Gísla saga 2: The Outlaw Years

In the last post, I mentioned some of the events described in Gísla saga Súrssonar that lead up to the point in the saga when Gísli Súrsson becomes an outlaw... Forced to leave his farmstead in Haukadalur, the saga relates how he survived on the run for 13 years before finally being hunted down and killed by his enemies. Gísli‘s outlaw years are the subject of the second half of the saga, which is an intriguing mix of almost slapstick-style or fabliaux comedy on the one hand, as Gísli gives his pursuers the slip through pulling off various cunning tricks, and on the other, heightened and doom-driven prose as Gísli‘s final hour approaches. The prose is punctuated by verses uttered by Gísli, often about the frequently blood-drenched nightmares that disturb his sleep. Poignantly, Gísli comes to be afraid of the dark (as is another famous outlaw, Grettir, after he is cursed by the revenant Glámr...a post on Grettis saga will appear at some point over the summer months!).

Geirþjófsfjörður

Gísli relies on friends and family to support him as an outlaw and he spends periods of time in different places hiding out. Help is not always forthcoming, however: the consequence of a spell that the sorceror Þorgrímr nef conjures, on the orders of Börkr—who must capture Gísli in order to avenge the death of his brother, Þorgrímr, at Gísli‘s hands. One place where Gísli spends summers in hiding is in a fjord south of Dýrafjörður (where Haukadalur is) called Geirþjófsfjörður, which branches off the bigger Arnarfjörður. Geirþjófsfjörður can only be accessed by walking down from the heath above it, or from the water by boat. Its remoteness made my expeditions down into it to explore the places named in the saga even more of an adventure into the unknown.

Gísla saga tells of how Gísli‘s wife, Auðr, had a farmstead in Geirþjófsfjörður—and grassed-over mounds known as Auðartóftir (‚Auðr‘s ruins‘) where this farm stood are marked and easy to find, on the level plain at the end of the fjord. I had a packed lunch (together with a local Gísli expert, who came with me for the first trip down into the valley, and my filming Cambridge Ideas companion) with my back up against one side of Auðartóftir, the sun (welcome, after days of snow and sleet and minimal visibility) shining down on us. There is a modern farmhouse not far from Auðartóftir—but the last inhabitants left some time in the 1950s/60s, and the fjord and valley have been deserted since then. It must have been a remarkable thing to have lived and farmed down by this fjord, with places associated with Gísli‘s last years and death visible on all sides, both those that are named in the saga, and other places that incorporate his name in some way and testify to a tradition of engagement with the saga beyond the printed page. It‘s a beautiful valley—and its gentle contours, as well as the rivers and waterfalls that fall from the heaths above and run down noisily through huge gullies into the fjord, took me by surprise. I had imagined a much starker, darker, grimmer, silent backdrop for Gísli‘s last fugitive months.  



One of Gísli´s hideouts



The saga describes how Gísli had various small hideouts around the valley—two of these are marked, and a third, unmarked but clearly visible, was pointed out to me. I stood IN one of Gísli‘s hideouts and listened to birds calling, and water gurgling. According to the saga, Gísli only spent time in Geirþjófsfjörður over the summer—when the leaves on the birch and rowan trees—though these trees do not grow to a great height—would provide greater cover. But it struck me that this must have been a precarious security since a spy—such as Njósnar-Helgi in the saga, who is sent into Geirþjófsfjörður by Börkr‘s sidekick Eyjólfr inn grái to ascertain Gísli‘s whereabouts—looking down on the valley, might quickly notice the shaking of greenery in one spot or another... And after pushing through some of these tangled thickets for a short spell, I appreciated that being chased through such woods (as Gísli is, at certain points in the saga) would not have been a simple matter either.  

