Circles and Rounds-about Vápnfirðinga saga Country



Iceland's Coat of Arms

Vopnafjörður, in north-east Iceland, is famous on several counts, both medieval and modern. It is home to one of Iceland's four mythical guardian spirits or landvættir, the dragon (the other three are a great bird which resides in Eyjafjörður in the north, a bull based around Breiðafjörður in the west, and a mountain giant who roams around the south-west): all four creatures are pictured on Iceland's coat of arms, and on the obverse of Icelandic coins. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Vopnafjörður was the port from which the greatest numbers of Icelanders set sail for America and Canada after the terrible hardships of life in the east at that time became impossible to endure any longer. Most recently -- and at the opposite end of the financial spectrum -- Vopnafjörður, or the rivers in the area and the salmon in those rivers, have attracted figures such as Prince Charles and George Bush as well as numerous other high-profile tourists...



Looking north-east from Hof



The saga that is set around Vopnafjörður, Vápnfirðinga saga ('The saga of the people of Weapon-Fjord') was the last of the eastern sagas on my list to work through. I have written in recent posts about some of the connections -- genealogical, geographical, narrative -- between these eastern sagas and Vápnfirðinga saga is no exception here. One of the two key places in Vápnfirðinga saga, Krossavík, is where Grímr Droplaugarson of Droplaugarsonar saga hid out after murdering Helgi Ásbjarnarson (see post of 29th July). A local man who was born and grew up on the farm at Krossavík came with me for a spin about the countryside in the Embulance and pointed out the places associated with Grímr around Krossavík land, as well as passing on countless other anecdotes attached to local places.

Krossavík
(the land slopes down to the sea to the left of the photo) 

Vápnfirðinga saga is not a very long one and it deals for the most part with the close friendship, and subsequently deadly enmity, between two brothers-in-law: Brodd-Helgi Þorgilsson who lives at Hof, and Geitir Lýtingsson who lives at Krossavík. The rift between the two men comes after a Norwegian merchant is murdered: Brodd-Helgi and Geitir at first divide the Norwegian's possessions between them, but the goods are later taken from Brodd-Helgi and Geitir by another man who delivers the possessions to the dead Norwegian's family. It is unclear what becomes of two precious things (a gold arm-ring and a casket), however, and the friendship between Brodd-Helgi and Geitir is poisoned by mutual suspicion. Tension is compounded when Brodd-Helgi abandons his terminally-ill wife (Geitir's sister) and announces his betrothal to another woman. The two men take different sides in various local disputes and eventually, one thing leads to another, and Geitir kills Brodd-Helgi. The feud is passed down to the next generation and Brodd-Helgi's son Bjarni then kills Geitir (who was his foster-father) in order to avenge his father's death...then Geitir's son Þorkell tries to kill Bjarni in order to avenge his father´s death...

Hof (the white building to the right of the frame),
from Guðmundarstaðir, looking south-west across the valley

At a battle that takes place on a peninsula along the coast to the south of Vopnafjörður, both Bjarni and Þorkell sustain wounds -- but the battle is halted after women run out from a nearby farm and throw cloths over the weapons men are wielding. Bjarni offers a settlement package to Þorkell which he accepts, and so the saga ends, at least, with reconciliation...

I had the pleasure of being shown around other saga-sites in Vápnfirðinga saga by another local, Cathy -- who (together with her husband Sverrir) came to my rescue after somewhat alarmingly, the Embulance brakes seized up from chronic over-heating as I was descending the infamously steep and long Hellisheiði mountain pass into Vopnafjörður. A terrible smell of burning brakes culminated in a rather dramatic handbrake stop amidst clouds of dust...but all ended happily, thankfully, and the Embulance and I lived to tell the tale and continue to travel. It was an amazing road -- I took no pictures en route as all my energy was focused on staying on the road and negotiating the countless hairpin-bends -- I´d love to drive it again some time...but perhaps in a slightly lighter and more easily manouverable vehicle! Cathy is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being her history: her grandparents were amongst the many 'Western' Icelanders who emigrated from Vopnafjörður to the United States, which is where Cathy was born and lived...until she visited Iceland in order to explore her family past, and moved back east for good. A story of emigration come full circle...   

Surprised sheep at the abandoned Guðmundarstaðir,
another farm in Vápnafirðinga saga

Cathy is part of a local group which came together over the winter and, as part of a course on local tourism, read Vápnfirðinga saga and put together a very informative brochure about the saga. The brochure can be picked up in the tourist information and cultural centre (housed in an old merchant warehouse building called Kaupvangur) in Vopnafjörður, and it includes a map on which all of the farms mentioned in the saga are marked. Interestingly, it seems that the formation of this group has ignited a spark of local interest in the saga which wasn´t widely present before. On asking various people, it seemed that knowledge of, and interest in the saga hasn´t particularly been a part of life in Vopnafjörður for past generations... Now though, the saga is taught in the local school, and various Vápnafirðinga saga-related projects and activities are afoot. I spent a delightful hour leafing through a pile of pictures produced by school-children illustrating scenes and characters from the saga: one of my favourites was a brightly-coloured picture of a local farmhouse -- a farm which features in the saga, and on which the grandparents of the artist live today. The next post -- on Reykdæla saga ok Víga-Skútu -- will be something of an antidote to the all-too-often romantic temptations of seeing continuity between past and present in Iceland as far as the sagas and the places in them are concerned...but I left Vopnafjörður musing on how this saga, at least, seems to be one that has come full circle too, as far as its place in local consciousness is concerned.   



