"Vikings Unearthed" in Iceland

One of the joys of writing my book The Far Traveler was joining an archaeological crew in northern Iceland for six weeks in 2005. There I worked with Doug Bolender, who is featured on the NOVA TV program "Vikings Unearthed" airing tonight (April 6, 2016) on PBS.

The summer I joined them, Doug and his colleague John Steinberg, both now at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, were testing a new protocol that has since proved to be a very powerful way to locate ancient structures buried beneath the soil--without having to dig. Their method centered on a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) device: a sealed plastic box full of electronics, which sent pulses of microwaves into the ground and picked up their echoes; these were then read by sophisticated computer algorithms and compiled into detailed maps of the density and other characteristics of the earth at certain depths. The archaeologists spent weeks dragging the GPR box over the ground above a suspected Viking Age house. My contribution was to hold one end of a 100-meter tape measure so they would walk in a straight line.

John Steinberg and team doing GPR in Iceland in 2005.

Paired with this high-tech gadget was a more primitive tool: a soil-corer, a steel T made of tubing, with a narrow opening the length of the shaft. But the method, as I learned one day, was just as precise and equally tedious.

Following a mental grid Doug had set over the field using GPS, we took a sample every 50 meters (165 feet) along a certain north-south line, then turned east and took another line. For each core, we chose a place between þúfur—the knee-high grassy hummocks caused by frost-heaving. Þúfur is one of the first Icelandic words you learn out on the farms. They make walking through an Icelandic pasture an obstacle course, taxing the ankles and straining the knees. Once I misstepped, my attention caught by a pretty palomino stallion in the next field, and fell full-length on top of a þúfa—it was like a belly-flop onto a medicine ball.

While I floundered, Doug had found a grid-point between two thufur and plucked away the grass. Once I’d found my feet, he handed me the coring tube with a flourish. Attempting to regain my dignity as well, I punched it through the turf and pulled out and discarded the root-plug, as he had instructed. Then I pushed the instrument straight down, stomping on the foot pedal, which, like usual, slipped from its groove, leaving me stomping air and jarring my back. Doug laughed and took over: He had a special wiggle that made the pedal work.

Archaeologist Doug Bolender working in Iceland in 2015.

When the corer was fully buried, he stepped aside again to let me redeem myself. “Don’t twist it,” he warned. I crouched, set my feet well under the handle, hooked my elbows under the cross-bar, and lifted up with my thighs, not my (already tender) back. The tube slowly slid from the earth, full of soil. Doug sliced his pocketknife across the narrow opening to reveal the strata of that 50-centimeter (20-inch) sample: layers of deep red, black, shiny white, then brown, rust-red, tan, and honey-yellow. Some of the strata had been swirled around, either by flooding or by what Doug called “cryoturbation”: freeze-thawing, the same process that makes the þúfur, which inspired one member of the team to rename it thufurization.

The core was beautiful. “You could make upholstery out of that one,” Doug said.

A sample soil core from the SCASS blog.

I took up the clipboard to log in the color and depth of each soil layer and measure the location of the volcanic tephra lines. The honey-yellow line near the bottom of the core was tephra from an eruption of Mount Hekla nearly 3,000 years ago. It marked prehistoric soil, telling us we’d drilled deep enough. The shiny white tephra was more interesting: the distinctive marker left by Hekla’s eruption in 1104. In between there should have been—but I couldn’t see it—a thin dark gray layer. This tephra has been dated, by comparing its chemistry to dust found in the Greenland ice cores, to 871 (plus or minus two years). The date is remarkably close to when Iceland’s first historian, Ari the Learned, says Iceland was settled: 874. Archaeologists call this tephra the Landnám or Settlement Layer. Another, lighter greenish-gray tephra—also, unfortunately, not visible in this core—dates to the year 1000. Layers from 1300 and 1766, likewise conveniently color-coded, can also be found in Skagafjord cores.

Tephra line in a turf wall in Iceland.

The volcanoes from which this tephra spewed are clear across Iceland, near the south coast. The wind direction during the eruption, and the ground cover where the tephra landed, determined if a core will have a tephra line or not: bushes and thick grass trapped tephra, while on bare gravel and rock it washed away. Skagafjord is a good spot for archaeologists because the wind generally did bring tephra from these historically important eruptions north.

