Save the Icelandic Goat

When the Vikings settled Iceland in the late 800s, they brought sheep, cows, horses, goats, pigs, hens, geese, dogs, cats, mice, lice, fleas, beetles … Archaeologists have found signs of all these in the detritus of a Viking Age house. 

Go to Iceland today and you can ride a Viking horse. You can buy a sweater made from Viking sheep's wool. You can eat cheese from the milk of Viking cows and--if you hurry--Viking goats. 

We could also talk about Viking dogs and Viking chickens, but it's the goats I'm worried about.

There's only one farm left in Iceland that specializes in raising Icelandic goats, and it's going on the auction block next month. Háafell in Borgarfjord--aka the Icelandic Goat Conservation Center, www.geitur.is--is in foreclosure. Unless they can raise $90,000 in a month, their 400 goats will go to the slaughterhouse. That's about half the total population of Icelandic goats in the world.

If Háafell fails, we'll lose an important link to the Viking world.

Thor the Thunder god will not be happy. 

Goat is what Thor eats for dinner, according to Snorri's Edda. The two goats that pull Thor's chariot allow him to butcher and boil them every night. Provided that he saves every bone and wraps them up in the skins, unbroken, the goats will come back to life in the morning. 

The heroes in Valhalla will also not be happy. There, a magic goat produces endless vats of mead instead of milk for them to drink. 

And what, without goats, would make the goddess Skadi laugh? 

In one of Snorri's funniest tales, Loki was caught by a giant eagle who dragged him through treetops and bounced him on stony ground. "Stop!" cried Loki, "and I'll give you the goddess Idunn and her golden apples, source of the gods’ immortal youth." 

The gods began to grow old and gray. Forced to confess, Loki was ordered to retrieve Idunn. He borrowed Freyja’s falcon cloak and flew to Giantland. Learning the giant was out, Loki turned Idunn into a nut, clasped her in his talons, and took off for Asgard. When the giant came home to find his prize missing, he transformed into giant-eagle shape and went after Loki, "and he caused a storm-wind by his flying."

The gods stacked a great pile of wood in the yard of Asgard. As soon as Loki the falcon flew over the wall, they torched the stack. The giant eagle's feathers caught fire. He fell to earth, in giant form, and Thor killed him with one whack of his hammer. 

It's to compensate for this killing that the giant’s daughter Skadi was allowed to marry one of the gods. She also demanded they make her laugh; she considered it quite impossible. "Then Loki did as follows: he tied a cord round the beard of a certain nanny-goat and the other end round his own testicles, and they drew each other back and forth and both squealed loudly. Then Loki let himself drop in Skadi’s lap, and she laughed."

If that's not a reason to save the Icelandic goat from extinction, I don't know what is. Click here to go to the IndieGoGo site and get yourself a coffee mug:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-the-icelandic-goat-from-extinction

A Thin Place in Iceland

“For me Iceland is holy earth. This memory is background for everything I do. Iceland is the sun which colours the mountains without being there and gone over the horizon.”

In 1937, the American poets W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice went to Iceland. They wrote about it in Letters from Iceland, a collection of poems, prose, photographs, charts, graphs, you name it. Auden also took time to chat with Matthias Johannessen and provided the Icelandic poet and newspaper editor with those three sentences, sentences that have echoed in my head ever since I read them in the magazine Iceland Review in 1987, the year after my first visit to Iceland.

In a March 2012 essay in the Sunday New York Times that I clipped out and saved, writer Eric Weiner evokes “thin places”—“places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again…. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.”

It's obviously a hard topic to put into words, but I think I know what Weiner is getting at. He traces the phrase “thin places” to Celtic Christianity. George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community on the Scottish island of that name, is generally credited with bringing the concept into modern times—to the extent that you can now take “thin places tours” to catch glimpses of a divine that is decidedly Christian. (See the blog “Thin Places” at www.thinplace.net.)

I’m more interested in “the Infinite Whatever.” I catch glimpses of it regularly in Iceland, most often beside the hill named Helgafell, or Holy Mountain, by the first settler on the peninsula. According to the medieval Icelandic Eyrbyggja Saga, “Thorolf gave the name Thor’s Ness to the region between Vigra Fjord and Hofsvag. On this headland there is a mountain held so sacred by Thorolf that no-one was allowed even to look at it without first having washed himself, and no living creatures on this mountain, neither man or beasts, were to be harmed unless they left it of their own accord. Thorolf called that mountain Helga Fell and believed that he and his kinsmen would go into it when they died.”

