Northern Fiction - The Saga of Freydis Eiriksdattir
Chapter 1
The warriors wrapped Agdi in a fine brown cape woven of rich Greenland wool that he had received of Leif the Lucky at Eirik’s home at Brattahlid on Eiriksfjord. The cape was lined with black martin from Markland, Forestland, that lay to the west of Greenland. It was as precious as the sable pelts traded at Lake Ladoga in northern Russia, at Novgorod, called Holmgard by Scandinavians, and at the cities of Bulghar on the banks of the River Volga far to the east.
His iron chain-mail hauberk had been taken in Normandy from a slain knight when Agdi led a raid ravaging the coast’s of those distant-kinsmen: Norsemen -- descendants of the Danish Viking followers of Rolf, the son of the Earl of More, called Rolf the Ganger. Rolf, a man so huge that no horse could carry him, and therefore he walked, or ganged, had been driven into exile from his homeland. He fled from the North, after committing an illegal strandhug -- victualling of a ship by looting and slaughtering a neighbor’s cattle. He and his followers had conquered Valland, the west coast of France, and thereafter became known as Normans. Rolf, who was a great Viking, had laid siege to Chartres in 911 AD. He was granted a dukedom, on the west coast of France, by Charles III that year as ‘protection’ to keep away other northern raiders to the Seine. ‘Northmany,’ the province of the Northmen or Normenns, was where Duke William, known as William the Bastard to his henchmen, had grown up. William succeeded where Harald Hardrada failed. Hardrada got seven feet of England earth at Stamford Bridge. William won the rest. At Hastings, when the Saxon Harold Godwinson, Earl and King, died in battle in 1066 AD, the bastard duke became the most puissant lord King William the Conqueror of England.
Agdi had a fine helm of iron, trimmed with a nasal of bronze, and a massy gold chain with a Thor’s hammer pendant, both from Hedeby in Denmark. Agdi had long and proudly worn the pendant in bold defiance of Norumbega’s priest in Christ, Father Hrolf Haakonsson. The priest had often admonished Agdi to put away the pagan amulet, but the token would worn by Agdi to his immolation now and forever after in Valhalla. Agdi had been a merchant at the great fairs and markets: He’d sailed to Hedeby in Jutland, Birka in Sweden, Kiev on the Dnieper and Bulghar on the Volga, and even to fabled Baghdad on the Tigris. He traded in walrus-ivory, slaves, wine, silver, amber, furs, and weapons of war in exchange for the delicate treasures from the reaches of the world.
He had sacks of golden coins, the goddess Freya’s tears that she had wept at the long absence of her husband Odd, and to his last breath Agdi hoarded Asian treasures: A silver ewer and a blue and white glazed ceramic vase from Persia, and a polychrome bowl, decorated with dragons in red, from the furthest east. These priceless objects, all wrapped safely in soft linen, had been stashed. Now, the ewer, vase, and bowl were taken from Agdi’s treasure chest and displayed to those assembled for his funeral. But these heirlooms would not be committed to the pyre, Agdi’s foster-brother Thorir Rennirsson claimed them for himself.
Rennirsson was a tall man with a scarred forehead. He had massive broad shoulders and arms the size of most men’s thighs. He was a bonde, a member of the Icelandic landed gentry, like a hersir in Norway, but not quite a landsman or baron. He was the son of Rennir Shaggy-Breeches, son of Halfdan the Meat-Stingy, son of Olaf the Wood-Cutter, who owned the sword “Leg-Biter,” and who had come to Iceland with Hrafnell at the ‘Time of Settlement.’ Years before, Agdi and Thorir had cut a ‘ring-neck’ of turf, representing the womb of Mother Earth, and stood together beneath the circle of sod held aloft on spear points. They had drawn blood and let their life’s water run together into the raw earth, exposed where the sod ring was cut from the turf, and became one blood. Together they had fallen on their knees and sworn an oath of brotherhood pledging with clasped hands before witnesses, in the manner that seals all bargains, to avenge and care for each other, always. Agdi’s son Thorvald was not then at Norumbega, and Thorir therefore rightly took up his role as spokesman at the funeral. It was his obligation and his honor: Duty and destiny intertwined inexorably and inevitably as the finality of death. Stoicism and fatalism were the traits of gods and heroes and even the old gods were doomed to die. Death would come in one cataclysmic ‘Last Battle’ called Ragnarok: Doom of the Gods.