The saga‘s account of Gísli‘s last hours and his final battle is a powerful piece of narrative. His end is nigh and utterly inevitable, but the narrative tension is nonetheless built up and up right until the climax of his last fight, which itself is dramatically staged and presented. It is the last night of summer and Gísli is with his wife Auðr and their foster-daughter at the farm but he cannot sleep, so the three of them walk from the farm to one of the hide-outs, to the south of the farm and beneath some cliffs. The weather is close and there is a heavy dew: as they walk, their cloaks leave trails behind them, and Gísli lets shavings from a runestick that he is carving fall unheeded too. When they get to the hideout, Gísli tries to sleep but dreams of two loon-birds fighting each other, covered in gore. The voices of approaching men are heard—it is Eyjólfr with a band of 15 men and they have followed the trails from the farm to the hideout. Gísli, Auðr and the girl run up onto the cliffs—these now bear the name Kleifar, and are marked with a sign—and Eyjólfr and his men attack from below.

Auðr has armed herself with a wooden club and beats Eyjólfr, driving him back down; she is captured and Gísli utters the memorable words ‚I have known for a long time that I married well, though I did not know just how well married I was. But you helped me less than you might have done or intended to, although your attack was good, because they would both have gone the same way now‘—i.e., had Gísli attacked Eyjólfr, he would have killed him as he has others (‚Þat vissa ek fyrir löngu, at ek var vel kvæntr, en þó vissa ek eigi, at ek væra svá vel kvæntr sem ek em. En minna lið veittir þú mér nú en þú mundir vilja eða þú ætlaðir, þó at tilræðit væri gott, því at eina leið mundu þeir nú hafa farit báðir‘, Gísla saga ch. 34, p. 112). The attackers press on and up and Gísli kills two more men—four are now dead. When least expected, Gísli runs off and up onto a rocky outcrop close by, called Einhamarr, and defends himself from there.

Einhamarr, view north from the top

Men climb up and ‚er atsóknin þá bæði hörð ok áköf, ok fá þeir nú komit á hann sárum nökkurum með spjótalögum, en hann versk með mikilli hreysti ok drengskap. Ok fá þeir svá þungt af honum af grjóti ok stórum höggum, svá at engi var ósárr, sá er at honum sótti, því at Gísli var eigi missfengr í höggum‘ (Gísla saga ch. 35, p. 114; ‚the attack was both hard and furious, and they manage to wound him somewhat with spear-thrusts, but he defended himself with great courage and valour. And they receive such a heavy onslaught of rocks and blows from him that none was unwounded of those he attacked, because Gísli was not inaccurate with his blows‘). Gísli is speared in the stomach and his guts spill out; he gathers them up in his shirt and ties them in with his belt. Then he calls for a pause, states that they will get the end they want, and then speaks his last verse—in which he claims his courage comes from his father. After this, Gísli leaps from the rock and drives his sword into the head of one of the attackers, cleaving him down to the middle, and dying himself.   

      

I sat on top of Einhamar and read all of this—in the sunshine, looking down onto the plain where Auðartóftir are, and over to Kleifar. I found it hard in some ways to reconcile the details of the scene—violent shouts, clashing of weapons, blood and guts—with the peace of that rock as I sat, read, thought on it...I wondered if I was falling into the trap of reading the sagas—and imagining episodes within them—as though they are history rather than narratives that occupy the hazy space between history and fiction.

Certainly, it seemed to me that for local people, Gísla saga was more history than fiction—and Gísli might have died only decades ago rather than many centuries, in some cases. I think it would have been impossible to find a local person who did not know something of Gísli—that he lived in Haukadalur, at the very least—and many in the area know Gísli‘s story not necessarily through reading the saga, but because of his presence in the landscape, and the way that the events in the saga play out in local places, and the way that people have always passed on stories about Gísli in these landscapes. And this is not a passive tradition in present times either—in different ways, local people still actively engage with the saga and see it as their local heritage. There have been concerted efforts to present the saga to those unfamiliar with it and new to the area in the form of very well-made information boards raised at key places mentioned in the saga, for example. But most absorbingly, I experienced the spontaneous composing of verses about Gísli and places in the saga at first hand—in a perfectly natural context, not an artificial one. And I had to compose a verse about Gísli myself, in return...and thus found myself engaging with Gísli and Gísla saga creatively in the way that Icelanders have for many hundreds of years—and in some places, still do.     

A joke in/by nature...or perhaps created by Gísli?