The first time I went to Iceland, in 1986, I went to see Helgafell. I was drawn to it, like many visitors, by the sagas. And I have gone back to Helgafell every time I’ve been in Iceland since. I’ve met four generations of the family who farms beneath the hill. I’ve grieved with them over deaths and rejoiced over births. I’ve written them numerous letters, never receiving a reply until Facebook was invented. Now we’re in touch nearly every day.

Helgafell is to me, as Iceland was to Auden, “holy earth.” In Weiner’s term, it is my “thin place.”

I recently stumbled upon a 2010 paper in the online academic journal Limina that helped me understand just why it is so. The author, Carol Hoggart, a saga scholar and (if I can trust Google) a Romance writer, discourses on “three ways in which the family sagas inscribed cognitive maps over Iceland.” (You can find her paper, "A Layered Landscape," at medievalists.net.) Hoggart takes as her starting point, she says, “a notion that humans cannot understand their environment until it is cast in human terms.” The sagas, she continues, “portray a gradual filling up of landscape with human meaning” and “saga and land act to magnify each other’s impact.”

She seems a little dismissive of the idea, pointing out that, “So convincing has this process been that people still look to find a medieval saga-landscape in modern Iceland, despite evidence in the Íslendingasögur [the medieval texts] themselves of change since the tenth century.” Some farmsteads, she notes, were given new names even in saga times.

I think she’s missed the point—though she makes it herself when she adds, again a little dismissively, “The terrain is seen positively to glow with an identity sourced from medieval texts.”

It does. I’ve seen Helgafell glow. It glows with the long, slanting, midnight sun, of course. But it also glows with meaning. Helgafell is a thin place to me not because the first settler, Thorolf, saw its immanent holiness, as Hoggart puts it. Helgafell is a thin place to me because it connects me to an otherworld of story.

Stories from the tenth century drew me there: the time the north side of Helgafell opened up like doors, and the shepherd saw the god Thor feasting inside the hill. The time when 14-year-old Snorri tricked his uncle into selling him the farm cheap. When the same Snorri traded the farm to Gudrun the Fair to make peace. When Gudrun saw the ghost of her drowned husband in front of the church, or when she dug up the sorceress’s grave.

But stories from the last thirty years keep me coming back: the time we sat around the coffee table telling stories from the sagas. The time we went to Flatey together. When we put up the hay, went horseback riding, gathered eiderdown, found the raven’s nest. The time I came back from a walk with my pockets filled with sparkling stones and my hair braided with seagull and raven feathers. The time I wrote a story about it.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And don't forget to enter the raffle for a free, autographed copy of Song of the Vikings. For the details on how to enter, click here.

Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part V

Norse myths have been very popular with fantasy and science fiction writers. Why? I think it’s because of Snorri’s special touch—the wry and sarcastic humor that infuse his tales.

In 2005, for example, Shadow Writer interviewed Neil Gaiman while he was touring for The Anansi Boys (read it here: http://www.shadow-writer.co.uk/neilinterview.htm). They asked Gaiman if he had a favorite myth. He answered, “I keep going back to the Norse ones because most myths are about people who are in some way cooler and more magical and more wonderful than us, and while the Norse gods probably sort of qualify, they’re all sort of small-minded evil, conniving bastards, except for Thor and he’s thick as two planks.”

Then Gaiman referred a tale Snorri wrote: “I still remember the sheer thrill of reading about Thor,” Gaiman said, “and going into this weird cave that they couldn’t make sense of with five branches—a short one and four longer ones—and coming out in the morning from this place on their way to fight the giants … and realizing they’d actually spent the night in this giant’s glove, and going, Okay, we’re off to fight these guys. Right.”

It’s the beginning of the story of the god Thor’s encounter with the giant Utgard-Loki. No other source tells this tale. I think Snorri made it up. I imagine him regaling his friends with it, as they sat around his feast hall at his grand estate of Reyholt in Iceland, sipping horns of mead or ale. Snorri was known for holding extravagant feasts, to which he invited other poets and storytellers. He might have read aloud from his work-in-progress, the Edda. Or he might have told the tale from memory, like an ancient skald.

Here’s how I relate the story in my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths:

One day Thor the Thunder-god and Loki the Trickster sailed east across the sea to Giantland. With them was Thor’s servant, a human boy named Thjalfi, who carried Thor’s food bag. They trudged through a dark forest. That night they found no lodgings except one large, empty house. It had a wide front door, a vast central hall, and five side chambers. Thor and his companions made themselves comfortable in the hall. At midnight came a great earthquake. The ground shuddered. The house shook. They heard scary grumblings and groans. Loki and the boy fled into one of the little side chambers, and Thor guarded the doorway, brandishing his hammer against whatever monster was making that noise.

