Embulance trials and tribulations parts 2, 3, 4...and medieval Icelandic manuscripts



The Embulance on the track to Sólheimajökull in south Iceland (photo by Axel Steuwer)



So...it's been a little while since my last post, but for those who may have been worrying, I haven't been wandering lost through lava-fields or stolen away by the huldufólk (the 'hidden people')... The Embulance continues to test my patience and purse by throwing up all kinds of mechanical issues: the drive down south was not exactly an easy ride what with a whimsical alternator and battery/electrical issues, the fan-belt coming off and some serious engine overheating, no power-steering thanks to the power-steering pump seizing up so the belt couldn't turn, and further clutch-related problems...On the plus side, I'm constantly learning from these trials and tribulations and they also present me with the opportunity to meet all kinds of extremely kind people. I have been quite overwhelmed by the lengths to which people have gone to help me out when I've been broken down. Thank you to all who have helped me so far! There's 10 minutes or so of live interview chat with Liz Rhodes on her BBC Cambridgeshire programme from Wednesday (at about 1hr 19mins) if you'd like to hear a little more... 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00dj6h5/Liz_Rhodes_16_02_2011

Right now though I'm in Reykjavík where I´m finishing up a couple of pieces of academic work that need attention...at a real desk, inside!! Yesterday morning saw me at the door of the Þjóðmenningarhús on Hverfisgata at 9am in order to look at a very important manuscript: the Konungsbók or Codex Regius of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, classmark GKS 2367 4to. Most of the medieval Icelandic manuscripts are kept at the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies) which is attached to the University of Iceland. But GKS 2367 4to is on display at the Þjóðmenningarhús as part of a permanent exhibition about the Eddas and Sagas and medieval Icelandic manuscript culture -- essential viewing for anyone visiting Reykjavík! It was a great privilege to be allowed access to the manuscript, and it was taken out of the musuem cabinet in  which it's housed so I could examine it and check various things for the edition of a poem (Jómsvíkingadrápa) I'm editing for the Skaldic Editing Project. I had two hours to scrutinise the manuscript's surprisingly small -- and often worn and dark -- leaves before it was replaced behind the glass on its pedestal, and the doors to the exhibition were opened to the public.  

The manuscript is thought to have been written between 1300 and 1350 and is famous first and foremost for containing Snorra Edda -- a prose retelling of Old Norse pre-Christian myths and legends, and a repository of skaldic verse and metres put together by Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), an Icelandic politician, scholar and poet. On the last few leaves of the manuscript, however, the texts of a couple of poems were copied out in full (or nearly in full) by the anonymous scribe: firstly Jómsvíkingadrápa, composed by the Orcadian Bishop Bjarni Kolbeinsson (d. 1222), followed by the anonymous Málsháttakvæði which dates to around the same time as Jómsvíkingadrápa and may also have been composed in the Orkneys. For those interested in reading more about Norse myth and literary production in medieval Orkney, a conference paper on the subject by Professor Judith Jesch (University of Nottingham) can be found here http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/sagaconf/jesch.htm.

The 45 stanzas of Jómsvíkingadrápa focus largely on the late-10th-century naval battle of Hjörungavágr, south of Ålesund, Møre and Romsdal in Norway. On the one, attacking, side was the famous Jómsvíking warband led by the bold chieftains Sigvalldi jarl Strút-Haraldsson, Búi digri Vésetason and Vagn Ákason: the Jómsvíkings established and maintained a warrior-brotherhood stronghold, Jómsborg, where present-day Wolin is now (i.e. on the Baltic coast of Poland) in the latter decades of the 10th century and first half of the 11th century. On the other side was the father-and-son-duo Hákon and Eiríkr, Norwegian jarls of Lade. There are numerous descriptions of the various feats of daring executed by these characters during the battle, and accompanying graphic detail of bodily dismemberment...but the poem is particularly interesting and unusual stylistically for the way that at certain points, the poet weaves his personal experiences of unrequited love alongside the standard viking swash and buckle and battle-gore, as in the verse below: 

Jómsvíkingdrápa verse 31 Ein drepr fyr mér allri                  -- ylgr gekk á ná bolginn -- -- þar stóð ulfr í tu -- ítrmanns kona teiti. Góð ætt of kemr grimmu -- gein vargr of sal mergjar -- grðr þvarr gylðis jóða -- gœðings at mér stríði.