There was but one consolation. Thorir intoned the code:
man himself must likewise die;
one thing I know that never dies:
But word-fame never dies,
For him who achieves it well.
A widower when he died, it fell to the head of his family, in this case his blood-brother Thorir, to ask among his servants and slave-girls: “Which of you will be his bride and live with him forever?” Those asked always submitted (not entirely without some compulsion at the hands of the interrogator) and offered their lives to be the bride and accompany their master. Therefore, Thorir went to the house of Agdi and ordered the women servants to assemble in the hall. He walked among them, stopping before a young Skraeling girl Agdi had named after the beautiful lake Vaner in Sweden. No more than fifteen, she had soft smooth olive-toned skin and blue-black hair that reached to her slender waist. With long slender thighs, full-breasted and broad-of-hip, Vaner was ripe for pleasure. Surely, Agdi would want her company in the feasting halls at Valhalla.
Thorir reached out and grasped Vaner by the arm, dragging her from the huddled group of slave women.. His voice boomed: “Welcome bride of Agdi. Come with me. Eternity awaits.” The girl’s eyes widened in terror, the full meaning of the ritual was not clear, but she instinctively sensed the dreaded import of the moment. She screamed, struggled, tried to pull free from Thorir’s grasp, but the warrior’s grip was not to be broken. He put the question to her again before his attending warriors: “Will you be Agdi’s bride?” When he declared Vaner to be Agdi’s new bride, the dead man’s shipmates and kinsmen loudly rattled swords on shields and stamped their feet heavily on the hard-packed earth before the hall. The uproar drowned all sense out of the exchange and rendered unheard Vaner’s hysterical sobbing.
Thorir announced: “This one. She is Agdi’s bride. She will die with Agdi.”
There could be no retraction of a public commitment. Thereafter, the girl was to be kept in a drunken and drugged stupor, and never left unattended. Vaner’s fate was sealed. The ceremonies would proceed inexorably to their ordained conclusion. The henchmen raised their voices in loud hurrahs, confirming Thorir’s choice, and when the time came would make good use of Agdi’s funeral-bride.
A warrior, a sea-king, who had died in battle deserved to be placed within the bowels of his faithful sea-horse and given a ship burial. However, Agdi was not a crowned king who could claim a warship, a “dragon” ship named for the decorated head of a dragon, serpent, or other wild animal on the bow, for his funeral rites and pyre. (“Draco” was later used to identify the largest class of war ship and “snekke” the smaller war cutters.) Dragon’s were vessels used only in raids and sudden descents on enemy shores and were best suited to the sailing conditions in fjords and coastal waters, or quick raids across the open seas in good sailing weather. A dragon would never have met Agdi's needs. Agdi’s ship was a trading vessel, or knorr, named the Sea Mew. Knorrs, were broader of beam, deeper of draft, and had more freeboard than a dragon and could sail in all conditions and brave the worst storms and seas, therefore they were more seaworthy than a warship. Like all Viking ships, knorrs had a single mast that could be unstepped or lowered as needed and tholes, openings between gunwales and sea, for oars to propel the vessel in calms and contrary winds. The knorr’s hull was kinker built, the overlapping planks held together with iron. The flexible hull was then lashed to the frame. The crafts built in this manner would undulate and snake through the seas rather than lurch rigidly pounding from wave to wave. The bow and stern were richly carved high posts to which figure heads were mounted when approaching a port, at sea the figureheads were stowed to keep the vessel better balanced. Agdi’s Sea Mew had been draw up on the beach a short way from the nausts. The low sides of the vessel’s hull propped with stakes, driven into the shelving shore, to make the Sea Mew a steady platform and a deck laid across the open hull to create a stage on which to enact the funeral rites. The space beneath and around the hull, from keel to freeboard line, was surrounded with faggots of sticks piled close and dense to fuel the funeral pyre.
