a Reykjavik parking lot last year and is forcing a critical rethinking of the city's development.

And then there's the weather. 

Last summer, from the farm where I like to stay, I gazed for days and days at the high white ice caps in the center of the island. But the one day we traveled toward the sea, the mountains by the coast wrapped themselves in clouds. Majestic Snaefellsjokull simply disappeared.

I knew it was there, laughing behind my back. The West is one part of Iceland I know very well: from Borgarnes to the Breiðafjorður, out to the tip of Snæfellsnes, and in to Surtshellir cave at the edge of the highlands. The West has a wonderful variety of landscapes--farms, fishing villages, lava fields, glaciers, beaches, waterfalls. On various trips I've found a path through the lava that had long been lost, crouched behind a rock while a sea eagle strafed me, rode a horse through a swift salmon river (careful not to let the eddies dizzy me), collected crowberries, watched fox pups play, rescued trapped sheep, frightened myself in a pitch-dark cave, drank sweet water from the well in another, soaked in a wilderness hot pool, sunned on the flank of a volcano.

I'm not a naturalist: What draws me to this part of Iceland are the medieval sagas, with their tales of sheep-farmers and sorcerors, horse fights and feuds, love and grief and hard times and strife. Tales of a satisfying life scratched from an unforgiving land. Tales tempered with poetry and grace. 

These sagas, this landscape, has inspired nearly all my books. It's here that I found one perfect horse in A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse (Stackpole 2001), and learned how Icelandic folklore and mythology are infused with horses.

Here is where the story of Gudrid the Far-Traveler begins, the Viking woman who explored North America 500 years before Columbus. I've written about Gudrid twice, as nonfiction in The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), and in the young adult novel The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (Namelos 2015). Guðriður grew up on the tip of Snæfellsnes, in the shadow of the glacier some people call the third most holy spot on earth. (Seeing it rise out of the sea is certainly one of my favorite views of Iceland). 

In the twelfth century, West Iceland was ruled by Snorri Sturluson, that unscrupulous chieftain who has become the most influential writer of the Middle Ages, in any language. My book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) is his biography. Here he wrote the Edda, which contains almost everything we know about Norse mythology. Here he wrote Heimskringla, his history of the kings of Norway. Here he probably wrote the first (and maybe the best) of the Icelandic sagas: Egil's Saga. And here he died, murdered, cringing in his cellar, for having betrayed the king of Norway.

Here, as well, Snorri and his family may have cornered the market on walrus ivory. As I argue in my latest book, Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them (St Martin's 2015), the land of the sagas may also have been a land of world-class visual art in the Middle Ages. 

The best way to research my books, I've found, is to walk through the landscape where history happened, to live where my subjects lived and face some of the same challenges. To cross rivers on horseback, for example, or climb a volcanic crater. To experience the midnight sun in summer, when the birdsong never stills, as well as the dark days of winter (though I must admit, I've let a very few of them stand in for the rest). To marvel at the beauty of white glacier ice, black lava rock, blue (or slate-gray) sky, and jewel-green fields. To feel the spirits of the land in the breath of the wind, the sting of rain, and the warmth of the sun.

I'd like to bring you with me. Since 2012 I've been leading tours in West Iceland for the company America2Iceland, which is based on the farm of Staðarhús in Borgarfjörður. Earlier on this blog I've written about our Trekking Bootcamp I, an adventure tour for horseback riders. 

But we also offer a tour for non-riders, for people who like to learn about Iceland's sagas and its Viking past. For people who'd like to meet real Icelanders and see more of the country than just the surface it presents to the usual tourist.

This year's "Sagas & Vikings" tour will take place from July 10-16. We'll begin in Reykjavik, with a visit to the Settlement Exhibition, then travel to Thingvellir, site of Iceland's ancient parliament and locus of many saga episodes. We'll end our day at Staðarhús, where we'll settle in for a week in a comfortable, family-run country hotel.

Mornings we'll spend reading, taking nature walks, and observing the lifestyle of a traditional Icelandic horse farm. Those so inclined can take a riding lesson or short trail ride (for an additional charge). 

Each morning's assigned readings, from my own books, will introduce the sights we'll see on our bus tour in the afternoon. We'll hike into the lava fields at Eldborg and Budir. We'll tour the sea caves and bird cliffs at Hellnar and Arnarstapi, and visit Gudrid's birthplace at Laugabrekka. We'll explore the town of Borgarnes, with its museums and geothermal pools, and Snorri's estate of Reykholt. We'll visit hot springs, wander along black and golden beaches, and see glaciers, volcanic craters, and waterfalls. And we'll meet the Icelandic horse and learn why the horse, not the dog, is "man's best friend" in Iceland. 