Prose word order: Ein kona ítrmanns drepr allri teiti fyr mér; ylgr gekk á bolginn ná; ulfr stóð þar í tu. Góð ætt gœðings kemr stríði at mér; vargr gein of {sal mergjar}; grðr jóða gylðis þvarr. Translation: A certain nobleman’s wife kills all joy for me; a she-wolf stepped on the swollen corpse; a wolf stood there eating. The good descendant of a nobleman brings torment upon me; a wolf gaped over {the hall of marrow} [BONE]; the greed {of the offspring of the wolf} [WOLVES] diminished.

Lights, camera, action (photo by Axel Steuwer)

Love is in the air...and may feature in upcoming posts -- strictly with respect to the sagas, of course -- since I plan to drive north out of Reykjavík on Monday (fingers crossed for Embulance co-operation) and will head for Borgarfjarðarsýsla and Mýrasýsla where a number of poets and outlaw sagas are set (Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar). Business will bring me back to town at the end of February so I'll only have a week or so on the road but it should be a productive and fun one so please do come back soon for a progress report!

And we're rolling!

So -- happy news from Iceland. First, I'm delighted to announce that the Embulance has come out of surgery (the op. involved replacing the clutch plate...) and she has made a very successful recovery, running sweet as a Land-Rover-shaped nut. Outside, further modifications include the installation of four very smart and very grippy tyres courtesy of one of my sponsors, the Icelandic petrol company N1. Inside the back of the van, I´ve been doing some interior decorating: the fold-down table has been plastered over with a large map of Iceland and I have curtains! It's feeling very homely in there, and thanks to the new tyres I feel much more secure on the road and ready to face whatever terrain I encounter.

Secondly and most importantly, the real saga-steads work has begun too. I'm revisiting Víga-Glúms saga ('The Saga of Killer-Glúmr') which is largely set around the part of Eyjafjarðarsveit (south of Iceland´s second town and the capital of the north, Akureyri, population circa 17,000) that I´m staying and working in for the next couple of weeks, while I plot a route for the next few months and organise myself generally. The subject of Víga-Glúms saga is the life of the titular Glúmr Eyjólfsson, who established himself as a powerful chieftain in the 10th century in the Eyjafjörður valley. The narrative describes various local feuds over land, personal honour, and family reputation in which Glúmr is involved over the course of his long life -- he is thought to have been born around 928 C.E., and to have died around 1003-1004 C.E..

Early on in the saga, we hear how the difficult Glúmr (more on him in the next post) -- fresh from rite-of-passage triumphs in Norway, such as overcoming a dangerous berserkr -- has a remarkable dream, in which he is standing outside his farm at Þverá looking north towards the fjord (passage in Old Norse below). He sees a woman walking in through the district: she turns directly to face Þverá and she is so huge that her shoulders touch the mountains on both sides of the valley. Glúmr goes out of the farmyard to meet her with the intention of inviting her to stay but he wakes from the dream before this is achieved. On waking, Glúmr describes the dream to his household and interprets it as foretelling the death of his powerful Norwegian grandfather, Vigfúss. The woman is his grandfather´s hamingja, or guardian spirit. When ships reach Iceland from Norway later on in the summer, the news of Glúmr´s grandfather´s death is announced, and the dream is proved to have been a prophetic one.



Looking south down the Eyjafjörður valley from Akureyri

 Þverá -- now known as Munkaþverá, on account of the Benedictine monastery founded on the site in 1155 and dissolved with the Reformation in 1550 -- is only a few minutes' drive north from the farm I´m staying on, Fellshlíð, halfway down the Eyjafjörður valley on the eastern side. Fellshlíð used to be called Öxnafellskot and was a hjáleiga (a leased smallholding) of the large (and in the past, very wealthy) neighbouring farm to the north, which is called Öxnafell -- hence the literal translation of Öxnafellskot, 'the Öxnafell farm-cottage'. Öxnafell is named in Víga-Glúms saga, along with numerous other farms in the broad valley that I can see from Fellshlíð: Grund and Espihóll, to name but two examples. It has been suggested that Víga-Glúms saga was put together as a written narrative in the 13th century by someone attached to the monastery at Munkaþverá.

