Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

I know that sounds absurd. Yet it is no more fantastic than the contention that I have heard from apparently wise and learned men that fire and brimstone will pour from the sky in the great apocalypse. Certainly the people of Frodriver and the locality swear that the drops which hurtled from the sky were not rain, but dark red blood. It stained red the cut hay, it left pools of blood in the dips and hollows, and it drenched Thorgunna in blood. When she returned to the farmhouse, still as if in a daze and not saying a word, her clothes were saturated. When the garments were squeezed, blood ran out of them.

Thorodd asked her what was meant by the thunderstorm. Was it an omen? If so, of what? Thorgunna was slow in recovering from her confused state and did not reply. It seemed to Thorodd that she had been absent from her physical body and was not yet fully returned to it, and that something otherworldly was involved. His opinion was confirmed when the entire haymaking team went back into the field. The sun had re-emerged and the cut hay was steaming in the heat. All except one patch. It was the area where Thorgunna had been working. Here the hay still lay sodden, a dark blotch on the hillside, and though Thorgunna went back to work, turning the hay steadily, the workers noticed that the hay never dried out. It clung flat and damp on the ground, gave off a rank smell and the heavy handle of Thorgunna's hay rake stayed wet.

That evening Thorodd repeated his question. 'Was that strange thunderstorm an omen, Thorgunna?' he asked.

'Yes,' my mother replied. 'It was an omen for one of us.' 'Who is that?' asked Thorodd.

'For me,' came Thorgunna's calm reply. 'I expect I will shortly be leaving you.'

She went off to her splendid bed, walking stiffly as though her muscles were aching. In the morning she did not appear at breakfast to join the other workers before they returned to the haymaking, and Thorodd went to see her. He coughed discreetly outside the hanging drapes of the four-poster bed until Thorgunna called on him to enter. Immediately he noted that she was sweating heavily and her pillows were drenched. He began to make a few mumbled enquiries as to how she felt, but Thorgunna in her usual brusque fashion interrupted him.

'Please pay attention,' she said. 'I am not long for this world, and you are the only person around here who has the sense to carry out my last wishes. If you fail to do so, then you and your household will suffer.' Her voice was throaty and she was clearly finding it an effort to speak. 'When I die, as I soon will, you are to arrange for me to be buried at Skalhot, not here on this out-of-the-way farm. One day Skalhot will achieve renown. Just as important, I want you to burn all my bedding; I repeat, all of it.'

Thorodd must have looked puzzled, for Thorgunna went on, 'I know that your wife would love to get her hands on it. She has been hankering after the sheets and pillows, and all the rest of it from the very first day I got here. But I repeat: burn all of it. Thurid can have my scarlet cloak - that too she has been coveting since I first arrived and it ought to keep her happy. As for the rest of my possessions you can sell off my clothes to those who want them, deduct my burial costs from the money, and give the rest of the money to the church, including this gold ring,' and she removed the gold ring which she had been wearing since the day she arrived and handed it to Thorodd.

A few days later she died. One of the house women drew back the curtain and found her sitting up in bed, her jaw hanging slack. It took three strong men to lift her corpse and carry it out to the shed, where she was wrapped in a shroud of unstitched linen, and the same carpenter who had made her special bed nailed together a coffin large enough to contain her body.

Thorodd genuinely tried to carry out Thorgunna's last wishes. He had the bed frame knocked apart, and the pieces and the mattress and all the furnishings carried out to the yard. The carpenter took an axe to the bed frame and its four posts and made kindling, and the bonfire was ready. At that point Thurid intervened. She told her husband that it was a wanton waste to destroy such beautiful items, which could never be replaced. There would never be another chance to acquire such exotic goods. Thorodd reminded her of Thorgunna's express last wishes, but Thurid sulked, then threw her arms around him and wheedled. Eventually the poor man compromised. The eiderdown and pillows and the coverlet would be thrown on the flames; she could keep the rest.