Using this handy vulcanological dating method, if you take enough soil samples (and for his Ph.D. dissertation on medieval farming practices, Doug collected approximately 16,000), you can see a “massive jump” in phosphorous levels, due to animal manure, in farmers’ fields between 870 and 1100. You can also, if your grid is tight enough, find and date the farmers’ houses and garbage middens by the position in the soil cores of charcoal, bone, peat ash, or chunks of turf.

It's not an easy job to get 16,000 soil cores. There are surprising dangers.

One day, two members of our team, Susan and Tara, were coring in a fenced field. The farmer had told them it contained a herd of “calves.” One came over and pissed on the leather corer bag. The next day, it came up to them and let them scratch its nose. It stood beside them, grazing, while they recorded the last soil core.

Skagafjörður, Iceland, where we were coring.

When they were ready to leave, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to get between him and the rest of the herd, so they walked directly away from the "calf." He snorted and champed and charged after them, suddenly morphed into a raging bull. They ran, dodging thufur, clutching their instruments.

Up ahead Tara saw a drainage ditch—This way!—she leaped into the ditch and sank up to her thighs in muck. Susan followed. The bull tried to get under the fence and into the ditch. He went under head and shoulders. They dropped the corers on the bank and slogged up the ditch away from him until they could get up the bank and under the far fence.  Leaping up the bank out of the ditch, Tara cradled the $300 GPS monitor, Susan the soil-coring data sheet. They waited until the bull lost interest and went away before going back into the ditch to retrieve the rest of their equipment.

Watch the PBS special "Vikings Unearthed" online here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/vikings-unearthed.html. For more on my book The Far Traveler, see my website at: https://www.nasw.org/users/nmb/books.html#FT. For more on Doug Bolender's work at UMass-Boston, see the blog of the Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey here: http://blogs.umb.edu/scass/2016/04/02/doug-bolender-stars-on-vikings-unearthed/.

Turf Houses and Hobbit Holes

Whenever I see an Icelandic turf house, especially from the back, I think of the opening of Tolkien's The Hobbit:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

When I first went to Iceland, I wondered why it seemed so familiar. Then I learned that Tolkien had read William Morris's journal of his travels to Iceland in 1873 and used them as the basis for much of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins's quest.

Morris's view of an Icelandic turf house, though, was that of a guest. "We are soon all housed in a little room about twelve feet by eight," he writes, "two beds in an alcove on one side of the room and three chests on the other, and a little table under the window: the walls are panelled and the floor boarded; the window looks through four little panes of glass, and a turf wall five feet thick (by measurement) on to a wild enough landscape of the black valley, with the green slopes we have come down, and beyond the snow-striped black cliffs and white dome of Geitland's Jokul."

Quaint and pretty, it seems--with a little imagination, it could be a hobbit hole.

But what was it really like to live in a turf house?

When I was in Iceland earlier this month, I picked up a book by the writer Thórbergur Thórdarson that has just come out in English translation as The Stones Speak. Thórbergur was born in 1888 in a remote part of the country. He moved to Reykjavik in 1906, became a schoolteacher, and in 1924 published a novel, Bréf til Láru (or, Letter to Lára) that "became an overnight sensation," says translator Julian Meldon D'Arcy. (The book also got him fired from his teaching job.) Thórbergur is now considered "as important an author in the Icelandic canon as his friend, the contemporary novelist and Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness," D'Arcy says.

The Stones Speak tells of his childhood living in a turf house in Suðursveit, about 400 kilometers east of Reykjavik near the beautiful national park of Skaftafell. If you want to get an idea of what it was like to live in Iceland in the early 1900s, this is the book to read.

Here is how he describes his home:

"Its three houses stood next to each other in a row with their peaked front gables facing south and their sterns toward the mountain. It was a pleasure to see them from the home field below standing side by side like that, as if they were taking care of each other, and it was easy to see that they all got on well together. When it started to grow dark it was as if they slept all huddled up as one."

It's characteristic of Thórbergur's writing style to infuse the houses with feeling, as if they were alive--as if they, like the stones of the title, the paving stones outside his front door, could speak. What stories they could tell if only we would listen!

Yet for all the warmth with which he looks back on his childhood home, Thórbergur's eye is sharp. One of my favorite passages in The Stones Speak describes the kitchen, warmed by its fire of sheep dung:

"The first thing you saw when you came in through the kitchen passageway, after you'd just carried in the dung, was the dung screen. This was a high wall made from stacked sheep droppings at the front of the dung heap to prevent the heap from tumbling all over the floor. The screen reached right across the kitchen, from wall to wall, a short distance from the fireplace. I thought it was beautiful. It made quite an artistic impression on me seeing the droppings regularly stacked up like cards on top of each other and side by side in a high and broad wall. And when the fire blazed brightly in the fireplace, a living glow flickered on this screen in different shades and tones. It was a poem in living colours. What a pleasure it was to look at, it was as if something delightful was aroused deep inside me as I stood and gazed at it."

