Wayward Heroes Page 26
It is said that during his time in this abode, Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld developed a taste for warm seal’s liver. Yet folk began to grumble when Mistress Luka brought the pale man better and more plentiful morsels than what other men in the hunting band received from their wives, and also when she fed him, while others had to feed themselves. A wise man who was an acquaintance of the Moon Man was called upon to meet with Þormóður and Luka, and he informed them that no wife in a hunting band was to shower more affection on her husband than other women did on theirs. Nor did it please the group when the pale man grumbled ill-naturedly to himself while the rest of them sang, and folk wanted to know the reason for it. Þormóður replied that it was fair that he be granted more seal’s liver than most men, since he was a liegeman of Olaf Haraldsson, the most praiseworthy king in the North, and it was for his sworn brother’s sake that he served this king and constantly sang his praises, whatever others might sing. The Inuits understood little of what he said. They were completely ignorant of the customs and laws of other lands and had never heard of kings or warriors. “Does this Olaf,” they asked, “drive dogs better than other men?”
That winter passes like others that are no shorter, until cracking sounds begin to rend the night, and those in the know announce the tidings, that the Mother of Sea Creatures is breathing a warm breath toward the land from the farthest seas where she has her abode. When the sun drives its bright celestial dogs south of the glacier, and the Moon Man, the guardian of midnight, returns to his bed, men wake their earthly dogs, brush snow off their sled-runners, and go to see what gifts the one-handed woman has left on the rim of the ice.
Þormóður remains at home, with his mind on grander exploits than killing seals or walruses. Time passes sluggishly, slowly, and in order to while away the hours he takes to seducing the women tending to their chores in his dwelling, their lawfully wedded husbands having journeyed out onto the ice. Once again, folk begin grumbling at this behavior of his. The women grow jealous of one other – many of them harboring a desire to sleep with this colorless mankiller – while the menfolk are swollen with grief at the thought of the women’s disdain of the honorable behaviour expected of them. Eventually, Mistress Luka discovers her sister, the maiden Mamluka, beneath the mankiller’s hide one evening. Upon finding Mamluka there, Luka attempts to chase away the maiden, but the lovestruck girl refuses to get up, so her sister sits herself down by the wall and starts wailing. Her mother goes to Luka and squats beside the girl and wails as well, with all her might, as do her cousins and other female relatives, filling the room with their cries, but the other girl refuses to get up from beneath Þormóður’s hide.
Among the Norsemen, men who seduced other men’s wives could be killed with impunity, but the Inuits have no idea of justice of this sort, as previously mentioned. Reliable sources say that although the Inuits never resort to revenge, they consider one crime far worse than any other evil deed – to the extent, in fact, of it being unatonable: when a man abandons his wife without grounds and leaves her in tears, and takes up with another woman before her very eyes. A heavier penalty and harsher forfeiture is imposed for this crime than any other that might conceivably be committed in a hunting band. This terrible punishment is carried out as follows: people take a snow bunting and blow into its nose – exhaling their repugnance of the deed. Then the bird is left where the criminal dwells, and the other men walk away. From that day on, the hunting band neither lays eyes on the criminal again nor acknowledges his presence among them. From then on, he is on his own – and he who is on his own there is dead.