Thurid did not lose a second in seizing the sheets and hangings and the embroidered canopy, and rushed them into the house. When she came back out, Thorodd had already left the yard and was walking away across the fields, so Thurid darted over to the fire and managed to salvage the coverlet before it was scorched, though it was some time before she dared to produce it before her husband.

Up to this point there seems to be an explanation for what happened in the events leading up to my mother's sudden death, including the red rain: she had caught a bad chill when she stayed out in the thunderstorm, then failed to change into dry clothes, and the chill developed into a mortal fever. Her insistence that her bedding was burned may have been because she feared that she had caught some sort of a plague and — if she had the medical knowledge that I was later to find among the priests and brithemain in Ireland — it was normal practice to burn the bedclothes of the deceased to prevent the illness spreading. As for the red rain, I observed when I was in the lands of the Byzantine emperor how on certain days the raindrops had a pinkish tinge and contained so many grains of fine sand that if you turned your face to the sky and opened your mouth the rain drops tasted gritty and did not slake your thirst. Or again, when I was employed at Knut's court in London, a south wind once brought a red rain which left red splotches on the ground like dried blood, as if the sky had spat from bleeding gums. Also I have heard how, in countries where the earth belches fire and smoke, there can be a red rain from the sky — and, Adam of Bremen should note, there are places in Iceland where holes and cracks in the ground vomit fire and smoke and steam, and even exude a bright crimson sludge. Yet the people of Frodriver will swear on any oath, whether Christian or pagan, that genuine blood, not tinted water, fell on them from the sky that day. They also affirm that in some mysterious way Thorgunna and the red rain were linked. My mother came from the Orcades, they point out, and as far as the Icelanders are concerned any woman who comes from there — in particular one as mysterious and taciturn as my mother — is likely to be a volva. And what is a volva? It is a witch.

Perhaps witch is not quite the right word. Neither Saxon English nor Latin nor the Norman's French, the three languages most used here in the scriptorium, convey the precise meaning of the word volva as the pagan Norse use it. Latin comes closest, with the notion of the Sibyl who can look into the future, or a seeress in English. Yet neither of these terms entirely encompasses what a volva is. A volva is a woman who practises seidr, the rite of magic. She knows incantation, divination, mysticism, trance — all of these things and more, and builds up a relationship with the supernatural. There are men who practise seidr, the seidrmanna, but there are not nearly so many men as there are women who have the knowledge and the art, and for the men the word magician would apply. When a volva or seidrman is about to die, there are signs and portents, and the red rain at Frodriver is a surer sign that my mother had seidr powers than any silly stories about love potions she used on my father.

And this is confirmed by what happened next.

Early the following morning my mother's coffin was lashed to the pack saddle on the back of the biggest horse in Thorodd's stables, and a little procession set out for Skalhot, where my mother had asked to be buried. Thorodd stayed behind on the farm as he had to oversee the rest of the haymaking, but he sent four of the farm labourers to manage the pack train. They took the usual route southward over the moorland. The going was quite easy as the moor was dried out at the end of summer and the usually boggy patches could carry the weight of the horses, so they made good progress. The only delays were caused when my mother's coffin kept slipping sideways and threatening to tumble to the ground. A coffin is an awkward load to attach to a pack saddle. If slung on one side like an enormous wooden pannier, you need a counterweight on the opposite side of the horse to keep the load in balance. The men did not have a sufficiently heavy counterweight to balance my mother's coffin, and in the first half-hour the saddle itself kept slipping sideways, forcing the escort to tighten the girth straps until the poor pack horse could scarcely breathe. In desperation the men were on the point of hauling my mother's body out of its wooden box and draping it sideways across the pack saddle in its shroud, as it should have been in the first place. But they were far too fearful. They were already muttering amongst themselves that Thorgunna was a volva who would come to haunt them if they disturbed her. So they kept on as best they could, stopping every so often to tighten the lashings, and at noontime shifted the coffin to one of the spare pack horses as the first animal was on the point of collapse.