B0046ZREEU EBOK

Title Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’s NOTE
Principal Characters
PRAEFATIO
March 1069, at Skalholt, Iceland
GUDRID’s STORY
ONE: English Convent of St Peter, Rome July 5th, 1051
TWO: July 6th
THREE: July 9th
FOUR: July 10th
FIVE: July 11th
SIX: July 12th
SEVEN: July 14th
EIGHT: July 17th
NINE: July 20th
TEN: July 21st
ELEVEN: July 24th
TWELVE: July 25th
THIRTEEN: July 28th
FOURTEEN: August 3rd
FIFTEEN: August 7th
SIXTEEN: September 12th
SEVENTEEN: September 13th
EIGHTEEN: September 15th
NINETEEN: September 18th
TWENTY: September 19th
TWENTY-ONE: September 23rd
POSTSCRIPTUM
December 22nd, 1051, at Rome
About the Author
Copyright

The characters and events in this novel are chiefly based on the accounts found in
Eirik’s Saga, Graenlendinga Saga
and
Eyrbyggja  Saga.

Agnar Asleifarsson writes this preface, so that in time to come the script may be interpreted with integrity and truth.

I wrote her story down in obedience to a command from Cardinal Hildebrand in Rome. When she arrived there first he received her, and later he sent for me. These were his words:

‘A woman has arrived here on pilgrimage from your country. No, not from Reims, from Iceland. She brought a letter for me from our brother Isleif Gizursson, the bishop at Skalholt in Iceland. By the way, Isleif had heard that you had come to Rome, and he wishes to be remembered to you. His letter tells a very strange story. This woman, apparently, is one of those who have gone beyond the confines of the mortal world, in the body. She has dwelt for over a year in the lands outside the material world. She has talked with demons and with the ghosts of the dead. The kind of thing, you may say at first, that makes a useful fable for the vulgar. But Isleif thinks there is more in it than that. You know that our brother Adelbert is writing a treatise on the Four Last Things, and we need to collect as much evidence as possible to prepare a statement of doctrine. It’s an area where heresy is rampant, and within the next year or two I intend to counteract these errors with a decree from the Lateran, authorised by the Holy Father himself. I’m taking you into my confidence here, Agnar. I know you won’t repeat this.

‘I’m acting on my faith in Isleif. I learned to trust him when he was in Toul. He could have become a cardinal if he hadn’t chosen to return to Iceland. I’ve met the woman myself. She impressed me. Her
manner is alert, and she has the confidence of a man, without any lack of modesty. That would be less acceptable if she were young, of course. We could not converse. She had enough vulgar Latin to greet me and to deliver Isleif’s message. I tried her in German, and she said, with a strong accent, in that language, ‘I do not speak German.’

‘So, my plan is that you should hear her story, and write it down in Icelandic. When you have made a transcription of her words you can translate them into Latin, and improve her crude account, as no doubt it will be, with your own sound theology.’

That was probably the only compliment I ever had from the Cardinal, but I was not as appreciative as I should have been. The whole thing seemed an irritating interruption. It wasn’t worth telling Hildebrand that everyone in Iceland tells stories about ghosts and devils, and journeys out of the world. On winter evenings we do very little else. I was a scholar; I was not a purveyor of vulgar tales. It may be useful to a parish priest to have a few fables up his sleeve to frighten ignorant peasants into some sense of their condition. That was not my job. On the contrary, I had been engaged for several years on precisely the opposite task. That was before I left Reims with Pope Leo after the Council in ’49 and came to Rome. I had less time for translations after that, as I became more involved in church government. Those were the days of reform, and we were involved in nothing less than a mission to reinstate Rome as the centre of the world, this time upon the basis of a spiritual principality.

But even in this heady atmosphere, I was still working on my translation into Icelandic of the Dialogues of Pope Gregory. I should perhaps mention here that I finished it two years after Gudrid left Rome, and I made a copy myself (I wouldn’t have trusted an Italian scribe with an Icelandic text), and then I sent the original to Isleif at Skalholt. I had hoped to finish it sooner, only no sooner had Gudrid left than the Normans were upon us, and there was no time for writing then. But texts have been my real work in life.

The transcription of Gudrid’s story proved far more important than I expected. It was an interlude in the most active period of my youth. Now I have been back at Skalholt these fifteen years. Leo IX is dead, and Cardinal Hildebrand bides his time in Rome. Only death is
likely to rob him now of the ultimate prize. He has worked towards it for long enough, and I think he will make a memorable Pope. And I think it is not an empty boast to say that I could have worn a Cardinal’s hat by now if I had stayed there with him. I chose differently. When Leo died, I made up my mind to return to Iceland. I’ve never regretted that decision, although my colleagues in Rome tried to persuade me against it. In their eyes, I was committing an utter folly in choosing to go quite out of the world. My argument was that I wanted to help Isleif establish his monastery at Skalholt. That was true: the idea of a monastery in my native land had been in my mind ever since Isleif and I used to discuss it when we were students. Also, I was realising there would never be peace or time for scholarship in Rome. The new Pope Victor finally gave me permission to depart. Hildebrand was angry that His Holiness did not prevent me going, but he has long since been reconciled. I’m useful to him here, in this outpost of Christendom, and we correspond infrequently. It is part of his political genius to make the most of every contact. But I’m no longer so interested in politics; at Skalholt I have devoted my life to translating for my own people.

