Free The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Page A

character renowned for his superhuman strength and his fear of the dark, a killer and a troublemaker who lived as an outlaw for nearly twenty years, hunted from place to place until he came to Drangey, a grass-topped rock in the middle of the inlet that gave the valley of Skagafjord (“Bay of the Headlands”) its name. Tall, lone, and visible for hundreds of miles, this island had been a crucial resource for the local farmers in Viking days. They trapped seabirds and gathered eggs on its sheer cliffs, and hoisted sheep to its top to graze the rich grass there. When Grettir hauled up the rope ladder and declared the island his own, he was in essence raiding their pantry. All the farmers along the fjord could see the smoke of his cooking fire and know Grettir was feasting on
their
meat.
    The story of Grettir’s Bath begins on a night when the outlaw’s fire went out. Grettir, who was built like a bull seal, determined to swim to the mainland to fetch live coals. The distance is four miles. The temperature of the sea is a few degrees above freezing. (Lately it’s become fashionable for extreme swimmers, in wet suits and Vaseline, to try to match Grettir’s feat; Sirri at Glaumbaer has lost track of how many have tried it, but she assured me that none had drowned.)
    John Steinberg, who wanted his crew to get the full Icelandic experience from their visit to the hot spring, opened a translation of
Grettir's Saga
and began reading:
     
    He swam strongly, and made Reykjanes by sunset. He walked up to the farm at Reykir and took a bath, for he was feeling very cold. He basked in the warm pool for a good part of the night, and then he went into the hall. It was very hot there, for a fire had been burning earlier, and the room had not cooled off. Grettir was exhausted and fell fast asleep; he lay there until the following day.
    Late in the morning the household got up, and the first people to go into the room were two women, a maidservant and the farmer’s daughter. Grettir was asleep, and his cover had rolled off down to the floor. The women saw and recognized who he was. The maidservant said, “What do you know, dear, here is Grettir Asmundarson, and lying there stark naked. He is certainly big enough in the chest, but it seems to me very odd how small he is farther down. That part of him isn’t up to the rest of him.”
    The farmer's daughter said, “Why do you keep running off at the mouth like that, you silly little fool? Keep quiet!”
    “I can’t keep quiet about this, dear,” said the maid, “since I never would have believed it, even if someone had told me.”
    She kept going over and peeping at him, and then running back to the farmer’s daughter and bursting out laughing. Grettir heard what she was saying, and when she ran across the room again he seized her....
     
    The saga proceeds with a pair of dirty poems that Grettir composed on the spur of the moment—puns on swords being prominent—and a cheerful rape scene that had the male scientists howling with laughter while the women snickered and looked at each other askance. When things quieted down, someone asked, Was this scene typical of the sagas?
    Love scenes there are in plenty—enough that historian Jenny Jochens needed a dozen pages of her book,
Women in Old Norse Society
, to explain how a woman became pregnant. First the man “placed her on his lap ... and talked with her so all could see it,” talk that was visible as kisses and caresses. Then he might stretch out with his head in her lap and let her pick lice out of his hair. (Another sure sign of love is a woman offering to sew a man’s wide shirtsleeves tight around his wrists, a daily task before buttons became common.) After a bit he might take her by the hand and lead her to a more private spot; an illegitimate baby was variously called a “forest child,” a “corner child,” and a “cowbarn child.” There, says Jochens, the Vikings assumed the missionary position, the man