From Snæfellsnes to the West Fjords: Gísla saga Súrssonar

I promised a second post on Eyrbyggja saga and the Snæfellsnes peninsula -- but events have taken various turns the past couple of weeks and time is flying...and so I have made an executive decision to move straight on with a post on Gísla saga so as not to leave you all too far behind as I move on! More about Eyrbyggja (and there is so much to say) will be worked into the book...  

On the geography of Iceland and the location of the West Fjords (Vestfirðir), William Gershom Collingwood wrote, delightfully: „The map of Iceland has been sometimes drawn by school-boys as an eider-duck, quacking with wide opened beak; the head whereof is that great peninsual of the north west between Breidifjord and the Arctic Ocean, and its lower mandible Snæfells-nes. In our pilgrimage we have now got into the duck‘s mouth: next we propose to make the tour of the head before returning to the neck for further explorations over the ruffled quills of the back“ (A Pilgrimage to the Sagasteads of Iceland, p. 107).

This upper westernmost part of Iceland that stretches its many clawlike fingers out into the Atlantic is one of the most visually spectacular and dramatic parts of Iceland: I approached and entered the region from the water, via the ferry that runs across Breiðafjörður from Stykkishólmur to Brjánslækur on the southern coast of the Vestfirðir, a journey of a little over 2 hours or so. The roads that follow the shorelines of the many fjords that comprise this western peninsula and wind their way, hairpin-bending, up over the heaths and mountain passes between valleys (often with great deep drifts of snow still – though the dark night hours have been banished by now, spring is still slower to show itself here than it is further south) are for the greater part unsurfaced and it is challenging driving in places. Though Icelanders comment frequently on the fact that the Embulance is a left-hand-drive vehicle, i.e. with the steering wheel on the right, and call it ‚silly steering‘, this actually has proved a rather useful feature as I can keep an eye on the edge of the road to my right much more easily...and make sure that I don´t fall off it when negotiating tight bends or passing oncoming vehicles.

View along Dynjandisvogur into 
Árnarfjörður from Dynjandi

From Brjánslækur I headed straight up north over Dynjandisheiði, spending the night beside the great waterfall Dynjandi en route to Dýrafjörður, where the outlaw-hero Gísli Súrsson and his family established their homestead(s) after emigrating from Norway around 952 C.E.. Dynjandi – true to its name – thundered mightily like so many lanes of motorway traffic through the night; I walked up the waterfall (or waterfalls, since there is a series of them, each kicking up sparkling spray), the only soul there, at 11pm and looked west along into Arnarfjörður where low clouds in faint pinks and smudgey greys were building up and catching the light from the late evening sunset. After reaching Hrafnseyri on the northern shore of Arnarfjörður the next morning (the home of the 13th-century chieftain Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, whose life is outlined in the contemporary saga Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar), I took the road north up over Hrafnseyrarheiði and down into Þingeyri, which sits on the southern shore of Dýrafjörður.

After refuelling I drove straight on west along the fjord, to Haukadalur, which was only 10 minutes or so further on. The weather was bright and the sky blue – and my arrival in Haukadalur was an intense moment to which I had long looked forward. I wrote my PhD thesis on Gísla saga – but until now, had never made it out to the Vestfirðir to explore the actual places where the saga unfolds. A couple of sentences in a book about the history and settlements in the Vestfirðir that I looked at while I was in Haukadalur made a strong impression on me: ‚Úr fornsögum er Haukadalur í Dýrafirði betur þekktur en flestir aðrir staðir í Vestfjörðum því allir þræðir í Gísla sögu Súrssonar mætast hér í einum punkti‘ (‚Haukadalur in Dýrafjörður is better known from old stories than most other places in the West Fjords because all the threads in Gísla saga meet here at one point‘, Kjartan Ólafsson, Vestfjarðarit I: Firðir og fólk 900-1900. Vestur -Ísafjarðarsýsla, 1999).