Thermos to hand and back up against a hay bale, wrapped up snug in outdoor kit (thank you 66 Norður, Rab, and Les at the Salvation Army shop in Cambridge) and with Fellshlíð horses peering at me curiously in the mane-whipping wind, there I was: sitting and reading about Glúmr's dream-woman and mapping out her path for myself, glancing across the valley, and north and south up and down it. The passage is a striking one wherever one is reading it; the immensity of the dream vision, and the significance of the event are further highlighted when one is actually in the landscape of the dream. This kind of experience is at the heart of what this project is about and the first glimmerings of the idea came to me while I was working on the farm here for the first time in 2008... reading Víga-Glúms saga then, I realised for the first time how remarkable it is to be able to locate this literature so precisely in the landscape as it is today. In the next instalment, more about Killer-Glúmr...and more about some of the specific places named in the saga and the people who live in these places now.

Víga-Glúms saga, ch. 9, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson in Eyfirðinga sǫgur, Íslenzk fornrit vol 9 (Reykjavík, 1956), pp. 30-31; my translation into English



Eyjafjarðarsveit

Þat er sagt, at Glúm dreymði eina nótt: hann þóttisk vera úti staddr á bœ sínum ok sjá út til fjarðarins. Hann þóttisk sjá konu eina ganga útan eptir heraðinu, ok stefndi þangat til Þverár; en hon var svá mikil, at axlarnar tóku út fjǫllin tveggja vegn. Enn hann þóttisk ganga ór garði á mót henni ok bauð henni til sín; ok síðan vaknaði hann. Ǫllum þótti undarligt, en hann segir svá: "Draumr er mikill ok merkiligr, en svá mun ek hann ráða, at Vigfúss, móðurfaðir minn, mun nú vera andaðr, ok myndi kona sjá hans hamingja vera, er fjǫllum hæra gekk. Ok var hann um aðra menn fram um flesta hluti at virðingu, ok hans hamingja mun leita sér þangat staðfestu, sem ek em." En um sumarit, er skip kómú út, spurðisk andlát Vigfúss.

"It is said that Glúmr dreamed one night: he thought he was standing outside on his farm, looking out to the fjord. He seemed to see a certain woman walking from the sea through the district, and she headed thither, to Þverá; and she was so huge that her shoulders touched the mountains on both sides. And he seemed to walk from the yard out towards her and he invited her to his house; and afterwards, he woke. This seemed extraordinary to everyone, and he says then: 'It is a great dream and a significant one, and I interpret it thus, that Vigfúss, my maternal grandfather, is now dead, and that woman must be his guardian spirit, who walked taller than the mountains. And he [Vigfúss] was superior to other men in most matters of honour, and his guardian spirit must have been searching thither where I am for a resting place.' And during the summer, when ships came out [to Iceland], news of the death of Vigfúss became known."



Sagas and the Embulance on the airwaves

Today was an epic day. While students were massing in London in the run-up to the vote in Parliament to increase university tuition fees (a disastrous, if not unsurprising outcome with the bill being passed by 21 votes), I collected the Embulance keys and took her on her maiden drive from Nene Overland in Peterborough down the A1/A14 to Cambridge. On arrival, I was straight into a live interview outside the BBC Cams studio which was conducted in the back of the van with Sue Dougan for her  Radio Cambridgeshire 'Sue Dougan in the Afternoon' programme. This was followed by some late afternoon filming for BBC Look East outside the Marshall's Cambridge Control Tower. In a pleasing twist of fate it transpires that the vehicle was converted into an ambulance (for the RAF) at Marshall's in the late 1980s...better yet, the designer, Kevin Peacock, still works for the company and came over to reacquaint himself with his creation and to give me the vehicle's original coachworks badge.  