Cairns on Sandvíkurheiði, on the way north from Vopnafjörður



From Eastern Parts II: Brothers in Arms, or Droplaugarsona saga

Two sons, Helgi and Grímr, were born to a couple (Þorvaldr and Droplaug) who lived at a place called Arneiðarstaðir (today Arnheiðarstaðir) on the western side of the long lake Lagarfljót, in the east of Iceland (the present-day capital of the east, Egilsstaðir, sits on east of the northern end of this lake, in which Iceland‘s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, the Lagarfljót serpent or Lagarfljótsormurinn, is said to reside...). Helgi, the elder, was ‚a large man, promising and strong, cheerful and self-assertive‘ who was not interested in thinking about farming, but the best of men as far as skill with weapons was concerned (mikill maðr vexti ok vænn ok sterkr, gleðimaðr ok hávaðasamr. Hann vildi ekki um búnað hugsa. Vígr var hann manna bezt, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 2, p. 140, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit XI, Reykjavík 1950). The younger son, Grímr, was also large and strong but silent and composed, and a good farmer (mikill maðr vexti ok afrendr at afli, hljóðlátr ok stilltr vel. Hann var búmaðr mikill, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 2, p. 142). These two men were thought to have the greatest potential of all the young men in the district.

The old farmhouse at Arnheiðarstaðir

The saga of these two brothers, the ‚sons of Droplaug‘ (who was their mother, and whose name they take rather than that of their father‘s, on account of their father dying early in their lives) takes place for the most part around the Lagarfljót lake – which, at 25kms running on a north-east/south-west axis, is one of the longest lakes in Iceland. At the ages of 13 and 12, respectively, Helgi and Grímr kill a man called Þorgrímr torðyfill (‚dung-beetle‘) who had been spreading slander about their mother. They travel to a farm called Eyvindarár on the other side of the Lagarfljót lake, where their aunt lives, rise up early in the morning, and when their aunt asks where they are off to, they answer „We shall hunt ptarmigan“ („Rjúpur skulum vér veiða“, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 3, p. 145). On their return to Eyvindarár a little later, when their aunt asks what they hunted, they answer „We hunted down a certain dung-beetle“ („Vit höfum veitt torðyfil einn“, Droplaugarsona saga ch. 3, p. 146). This killing does not go down well with a local man called Helgi Ásbjarnarson, since the dead Þorgrímr dung-beetle was one of his men. The greater part of the rest of the saga tells of the escalating feud between the brothers and Helgi Ásbjarnarson: tense local politics, disputes over missing sheep, conflict over the courting of a married woman and other episodes all contribute to the escalating tension and enmity between the two sides.

Lagarfljót from the western side

Both sides gather support and have spies out about the area to watch on each other‘s movements; eventually, Helgi has a dream in which it seems to him that the brothers travel exactly the route they are embarked upon in reality, down into Eyvindardalr (on the north-eastern side of Lagarfljót) to a place called Kálfshváll – where it happens that Helgi Ásbjarnarson is hiding nearby, waiting to ambush the brothers. Helgi dreams that the brothers are attacked by 18 or 20 wolves, one of which is bigger than the others, another of which leaps up at Helgi‘s chin and mouth...at which point Helgi wakes up. The dream is interpreted as being a sign that a band of men (with Helgi Ásbjarnarson as their leader) are lying in wait for the brothers; Helgi Droplaugarson refuses to turn back, however.

Vopnalág in Eyvindardalur, where Helgi
Ásbjarnarson is said to have hidden
(the hill with the scooped-out centre)

The brothers come down into Eyvindardalr and head towards the ford by Kálfshváll; it is still winter and the river is frozen. 18 men run towards Helgi and Grímr who turn off the path and up towards the edge of a gully: a great battle takes place and Helgi demonstrates his agility and prowess with weapons. A man called Hjarrandi hews at Helgi‘s face and hits him on the mouth: „Aldri var ek fagrleitr, en lítit hefir þú um bætt“ (Droplaugarsona saga ch. 10, p. 164; „I was never good-looking, but you haven´t helped much“), quips Helgi. Helgi takes his beard in his mouth and bites on it; he looks over and sees that his brother has fallen, is hit by a spear, and dies himself. The brothers‘ aunt hears of the battle, and sends her son to the battle-field to recover Helgi‘s and Grímr‘s bodies. Helgi is buried at Eyvindarár in a mound but it turns out that Grímr is not actually dead, and he is nursed back to life...to exact vengeance on Helgi Ásbjarnarson for the death of is brother.       

