Northvegr - Northern Fiction - The Saga of Freydis Eiriksdattir

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Northern Fiction - The Saga of Freydis Eiriksdattir

Chapter 2

Page 1

        The settlers of Norumbega lived huddled within the walls of the stockade, unlike Iceland and Greenland where most people lived on isolated farms. The town dwellers livestock was lead out at sunrise each day to graze in the meadows, tended by servants and guarded by armed warriors, until they brought home before sunset each evening. The livestock of Kraekleroost were kept at night within yard surrounded by a fence of wicker hurdles. The hurdles also encircled Freydis' home which was situated on Aoalstraeti, the Main Street, off the Micklegata. Most fences were intended to keep stray animals out, rather than pen in domestic animals, because the gardens had to be protected and householders needed the livestock kept from nibbling roof thatch. Within the yard, but apart from the other buildings because of the risk of fire, was a small smithy with a stone forge and a slag heap that marked the iron working that took place within. Closer to the dwelling houses were a sauna bath-house and a large privy. Three byres for cattle and a separate stable for horses formed the sides to a farm yard within the compound. Coops and cotes, pigsties, sheep-sheds, and separate lamb and milch ewe shelters completed the accommodations for the livestock. Hay ricks and barns, several storage sheds for tools, dried and salted fish, harnesses, ropes, stored food, roots, and grain were also crowded within the enclosed area. Most of the buildings were oriented along an east-west axis. Two large farmhouses sheltered both men and beasts under a single roof. These buildings had their hearth and living quarters toward the western end and the space for livestock was at the eastern half of the structures. The towering main house stood apart from the other buildings and was opposite the gate.
        At Norumbega domestic buildings typically had stone foundations and sod walls like the buildings in Greenland however the tall roofs made of rafters and wicker were covered over with thatch rather tan sod. There were neither windows nor chimneys in the roof, and instead of a gaping opening in the top of the roof (that would have let in rain and snow) there were openings under the apex of the roof peak at each gable end to let the smoke escape. In the farmhouses, the air was warmed by livestock body heat and circulated through the building as the draft created by the rising smoke vented out the gable holes. About the glowing hearth of the farmhouses the occupants cooked, slept, and fornicated in the common room. To lay the dust, farmhouse floors were often soaked down with ox blood, trod hard, and swept smooth with besoms of willow twigs. Threshing and winnowing of grain took place indoors in the passageway between barn and dwelling. A cross breeze, between opened doors on opposite sides of the building, blew away the chaff from the grain. The girls and women had the daily task of grinding grain and in good weather they would sit in the passageway and when it was inclement by the hearth. Millstones, called “runner and rested,” were placed on hides spread to keep the grist from the clay floors. The gritty flour was mixed in wooden bowls and bread baked in the ashes of the hearth on a hot bed of stones. Suspended high overhead, leather hangings kept sparks from igniting the roof thatch. Meat hung from hooks in the rafters curing in the rising smoke. Drying racks kept the precious grain, needed for both food and seed, out of the reach of vermin. In the barn side of the dwellings, cattle and small hardy Icelandic horses were stabled, beneath fodder filled lofts. The lofts also sheltered serving men and boys, who slept there when the smoke was not too thick to be endured. Freydis’ main house was a collection of dwelling rooms that did not share any space with livestock, however, she did live in the company of an extensive household of dependents and retainers who slept in the great central fire-hall called the skali.
        When Freydis entered her house, the croaks of her pet ravens called out a “welcome home.” She loved her ravens most of all her pets and had named them Hugin and Munin after Odin’s ravens: Thought and Memory. People said that the birds, like Odin’s, knew the speech of man and each day flew into the world gathered knowledge. It was believed that they too reported all they had witnessed and so she always knew what was happening. Freydis chuckled to herself with a cackling noise that sounded like bones rattling in a copper cup. “So like people,” Freydis mused, “if they could see you now, whatever would they think!” She recalled an incident when her crows stole an otters diner. “Such clever thieves. I admire them so,” she chortled. “I well remember how you harrassed the otter as he basked by a riverbank with a fish in his mouth. Hugin swooped down and began tugging at the otter’s tail. Then, Munin flew down and grabbed the fish!” She had also watched them pull in the lines of fishermen to steal their bait and catch. “So like people, so wonderfully wicked,” she thought.” who could not love you, my babies?”