Nothing more happened that night. At dawn Thor saw a man lying asleep at the edge of the forest. Thor clasped on his magic belt and his strength grew. He lifted his hammer—but then the man awoke and stood up. He was so huge that “Thor for once was afraid to strike him.” Instead, he politely asked the giant’s name.

The giant gave a fake one. “I do not need to ask your name,” he said in return. “You are the mighty Thor. But what were you doing in my glove?”

(Here I imagine Snorri pausing, while laughter fills the room. Maybe he gets up and refills his ale horn.)

The giant, Snorri continues, suggested they travel together and offered to carry their food bag in his giant knapsack. After a long day keeping up with giant strides they camped for the night under an oak tree. The giant settled in for a nap. “You take the knapsack and get on with your supper.”

Thor could not untie the knot. He struggled. He fumed. And—giantlike?—he flew into a rage. He grasped his hammer in both hands and smashed the giant on the head.

The giant awoke. “Did a leaf fall on me?”

(Another pause for laughter.)

He went back to sleep.

Thor hit him a second time.

           

“Did an acorn fall on me?”

           

(Pause for laughter.)

He went back to sleep.

Thor took a running start, swung the hammer with all his might—

The giant sat up. “Are you awake, Thor? There must be some birds sitting in the tree. All sorts of rubbish has been falling on my head.”

(Pause for laughter.)

The giant showed Thor the road to the castle of Utgard then went on his way.

Thor and Loki and little Thjalfi walked all morning. They reached a castle so huge they “had to bend their heads back to touch their spines” to see the top. Thor tried to open the gate, but couldn’t budge it. They squeezed in through the bars. The door to the great hall stood open. They walked in.

King Utgard-Loki (no relation to the god Loki) greeted them. “Am I wrong in thinking that this little fellow is Thor? You must be bigger than you look.”

It was the rule of the giant’s castle that no one could stay who was not better than everyone else at some art or skill. Hearing this, Loki piped up. He could eat faster than anyone.

The king called for a man named Logi. A trencher of meat was set before the two of them. Each started at one end and ate so fast they met in the middle. Loki had eaten all the meat off the bones, but his opponent, Logi, had eaten meat, bones, and wooden trencher too. Loki lost.

The boy Thjalfi was next. He could run faster than anyone. The king had a course laid out and called up a boy named Hugi. Thjalfi lost.

Thor could drink more than anyone, he claimed. The king got out his drinking horn. It was not terribly big, though it was rather long. Thor took great gulps, guzzling until he ran out of breath, but the level of liquid hardly changed. He tried twice more. The third time, he saw a little difference.

He called for more contests.

“Well,” said the king, “you could try to pick up my cat.”

Thor seized it around the belly and heaved—but only one paw came off the ground. “Just let someone come out and fight me!” he raged, “Now I am angry!”

The king’s warriors thought it demeaning to fight such a little guy, so he called out his old nurse, Elli.

“There is not a great deal to be told about it,” Snorri writes. “The harder Thor strained in the wrestling, the firmer she stood. Then the old woman started to try some tricks, and then Thor began to lose his footing, and there was some very hard pulling, and it was not long before Thor fell on one knee.”

Utgard-Loki stopped the contest, but allowed them to stay the night anyway.

The next day the king treated Thor and his companions to a feast. When they were ready to go home, he accompanied them out of the castle and said he would now reveal the truth. He himself had been the giant they met along their way; he had prepared these illusions for them.

When Thor swung his hammer—the leaf, the acorn, the rubbish—Utgard-Loki had placed a mountain in the way: It now had three deep valleys. At the castle, they had competed against fire (the name Logi literally means “fire”), thought (Hugi), and old age (Elli). The end of the drinking horn had been sunk in the sea—Thor’s three great drafts had created the tides. The cat? That was the Midgard Serpent which circles the entire earth.

Outraged at being tricked, Thor raised his mighty hammer once more. But he blinked and Utgard-loki and his castle disappeared.

“Thick as two planks,” indeed.

Why do I think Snorri made up this story of Thor’s visit to Utgard-Loki? A poet does refer to Thor hiding in a giant’s glove—but it’s a different giant. Another mentions his struggle with the knot of a giant’s food-sack. A kenning for old age refers to Thor wrestling with Elli—but it appears in Egil’s Saga, which Snorri probably wrote, so he may be quoting himself. Otherwise, the journey and the contests are unknown.