Grímr hides out in various local places and then strikes, killing Helgi Ásbjarnarson in his bed on his farm at Eiðar. This scene is an interesting one – and many of the details concerning how Grímr sneaks into the farmhouse at Eiðar (how he ties together the tails of the cattle in the cowshed in order to inhibit people‘s pursuit of him later, for example, and is clad lightly in a shirt and linen underclothes without shoes) have very close parallels in the description in Gísla saga Súrssonar of how Gísli kills Þorgrímr at night in his bed. There is certainly some close textual relationship between the two sagas here – but scholars have debated which of the two sagas borrows from the other and recasts the scene. After killing Helgi, Grímr flees north to a farm at Krossavík in Vopnafjörður where his kinsman Geitir Lýtingsson lives. He hides out there for a while, then escapes to Norway, and then dies from a wound he picks up while fighting a viking called Gauss...

Grímsbás (under the rock overhang)

I was shown, and told about, various places around Lagarfljót where Grímr is said to have hidden, and which contain the element ‚Grímr‘ in them. Grímstorfa ('Grímr's turf') can be seen when driving out along the road from Egilsstaðir/Fellabær, on a mountain called Hafursfell, where a number of trees grow out from the rock high up. This place is not named in the saga, but it´s mentioned in a folk tale – though this folk tale also records an alternative tradition that the place-name is associated with a different Grímr. I climbed down to another Grímr-place, Grímsbás ('Grímr's stall') – a low overhang of rock forming a cave by a waterfall, with what seems to be a man-made wall running along the outer mouth of the cave. The slopes by the waterfall were studded with birch trees, and grasses and wild flowers grew high and abundantly.  

Outlaws and heroes on the run seem to capture the imaginations of past generations of Icelanders almost more than anything else, if the number of place-names around the country associated with these characters‘ hideouts are anything to go by...From Lagarfljót I travelled north up to Vopnafjörður with the dual aim of visiting Krossavík and finding Grímr‘s hideouts there (there‘s a gully known as Grímsgjá, in which Grímr is said to have hidden, a large stone halfway up the mountain behind the farm called Tjaldsteinn (‚Tent-stone‘) which Grímr is said to have used to construct a woollen tent with, and a slope on the same mountain called Grímsbyggðir (‚Grímr‘s settled area‘), and taking on the saga that is set in Vopnafjörður, Vápnfirðinga saga, in which Krossavík features too. But these Grímr-place-names notwithstanding, Droplaugarsona saga doesn´t seem to be a saga that has a central place in many local people‘s consciousness today. There is an information sign beside the road that leads out of Egilsstaðir and towards Fagridalur, close by where the battle of Eyvindardalur was fought but little else around the area. The saga was closer to the hearts and in the imaginations of people who lived in the area one or two generations ago though: south of the farm at Arneiðarstaðir where the brothers were born and grew up is a farm called Droplaugarstaðir...which was built in 1942, and on which, at one time, lived two cousins who were both called Droplaug...   

Upper panel of the famous medieval carved door panels
at Valþjófsstaðir church, in Droplaugarsona saga territory
(the originals are in the National Museum)

And another link with the saga-age past has been put forward by a local historian (Helgi Hallgrímsson, whose parents built Droplaugarstaðir). In the summer of 1980 the biggest silver hoard ever found in Iceland was uncovered on a farm called Miðhús, on the outskirts of Egilsstaðir, not far from Eyvindarár. It had been a hot summer and the family had been building a new house: a muddy patch by the house had dried up cracked open and on her way out to call the family in for food, Edda, who lives there still, stumbled on something stuck in the ground. When her family came in, their hands were filled with bracelets and twists of silver. Was this the silver that Arneiðr  – from whom the farm Arneiðarstaðir takes its name, a woman of noble Shetland descent who was captured and enslaved, then bought and married by one of the first eastern settlers and the first person to be named in Droplaugarsona saga, Ketill þrymr – found buried in Norway, as Droplaugarsona saga and Fljótsdæla saga recount?...

For further reading on Grímr-place-names, and on Arneiðr and the silver hoard, see

·    Helgi Hallgrímsson, 'Grímshellir og Grímsbás', Múlaþing 15 (1987), 117-31

·    Helgi Hallgrímsson, ‚Arneiður og Droplaug: Frásögn af tveimur fornkonum á Austurlandi‘, in Greinar af sama meiði, helgaðar Indriða Gíslasyni sjötugum (Reykjavík, 1998), pp. 359-74

·    Þór Magnússon, ‚Silfursjóður frá Miðhúsum í Egilsstaðahreppi‘, Árbók hins íslenska fornleifafélags (1980/1981), 5-20 (available online here, with photos of the hoard  http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pageId=2054967)