Now the nights grow lighter – the time has come for the band to embark upon its summer hunting and fishing. One evening they notice that a bird has flown into the dwelling, beating its wings against the ceiling in the great distress of its avian heart. On the bird’s arrival, the group falls silent. All at once they are overwhelmed with fear, and they scramble to their feet and rush out of the dwelling. Þormóður’s in-laws leave one by one, his wife and sister-in-law and the entire clan, as well as the other women who have previously had relations with the guest, each of them taking whatever they have in their hands, until Þormóður and the bird are the only ones left. He sits there for a spell, listening to the bird beat its wings against the ceiling, and expecting the others to return – but this does not happen. Finally, Þormóður gets to his feet and opens the door for the bird, which flies off, following the path laid down for it by the Moon Man and the Mother of Sea Creatures. Þormóður goes outside and shouts that the bird has flown away, but no one pays him any heed. By then, the nights have grown light enough for work. There is a hustle and bustle on the hard-crusted snow around the winter camp, and to Þormóður, it looks as if everyone is preparing for departure that very night. But when he tries addressing anyone with the few words he has learned of their language, they all turn a deaf ear. When he touches someone to get his attention, the man walks off without a word. No one glances Þormóður’s way, any more than if he were wearing a helm of invisibility. Then, like so many men who fail their lovers, he flees back to the comforts of his wife. He goes to Luka, who is busily occupied, and asks why she has not brought him something to eat, but his wife neither sees nor hears him, and when he nudges her, she acts startled, as if some unexpected, foul thing has fallen from the sky. She hastily brushes herself off, walks away, and hides behind a group of unrelated people. No one bids him start preparing himself to join the hunting expedition. After finishing gathering and bundling up their possessions, they drive their sleds and boats over the ice in the direction of the sea. As the yelping of the dogs and creaking of the sleds dwindle in Þormóður’s ears, he realizes that he is dead. That night, he lies awake, racking his brain over what he can possibly do to regain his life. When he goes out the next morning, he is in for another shock: the old folks remaining behind in the winter camp neither see him nor pay him any notice, but pass by him like fleeting shades. As for those left behind to look after the dogs and household things in this abode over the summer, he is invisible to them as well. He has the suspicion that among the group, there are several other men who have been made outcasts for some reason, and are therefore as good as dead. The dogs that had greeted him earlier in the winter when he brought them food no longer give him as much as a sniff.
The next evening, when he crawls all alone beneath a shabby scrap of hide in the empty dwelling, having had nothing to eat but what he has picked out of the rubbish heaps, his mind drifts to the sorrowful fate of the skald who was one of the greatest heroes and lovers of women that ever lived in the North: not even dogs sniff at him; he is buried alive north of the world. As he lies there, pondering what chance he has of reawakening to life and exalting King Olaf, whose power and majesty he believes surpass those of any other king, he hears dogs barking and the swishing of sled-runners over the hard-frozen snow, and then the rustling of skins outside the dwelling door, as one always hears when Inuits walk by. Now the stone slab is lifted from the mouth of his tomb, and a person comes to where the skald lies dead, and in the next instant is sitting at his bedside, and has touched him, mouth on skin. He recognizes from her breaths that it is the maiden Mamluka, his crime. She takes a warm seal’s liver from her bosom and hands it to him. He thinks that what the maiden says is this:
“We set off for the south, away from your corpse. Yet when night fell, and we had pitched our tents, and all had gone to sleep, I could not sleep, and the one thing I knew was that I had to return to you, despite your being dead. For I love you so much that I would prefer to be with you dead, rather than not at all.”
There she tarries for a time with the skald in the dark of night, feeding him liver and wrapping him in a good hide – before turning away. She does not hear what he says to her, makes no reply to any of the dead man’s questions, but loves him as disconsolately as only a woman can do, and departs.
Reliable sources say that in this manner, the maiden Mamluk was the dead Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld
’s wife for three nights, returning each night from her hunting band’s camp after all had gone to sleep – but on the fourth night, she failed to return, nor did she ever return again.
43
NOW, FOR THE moment, we shall shift our narrative from the cold abodes of trolls back home to the North, and tell of events that occurred there during these years. In brief – King Olaf Haraldsson was toppled from his throne and driven from the country, exiled by his enemies. Many accounts are given in Icelandic books of the ruin of his kingdom, according to the testimony of heroes and skalds, but few of them will be detailed here. Yet there is no concealing what wise men have considered to have weighed most heavily in Olaf’s downfall: namely the utter lack of benevolence and the huge resistance that Olaf encountered from the peasants of Norway, despite his having for a time made great strides in consolidating his rule among the good nobles of that land, whom he had bribed or won over in some other way. The peasants constantly sought for an opportunity to murder the king, along with the nobles whom Squire Sigurd Syr had induced to support him. The Norwegians never viewed King Olaf Haraldsson as more than an incendiary who could be killed with impunity according to the laws of the land, whether by a slave or a free man.