I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?

It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.

This essay was adapted from my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, published by Palgrave Macmillan. It originally appeared on the science fiction and fantasy lovers website Tor.com.

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

Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part IV

Imagine you are a 40-year-old poet who wants to impress a 14-year-old king. You want to get him excited about Viking poetry—which happens to be your specialty—and land yourself the job of King’s Skald, or court poet. A cross between chief counselor and court jester, King’s Skald was a well-paid and highly honored post in medieval Norway. For over 400 years, the king of Norway had had a King’s Skald. Usually the skald was an Icelander—everyone knew Icelanders made the best poets.

Except, it seems, 14-year-old King Hakon. He thought Viking poetry was old-fashioned and too hard to understand.

To change young Hakon’s mind, Snorri Sturluson began writing his Edda, the book that is our main, and sometimes our only, source for much of what we think of as Norse mythology.

Snorri started off, in about 1220, by writing an elaborate poem in praise of King Hakon and his regent, Earl Skuli. It was 102 stanzas long, in 100 different styles. No poet had ever written such a complicated skaldic poem. With it, Snorri was handing the young king his resume: There was no better candidate for King’s Skald.

It’s a really dull poem.

If you’re not in love with skaldic poems—if you don’t like riddles and trivia quizzes—it’s no fun to read.

 Snorri realized this. He did not send his poem to the young king. Instead, he began a new section of the Edda, explaining how skaldic poems worked.

One thing he had to explain were “kennings,” the riddles Viking poets loved. No poet writing in Old Norse before about 1300 would say “mead” when he or she could say “waves of honey,” or “ship” instead of “otter of the ocean,” or “sword” instead of “fire of the spear clash.”

And those are easy kennings to figure out. The harder ones refer to Norse myths.

For example, what did a Viking poet mean by saying “Aegir’s fire,” or “Freya’s tears,” or “Sif’s hair”?

The Norse gods Aegir and Freya and Sif hadn’t been worshipped for over 200 years in Norway or Iceland. Few people remembered the old stories of gods and dwarfs and giants, and so the old poems hardly made sense. For this reason, Snorri included in his Edda many stories about the gods: stories he had heard, stories he pieced together from old poems—and stories he simply made up.

Many of his stories feature Loki the Trickster. One of the most important for our understanding of the Norse gods is the time that Loki, out of mischief, cut off the goddess Sif’s long, golden hair.

Her husband, the mighty Thor, was not amused. “He caught Loki and was going to break every one of his bones until he swore that he would get black-elves to make Sif a head of hair out of gold that would grow like any other hair.”

Loki went to the land of the dwarfs. (Here, Snorri says dwarfs and black-elves are the same. Elsewhere he says they are different. It’s a problem in the Edda that bothered Tolkien greatly.)

Shortly, Loki and one of the dwarf smiths returned to Asgard with Sif’s new head of hair. They also brought five other treasures. Turns out, the dwarfs were happy to make Sif’s hair. They liked to show off their skills.

They made Freyr’s magic ship Skidbladnir, “which had a fair wind as soon as its sail was hoisted” and “could be folded up like a cloth and put in one’s pocket.”

And they made Odin’s spear, Gungnir, which “never stopped in its thrust.”

But greedy Loki wanted more treasures. So he wagered his head that the two dwarf smiths, Brokk and Eitri, could not make three more treasures as good as these three were.

The dwarfs took the bet.

Eitri put a pig skin in his forge. He told Brokk to work the bellows without stop. A fly landed on Brokk’s arm and bit him—but he ignored it. After a long while, Eitri took out of the forge a boar with bristles of gold. It could run across sea and sky faster than a horse, and its bristles blazed with light like the sun. This magic boar, Gullinbursti, became the god Freyr’s steed.

Next Eitri put a bar of gold in his forge. Again he told Brokk to work the bellows without stop. That pesky fly came back and bit Brokk on the neck—but Brokk ignored it. Out of the magic forge came Odin’s gold ring, Draupnir. Every ninth night it dripped eight rings just like itself.

Then Eitri put iron in the forge. He told Brokk to work the bellows, “and said it would turn out no good if there were any pause in the blowing.” The fly—which, of course, was Loki in fly form—landed this time on Brokk’s eyelid. It bit so hard the blood trickled into the dwarf’s eyes. Brokk swept a hand across his face— “You’ve almost ruined it!” his brother yelled. This treasure was Thor’s hammer, Mjollnir. It would strike any target and never miss. If thrown, it would return to Thor’s hand like a boomerang. It was so small, Thor could hide it in a pocket. But it had one fault: The handle was a little too short.

