A Voice in Time

 

In 2014 I visited a Viking exhibit at the Royal BC Museum.  That was the year I began a relationship with a dead woman.

 

I remember it vividly.  As I stood under the museum spotlights that sleeked the beams of a replica Viking longhouse, my eyes scanned a still snapshot of Norse family life.  There were wax figures of fur-clad Norsemen sitting around a smouldering hearth fire.  Their voices rose up in my imagination before fading away like drifting smoke.  I learned that in the Viking culture, girls would be married off as young as twelve and the primary duty of a wife was to provide her husband with offspring, preferably male.

 

In the next exhibit hall, a father was trying to console his cranky child, who fussed like a crying seagull.  The child’s stroller sat in front of a collection of swords, spears, and axes that glinted under the soft museum lights.  The museum label indicated that Vikings were trained in warfare, that they were brutal conquerors of many lands.  Of all weapons, the sword was the most highly valued.  Some were even given a name, such as “Leg Biter” or “Snake of Wounds.”

 

Wandering through the displays I contemplated the fact that Vikings were more than marauders and raiders, more than fearsome warriors with a lust for power.  They also were family-oriented farmers, shipbuilders, seafarers, navigators, cartographers, and courageous explorers of new worlds.  I zigzagged between the display cases until the crowded room began to empty.  When I caught the security guard staring fixedly at me as the closing hour approached, I reluctantly took my leave, the silence of the gallery behind me a stark reminder that the Viking age had long since passed.

 

Despite the lateness of the hour, I was drawn to the museum gift shop.  When I stepped through the glass doors, the postcards and gaudy Viking souvenirs were less appealing than the shelved books.  It is funny how a split-second decision can be so impactful, how an impulsive purchase can launch one into a new world.  I bought a thin paperback, The Vinland Sagas, and was introduced to Freydis Eiriksdöttir, who lived around 1000 A.D.  She must have been a powerful, medieval woman to have made it into the history books.

 

Freydis’s story was only a few pages long.  The tale tells that she was a feisty Greenlander who led one of the first Viking expeditions to North America — along with two Icelandic brothers and her husband, Thorvard of Gardar.  Prior to taking the longboat journey across the frigid North Atlantic, Freydis supposedly made a business deal with the Icelanders behind her husband’s back.  What a conniving fox she was, or so the sagas would have us believe.

 

When the Greenlanders and the Icelanders finally arrived on North American shores, they fought amongst themselves, their animosity fueled by Freydis’s “false allegation” that one of the Icelandic brothers had molested her.  In the end, Freydis was blamed for being the instigator of all the strife.  She was accused of murdering Viking men; axing five Norsewomen to death; and stealing the Icelanders’ ship to return to Greenland, where she claimed all of the trade goods for herself.  Her fate was sealed when she was condemned by her people and accused of being a murderer, a mercenary, and a cheat.

 

I imagined that the Viking storytellers, called skalds, often repeated Freydis’s tale while sitting around a blazing hearth fire with a cup of mead in hand.  Skalds were valued members of their clans who entertained by spinning tales, by transforming everyday events into sensationalist poems that drew a listening crowd.  The skalds were like news reporters, the television talk-show hosts of their day.  They were responsible for retelling the stories of blood feuds and Viking expeditions, for keeping track of the battles that were won and lost, for summarizing the real-life dramas of the Norse.  Their bias must have overlaid their characters and plots.

 

Like a game of telephone — where players form a line to whisper a message from one ear to the next, and the message, by the time it is announced, is changed dramatically — Freydis’s story must have evolved.  I wondered how much of her saga was reshaped and lost before it was first written down in the thirteenth century by some literate Icelandic scribe.  I contemplated how much of her story was real and how much of it was just made up.  Regardless of the veracity of her tale, Freydis’s story drew me in like a moth attracted to a flame.

 

With my interest peaked, Freydis became my muse.  I read, voraciously, about the culture and traditions of the Norse.  I began studying Norse mythology and the role of women during the Viking age.  In my enthusiasm I became a navigator of websites, an explorer of libraries and bookstores, an excavator who dug up fun Viking facts.

