Authors: Margaret Elphinstone
I don’t think it occurred to my father that I might need a woman to take the place of my mother. His choice of foster parents was governed by other factors. Me being a girl, he must have reckoned I’d need all the loyalty from my own people I could get, if I were to inherit Laugarbrekka. He chose Orm because Orm was a man he knew he could rely on to support me if ever I were left alone. Many women in Iceland have cause to be grateful to a loyal foster father, when they can’t count on a man of their own.
I wasn’t sad to leave my father’s house. I wasn’t leaving behind anyone I loved. I remember the first ride to Arnarstapi. It seems strange to me now that the actual journey was only a couple of miles. Out of one life and into another. I was five and a half.
It was a kind fate that made Halldis part of the bargain. She was Orm’s wife, and she was the mother I had lost. A kind fate, but in some ways a confusing one. I’ve heard it said often enough that Halldis was a witch. Of course, Arnarstapi wasn’t a Christian household when I first went there. We were all baptised later, when I was about fourteen. Oddly enough, that was Halldis’ doing, but I’ll tell you about it in its place.
Arnarstapi lay on the eastern boundary of my father’s estate. The farm faces east across Breidavik, and on clear days you can see the whole range, white in winter, snow-patched in summer, that stretches down Snaefelsnes, and far away, the ice cap called Langjokull, which years later I was to know when Karlsefni and I used to take the road from Glaumbaer to the Thing – but that comes later. Just below our farm was the bay called Breidavik, and it was from our mooring off the beach at Arnarstapi that we were one day to set sail for the Green
Land. But when I was a little girl I knew nothing of Karlsefni or the voyages I would make.
I grew up in the lee of Stapafel, and the spirits of Snaefel behind it always lurked in the background of my childhood. Sometimes the mountain raged behind us and storms drove across its face; often it was hidden in cloud. I remember clear, short days in winter, and moonlit nights when Stapafel lay like an unearthly black shadow over our lives, and dark evenings when the northern lights flickered over its head. The gods walked up there, and on tempestuous nights we could hear Thor battle with the demons who live in the heart of the mountain. Snaefel is full of lesser spirits too: goblins, elves, trolls, all kinds of unknown things. I’ve seen them often, but always from the corner of my eye. If you look straight at any of those folk they change shape at once into twisted lava columns, so you’re never quite sure of what you’ve seen. When I was little I was afraid of the mountain, but from early on I dared myself to leave the pastures and go up out of sound of the cattle bells, right into the lava desert that bounded our land. You can’t see out once you’re in the lava; you’re surrounded by odd shapes and blind corners. The lava is cold cinders now, but once it was red and molten. I’ve seen Hekla throw out red flames and ashes from as far away as Glaum and I know the gods only lend us our land while they choose. Arnarstapi was a gift snatched from Snaefel, and for me it was ten years of childhood snatched from fate. We are never safe.
If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it’s shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I’ve never seen it since, but that doesn’t matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it’s not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.
The daily business of our lives lay in Orm’s pastures and hayfields. I was taught to herd cattle when my head was no higher than their bellies, and I learned to make butter, skyr, cheese and fermented buttermilk. We kept pigs too, and poultry. Just in front of our house, before you got to the shore, there were a couple of ponds at the top of
the cliff, much better than the little tarn at Laugarbrekka. Our ducks stayed all year, and we’d be woken at dawn in winter by them quacking at the door for scraps. They’d be joined on the pond by wild duck and geese, and in spring teal and mallard used to nest in the rushes. We collected the eggs from wild and farm birds alike, and if you do that the wild duck will usually lay twice, just like the seabirds. It was my job to hunt in the rushes for the eggs, wading through green water to my thighs.
We caught mostly guillemots from the cliffs, but also kittiwakes, gulls and puffins. In winter we had one cave that gave off a queer blue light. I never noticed the noise that the sea and the birds make until I got to Eiriksfjord. Everywhere I’d lived before had been within sound of the open sea and the cliffs, and at first the fjord seemed uncannily quiet. Even here, when the gulls fly in up the Tiber and circle over the Saxon town, their cries remind me of home. Sometimes in Rome I catch a whiff of salt in the air, and find myself listening, but of course no waves break against the shores of the Vatican hill.