Over dinner--a gourmet meal served at the farm--we'll discuss what we've learned and seen: How Iceland was settled, why the sagas were written, how the country has changed since the Middle Ages, how its culture has so powerfully influenced our own.

This tour is limited to 12 people, so each will get my personal attention. For more information, or to sign up, see America2Iceland.com or contact Rebecca at America2Iceland by email at info@america2iceland.com or phone at 1-828-348-4257. I think this is the perfect tour for first-time visitors to Iceland. Even if you've been to Iceland before, you'll see it in a completely new light.

The Saga of Herdis, the Bishop's Wife

What is a saga? Confusingly, 140 texts written in Old Icelandic are labeled "sagas." Derived from the Icelandic verb "to say," saga implies neither fact nor falsehood. Today we place the Icelandic sagas in several genres--Family Sagas, Sagas of Ancient Times, Kings' Sagas, Contemporary Sagas (including the Bishops' Sagas), Knights' Tales, and Saints' Lives.

The best, the ones people usually mean when they say "the Icelandic sagas," are the Family Sagas. "The glory of the sagas is indisputable," they are "some sort of miracle," scholars gush. "In no other literature is there such a sense of the beauty of human conduct." Others praise the sagas' "earnest straightforward manner," their crisp dialogue and "simple, lucid sentence structure," their individualistic characters, their gift for drama, their complex structure, "the illusion of reality which they create," and their sophisticated use of "the same devices that we are accustomed to from modern suspense fiction." The Family Sagas are "a great world treasure," comparable to "Homer, Shakespeare, Socrates, and those few others who live at the very heart of human literary endeavor."

The Bishops' Sagas, on the other hand, have been dismissed by one expert as "backwards, stilted in style, and schlocky in hagiographical excess." No one gushes over the Saga of Bishop Pall. Few people, other than specialists, even read it--there's no English translation.

But that doesn't mean there aren't treasures to be found in it. The Saga of Bishop Pall is the only text to mention Margret the Adroit, the best ivory carver in all of Iceland, and the artist at the center of my book Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them.

Another fascinating woman introduced in this saga is Herdis, the wife of Bishop Pall. Technically, Pall should have divorced her when he became bishop of Skalholt in southern Iceland in 1195. Church reformers had preached against clerical marriage for hundreds of years. The Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 officially banned it. If previously married, upon consecration a priest must eject his wife and children from his home and take a vow of celibacy: The church should be his only bride.

Perhaps Pall tried. When he returned to Iceland from his consecration and moved into the bishop's quarters at Skalholt, he left his wife of 20 years and their four children behind at their family estate of Skard. A year later, however, Herdis and the children moved to Skalholt, and Herdis took over running the household. Whether she shared Pall's bed, we do not know; they had no more children. But foregoing her management skills was more than Pall could accept. According to the Saga of Bishop Pall, she was such a good manager that "she had been there only a few winters before there was enough of everything that was needed and nothing was lacking at the estate even if 120 people arrived, on top of the 70 or 80 in the household itself."

At the same time, Herdis continued to manage the family estate at Skard, which "stayed in good shape while she lived," says the saga, "for of all women she was the most zealous, both concerning her own work and that of other people, as experience well shows."

Skard lies between ice and fire. The roiling glacial river Thjorsa marks its western border, the foothills of the looming, cloud-shrouded volcano Hekla rise to the east. Skalholt is 15 miles away, as the raven flies; with two rivers to cross, it's not an easy horseback ride.

One day soon after Easter in 1207, the saga says, Herdis went to Skard to check on the farm there. With her went her son Ketil and daughter Halla, leaving Loft and his sister Thora at Skalholt. While she was there, the glacial river flooded. The ford across the Thjorsa became impassable.

Determined to return to Skalholt on the day arranged, Herdis hired a ferry. Ketil, then 16, and a priest named Bjorn crossed first, carrying over the riding gear and leading the horses, forcing them to swim behind the boat. One horse--Herdis's own--broke free of its rein and was swept down the river. Herdis did not respect the omen.

On the second trip, the wind gusted up. The ferry hit a shoal and flipped, spilling Herdis, her daughter Halla, and her niece Gudrun, as well as the deacon who oversaw Skard and a man named Sigfus, into the icy, turbulent water. Sigfus made it to land, exhausted. The others, while the priest and the boy watched, helpless, drowned. The women, especially, had no chance, weighed down as they were by their heavy wool gowns and cloaks, against a current strong enough to overcome a horse.