Looking south down Haukadalur

Gísla saga is not overly long – about 80-odd pages in the Penguin Classics translation; structurally and stylistically, the narrative is articulated with consummate artistry. It is one of the more widely-read sagas in Iceland on account of its being on the school-syllabus for several decades; a famous (famous at least in Iceland, and in the world of Old Norse/medieval Icelandic saga studies...) film of the saga was made too, by the director Águst Guðmundsson in the 1980s too – the only film of a whole saga of which I am aware. Gísla saga is sometimes described as a medieval murder mystery: at the heart of its plot are two violent murders. The Scandinavian crime novel phenomenon (Arnaldur Indriðason, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir to name but two world-popular Icelandic crime-writers) is not a new one...

Gísli and his family build a farmstead at Sæból in Haukadalur after arriving from Norway; Gísli‘s sister Þórdís is soon married to Þorgrímr ‚Freysgoði‘ Þorsteinsson (there‘s a connection here to Eyrbyggja saga, Þorgrímr appearing therein; Þórdís eventually ends up on the Snæfellsnes peninsula too—Snorri the chiefain in Eyrbyggja saga is Þórdís and Þorgrímr‘s son), Gísli to Auðr, and Þorkell to Ásgerðr. Þórdís and Þorgrímr take up residence in Sæból, and Gísli and Þorkell (together with their wives) build a second farmstead at Hóll and live together there. Gísli is hard-working and conscientious whilst Þorkell is less inclined to work, and one morning Þorkell lies down after breakfast and overhears a conversation between his wife Ásgerðr and Gísli‘s wife Auðr in which he learns that his wife has feelings for – and is possibly having, or had an affair with -- Auðr‘s brother, Vésteinn. Þorkell and Ásgerðr move out of Hóll over to Sæból where Þorgrímr and Þórdís live, and a rift grows between the brothers and the two households; a damage-limitation attempt by Gísli to bind the four men (Gísli, Þorkell, Vésteinn, Þorgrímr) together with a blood-brotherhood oath fails. Vésteinn returns from a trading voyage and arrives in Haukadalur to visit his sister and Gísli; that night, an unnaturally violent storm blows up and while Gísli and his men go out to rescue the hay, Vésteinn is murdered while he lies in his bed by an unidentified intruder who then escapes.

The spear is left in Vésteinn‘s corpse and Gísli pulls it out and recognizes it as the reforged fragments of a cursed family sword that Þorkell took with him when he parted with Gísli and moved to Sæból. Gísli is obliged by virtue of his marital ties to Vésteinn, and his blood-brotherhood bond, to avenge Vésteinn‘s death. The evidence suggests that the murderer must have come from Sæból: thence Gísli goes by cover of night some time later, wading down the stream that runs beside both farms so he does not leave tracks in the snow. On entering Sæból, and making his way silently into his sister and brother-in-law Þorgrímr‘s bed-closet, Gísli, in turn, impales Þorgrímr with the same spear Grásíða that he pulled out of Vésteinn‘s dead body. After Vésteinn‘s death, winter-ball games on the frozen pond at the mouth of the valley were held by the Haukadalur men; Vésteinn was buried in a mound at the western end of the pond. Þorgrímr is buried at the eastern end of the pond, and the ball-games are again held on the pond. After a clash with another player, Gísli pauses for a moment, looks up at Þorgrímr‘s mound, and recites a riddling verse in which he acknowledges his responsibility for Þorgrímr‘s death. Þórdís, who is now married to Þorgrímr‘s brother Börkr, overhears Gísli‘s verse, remembers it, unravels it, and reports its substance to Börkr – who now must kill Gísli in order to avenge Þorgrímr‘s death.



Seftjörn, looking west down Dýrafjörður



The pond, Seftjörn, is still there at the fjord-end of Haukadalur, with a natural bank separating it from the beach and sea just below. It has silted up considerably but green shoots of the rushes which the inhabitants of Sæból and Hóll gathered to strew on their hall floors were pushing out of their pale, winter sheaths; the rushes will grow to over my height, I was told. Great numbers of birds – gulls, oyster catchers, geese, ducks -- flew up into the air calling shrilly as I walked down to the pond. The two mounds aren‘t visible now though Vésteinn‘s was, partially at least, when the Icelandic archaeologist and antiquary Sigurður Vigfjússon examined the valley in the early 1880s. A house, enclosed by trees, stands on the site where Vésteinn‘s mound rose (now called Vésteinshólt); at the other end of the pond, where Þorgrímr‘s mound was, the concrete/stone foundations of buildings put up there in the late 19th/early 20th century can be seen. At one point, the population of the valley numbered over 100 and there were a couple of shops or trading centres, a small school, and the first ice house in the west of Iceland.