        As she babble with the ravens, four large hounds loped to her, barking joyously. They licked her hands and, rising up on hind legs, nuzzled her face. “Hello, have you been good dogs? Give us a kiss: Come to me Hrod, hello Hrym, atta dog Hymir, and you big old Ygg down now, good.” Sitting down heavily on the raised bench next to the door she confided to the hounds: “Gods, I feel so old. And, ever so weary. I ache in all my joints day and night. Another night of labor like this and I will surely die, even in contradiction of Leif’s curse! Ha! What a joke on him to have me die at last, and in the service of the old gods at that!”
        Freydis’ house, just as all the other buildings, was built with on a foundation of flat stones and six foot thick walls of sod. Unlike the humble farmhouses, the main house had the lower part of the exterior walls faced with stone and the floors flagged with slate. An interior framework of posts and beams supported a wicket of woven branches, overlaid by a thick and dense roof of reed thatching. Further north the Norsemen usually erected sod covered roofs, at Norumbega reed thatching was a better protection against rain and moisture, but the thatch was still dense enough to insulate against the coldest winters.
        The entry door hung on wooden hinges and was secured with clever locks of wood and iron. In accord with common practice, Freydis had followed the injunction:
Beware the heavy beam above the door,
Hang a horseshoe on it against
Ill fortune, lest it should suddenly
Break and crush your guests.
The main house was as innocent of windows or chimneys as the humblest farmhouse and the smoke holes in the eaves of the thatched roof were the only sources of natural illumination. Nevertheless, it was a grand dwelling, with the interior walls paneled with split half-round logs with the inward facing flat sides adzed smooth. The smooth surfaces of the logs were carved in carpet-like patterns of tendrils, gripping beasts, and compact animals set side by side in an intricate field with ring-chains and pretzel-like knot motifs. All the woodwork was picked out with colored pigments and darkened by the smoke of the interior’s long fire trenches that occupied the center of each room. Sets of embroidered linens and woven tapestry’s hung on all the walls depicting scenes of Norse gods, warriors, beasts and plants. The textiles were richly colored in mineral and herb dyes: blue from woad, red obtained from madder, reddish-browns and violets from lichens, black from bog iron, and yellows from golden rod and onions, and to add accents and highlights, pure gold and silver wire threads were drawn through the finished work. High up, the walls were lined with the overlapping shields of her warriors, and no space was empty between them. The surfaces of the built-in benches used for sleeping and sitting were wood and piled high with furs and woolen robes. In Freydis’ own chamber the bench was heated with hot air circulated under the dais, just as was provided for the home of the Thorfinn the Mighty, the Jarl of Orkney at Birsay. Several rooms had stone floors laid over with the “wood wool” coverings of woven willow and brushwood. Other rooms had the floors strewn with armloads of sweet grasses and rushes that imparted a meadow fragrance to the rooms, but they concealed an accumulation of house litter, dog droppings, and tracked-in mud.
        The house had seven rooms. An entry, a main hall or skali, a sleeping hall for many of the household, a private chamber for Freydis, a weaving room, a kitchen with a hearth and an adjacent milk room. A wide bench built along both sides of the main hall served both as a seat and as a bed for retainers and guests. A dais occupied a central place before the fire and carved totemic posts, called sestokkars, stood at the high seat signifying that the hall was the home of a chieftain. When meals were served, trestle tables were brought in and set up on either side of the fire-trench. The diners sat facing the center aisle while servants passed back and forth attending to the company. Principal guests sat midway in the hall, opposite the host on the dais, and lesser folk dined down toward the ends of the tables. The entry and weaving rooms had narrow benches more suitable for sitting than sleeping and the living-room, or stofa, was a women’s weaving room housing a great loom that occupied a major portion of the floor space. It was a traditional Norse upright loom