"When the news came to Bishop Pall's ears, suddenly, in the middle of the night," the saga says, "it seemed to everyone that God had nearly given him more than he could bear. He could not eat, he could not sleep, until the bodies were buried, though he tried to cheer up everyone else as much as he could."

The pathos of this description--"in the middle of the night ... he tried to cheer up everyone else"--suggests to some scholars that Loft, Pall's son, the one left at home, was the author of the saga. His brother Ketil died in 1215, about 22, but Loft lived to old age, entering a monastery late in life and dying in 1261, about 70 years old.

You can learn more about Bishop Pall and his family in Ivory Vikings. Read about it on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker (November 2): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/briefly-noted-the-blue-guitar (scroll down)

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

Iceland's Medieval Art

The Lewis chessmen are among the most popular exhibits in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. Found on the Isle of Lewis in the early 1800s, these walrus-ivory figurines have been called the best-known Scottish archaeological treasure of all time. 

Who carved them? Where? In my book Ivory Vikings, I evaluate the theory that they were made for Bishop Pall of Skalholt, Iceland in about the year 1200 by a woman artist named Margret the Adroit.

According to the Saga of Bishop Pall, the bishop was in the habit of sending expensive gifts to his friends in Norway, Denmark, Greenland, and the Orkney Islands. He surrounded himself with the finest artists in the land, four of whom are named in his saga: Amundi the Smith, Atli the Scribe, Thorstein the Shrine-Smith, and Margret the Adroit, who was the best ivory carver in Iceland.

Until recently, scholars thought the Lewis chessmen must have been carved in a town like Trondheim, Norway. Iceland was too poor and backwards, they thought, to produce such sophisticated works of art.

They didn't know about Bishop Pall and his artists.

Why not? The Saga of Bishop Pall has never been translated into English. Besides, many scholars consider the Icelandic sagas to be fiction. Some of the sagas are. The word "saga" comes from the Icelandic verb segja, "to say," and it doesn't imply either fact or fiction.

The Saga of Bishop Pall, however, is as factual as any medieval chronicle. It falls into the category of Contemporary Sagas. These sagas were composed within a generation of the actions they describe. Their authors were often eyewitnesses to the events. 

The Saga of Bishop Pall is also backed up by archaeology. According to the saga, when Pall died in 1211, he was buried in a stone sarcophagus. This sarcophagus is the only one mentioned in Icelandic records. The country has no tradition of stone sculpture, and even Icelanders did not believe the saga account of Bishop Pall's sarcophagus--until they found it.

Bishop Pall's sarcophagus. From fornleifur.blog.is

In the mid-1950s, before the new church was built at Skalholt, archaeologists were called in to excavate. They were uncovering the floorplan of the huge cross-shaped medieval basilica, the largest wooden church in Scandinavia at the time, when one of the workers struck stone. "Of all the things that came to light during the excavations at Skalholt," said archaeologist Kristjan Eldjarn (who later became president of Iceland), "the grave of Pall Jonsson is the most important and meaningful. It is not certain that another such sign and wonder of the Icelandic sagas could ever be unearthed."

You can now see the sarcophagus in the basement of Skalholt Cathedral. Carved out of one large stone, of the soft reddish volcanic tuff found on the hill across the river from Skalholt, it is simple and elegant, its rounded lines ornamented only by two cylindrical knobs projecting from the broader end. The lid has been cracked by fire, perhaps by an inferno in 1309 that destroyed the cathedral, but otherwise the coffin shows little damage.

When it was opened, the researchers found a bishop's crozier carved from walrus ivory resting on the shoulder of the skeleton.

Bishop Pall. From thjodminjasafn.is

In 2012, any question that the skeleton was not that of Pall Jonsson was put to rest by carbon dating, which dated a bone sample to between 1165 and 1220. Pall lived from 1155 to 1211.

Bishop Pall's crozier.
From fornleifur.is

Margret the Adroit would have remained a colorful detail in a little-read saga if the Icelanders had not decided to build that new, modern cathedral at Skalholt--and called first for an archaeological excavation. The existence of Pall's sarcophagus vouches for the overall truth of the Saga of Bishop Pall. The ivory crozier found inside it calls to mind the one Margret carved out of walrus tusk, the saga says, "so skillfully that no one in Iceland had seen such artistry before."

Bishop Pall's crozier is now on display in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik. We don't know if Margret made it, but if the one she carved was comparable, she was clearly a talented artist. And the description of Pall in his saga proves that this lover of fine things has the means, the motivation, and the taste to commission the Lewis chessmen.


(This story was first published on the "Stuck in Iceland" blog, http://stuckiniceland.com/south/ivory-vikings/.)