A tent made from a striped red and white wool sail was raised on the deck. The stripes were crossed with lines of leather sewn diagonally to prevent the material from causing the sail to droop and sag of its own weight when wet. A wooden bench, covered with red and blue silk damask hangings, and rich tapestries, was set up under the tent. Tapestries, which had hung in Agdi’s hall, woven with figures in red, green, and yellow wool depicting Odin, Thor, and Frey surrounded by stags and wolves, were draped within the tent. Great furs, including a huge Snow Bear skin that Agdi had killed on a hunt at Bjarney, Bear Island, west of Greenland, were deeply piled on the bier to receive the warrior’s remains.
The warriors came to a halt before a tall slender woman. Norn-like, mysterious, regal, and mature, yet of an indeterminable age, she was a formidable presence of intensely contained energy. Her auburn hair was pulled back from her leperously-white brow that rose nobly above a carved-ivory beak-nosed visage. Her pale gray-blue eyes fixed with a malevolent raptor-like intensity on the muscular sweating-torsoed men. Her expression was grim. Her movements solemn and still curiously fluid. A dark blue mantle fell from squared shoulders, clasped with a strap, and held with a pair of golden broaches at the level of her lean and sharp collar-bones. The mantle edge was set with precious stones from the neck all the way down to the hem and fell open over a beltless black dress. On her head was a black lambskin hood lined with white catskin and about her neck hung a necklace of clear glass beads. Encasing her legs were high calfskin boots tied with heavy leather thongs terminating in brass buttons. She wore catskin gloves line with soft white fur and in her left hand she clasped a long staff of witchhazel, ornamented with a brass knob and set with multi-colored stones. The woman was referred to as the “Angel of Death.” She officiated in the role of a Valkyrie, a “chooser of the slain,” addressed in the poem “Haakonarmal”with the words:
“Go forth, my angels of the dead,
Gondul and Skogul, to the plain
Drenched with the battle’s bloody rain,
And to the dying warrior tell,
Here in Valhalla he shall dwell.”
Next, the henchmen brought all his weapons to the ship in answer to dead King Haakon’s question on entering Valhalla:
Helm, sword, and mail-coat, ax and spear,
Be still at hand? ‘Tis good to hold
Fast by our trusty friends of old.
Agdi’s fellows then brought baskets laden with apples, and loaves of bread, and kegs of ale and mead to the ship throwing the food in front of the corpse for the journey to Valhalla. Then, in the traditions of the Odin-worshipping Norse, sacrificial victims were tied about the neck with a rope, yanked into the air strangling, and finally run through with a spear. First the men led Agdi’s hound Fenrir, a large shaggy wolf-like dog with orange eyes, to the vessel. Spying his master’s body Fenrir, began to howl and struggle violently to get free. The howls were deemed ill-omened so the men quickly clubbed the hound senseless, hacked it in two with an ax, and threw the pieces onto the ship. Two of Agdi’s Icelandic stallions, named after King Adil’s horses, Slongve and Raven, were led to the ship. The amber colored horses, with manes and tails as white as ewe’s milk, were galloped around the vessel until lathered white and foaming sweat. Then they were hacked into bloody chunks and the pieces tossed with the other offerings. Two cows, a cock and a hen, and a pair of goats, named Tooth-grinder and Gat-Tooth, after Thor’s chariot team, followed the fate of the other beasts. Finally, Agdi’s two white Greenland falcons, prince-worthy gifts rare almost beyond equal, were torn apart and tossed, wings still fluttering fitfully in the final spasms of life, onto the corpse’s lap. The sacrificial blood, called laut, was collected in basins, or laut-vessels, and sprayed about with laut stave branches to sanctify the scene.
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