In his youth, Olaf the Stout had become accustomed to the Viking habit of salting down cows in distant lands, and now, after becoming king, he quickly took up his old habits, making plans to plunder his neighbors of their livestock, and then deploying his troops to pillage cattle, sheep, and goats, as well as stoats, in several of the Norwegian districts that paid tribute to Swedish kings with the consent of the kings of Denmark. These deeds gave rise to such ill will between Olaf and one Swedish king that it could never be fully assuaged afterward, not even when Olaf became the king’s son-in-law. As the saying goes: “What you build, you live in.” The Swedish kings that called themselves lords of the Uppsala domains, Olof Skötkonung and later his son Anund, who was christened Jakob by clerics, plotted constantly against Olaf Haraldsson. They considered these raids of his daft, and attempted to decoy him into fool’s errands. Nothing made them hotter than when someone called him a king in their hearing.
The Swedish kings habitually provoked the Danish kings and the Norwegians into conflict with each other. The Danish kings called themselves the sovereigns of the North, despite not truly being so, except for the times when they were surrounded by weak and worthless kings at loggerheads with each other.
Olaf, King of the Swedes, was stunned and flabbergasted when he received news of an impudent, reckless move on the part of his namesake the Stout – a move no less impudent than his current enterprise of killing the Swedish king’s men and plundering goods and chattels in the Swedish tributaries in Norway.
The Swedish king Olaf had numerous children. Some were fathered in secret, or with his mistresses, while others he had by his queen. The king had presented his daughters with an magnificent manor in Götaland, rich in meadows, woods, and lakes. Each spring he sent his daughters to dwell there in the company of those henchmen of his who seemed better suited than others to taking care of women.
Around that time, it so happened that noblemen in Norway, friends of the Swedes entrusted with looking after the king’s daughters in summer, contrived to have Olaf Haraldsson make a covert journey to Götaland to hunt in the extensive, game-packed woods there, and Olaf asked to spend the night at the king’s daughters’ manor. He was announced as a count of the Holy Roman Empire, there on a pleasure trip, and was welcomed with a most excellent banquet. The Swedish king’s two daughters were then in their prime. One was named Ingegerd, a radiant, tall-statured woman, who had a swan-dress and could fly, and when she wanted, she flew off to determine men’s fates. She was the king’s lawfully begotten daughter, and the best match in the North. Ingegerd had an illegitimate half-sister, dark in complexion, named Astrid, who could be as chatty as anyone when she wished, but also extremely ill-tempered and rancorous. She was a shrewd woman and a good drinker, but it was thought unlikely that she could be married off to a foreign potentate. Some sources say that she was dwarfish.
The sisters agreed that this young king had certainly made his mark among nobles esteemed for deeds of renown, having subdued Norway of his own volition and in valiant style, killing five kings in one morning. They declared him fit for the company of the truly illustrious, despite his being called a cow-salter in Uppsala. That evening, they drank to the king’s health with great courtesy.
When Olaf the Stout woke the next morning, he asked for the hand of Ingegerd, the king’s daughter, in marriage. She received his proposal politely and took it up with her guardians, and they promised to bring the matter before her father, King Olaf, in Uppsala. Olaf the Stout sorely regretted having to take his leave of the ladies, particularly Princess Ingegerd. They accompanied him to the gate and bade him farewell on a hill overlooking the sun-splashed lakes of the kingdom of Sweden, its golden pastures and dark forests. This pale lad, with his sullen, evasive gaze, lacked all mirth and was bereft of playfulness, having experienced little of what normally constitutes youth. On land he had a waddling, wobbly gait. He was stout above and slender below, with a pale layer of down on his cheeks and the hands of a surgeon. Yet at that hour, this lad appeared in the eyes of the king’s two daughters as nothing less than the hero of a lay. Ingegerd approached him and vowed to do her best to convince her father to accept his proposal, and bestowed him a parting kiss. Olaf then turned to Princess Astrid, who had less to say than usual. To her, he said the following:
“What keepsake will you, Astrid, give this wayfarer who is about to return from the golden peace of Sweden to the land of his enemies?”
