Northern Fiction - The Saga of Freydis Eiriksdattir
Chapter 1
High on the headland,
Hel stands and waits.
Life fades, I must fall
And face my own end.
Against the deep dark void of Ull’s heavenly-realm unnumbered icy points of light gleamed like serpent’s eyes in Elivagur, the star-shinning Milky Way. Grim-faced Skuld held the spear-dead corpse of Agdi Grynjofsson laying lank across the sweat-foamed withers of Odin’s dapple-gray eight-legged steed Sleipnir. The blotspann had been cast -- the sacrificial chips -- indicating that the warrior Agdi, brave son of Fitjung (Earth: Born of the corpse of the Frost Giant Ymir), was chosen by the god to be among the man-harvest of battle strife. Now, Agdi was Valkyrie-borne to the Warrior’s Grove and Hropt’s golden hall in hallowed Asgard. He was greeted by Frey the Fruitful’s sister Freyja, leader of the Valkyries, who received the fallen heroes into Valhalla. Freyja took Agdi by the hand and showed him to his assigned place at Odin’s great banqueting table.
Slay each other every day;
They raise the fallen and ride from the field,
Sit in friendship side by side.
The column of grim faced, blond-bearded, warriors wound past the great sod and thatch nausts-- boat sheds -- that lined the shore. The heavily armed men strode with assurance through a pressing, milling, and shuffling mass of babbling spectators that parted as deferentially as waves rippling beneath the tall gilded bow of a dragon ship. A pack of gangly youths yapped noisily about the heels of the solemnly chanting men, pushing and elbowing-aside the more restrained citizens of assembled Norumbega. Proud, well-traveled, and full-bellied merchants; brashly inquisitive housewives, with young maidens timorously sheltered behind them; and journeymen workers still carrying the tools of their trades in large callused hands had all turned out to witness the event. Gawking old relics craned their necks and peered with beady eyes, intent on recalling every detail of this night filled with a lifetime’s store of gossip, while toil weary farmers knuckled their eyes to stay awake at the unaccustomed and unseemly hour. Wide eyed naïfs, weathered seamen, stolid and staid matrons, world weary harlots, simple rustics, and dully-gawking oafs, the merely curious and the positively awe struck ganged together and jostled in the path thronging about the torch-bearing warriors. The crowd’s emotions ranged from uninhibited elation to pious terror to righteous outrage at this brazen revival of the ancient pagan funeral rites.
The warriors proudly bore the body of Agdi Grynjolfsson on a sable draped bier. As was sung of the heroic dead in King Harald’s Saga:
Clearly sees the awaiting fates.
hungry jaws she rends
flesh of fallen men:
frenzied hands she stains
wolf’s jaws red with blood.
Feathered shafts, pointed and sharp
That pierced his linden-wood shield
Pierced his ring-mail armored life.
Who knows when death will come?
The bravest and the strongest prince
Is destined to die,time all expended,
Home quiet, hall empty, all is stilled.
Therefore, he deserved better than to be meekly interred in a Christian plot of earth and left to slowly rot in anticipation of some far off day of salvation. Agdi’s comrades-in-arms had not forgotten the time honored ways of their ancestors. They demanded that Agdi’s spirit be provided with a proper warrior’s funeral. A ceremony worthy of the heros who had gone on before to Valhalla’s feasting-hall. He had earned the right to join those other heroes, and the ancient gods, in eternal feasting and wassail. Agdi, no pious monk, had lived and died a Viking warrior.
Ten days earlier his comrades had brought Agdi’s body back to the city of Norumbega at Hop. The settlement located in back of beyond and across wide Ocean to the Western Obygdir. Hop was at the very ends of Midgard, that is Middle Earth, man’s portion between the gods in Asgard and the giants in Utgard. There he had been inhumed temporarily in a wooden framed chamber-grave. On the tenth day Agdi’s body was exhumed from its resting place and the women of his household washed, embalmed, and dressed the corpse for the funeral rites. Owing to the coldness of the ground, the body was scentless; but, it had turned black. His gray-streaked blond hair and beard shone like gilded silver against the darkened flesh.
Agdi had amassed great wealth, as well as glory, in the years before he came to Norumbega. Now those riches would be well spent. The estate was divided according to tradition: One third for the heirs; one third for the provision of funeral clothes and equipment; and, one third for the ale and food needed for a properly-heroic funeral feast. It would have been dishonorable to send Agdi off with less than a hero’s farewell.
His treasures were removed from the iron bound storage chest that had traveled with him the length and breadth of the Norseman’s world. For the last time, Agdi was dressed in his finest apparel: Red woolen trousers, high calfskin boots, and a dark-blue silk brocade blouse. The blouse was richly embroidered with circling tendrils and leaves in bright green silk and sewn with accents of gold bullion thread. It was a shirt that had come all the way from Byzantium and had once been worn by a Metropolitan of the Eastern Church.
Agdi had been with the Swedes in the Kingdom of the Rus. He had been to Saracenland, sailed between the Pillars of Hercules, and seen Jerusalem’s shore. While not a monarch of men, Agdi was a sea-king, an adventurer, merchant, pirate, and rover who from his youth had seldom slept beneath sooty roof-timbers. Truly the skalds could say that Agdi furrowed the hull’s-lair of the sea with his ship’s beaked-prow. In his lifetime, he had sailed all the known seas of Middle Earth. It could be sung of him, as it was of King Harald Fine-Hair:
Norumbega armies battled.
Norsemen fought the Skraelings there.
heads snarling on well-carved hulls,
Fearless Agdi, sailed westward,
Seeking trade, yet ready for battle,
there grim-death waiting.
loss, Valhalla’s gain
along the coast-line
Iron-shielded longships
Flaunted colored rigging.
great prince saw ahead
copper roofs of Constantinople;
swan-breasted ships swept
Towards the tall-towered city.
Agdi had stayed in the Miklagard on the Golden Horn and carried his ax as a member of the imperial bodyguard. He served the Empress Zoe the Great and her husband the Emperor Michael Catalactus, joint rulers of the Byzantine Empire. When Harald Hardrada became commander of the Varangian Guard, Agdi served him in Asia Minor and the Caucasus. In Sicily (where eighty towns were seized and plundered) every Varangian had gained enormous booty at Messina and Tragina. Agdi also campaigned against the Bulgars and had visited Jerusalem. He was present in Constantinople when Hardrada had ripped the eyes from the Emperor Michael of Byzantium and stolen away the Empress Zoe’s niece Maria. He was with Hardrada when he sailed away to Novgorod:
Freighted with hard-won honors
a hoard of gleaming gold.
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