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker (November 2): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/briefly-noted-the-blue-guitar (scroll down)

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

Iceland's Independence Day

Today, June 17, Icelanders celebrate their independence day, on the birthday of Jon Sigurdsson, the leader of the nineteenth-century Icelandic independence movement. Jon was a saga scholar, before he became a politician. He worked briefly at the library in Copenhagen established by the great collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, Arni Magnusson.

So it's fitting that, on this day of Icelandic independence, we remember the role of the sagas in setting Icelanders free.

Reading the Icelandic sagas, you learn of Iceland's early days as a free state, from its founding in 874.

Reading the sagas, you learn how Iceland lost its independence in 1262 and became subject to Norway, which itself was later taken over by Denmark.

And reading the sagas--simply the act of reading and rereading them--is what united the nineteenth-century Icelanders, as I learned while researching Song of the Vikings, my biography of the saga master Snorri Sturluson.

Here's how I explained the connection between Icelandic sagas and Icelandic independence in Song of the Vikings:

In 1835 four Icelandic students founded a political magazine in Copenhagen. They printed their manifesto in the form of a poem, which "was exactly what was needed in order to unite the Icelandic people," says Karlsson in The History of Iceland (published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press).

The only one of their ancestors it evokes is Snorri:

"... Ah! but up on the lava where the Axe River plummets forever
into the Almanna Gorge, Althing is vanished and gone.
Snorri's old site is a sheep-pen; the Law Rock is hidden in heather,
blue with the berries that make boys--and the ravens--a feast.
Oh you children of Iceland, old and young men together!
See how your forefathers' fame faltered--and died from the earth!"

Four lines of this poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson (translated here by Dick Ringler) are engraved on a plaque now standing on the site of Snorri's booth in Thingvellir, the great rift valley in the south of Iceland where the Althing, the yearly parliament of chieftains, met during the Saga Age.

The Althing reconvened as a national parliament, with Danish permission, in 1845. In 1874 Iceland received a new constitution and, in 1904, home rule. One of its first demands was that Denmark return the manuscripts of the sagas that had been collected--mostly by the scholar Arni Magnusson--and brought to the royal library and that of the University of Copenhagen in the early 1700s. The Danes declined.

In 1918 Iceland became a sovereign state in a "personal union" with the Danish king--much like the situation in 1262, when the chieftains swore oaths of loyalty to King Hakon the Old. For its coat-of-arms the new nation turned once again to Snorri.

King Harald, Snorri wrote in Heimskringla, was angry at the Icelanders, who had composed lampoons about him. He ordered a "troll-wise man" to spy out the country's defenses. Disguised as a whale, the wizard swam close to Iceland’s eastern shore: "Then came a great dragon down from the dale" and "blew poison at him." He swam along the north coast, "but there came against him a bird so big that its wings neared the fells on both sides of it." The wizard-whale fled to the west: "Toward him came a great ox that waded out in the sea and began to bellow horribly." Swinging wide, he swam south, "but against him there came a great hill giant who had an iron staff in his hand and bore his head higher than the fells." King Harald was dissuaded from attacking. Iceland's coat-of-arms bears a dragon, an eagle, an ox, and a giant.

The Icelanders repeated their demands to "bring the manuscripts home." The Althing passed resolutions in 1930 and 1938, then their literary quest was interupted by World War II. In April 1940 Denmark was invaded by Germany; a month later Iceland was occupied by the British, one result being Iceland’s final break with Denmark. The independent Republic of Iceland was established at Thingvellir in 1944; in 1947 the Althing resolved, once again, to "bring the manuscripts home."

This time, Denmark formed a committee. In 1961 a list of manuscripts was drawn up, and Iceland agreed to give Denmark twenty-five years to deliver them. Ten years later—after being photographed and conserved—the first set steamed into Reykjavik harbor aboard a Danish coastguard cutter. Thousands of Icelanders stood by the docks. Thousands more watched via the first live outdoor broadcast of the state television station. Eventually 1,666 manuscripts and over 7,000 charters (1,350 of them originals, the rest copies) were returned from Arni Magnusson’s collection—slightly over half of it. Another 141 manuscripts were sent home from the Royal Library. The last arrived in Iceland in 1997.

"People still say: 'We want to see the manuscripts,'" wrote Gisli Sigurdsson and Vesteinn Olason in The Manuscripts of Iceland in 2004. The manuscripts "are at one and the same time the repository of medieval Icelandic culture and its visible symbol." They are Iceland's "main source of pride."

If you are in Iceland, a fitting way to celebrate June 17 would be to visit the Settlement Sagas exhibition of the Reykjavik City Museum.