Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

Deep down, I suppose I was hoping that I might be able to find Gudrid again and be accepted back into her affections. I had heard nothing from her since she and Thorfinn and young Snorri had left Greenland to return to Thorfinn's people in Iceland. But for me Gudrid was still the person who had shown me the greatest kindness in my childhood, and I had no plan save for a vague notion of presenting myself at her new household to see if she would take me in. So when the ship called in at Iceland I told the captain that I would be going no farther with him. It may have seemed a rash decision to set foot in a country, several of whose people had been victims in Vinland, but news of the massacre had not yet spread and I discovered within days that the extermination of the Vinlanders was not the unique atrocity that I had imagined. Every farmer in Iceland was talking about the climax to a more local feud which, in its gruesome details, provided a freakish echo of the Vinland atrocity.

The feud had been going on for years, driven by the hatred of Hallgerd, the malevolent wife of a farmer named Gunnar Hamundarson, for her neighbour Bergthora, wife of Njal Thorgeirsson.

The feud had started with a quarrel over a dowry and had spread to include dozens of kinsmen and outsiders, leading to a series of killings and revenge murders. The autumn before I arrived a gang of Hallgerd's faction had surrounded the farmhouse in which Njal and his wife lived, blocked up the doors and set it on fire, burning to death nearly everyone inside, including Njal's three sons.

For me the story was a grisly reminder of Vinland, but for the sweating farmer from whom I heard the tale after I came ashore it was the juiciest gossip of the day. I was helping him stack hay in his barn to pay for my night's lodging. 'It'll be the high point of the next Althing, of that you can be sure,' he said as he wiped the back of his hand across his shiny forehead. 'It'll be a confrontation the like of which has not been seen for ages. Njal's people are bringing a lawsuit against the Burners, seeking compensation for his death, and the Burners are sure to bring along as many of their own supporters as they can muster to defend their action. And if that maniac Kari Solmundarson also shows up, the Gods only know what is likely to happen. I wouldn't miss it for all the looted silver in the world.'

Kari Solmundarson was the name which kept cropping up whenever people discussed the possible repercussions of the Burning, as people had taken to calling it. He was Njal's son-in-law and had escaped from the blazing building after the roof fell in by running up a fallen rafter, where it lay aslant against the gable wall, then leaping out through the smoke and flames as his makeshift ladder collapsed behind him. The Burners had surrounded the building and were waiting to kill any fugitives. But they failed to spot Kari in the gathering darkness, and he slipped through the cordon, though his clothes and hair were so charred by the heat that he had to plunge into a small lake to extinguish the embers. Now he had sworn to exact revenge and was criss-crossing Iceland, rallying Njal's friends to the cause and swearing bloody vengeance. Kari was a foe the Burners would have to take seriously according to everything I heard. He was a skilful warrior, a vikingr who had seen plenty of action overseas. Before he came to Iceland and married Njal's daughter, he had lived in Orkney as a member of the household of Earl Sigurd, lord of that country, and had distinguished himself in several sharp battles, including a famous encounter with a gang of pirates when he had rescued two of Njal's sons.

The moment I heard Kari's story, my half-formed idea of trying to track down Gudrid was replaced by a new and more attractive scheme. I added up the years and calculated that when Kari Solmundarson had served the Earl of Orkney, he might well have met my mother, Thorgunna. He was in Orkney at about the time she seduced Leif the Lucky, to the amazement of all at Earl Sigurd's court, and conceived a son. If I could locate Kari and ask him about those days in Birsay, maybe I would have the chance to learn more about my mother and who I was.

The place to find Kari, if the farmer was correct, was at the next Althing.

As this memorial is intended, if only in my fantasy, to redress some of the lapses which the good Adam of Bremen is likely to make in his history and geography of the known world, perhaps I should say something about the Althing, because I doubt if the cleric of Bremen has ever heard of it, and it is a remarkable institution. Certainly I never came across the like of it elsewhere in my travels. The Althing is how the Icelanders rule themselves. Every year the leading farmers in each quarter of the island hold local meetings, where they discuss matters of common interest and settle disputes among themselves. Important topics and any unresolved lawsuits are then brought to the Althing, a general conclave, which always assembles in July after ten weeks of summer have passed. Only the wealthier farmers and the godars or chieftains have any real role in the actual law-making and courts of justice. The common folk merely look on and support their patrons when called upon to do so. But the gathering is such a combination of fairground, congress and gossip shop that every Icelander who can make the journey to Thingvellir does so. Listening to the lawsuits is a spectator sport. Plaintiffs and defendants, or their representatives, appear before sworn juries of their equals and make their appeals to the customs of the country. This is where the Law-speaker has an important role. He acts as umpire and decides whether the customs are fairly quoted and applied. In consequence the arguments often take on the flavour of a verbal duel, and the Icelanders, who enjoy courtroom revelations as much as anyone else, cluster round to listen to the rhetoric, while analysing who is being most skilled in twisting the law to their own ends or outsmarting the opposition. If they are looking for such lawyers' tricks, they are rarely disappointed.

Some might say that the Althing is an ill-advised way to run a country's affairs, and feel that these are best conducted by a single wise ruler, whether king or queen, emperor, lord or regent. If a single ruler cannot be found, then a small council of five or six is more than enough. The notion that Iceland's affairs should be conducted by the mass of its citizens assembling once a year on a grassy pitch does seem very odd. But this is how the Icelanders have arranged matters ever since the country was first settled nearly two hundred years ago, and in truth its way of government does not differ so very much from the councils of kingdoms where the barons and nobles form their rival factions and compete with one another for the final verdict or advantage. The only difference is that Iceland lacks a single overlord, and this leaves the factions to settle the scores directly among themselves when legal arguments are exhausted. This is when the weapons take over from words.

Thingvellir, the site of the annual Althing, is an impressive location. In the south-west of the country and about five days' ride inland from Frodriver, where my mother spent her last days, it is a grassy area at the base of a long broken cliff, which provides sheltered spots for pitching tents and erecting temporary cabins among scattered outcrops of rock. One particular rock, known as the Lawgiver's Rock, makes a natural podium. Standing on top of this, the Lawspeaker opens the proceedings by reciting from memory the traditional laws and customs of the land to the assembled crowd. There is so much law for him to remember that the process can take two or three days, and when I was there the White Christ priests were already suggesting that it would save time just to write down the laws and consult them as necessary. Of course, the priests knew very well this meant that they, the book-learned priests, would eventually control as well as interpret the legal system. But as yet the change from memory to the written page had not been made, and to the irritation of the White Christ faction the Lawspeaker still went to the nearby Oxar River on the first day of the Althing and hurled a metal axe into the water as an offering to the Old Gods.