 

My fascination with Freydis’s story soon morphed into a desire to retell her tale.  One night, after reflecting on the motivations of the skalds — those Norsemen responsible for keeping Freydis’s story alive for centuries on end — I decided to paint Freydis as an innocent who was falsely accused of evil acts.  It was then that I felt the ghost of a desperate woman rising up, as if from the bottom of a deep, dark sea.  Her voice was a whispered plea, a cry for help, that prompted me to begin to write.  There was no crackling, spitting hearth fire.  I sat in front of a glowing computer, the click of my nails on the keys echoing through a modern-day living space harshly lit by electric bulbs, instead of the warm glow of whale-oil lamps.

 

Like many writers, a strong desire grew within me to travel to the place where Freydis might have walked and lived.  I wanted to experience the sights, sounds, and smells that she might have encountered so long ago.  And so, in the summer of 2017, I convinced my husband and two daughters to follow me to Newfoundland.  At the northern tip of that great province lies L’Anse aux Meadows, a national historic park hosting archaeological artifacts and ruins that mark it as the only certain Viking settlement site in North America.  This is the place where Freydis’s longboat likely landed and her intriguing story no doubt unfolded.  In travelling there, I hoped to feel inspired to give voice to the hardships she might have faced.

 

It was a stormy day when we arrived at L’Anse aux Meadows.  The wind was howling, and the rain beat down in sheets.  I was told that the tail end of a hurricane was rolling past, but that did not stop me.  Pulling my jacket closed against the cold, harsh wind, I doggedly traipsed behind the guide, who took me to see the archeological finds — those spots where others before me had made discoveries in pursuit of their own Viking passions.  My family followed for only a short time before they announced their intention to escape to the Viking longhouse, their voices muffled by the wailing wind.  After a deep and lively discussion with the field interpreter in the driving rain, I ran through the mud puddles to reach the creaky, longhouse door.

 

Stepping inside, I entered another world.  In that brief moment time shifted and then stood still.  The interior of the longhouse was cozy and warm and quiet.  The thick sod walls blocked the sounds of the storm outside.  The hearth fire had been stoked, and the smoke rose up into the longhouse beams.

 

After my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw what the Vikings would have seen one thousand years ago: a family scene — a group of cold, windblown travellers who had rushed inside to find shelter from the storm.  My own family stood warming themselves by the fire.  My teenage daughter’s voice trilled high and melded with the other longhouse sounds — the sizzling capelins roasting on a Norse scroll iron over the blazing fire, the clink of drinking horns being passed around.  Then, I did what any Norsewoman might have done.  I found a spot to sit along the bench where I could warm my toes by the fire and wait to hear the storyteller’s tale.

 

The skald was dressed in Norseman’s garb; his wet, woven breeches released steam as the billowing heat rose from the dancing flames that licked the hearth.  In the dim light cast by the flickering fire, I saw that he had a beard, that he held a lyre.  He had a gift for remembering old-Norse names.  I later learned that his real name was Kevin.

 

As the skald began to pluck his lyre, the shadows cast by the hearth fire gyrated wildly on the longhouse walls.  In that instant I felt Freydis’s spirit in the room.  The skald’s voice dropped low as he began to speak, his inflection rising like an ocean swell when he first spoke her name. Freydis Eiriksdöttir.  A nefarious woman.  I listened avidly to his tale as he periodically strummed his lyre.  His music sent a wave of shivers shimmying down my spine.  When I heard Freydis’s well-known story being told by someone else — another storyteller who knew the plot — my tears welled up.  It was then that I realized that Freydis’s Viking saga had embedded itself into my heart, that I had journeyed far, that I was living her experience in the now.

 

For the last few years, I have lost myself in the world of the Viking explorers — those courageous men and women who conquered fear to venture forth on expeditions across the sea.  The world of medieval Iceland and Greenland, as well as the Viking’s North American-wilderness stories, have consumed my thoughts.  Like the many storytellers who have lived before me, I have honed my craft and claimed my right as a weaver of stories.  I spin new Viking tales and reshape histories to tell what I know of women in the Viking age, to thread together fact and fiction, to cast a yarn that gives a glimpse of another time.

 

In 2014, a museum exhibit inspired me to write Freydis’s untold story.  Her tale transformed me into a time traveller.  I became the defender of a Norsewoman stripped of her voice.  Even now, I do not know Freydis’s truth.  But one thing is certain: If gender bias prompted the skalds to downplay Freydis’s accomplishments and falsely blame her for the misfortunes her people faced while exploring new lands, then I have fervently slashed apart their saga with my pen — a new Viking sword.