Now, one elderly but completely independent woman lives in the valley; I also met a farmer who keeps his horses and sheep there (lambs were tripping around outside in the field beside his barns); the remaining few houses are used as summer-houses. A grassed-over track runs down to the ruins of the 19th-century settlement by the pond – it must have been on this slope that Þórdís sat and overheard Gísli‘s fateful verse; the mouth of the river (Haukadalsós) where the family put in with their boat and belongings on first arriving in Iceland, and where subsequent voyages were concluded, is just to the east. And the other side of the Haukadalsós is Saltnes, the small promontory between Haukadalur and the neighbouring Meðaldalur where the sorceror Þorgrímr nef and his witch-sister were stoned to death.

Gíslaaugu ('Gísli's Eyes')

What struck me most forcibly was the size and dimensions of the valley, and how densely settled it must have been with all of the farmsteads named in Gísla saga standing (6 in total, according to the saga: Sæból and Hóll, and four more at points either side of the central river, up the valley), compared with other ‚saga‘-valleys I´ve explored elsewhere in Iceland. The valley is not a large one: it's approximately 5 kms long, and 500-800 metres wide at its broadest points; at its southern end, the highest mountain in the Vestfirðir, Kaldbak (998m), rises starkly. It would have taken a matter of minutes to walk from Sæból to Hóll or vice versa: the strained relations between the two households take on an immediacy that I had not appreciated when reading and thinking about the saga up until this point--and the valley is so bare, with very little cover for any kind of private activity.

The faint foundations of the three buildings that comprised Sæból (a hall, cow-barn, and hof) are just traceable in the middle of a hay field south of Seftjörn; the farmer‘s son says that his tractor bounces over them when he ploughs/mows the field. The site of Hóll was on a low hill south-west of Sæból, which is now known as Gíslahóll. In fact, there are two hills: the southernmost and slightly higher one has the clearly visible foundations of a couple of modern (19th/20th century) cow-sheds on its crown; the lower, northern one is where Gísli‘s farm Hóll would have stood. It is a good spot with visibility up, down, and across the valley. Back down Gíslahóll, in the field below to the north of it, are a couple of pools where water wells up: the stream that this water fed ran north to the pond past Sæból and was the stream that Gísli waded along the night of his murder of Þorgrímr. The pools have the slightly sinister name of Gíslaaugu (‚Gísli‘s eyes‘) now; the stream no longer runs its natural course, having been diverted into a ditch, but a slightly sunken channel betrays where it lay.

I followed the stream--or the traces of its original course--as far as I could, thinking about Gísli watching over the valley through the two Gíslaaugu pools, over 1000 years later.  Gísli is outlawed after his riddling verse admitting his murder of Þorgrímr is unravelled by Þórdís -- and the second half of the saga describes his 13 years on the run while pursued by Þorgrímr's brother Börkr, whose responsibility it is to avenge Þorgrímr's death. The past few days have been spent visiting some of the places Gísli hid out as an outlaw (while filming for the 'Cambridge Ideas' series--very exciting--the documentary will be beautiful and will be released in August!)...so in the next post, I´ll be following Gísli's outlaw tracks. 

Looking north over Seftjörn at Mýrafell

  

Place-names and a mention of puffins

Place-names, and the study of them (toponymy), is not a subject I have spent much time thinking about in the past -- but it is something that I am becoming increasingly absorbed by with regard to the sagas, as my Sagasteads project progresses. There are numerous instances in the sagas where place-names are elucidated by a saga-author and connected with events described in a saga narrative. It is possible -- and likely in some cases -- that these anecdotes were invented by saga-authors, or by other figures at some point between the date of a saga's action and that of its written composition, in order to explain how places got their names. But whether or not individual anecdotes about events and places that purportedly led to places acquiring their names are historically 'true', I am finding the 'in situ' saga-fieldwork process of mapping written explanations behind place-names onto the  physical topography of local areas to be very engaging and revealing. 

