Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

'The Icelanders were far too easy-going,' Tyrkir added. "When the missionaries came back to Iceland some years later and began their preaching all over again, the farmers had no more stomach for the endless debates and quarrels between those who decided to take the new faith and those who wanted to stay with the old ways. They got so fed up that their delegates met at the Althing with instructions to ask the Lawspeaker to come up with a solution. He went off, sat down and pulled his cloak over his head, and thought about it for nearly a day. Then he climbed up on the Law Rock and announced that it would be less bother if everyone accepted the new religion as a formality, but that anyone who wanted to keep with the Old Ways could do so.

'We completely failed to see that the White · Christ people would never give up until they had grabbed everyone. We were quite happy to live side by side with other beliefs; we never presumed to think that our ideas were the only correct ones. We made the mistake of thinking that the White Christ was just another God who would be welcomed in among all the other Gods and would coexist with them peaceably. How wrong we were.'

Inevitably, my education in paganism was patchy. Thorvall and Tyrkir often confused folklore with religion, but in the end it did not matter much. I soaked up the welter of information they gave me. Tyrkir, for example, showed me my first runes, cutting the rune staves on small flat laths of wood and making me learn his futhark, the rune alphabet, by heart. He taught me also to read the staves with my eyes shut, running my fingers over the scratches and translating them in my mind. 'It's a skill that can come in handy,' he said, 'when you want to exchange information secretly, or simply when the message is so old and worn that you cannot see it with the naked eye.' I tried hard to repay my tutors by having significant dreams which they could interpret. But I found that such dreams do not come on demand. First you have to study the complex paths of the Old Ways, and then you must know how to enter them, sometimes with the help of drugs or self-mortification. I was still too young for that, and I was reluctant to approach my foster mother to ask about her seidr knowledge because she was growing more Christian by the day, and I was uncertain if she would approve of my growing interest in the Elder Faith.

Besides, that next winter Gudrid was distracted by much more down-to-earth events. Her father, old Thorbjorn, had died not long after our return from Lyusfjord, and Gudrid, as his only surviving child, had inherited everything. Next, Thorstein the Black announced that he would not return to the farm in Lyusfjord. He felt it was an unlucky spot for him and he did not feel like starting there all over again as it would mean finding a new partner to help run the farm. So by January he had found a buyer to purchase the farm as it stood, paying him in instalments, and this meant he could reimburse Gudrid for her deceased husband's share. The result was that Gudrid, who was still without a child of her own, still beautiful, still young, was now a wealthy woman. No one was much surprised when, within a year of being made a widow, my glamorous foster mother was approached by an eligible new suitor and that she agreed to his proposal of marriage. What did surprise everyone was that her husband announced soon afterwards that he was fitting out a ship to travel to Vinland and establish a new and permanent settlement at the same spot where the two Eriksson brothers, Leif and Thorvald, had previously set their hopes.

SEVEN

WHY DID GUDRID'S new husband, Thorfinn Karlsefhi, decide to try his luck in far-off Vinland? Partly, I think, because he felt he owed a debt of honour to my father, Leif. By Norse custom, when a man wishes to marry, he first seeks formal permission from the bride's senior male relation. In Gudrid's case this was Leif and he readily agreed to the match. When Leif suggested the Vinland project to Thorfinn soon afterwards, I believe that Thorfinn, who had an old-fashioned sense of family loyalty, felt that he should take up the project. Leif still believed that Vinland could be a new and prosperous colony for the Greenlanders and, though he was too busy as head of the family at Brattahlid to go there himself, he did everything he could to support the new venture. He offered Thorfinn the loan of the houses he had built there, which were technically still his property, as well as the help of several key members from his own household. Among them were my two secret tutors - Thorvall the Hunter and Tyrkir the Smith - and two slaves Leif had acquired on the same fateful voyage which brought him to my mother's bed in Orkney.

I had always been curious about Haki and Hekja because I saw them as a link to my own enigmatic past. They were husband and wife, or that is what everyone took for granted. On the other hand, they may have had no choice but to live together as a couple since fate had thrown them together. They had been captured in a viking raid somewhere on the Scottish coast and shipped to Norway, where, like Tyrkir, they were put up for sale in the slave market at Kaupang. One of King Olaf Tryggvason's liegemen bought them as a pair. He presumed the two captives were Christians and thought that he could get into the good graces of his king if he made a gift of them to his monarch. King Tryggvason could then gain public credit and reputation by giving the two slaves their freedom. To their owner's dismay, it turned out that Haki and Hekja were not Christians at all, but adherents of some pagan belief so obscure that no one had any idea what their mutterings and incantations meant. Olaf kept them at his court for only a few months, but the two Scots showed no aptitude for household work. They were only happy when they were out on some high moor or open fell that reminded them of their homeland. So when my father Leif visited the court, the Norwegian king got the two seemingly useless slaves off his hands by presenting them to Leif with the remark that he hoped that one day he would find some use for these two 'wild Scots', as he put it, whose only skill seemed to be how swiftly they could run across open country. Leif found the perfect work for Haki and Hekja as soon as he got back to Greenland. The couple made excellent sheep and cattle herders. They would spend each summer on the farthest heath lands, where they made themselves temporary shelters by thatching over natural hollows with branches and dried grass. Here they lived snugly like summer hares in a form, a resemblance enhanced by their extraordinary speed on foot. They could run down a stray sheep with ease, and they were particularly valuable when it came to chasing wayward animals during the autumn drive, when the livestock had to be brought down from the hinterland and put into the winter barns. For the rest of the year they busied themselves with odd jobs round the farm, where I used to watch them surreptitiously, wondering if my mother with her Irish blood had possessed the same mixture of fair skin and dark hair, and I tried without much success to understand the words that passed between the two Scots in their guttural, rippling language.

Karlsefni's expedition was the largest and best-equipped venture for Vinland up to that time. It numbered nearly forty people, including five women. Gudrid insisted on accompanying her new husband and she took along two female servants. There were also two farmers' wives, whose husbands had volunteered to help clear the land during the early days of the settlement in return for a land grant later. These two couples were too young to have had children of their own and Thorbjorn, Karlsefni's five-year-old son by an earlier marriage, was left behind in Brattahlid with foster parents. So the only child on board the knorr was myself, aged nearly eight. I had lobbied my father Leif to let me join the expedition and he readily agreed, to the open satisfaction of his harridan wife, Gyda, who still could not stand the sight of me.