A pile of sheep shit--is a "poem in living colours"! Thórbergur's description made me laugh. He is writing as the older and wiser man looking back on his naive childish self and, of course, he means to make me laugh. But he also means to make me think. Here in Vermont we heat with wood, not sheep dung, and those who stack the wood also take pride in their work. I could probably even find one or two who would describe their woodstacks as poems.

Another key feature of Thórbergur's kitchen was its rather temperamental smoke vent: When the wind changed, someone had to climb up onto the kitchen roof to reposition the vent.

Writes Thórbergur:
"In good weather it was always nice to get up onto the front wall of the kitchen. From there the whole of existence was a little different from down on the paved forecourt. The home field became broader and so did the Lagoon. Breiðabólsstaður and Gerði and the sheepcotes and stables on the home field seemed lower. You could see further out over the sea and west to the Breiðamerkursandur gravel plain. Hrollaugseyjar isles were a little further from land, and the folk and the dog on the forecourt became smaller while you yourself became bigger. That's life for you. When you yourself become big, others become small."

The Stones Speak by Thórbergur Thórdarson was published in 2012 by Mál og Menning, an imprint of the publisher Forlagið. You can buy it from the publisher's website, here: http://www.forlagid.is/?p=601952

The first two turf-house photos accompanying this blog are of the farmhouse in the Skagafjordur Heritage Museum at Glaumbær--about as far from Thórbergur's Suðursveit as you can get and still be in Iceland--but one of the best-preserved turf houses in the country. Learn more about it at: http://www2.skagafjordur.is/default.asp?cat_id=1123

The last one is from the Skogar Folk Museum in south Iceland: http://www.skogasafn.is. I wrote about visiting both Skogar and Glaumbær in June in "An Icelandic Horse(hair) Tale": http://www.nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/06/an-icelandic-horse-hair-tale.html

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

An Icelandic Horse (hair) Tale

Icelandic horses have a lot of hair, as anyone who has seen one knows. According to the breed standard, "a long, thick mane and tail" and a "thick, protective coat in winter" are typical. "Shaggy" is the word that usually comes to mind.

Of course it's cute. But that long mane and tail, in the old days, was an important resource on Iceland's farms, as I found out this week while visiting two of Iceland's museums.

The first was the Folk Museum at Skogar, in the south of the country. In addition to a collection of old houses, fully furnished, there's a separate building of several rooms stuffed with what can only be described as, well, stuff.

There are books and embroideries and a two-stringed fiddle. There are birds' eggs, skeletons, rocks, pinned insects, pressed flowers, and a stuffed two-headed sheep. There are busts of several local dignitaries and two paintings by one of Iceland's most famous artists, Kjarval, in the basement, along with some mid-20th-century living room furniture and a famous writer's studio. There's a fishing boat. There's an excellent description of how to make spoons from cows' horns.

And alongside a collection of butter churns and side-saddles and children's toys (made of bones) were what caught my eye: beautiful bags and ropes made of different colors of horse hair.

 The second museum I visited was the Skagafjordur Heritage Museum at Glaumbaer in the north. It's a place I know well. I visited it in 1997--on horseback--while researching my book A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse, and worked there as a volunteer on an archaeological dig in 2005, while researching my second Iceland book, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. In addition to a Viking Age longhouse (now reburied and awaiting further excavation), there's a well-preserved turf house at Glaumbaer, part of it dating to the 17th century, and a cafe famous for its fish soup and its cheesecake made from Icelandic skyr, a kind of yogurt.

Glaumbaer's curator, Sirri Sigurdardottir, told me that a woman in Skagafjordur still made things out of horse hair. She clipped the hair from the horses' manes and tails and hand-spun it with a spindle, then braided it into rope. Sirri showed me a sample--it turned out I had taken a photo of some matching rope objects at Skogar, not knowing exactly what they were.

They are hobbles, Sirri explained. There's a loop at one end and a sheep bone at the other end of each rope. You twist the rope around your horse's feet and lock it with the bone so that your mount won't stray at night. At least, that's how these hobbles originally were used. Today the museum store at Glaumbaer sells them ... as wedding gifts. They're very popular, Sirri says.