 

Geirshólmr from Þyrilsnes

The photo above is of Geirshólmr (now Geirshólmi), the island in Hvalfjörður on which the outlaw Hörðr Grímkelsson and his band lived for a couple of years until they were tricked into coming ashore with the promise of reconciliation, and met their deaths (a brief summary of the saga narrative is given in my previous post on Harðar saga). The name of the island translates, simply, as 'Geirr's Island'; the saga explains how 'Sá hólmr er nú kallaðr Geirshólmr; tók hann nafn af Geir Grímssyni' (Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík, 1991), ch. 24, p. 65; 'That island is now called Geirshólmr; it took its name from Geirr Grímsson'). Geirr was Hörðr's foster-brother and closest friend; it is rather odd that the island takes its name from Geirr rather than Hörðr and the Íslenzk fornrit editor of the saga comments in his introduction that people have long thought this strange ('hefur mönnum að vonum löngum komið það spánskt fyrir sjónir, að hann skuli ekki fremur vera kenndur við aðalsöguhetjuna', Harðar saga, p. xxxvi).



The island is approximately 100m long and 45m wide now: I heard opposing views in conversations with Hvalfjörður locals regarding the extent to which the island might have decreased in size over the past 1000 years as a result of weathering. Even if the island was somewhat larger when Hörðr and his men were living on it, there cannot have been much room for them all: the saga states they were never fewer than 80 and at their most, 200. Hörðr describes the island as being 'sæbrattr ok víðr sem mikit stöðulgerði' (Harðar saga ch. 24, p. 64; 'rising steeply from the sea and widely like a milk-pail [in shape, I imagine...]'); Collingwood notes how the island's sides 'rise absolutely, vertically sheer from the water-line, all around, with no foreshore except at the north-east, where there are a few yards of broken rock, into the cracks of which the bow of a boat may be thrust' (A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland (Ulverston, 1899), p. 34).

It being winter, I didn´t manage to find a boat or a boatman to take me out to the island but looking onto the bare and exposed island from various vantage points around the Hvalfjörður shoreline made a deep impression on me, and my thoughts turned often on what it must have been like for Hörðr -- both in practical and emotional terms -- to have been forced by circumstances to live in such a place. The saga relates how Hörðr and his men build a great hall there with a door in the middle of one side to the west; Geirr's farm at Botn is taken down and the materials conveyed to the island, and water from a nearby river is rowed over to the island and stored in a great cask. When Collingwood explored the island, the ruined remains of the hall were apparently still visible but upon asking whether this is still so, I learnt that it is no longer the case...tunnel-digging nesting puffins might have played a large part in this...  

   

In Harðar saga, Þyrilsnes, the projection of land that comes out from the northern shore of the mainland and curls into the fjord, is called Dögurðarnes ('Breakfast-Ness/Peninsula') -- and it is so-called because it is there, according to the saga, that Torfi Valbrandsson and the others involved in capturing and killing Hörðr and the Holm-dwellers have their breakfast before the Holm-dwellers are ferried over from the island and executed ('Þeir átu dögurð um morgininn eptir á nesi því innanverðu, er þeir kölluðu Dögurðarnes síðan', Harðar saga ch. 32, p. 80; 'They ate [their] day-meal the next morning on the inner side of the ness, which since they [i.e. people generally] call Dögurðarnes'). The outermost point on the ness where Geirr's dead body is washed ashore bears the name Geirstangi ('Geirr's Spit'; 'Þar heitir Geirstangi, er líkit rak á land', Harðar saga ch. 35, p. 85; 'That place is called Geirstangi, where the corpse was driven onto land'); and the place where Hörðr fights his last fight and dies is called Harðarhæð ('Hörðr's summit'), though this place-name is not mentioned in the saga. Nor, specifically, are Helguvík ('Helga's bay') and Helguhóll ('Helga's hill'), though the saga states that the place that Hörðr's heroic wife Helga rests after swimming from the island with her two boys, on the striking mountain Þyrill (see photo above) is now called Helguskarð ('Helga's ridge-pass').