When Brokk brought all six dwarf-made treasures to Asgard, the gods agreed Loki had lost the bet. The boar, the gold ring, and the hammer were every bit as good as Sif’s hair, Freyr’s ship, and Odin’s spear.

Thor grabbed hold of Loki and held him still so the dwarf could cut off his head. But Loki was a bit of a lawyer. Presaging Shakespeare’s Shylock by several hundred years, he told Brokk “that the head was his but not the neck.”

Loki didn’t get away scatheless. Since “the head was his,” Brokk decided to make an improvement to it: He stitched Loki’s lips together.

And if that story didn’t hold 14-year-old King Hakon’s attention, Snorri could make up others just as good. No other source tells of the dwarf smiths Brokk and Eitri or how the gods’ treasures came to be. Nor did there need to be a story about why gold is called “Sif’s hair.” Sif was blonde, after all.

In my next post in this series, I’ll look at one of Snorri’s funniest creations, the tale of Thor and Loki’s visit to the giant Utgard-Loki.

This essay was adapted from my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, published by Palgrave Macmillan. It originally appeared on the science fiction and fantasy lovers website Tor.com.

The illustration of Sif’s hair is by the Czech artist Hellanim, who has a wonderful series of drawings on Norse myths at http://hellanim.deviantart.com/gallery/

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

Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North

Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths has reached that delightful stage called “advance reader copies,” or ARCs—delightful for the writer because I get to see the final cover design, read my publisher’s description of the book, and (best of all) relish the first readers’ comments, or blurbs.

How Palgrave Macmillan describes Song of the Vikings:

“Snorri Sturluson, the thirteenth-century Icelandic chieftain who gave us Odin, Loki, and Thor, was as unruly as the Norse gods he created.

“Much like Greek and Roman mythology, Norse myths are still with us. Famous storytellers from JRR Tolkien to Neil Gaiman have drawn their inspiration from tales of the long-haired, mead-drinking, marauding and pillaging Vikings. Their creator is a thirteenth-century Icelandic chieftain by the name of Snorri Sturluson. Like Homer, Snorri was a bard, collecting and embellishing the folklore and pagan legends of medieval Scandinavia. Unlike Homer, Snorri was a man of the world—a wily political power player. One of the richest men in Iceland, he came close to ruling it and even closer to betraying it… In Song of the Vikings, author Nancy Marie Brown brings Snorri Sturluson’s story to life.”

Snorri by Gustav Vigeland. 
At Reykholt.

The first blurbs:

Jeff Sypeck, author of Becoming Charlemagne, wrote:

“For readers who’ve long sensed that older winds blow through the works of their beloved Tolkien, Song of the Vikings is a fitting refresher on Norse mythology. Without stripping these dark tales of their magic, Nancy Marie Brown shows how mere humans shape myths that resonate for centuries—and how one brilliant scoundrel became, for all time, the Homer of the North.”

Scott Weidensaul, author of The First Frontier, said:

“In medieval Iceland, one of the most remote corners of the known Earth, a very un-Viking Norseman named Snorri Sturluson crafted the heroic mythology on which rests everything from Wagner’s Ring cycle and the Brothers Grimm to Tolkien (who considered Snorri’s work more central to English literature than Shakespeare’s) and even the evils of Nazism. In Song of the Vikings, Nancy Marie Brown brings to vivid life this age of poetic Viking skalds, of blood feuds and vengeance raids, of royal intrigue and fierce independence, when the barren, beautiful landscape of the North was haunted by trolls, giants, and dragons—all of which Snorri, the most important writer the world ever forgot, captured for eternity.”

Why are ARCs delightful?

Because they got it. “Unruly” is the perfect word to describe Snorri Sturluson and his creations—and I didn’t think of it. “How mere humans shape myths” is an excellent summary of my theme—again, I wish I’d written it. A medieval Icelander influenced Wagner, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Tolkien, the Nazis—yes, that’s the point I was making, that and the importance of not forgetting a great and influential (if unruly) writer.

Song of the Vikings won’t be in bookstores until October, but I’ll be sharing more about it in posts throughout the summer and early fall. Meanwhile, I’m planning my book tour. If you’d like me to visit your library, local bookstore, bookclub, or school, please let me know.

And if you’re lucky enough to attend Book Expo America in New York next week, stop by the Palgrave Macmillan booth and pick up an ARC of Song of the Vikings.