Icelanders do have a well-developed sense of humor.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Tolkien’s Icelandic Trolls

My recent post on Bilbo Baggins’s ride and the influence of Iceland on JRR Tolkien brought a wonderful response from Þóra Magnúsdóttir in Iceland, who sent me a link to the February 28, 1999 issue of the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið. There, reporter Linda Ásdísardóttir interviewed 89-year-old Arndís Þorbjarnardóttir who had been an au-pair in the Tolkien household while JRR Tolkien was writing The Hobbit.

Describing her time in Oxford, Arndís noted that the Tolkien boys often asked her to tell them about Iceland, especially “about trolls and monsters.” After reading The Hobbit, she said, she realized “the professor” had been listening in to her Icelandic tales. He must have, “to create those little folk who have hairy toes just like ptarmigans!”

I must admit I never before saw any similarity between hobbits and ptarmigans.

But I have long thought Tolkien’s trolls were Icelandic.

The troll scene in The Hobbit is one of my favorites. Bert, Bill, and Tom are so blusteringly barbaric, comparing the taste of mutton to manflesh, and Bill’s squeaking purse is such a fine surprise for both Bilbo and the reader. But mostly I liked Tolkien’s scene for its ending:

“Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!” Gandalf pronounced, after having kept the trolls arguing among themselves all night until the sun came up. “And there they stand to this day, all alone, unless the birds perch on them,” Tolkien writes, “for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again.”

John Rateliff, in his fascinating two-part study, The History of the Hobbit (HarperCollins, 2007), finds Tolkien’s “as you probably know” to be rather coy. Tolkien “seems to have introduced the motif” of trolls turning to stone if struck by the sun’s rays “to English fiction,” Rateliff writes, so his readers could not possibly have known.

Yet I knew. Perhaps not the first time I heard The Hobbit read to me, at the age of four, but at least by the time I read it to my own son when he was four in 1993. For by then I had been to Iceland several times.

And in Iceland you can hardly take a hike without meeting a troll—often with birds perched on them, as in the beautiful picture book by Guðrun Helgadóttir and Brian Pilkington, Flumbra: An Icelandic Folktale (Iðunn 1981; though they call Flumbra a giant, not a troll). Here is one of Pilkington’s illustrations:

The summer my family lived at the abandoned farm of Litla Hraun on the west coast of Iceland—a summer described in my book A Good Horse Has No Color, as well as in my husband’s Summer at Little Lava (FSG 1998)—we looked out our window every day at the story of a troll.

One night, an amorous trollwoman decided to visit her lover on the western end of the Snaefellsnes peninsula. She took her horse, and a bucket of skýr (a kind of Icelandic yogurt) as a gift. She and her lover sported all night and she got a late start going home. About the middle of the peninsula, she dropped the empty bucket to ride faster. A little further on, her horse foundered and she abandoned him, running as hard as she could for home. The sun caught her at the mountain pass now named for her, Kerlingarskarð, and turned her to stone. Or at least that’s how our neighbor, the farmer at Snorrastaðir, told us the story.

Out my window, I could easily pick out the mountain peaks called Skýr Bucket and Horse. (You can see the back of the Horse just above the crater of Eldborg in this photo.) Crossing (on the old road) north to the town of Stykkishólmur, I would crane my head out the car window to say hello to the old trollwoman, the Kerling.

On a later visit to Skagafjörður, I learned the story of the blocky island Drangey that dominates the fjord. A troll and his wife had a cow in heat, but their cowherd was away so they decided themselves to lead her across the fjord to a neighbor’s bull. They misjudged the distance. The rising sun caught them only halfway across the water, and there they remained: the cow as the island itself, Karl as a tall rock stack on the seaward side, and Kerling as a matching stack on the landward side (though one or the other of the trolls, I forget which, has since tumbled down).

Every Icelandic farmer I’ve met knows stories like these of the mountains and islands and rocks near his or her farm. One of my friends jokes that you can’t take a step in Iceland without standing on a story. I agree. And while we know that Tolkien himself never visited Iceland, it seems that Iceland—and its stories—visited him. In the interview in Morgunblaðið, Arndís notes that she was not the first Icelandic au-pair to work for the Tolkiens in Oxford. Aslaug, an Icelandic woman who had gone to school with Arndís, had been there for the previous year and a half and had gotten Arndís the job. Who knows what stories Aslaug might have told. Perhaps the stories of Iceland’s Hidden Folk, who are so much like Tolkien’s elves?