More elaborate anecdotes are presented in conjunction with other place-names in the saga and a good number of these are connected with Hörðr's and the Holm-dwellers' raids on local farmers around Hvalfjörður and over in Svínadalur and Skorradalur, north of Hvalfjörður. The pass down into Skorradalur from Svínadalur, for example, is called Geldingardragi ('Wether-trail'; see photo left, of Dragá/Geldingardragi looking south from Skorradalur): chapter 29 of Harðar saga relates how after Christmas one year, Hörðr, Geirr, and 40 others head over into Skorradalur where they conceal themselves during the day, raid a sheep-shed when night comes, and drive the 80 wethers they find away. The weather (oh dear, no way around the punning here, sorry!) is against them (there is the suggestion that this is because of sorcery, of which there is a good deal in the saga) -- there is a heavy snowfall and the bell-wethers (i.e. the lead sheep) become exhausted. Geirr and the men want to abandon the sheep but Hörðr states this would be unmanly, 'þó at nökkur snæskafa væri eðr lítit mugguveðr í móti' (Harðar saga ch. 29, p. 74; 'although there might be some snow-whirling or a little bit of drizzling weather against us'). He takes hold of the bell-wether and drags it over the mountain: 'varð þat slóð mikil; þeir ráku þar í eptir annat féit; því heitir þar Geldingardragi síðan' (Harðar saga ch. 29, p. 74; 'consequently there was a big trail; they drove the other sheep on afterwards; thus the place has been called Geldingardragi since').

Episodes from Harðar saga are found 'written' into the landscape thus, crystalised as place-names, all over Hvalfjörður. Even people I spoke to who had not read the saga knew the story, or parts of it, and could relate it to the local area and to specific place-names. I suspect that the saga I intend to move on with now, Flóamanna saga, set in a part of the south coast of Iceland (around Eyrarbakki and Stokkseyri)  may not be so rich in this respect...though there is certainly much of interest in it: dreams in which the god Þórr appears, a trip to Greenland, a breast-feeding father...  rather glad I wasn't quizzed by Egill Helgason on his programme Kiljan (watch -- and overlook grammatical howlers -- here, at 23/24 minutes in http://dagskra.ruv.is/sjonvarpid/4548043/2011/03/02/ ) on this one...

So Flóamanna saga next -- thanks for reading and following! 

Hvalfjörður and Harðar saga ok Hólmverja

"This is one of the most picturesque of sites, and has one of the most romantic of sagas attached to it", opens William Gershom Collingwood's description of Hvalfjörður in his 1899 book A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland -- whose title, and overall concept, are the principal inspiration for this project.

Hvalfjörður lies north of Reykjavík and Mosfellslbær and is the longest fjord in the south-west of Iceland, cutting 30kms deep into the land along a north-east/south-west axis and curling to the east at its head. Before the Hvalfjarðargöng tunnel was opened in 1998 and the main ringroad re-routed underneath the fjord, all traffic heading north or west to and from Reykjavík had to follow the fjord all the way around -- a drive of an hour or two. The volume of traffic on the road now -- which at times is cut into the steep edges of the mountain-sides rising straight out of the fjord -- must be a tiny fraction of what it was, and the fjord as a whole now has a quiet but powerful feel.  



View down Hvalfjörður from the eastern end of the fjord



There's a lot of local history here. Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614-1674), poet and priest (Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík is named after him, and every year his Passíusálmar are broadcast on the national radio each day over the course of Lent) served as minister at the church at Saurbær for the last 24 years of his life. In the WWII, a British/American naval base and oil refuelling station was established here with over 20, 000 soldiers -- a staggering number, given that the current population of Hvalfjarðarsveit now is around 600 and can't have been that much bigger in previous generations. Part of the naval camp can still be seen, not far from where the whaling staion is, on the northern shore of the fjord, towards the eastern end.