Possibly Gudrid’s story was the beginning of my decision. When she came I had been in Rome two years. I thought of Reims as my home, rather than Iceland, for that’s where I’d lived from the age of ten. I was trained at the school there, and my teachers were disciples of the great Gerbert. I think that was important, when I came to transcribe Gudrid’s story. As she talked, her words began to take on another meaning for me, besides the one Hildebrand had indicated. I could not tell the Clunyites how I interpreted her narrative; that would have lost me my position in Rome. But at Reims we learned to value knowledge for its own sake, and from that training I learned to trust (I dare to say this here) that the theology would take care of itself. After all, did not God make the whole earth, and all that dwells within it? Hildebrand had instructed me to read Gudrid’s tale in terms of Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven, and so I did. But in my youth I had learned other things as well: particularly the use of the astrolabe, the abacus and the clock. Measurement is in itself a holy mystery, and not, in my opinion, a violation of the infinite.

Also, I was an Icelander, and even though I had not been in Iceland since I was a boy, I knew about sailing directions. I gave the best years of my life to making translations of sacred documents into Icelandic. Now that our monastery and library are well established, I have reverted to the task I once undertook with such reluctance. I find myself writing down the stories that are told here. This makes some people angry. Both bards and common folk say that it is a kind of death, to put into black words on vellum what should be alive, spoken and sung when people are gathered together. My brother monks too have expressed uncertainty, thinking that it may be blasphemous to use the gift of written scholarship for secular purposes. So I say little, but I continue, and what is more, I have a couple of apt pupils, young scholars here at Skalholt. You may think this is a far cry from making and unmaking Popes, but – (if this is heresy, I shall be dead by the time it is read and judged) – I think that what I’m doing now may be the more enduring.

At Reims we were taught to write the best Latin. Translation was an art. I was encouraged there to find a way to write down my own language. When I sleif was in Germany he came to visit me, and we talked for a long time about our work. He inspired me to continue. There was no reason, he said, why our own language should not be written down in Roman letters, if one worked out the principles on which to do it. Nor was there any reason why the great works of our Latin predecessors should not be inscribed in the words we had learned at our own hearths. It was I who had reservations. Meaning, I said, lies in the words themselves. Change the words and the sense is no longer the same. To change a text from one language into another is a kind of lie. I was afraid of distorting the truth, and in retrospect that is not surprising, because we were always dogged by the terror of heresy.

That’s why, after I had made the Latin document that Hildebrand wanted, I hid the original transcript. When I am dead, which, God willing, will not be for a good few years yet, it can stay here at Skalholt. Others will decide what to do with it. I am not sure what value it has. It is a woman’s tale, and women are good at storytelling. In Latin it became something else; Latin is not a language for women. I don’t know that anyone else has done what I tried to do, which is to
make into writing the words that a person spoke, at the very moment that she spoke them. Of course I couldn’t render them exactly. I’m a fast writer, but no one can write at anything like the speed of speech. She spoke very slowly, to accommodate me, but when she was excited she went faster without noticing, and I had to do the best I could. I was afraid that if I kept interrupting her and asking her to slow down I would lose the story. After each session I had to make a fair copy. I could afford to do that, as the Cardinal supplied all the vellum and ink. It is a laborious way of working, and I am not surprised that no one else I know has attempted it. It would be harder here, as ink flows more sluggishly in a colder climate.

The other distortion that I must admit to is one of natural affection. That is how I describe it, and at this stage of my life I have no need to care that the statement may be controversial. I grew fond of her. I am not referring to godly love, nor even simple charity. It was not common friendship, because she was a woman and I am a man. It certainly wasn’t an erotic love – after all, she was nearly forty years older than I was. And yet, I admit now, when all is past, that the worst temptation I encountered in all my adult years was lust. When I was a young man it was often agony to me and it was worst of all during my years in Rome. At the time I attributed it to the heat, which seemed an outward image of the diabolic flame within. Remember that these were the years when celibacy was the central issue of church reform. It was being discussed all round me, all the time. I could have married, of course, but I was ambitious and hoped to make a career for myself in Rome. If I’m to be completely honest – after all, I will be dead when you, whoever you are, read this – I may say that the torment of this particular temptation may have formed some part of my resolve to return to Iceland. I needed to get away from the heat.

I never expected that I would end by marrying. If Gudrid had not told me her story, I think perhaps I would not have done it. By doing so I turned my back on my ambitions for ever. I am now irrevocably a priest of Iceland, I, who stood most staunchly for Leo’s monastic reforms. I’m a married man, and the hunger and the loneliness are gone. But in Rome I’m already forgotten.

Perhaps it all goes back to that year. She stayed at the English convent of St Peter, in the Saxon town just north of St Peter’s church, across the river from the city of Rome. The nuns were mostly from England, and I think that suited her. It was a tiny foundation. They had no scriptorium, for the place was intended simply as a hospice for pilgrims from the north, but they gave us a cell for our work. It faced south across a small paved cloister, towards the hill, on the top of which one could just see the roof of St Peter’s church. We worked with the door open, for decorum, and also because it was a pleasure to let the sun stream in and touch us. Sometimes we used to take the desk into the cloister and work there, with the nuns passing to and fro across the yard, on their way to work or prayer.

At first I used to walk over from the Lateran, crossing the river by ferry at dawn and sunset. Later I stayed with the monks at St Peter’s, only a few minutes’ walk from the Saxon town. It was a time out of my busy life, when all my involvement with policy and government, and even my precious translation of Pope Gregory’s works, paled into the background. I became simply the vehicle for her story, and, as I did so, it became my story too. That’s how affection grew up between us.

I visited her several times when I came back to Iceland some years later. She had founded her cell of a few nuns up at Glaumbaer. I used to take them the sacrament. She was always glad to see me, and we would have our evening of talk. Three weeks ago she sent for me when she was dying, and I administered the last rites. One of the last things she said was, ‘Agnar, you are an honest man.’ Her family had her buried with Karlsefni.

I am not sure that I am an honest man, but in telling her story, I have tried my best to be as honest as possible, because that is how she was with me.