When I was little I was frightened of the terns, who used to attack anyone who walked through their nesting ground. That may be why the path to Laugarbrekka was not a way I liked to go. My father’s house was barely two miles from where I lived, but somehow to my childhood self it might have been twenty. I saw my father most often when he came over to our beach, which was where he kept his boat in winter. Our beach, unlike the one at Laugarbrekka, was sheltered from the west. It was made of grey boulders, with grey and yellow sandy stretches where the boats were hauled up. When the tide was out I could scramble over seaweed covered rocks and gritty sand, the wading birds scurrying away like mice as I came near. I liked going down to the beach in the evening when the men came in from fishing, and watch the baskets being carried ashore, full of cod or mackerel or saithe, depending on the time of year. Occasionally, on a calm evening, Orm took me out to fish with a line, or to set guillemot traps, even though I was a girl. On really calm days we’d row into the beaches under the bird cliffs and come back with a load of driftwood. Once we towed a big treetrunk home behind us. At that time the beaches were still piled with wood, enough for the settlers to build
houses and boats as they needed them. But it’s all gone now; you’re lucky these days to get a bit of kindling. If Orm had had a son, I suppose I’d hardly have been in a boat until we made our voyage. As it was, I could row and steer before I was seven years old, and I knew the coast around Arnarstapi almost as well as any of the boys in the place.
Orm used to take me about the country with him too. I always loved to ride anywhere, and I liked visiting the farms around Breidavik. There were games every year just before Midwinter on our neighbour Bjorn’s land under Oxl mountain. There’s a volcano on the plain close by – on still winter days we could smell the sulphur at Arnarstapi and see the smoke curling up. It erupted when my grandfather was living at Vifilsdalur. I remember riding along the frozen beach to Bjorn’s farm by sledge one year, with the mountains vanishing into the distance as white as salt, and the crisp air smelling of sulphur. People came to the games from all over Snaefelsnes, and stayed for a couple of weeks. The men had ball games and races and, of course, horse fighting, which was still a sacred ritual to us then. The bets were often high, and there’d be fights. One year they caught a slave who’d been bribed to kill Bjorn while the feast was on, and they took him up to the pass over to Eyr and killed him there. We’d had a band of men come over earlier that year to get Bjorn, but they didn’t catch him, then or ever. That’s how it always was: even in years when things passed off peacefully, the tension of the feuds was always smouldering underneath. As I grew older my main interest at the games was to watch the young men who came to compete. I knew my father would choose my husband from the families on our side in the feuds – Bjorn’s family or the Kjallekings preferably. So I silently observed them all while they were around.
Most of our gatherings happened in winter. There was less work to do then, and our summer weather was worse than in the Green Land, I think, although the winters were never as hard. Halldis, who came from Rif on the north of Snaefel, said when she came to Arnarstapi she found peace, and rain. It’s true we were fairly out of the feuding, living as remotely as we did, and it’s true too that from Rif or Frodriver you can often see the glacier winking in the sun, and behind it a cone of cloud like its shadow, that means on our side it’s raining.
As a child I adored the sun. Halldis told me the story of how it was the fate of Sun and Moon to drive their chariots through the sky with the wolves chasing them. My Sun didn’t mind wolves. He was handsome and brave and godlike, and while he showed his face our lives at Arnarstapi were transformed. I remember a day – I must have been seven, eight years old – when the sun shone fiercely on the pastures, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. I lay on my back, arms and legs spread like a starfish, and felt the heat of the sun go all over me, touching my skin and my closed eyes and my hair. It seemed to reach right through to my bones. I squinted up into blue sky, and felt myself falling and falling, drowning in the splendid brightness and the heat. I was innocent, and yet I knew then what passion was. It’s only come to me rarely. Marriage has meant good company, but only passion like that at the very beginning. I love the sun still, even though in this country his favours are cheap, and the magic just a commonplace.