with doughnut shaped warp-weights of soapstone brought from Greenland: suitable for homespun cloth or wadmal. Weaving was done upright working from the top down and two sets of warp threads, held by the weights, were separated by horizontal rods. The woof was slipped through the warp and beaten upwards with a whalebone or wooden “sword.” Textiles were woven in a standard width of two ells (ninety inches); and, lengths of the standard undyed twill was used as an alternative unit to silver in figuring prices, fines, and the fulfillment of obligations. The stofa had a kvennapallur, a women’s platform, with storage for textiles and the loom was surrounded by spare loom weights, baskets of dyed coarse homespun woolen yarn, wound into balls for weaving or tied in skeins for dying, and piles of clothing left for mending by the women of the house. The milk room was for both general household food storage, dairy goods, and cheese making. The dairy had three large barrel stave vats sunk into the floor that held milk, and skyr or curds, and also the occasional mouse that had tumbled in and drowned while seeking a bit of cheese. The dairy also served as a “buttery” to house the many “butts,” or barrels, of mead and ale required for each meal and poured in bounteous quantities in a chieftain’s hall. Buckets made of oak and iron, brass and yew, or humble pine with hoops of beech, were stored here to be near to hand. Pottery objects, which were rare and usually imported from the Continent, were put away safely in chests for special occasions. Spare wood, carved soapstone or steatite, and iron utensils for cooking and various storage containers were also stashed in the buttery. The finest storage pieces were richly trimmed with figures and enameled escutcheons decorated with animal and human head designs; however, even the plainest container employed for basic household use had the carved runic inscription announcing: “Freydis owns.”
        The room Freydis had reserved for herself was at the end of the main hall. Her chamber contained a great chair with carved frame posts and a leather seat but the several lesser chairs and the stools therein had rush bottomed seats. A bedstead with a raised headboard flanked by a pair of boards richly carved with figures of men, each clenched in the jaws of writhing sea monsters. All surfaces of Freydis’ personal furniture were richly decorated with of carvings in the form of knots and strapwork, fields of tendrils and palmettes, ring-chains, ropes, and fighting figures of men, lions, snakes, and dragons. The walls were draped with hangings depicting scenes of her family’s saga-making adventures richly embroidered on a tan wool and linen ground in bright silk and woolen yarn. Huge six-board chests of birch and pine painted with yellow, red, blue, and green stood about the room and a special oaken chest, bound with iron strapwork and massive iron rivets, was placed beside her bed. The oak chest was decorated with hunting scenes and cut plate iron figures. On one side a bearded man grasped the tail of a deer surrounded by a snake, a dog, and a hawk and on the other side a man fought a dragon on a wavy figured field. The oak chest was filled with Freydis’ greatest treasures, silver coin and jewels, silk brocades and clothes from Byzantium, and unused hangings, spreads, and eastern carpets. At the foot of her bed stood a great black iron chest wrapped with a chain and fitted with a massive iron lock.
        Rising from the entry bench Freydis walked into the main hall burdened down by the full weight of years and the labors of the noght. At the end of the fire-hall nearest her chamber she slowly lowered herself onto the great chair that was hers alone, a throne suitable for a bishop - and in truth it was loot that had been taken from an Irish cathedral - given to her years before by Agdi when he first came to Norumbega. She momentarily rested before the ember-filled fire-trench scanning its clutter of cooking pots, food containers, iron ladles, spits, pokers and rakes with mounting distaste. Her housekeeper personally brought to her upraised hand a horn of ale. Reaching for the vessel she meaningfully cast her hers toward the disarray and the woman said “I know! That little good-for-nothing tramp. I’ll beat the girl bloody. She was told to clean this before she went to sleep.” Freydis smiled wearily at the anticipated feigned outrage.
        “I trust you will, or shall have to beat you. Don’t let it happen again.”
        “No, my lady, be sure of that.”
        “You indulge the girl. Beat her more. Always demand obedience. Obedience and fear are much easier to win and to enforce. Beat her, just as I will beat you if I come back to such a mess again, and she will fear you. Fearing, she will obey.”
        “Yes, my lady.”

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