The radio interview is available for the next 7 days here (starting around 18 mins in after some Elvis... a good 12 minutes or so of chat!) 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00chjqj/Sue_Dougan_in_the_Afternoon_09_12_2010

The Look East segment will be broadcast locally in the East of England after the national news around 18.45 tomorrow (Friday) evening... I'll put a link up to it after it's gone out for those who'd like to see what the inside of the Embulance looks like!

Of differentials and viscous couplings

Much of the past week has seen me kitted out in the fine orange overalls I mentioned in my last post, with grease streaked across my forehead and under my fingernails, and all kinds of pungent Land Rover innards oil in my hair. I must thank everyone at Nene Overland in Peterborough first of all for their endless patience and good-humoured explanations as to what sumps, prop shafts, cylinder heads, gaskets, differentials, intake manifolds, planetary gearings, universal joints, drum brakes  are ... and how they all work together to comprise the Land Rover Defender. It's another world under the bonnet and beneath the chassis, and a fascinating one.

More than once, while watching painstakingly fine work being carried out on unwell engines in the garage at Nene, a parallel with medical surgery occurred to me: at different times, a mechanic must be a general surgeon, a brain surgeon, an orthopaedic surgeon, and sometimes a cosmetic one. I was amazed by how long it can take to replace a starter solenoid (this in itself sounds like some kind of nasal problem that requires antibiotics) in a Range Rover. In Grettis saga, Grettir Ásmundarson, another famous medieval Icelandic saga outlaw, utters the proverb "Verðr þat, er varir ... ok svá hitt, er eigi varir" ("The foreseeable happens ... as well as that which is not expected"). Proverbial words to this effect are also found in the anonymous Old Norse poem Sólarljóð ('The Poem [ljóð] of the Sun [sól]'. The first syllable (sol-) in the name of the vehicle part solenoid is the initial element of the Greek word solen ('pipe, channel') rather than the Latin sol, which means 'sun'. Sun shine on a snowy day? ... at least as far as starter solenoids are concerned, this is one thing that I will not have to worry about failing -- expectedly or unexpectedly -- in my 1990 3500 cc V8 petrol Embulance, since she does not have one, thank goodness.  

Although I did not order it in, the genuine arctic weather that has descended on Britain in recent days could not have come at a better time for me: I got even more out of learning how to handle a Defender 110 off-road today under the instruction of the ProTrax team at Rockingham Castle than I had hoped I would. I will not be going off-road in Iceland as this is banned on account of the fragility of the natural environment there. But many of the saga-sites I intend to reach will not be easily accessible and the unsurfaced roads and tracks will present certain challenges, especially given the size and weight of the Embulance, so much of what I was taught will prove to be extremely useful. After a day of tackling steep and icy rutted tracks in and out of an old quarry, my faithful old 999cc VW Polo felt like a toy car driving back home along the A14. Driving in the snow isn't a game, though...  

A sunny afternoon at Nene Overland, Peterborough

And here she is! An absolute beauty...and with the siren in working order as an added bonus. I took her for a little spin and can't wait to set off over a proper distance come January.

Some work will be done inside: a fridge will be put in (it's not always below zero in Iceland), and possibly even a little sink with a HOT water tap. Luxury. And for those who have expressed concerns about my surviving in slightly colder-than-Cambridge climes...you'll be relieved to hear that--because of it being a working ambulance in its former life--it is insulated, and (it just gets better) there is even a night-heater rigged up inside that runs off a second battery.

I'll be sleeping on one of the two benches; the second will be my spare bed...so all visitors will be put up in style. There are all kinds of useful lockers and cubby-holes to stash away gear. Best of all, the space behind the 'ambulance' sign, above the driver and passenger seats, is accessible from the back of the van (see the photo on the right) and it is there that I will house my travelling library.

Otherwise, I need to think about technical things, such as tyres and insurance. But she's pretty much ready to take to the tarmac, or the dirt track, or the no-visible-track-at-all, as she stands. What a brilliant afternoon!