She unfastened a gold pin from her neckline and handed it to him. He thanked her for the gift, and in return, fastened her mantle with an inferior pin of little worth. She then responded with these words, whose meaning has long been disputed:
“The woman who mocks you most shall harbor you, but she who pines for you daily shall show you the door. She who deceives you shall possess your life, but she who loves you shall destroy it.”
At that, King Olaf returned to Norway.
The king of the Swedes took this news far worse than the report that the king of Norway was slaughtering both his men and livestock.
As much as the Swedish kings have always been far mightier and greater rulers than the kings of Norway, there are fewer tales concerning them, since Icelandic books focused more on raising the Norwegian kings above their usual pettiness. It was the belief of Swedish kings that the kinless marauders or foreign renegades who were constantly turning up in Norway and claiming kinship to Harald Fairhair were poor matches for the daughters of the kings of Uppsala, who could trace their descent with certainty thirty generations back to Yngvi-Freyr, without a single woman in the line. The Swedes felt obliged to put the kings of Norway in their place, especially if they began stirring up trouble in districts neighboring their own, and it had not been very long since the Swedish king Olaf allied himself with the Danish king Sweyn to kill Olaf Tryggvason. It was very much in Sweden’s interest for the kingdom of Norway to remain poor and disunited and be ruled by petty kings, each feathering his own little nest. Thus was Olaf, King of the Swedes, stricken speechless when he learned that his daughter Ingegerd and his portly namesake were consorting.
The Swedes held lands and kingdoms in the Baltic regions, and Swedish merchants traversed the whole of Russia, all the way to Constantinople. The Swedish kings had kinsmen among rulers in the east, men who controlled vast realms but were prohibited by the emperor in Constantinople from holding a loftier title than knyaz – that is, prince. Around that time, Yaroslav, son of Knyaz Vladimir the Saint, was undertaking to subdue Russia. Opposing him were his brothers, three or four of them, and Yaroslav had sworn an oath to spare nothing nor lay down his weapons until he had defeated them all. Since Knyaz Yaroslav found himself hard pressed in battle against his brothers, with rather little backing from the native lords, he sent envoys to Upp
sala to request support from the Swedish king based on bonds of kinship, promising in return greater privileges for the Swedish merchants in Kiev than they had previously enjoyed, and taxable land for their livelihoods when they spent the frigid winters in the east. The Swedish king Olaf declared that Yaroslav should have as many troops from him as he needed, and ordered his vassals to levy troops on the coasts and islands east and west of the Baltic – everywhere that he ruled. But Olaf added a confidential stipulation: that when Yaroslav was victorious over his brothers, he was to wed Ingegerd, Olaf’s daughter, and grant her a half-share in his lands and kingdom, and the Swedish king’s agents were to accompany her and act as her stewards and advisors there in the east. Thus, the next news that Olaf the Stout heard of his betrothed, Ingegerd, after their meeting in Götaland, which we have just described, was that the girl had left Sweden and been wed out east in Russia to Knyaz Yaroslav the Wise, son of Vladimir the Saint.
Just when Olaf the Stout feels most cruelly betrayed by Ingegerd, whom he loves beyond all other women, and deceived by her kin in all other respects, it so happens that Ingegerd’s illegitimate sister, Astrid, declares her love for him. The single most important factor in sealing the peace treaty between the kings of Sweden and Norway is the support and authorization of noblemen from both lands for this match – and finally the Swedish king yields to the persuasions of his nobles and weds Olaf the Stout to Astrid, his illegitimate daughter. Yet relationships between fathers and sons-in-law can be chilly, and there is as little trust between the two kings as before, despite the treaty’s bringing an end to mutual slaughter and plunder.