I've been here since Monday -- on the trail of Harðar saga ok Hólmverja. For the main part, Harðar saga tells the story of Hörðr Grímkelsson, who was born around 950 CE. Hörðr's first steps, aged 3, brought his mother Signý's wrath upon him when he stumbled into her lap causing her precious necklace to break. "Ill varð þín ganga in fyrsta, ok munu hér margar illar eptir fara, ok mun þó verst in síðasta" (Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík, 1991), ch. 7, p. 17; "Evil were your first steps, and much ill will follow, with the worst, however, to come last"), she exlaims in anger. Aged 15, Hörðr travelled to Norway and Sweden where he broke into a burial mound, fought the zombie-viking-mound-dweller Sóti and acquired Sóti's precious sword and ring -- thereby incurring Sóti's curse ("Skaltu þat víst vita ... at sjá hringr skal þér at bana verða ok öllum þeim, er eiga, utan kona eigi", Harðar saga ch. 15, p. 43; "You will know this for certain ... that that ring will be your death, and the death of all those who own it, unless a woman owns it").

Litli-Botn, at the eastern end of Hvalfjörður 

After marrying Helga, the daughter of jarl Haraldr of Gautland, Hörðr returns to Iceland 15 years later. He farms for a couple of years, and then is outlawed after events force him to the killing of a man named Auðr, and the burning of Auðr's farm. Hörðr -- together with his foster-brother and close friend Geirr, whose farm Neðri-Botn (now Litli-Botn, photo right) is at the head of Hvalfjörður, and a number of others -- moves onto the small island of Geirshólmi which lies in the bay formed by the spit Þyrilsnes (photo below right). The band survive by raiding farmers in the area and stealing their livestock.

Eventually, local resistance (including Hörðr's uncle and brothers-in-law) comes to a head and the Hólm-dwellers are tricked into coming to the mainland, where they are slaughtered. Hörðr's wife, Helga, and two sons remain on the island, and Helga swims ashore at night with the children and makes for the farm where Hörðr's sister Þorbjörg, and her husband Indriði, live. The last part of the saga tells of further killings instigated by Þorbjörg in order to avenge her brother -- firstly, that of Hörðr's killer, Þorsteinn Gullhnappr of Þyrill, whose head Þorbjörg demands her husband bring to her.



Geirshólmi, from Þyrill; Þyrilsnes, on which Hörðr
fought his last fight and died, stretches out into the
fjord from the left-hand side



The saga is very much written into the topography of the area and a great number of place-names bear witness to the events related in it, bringing the text of the saga together with the physical contours of this part of Iceland in a very real way. I'll write more on this, and more about specific place-names and their relationship to Harðar saga in the next post, to follow shortly. The saga is used extensively by local tour-guide Arnheiður Hjörleifsdóttir (http://www.bjarteyjarsandur.is/) in her presentation of the area to visitors; it is very much in the consciousness of those who live here too.

I spent a fantastic two hours yesterday talking to a couple in their late 70s/early 80s who have lived on a 'Harðar-saga farm' (Ferstikla) on the northern shore of the fjord for many decades. Vífill was full of information about local places connected with the saga, had all kinds of opinons about the veracity and artistry of saga and its events and characters, and offered numerous nuggets of local history. Dúfa had had to read the Íslendingasögur as a girl at school and found them then to be utterly boring...nothing in them but people killing each other, which is interesting to boys maybe, but not to girls. Interestingly though, in further conversation on this point with Dúfa, it transpired that the way some episodes from Harðar saga -- Helga's swim from the island with her two boys in particular, for example -- fit into the local landscape, however, is different...as stories rather than printed text, these episodes are human, and alive, and have great appeal.        

Time to move on now, despite the rain and grey clouds which shroud the fjord as I write (happily, I'm writing inside, washed and warm, thanks to Gaui litli at Félagsheimilið Hlaðir, http://www.hladir.is/). I'm going to drive north from Hvalfjörður over into Svínadalur and then into Skorradalur in search of further Harðar saga locations...more will follow.

One last media alert though for those who wish to hear about the adventures via the radio/TV: I'll be talking to Bergsson and Blöndal live on RÚV 2 just after 9am on Saturday morning...and can be seen in conversation with Egill Helgason on his TV programme Kiljan next Wednesday evening. The Embulance, too, features in person (in vehicle?), in the studio...