After my first hungry years there was enough to eat at Arnarstapi. We even had grain some winters, which Orm used to fetch from a kinsman of his who had a farm on Reykjanes. I remember grinding the grains in the quern, and then Halldis showed me how to make dough out of the flour, and how to roll out the loaves and bake them on soapstone slabs over the fire. It took a long time, and I can still think of nothing more mouthwatering than the smell of cooking bread. The loaves would bake in black and white blotches, like the rock and snow patches on the glacier. They were flat – we never had this yeast they use in Italy – and we’d cut the round loaves into quarters and smear them with butter. I remember burning my fingers eating them, while butter dripped down my chin and over my fingers, and I used to lick it up afterwards like a cat washing itself on a Roman doorstep. By spring the grain would be long gone, and we’d be eating our butter with fish again as usual. But the loaves were my favourite, and I’ve never forgotten them.
Late summer was the best time for food. I liked haymaking, and milking in the ring on fine evenings, and the days when we lit a fire outside for dyeing wool or boiling meat. Perhaps because I’d known hunger first of all it satisfied me hugely to see the barrels being filled
for winter – layers of meat and fish laid down and preserved in sour whey; barrels of butter and skyr; dried fish and hunks of dried beef and pork and seal meat. Two – or was it just one? – lucky winters we had a whale, and then there was meat hanging to dry everywhere. I liked to see the hay brought in and piled in the barn, and know we could feed enough cattle for the eight months they’d need it, and maybe give extra to a milking cow so we’d even have fresh milk till spring. I suppose those early years have left me with an immense interest in food. I’m a good cook, though I say so myself, and I love to see guests at my table. I love to press food on them and stand over them while they eat as much as they possibly can. My sons used to laugh at me – just as well, perhaps, because luckily they never grew fat. Snorri was always thin, and although Thorbjorn was a chubby baby he soon grew as lean and tough as his brother.
I liked cooking the best of the indoor work. In winter we had to do mostly weaving, and that was all right, but I hated sewing. Halldis wasn’t strict; her way wasn’t to punish, but to find ways of helping me to like what I must learn. When I was nine she gave me an engraved bone needlecase to hang round my neck, with six needles of different sizes. I liked the case because it was pretty, but I still didn’t like sewing. It took me years to discover why I found it harder than other girls. I used to think I was stupid because I could never learn to thread my needle by lamplight, though sometimes I could manage if I went outside into the daylight. Oddly enough it was Freydis who first said, ‘But can’t you
see
?’ during that first winter at Brattahlid, when I was still trying to impress them all. ‘Look,’ she went on, and shoved a white cloth on to my lap. ‘Try that. Can you see the thread now?’ I could, too. Isn’t it strange that Freydis should realise at once that I couldn’t see, whereas Halldis, who loved me, never understood that what I saw with my eyes was different to what she saw with hers? But to this day I’ve never learned to like sewing. I used to reward my thralls for embroidering my tunics and Karlsefni’s shirts, because I gave up trying to do fine work after I married him, and I’ve never done any since. That’s shocking, isn’t it, for a wellborn woman like me to be so poor in accomplishments?
Perhaps it was because of my sight that I always preferred to be
outdoors. I’ve always loved the light, and I dread the dark of winter. I remember Arnarstapi in the light: sun on snow; the mountains of Snaefelsnes white against a slate-blue sea; moonlit snow on a winter afternoon, or green and golden summer light, with the land smelling of flowers when the hay is ripening; or the damp grey light that comes with mizzling rain. I remember the paths worn through the grass between buildings. I liked to visit the thralls in their huts, the shepherd and the cowherd families. As a child I was welcome everywhere without ceremony, and I’d always accept food at any house I visited, a bit of dried fish, usually, or a bowl of skyr that I could scrape clean with a shell.
You mustn’t think that we were lonely, even though we were distant from the main settlements along the north shore of Snaefelsnes. The next farm along Breidavik was managed by tenants when I was small, but then Bjorn of Breidavik came home to live at Kamb again. I told you about the winter games, but between times too he often used to visit my father, and he’d call on Orm on his way to Laugarbrekka. Sometimes his brother Arnbjorn came too – he had the farm at Hraunhavn further along Breidavik. I liked Bjorn. He was fond of children, I think, and because of Thurid and Kjartan he didn’t marry – I’ll tell you about that presently – and I enjoyed the attention that he gave me. I often think now of the strange fate he met, and every day I pray for his soul. He must have died long ago, among strangers in the lands outside the world. We might so easily have shared his fate. He left Iceland about the same time as we did, and, although my father never admitted it, I think his own decision was partly influenced by the fact that Bjorn of Breidavik had been driven out of our community.