The Pirate Queen (12 page)

Norna from
The Pirate

By the time Scott came to write the character of Norna of Fitful-head in
The Pirate,
pitiful, laughable Bessie Millie had become a towering figure of mystery, to exploit and then destroy. Scott's choice of Norna as a name for his weather witch and prophetess comes from the Norns of Scandinavian mythology, the three Weird Sisters, the Fates. The Norns are
the northern version of the Greek
Moirai:
Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, Atropos the Cutter. The
Moirai,
in turn, are Western names for the earlier Triple Goddess from the East: Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. The Celts also had a tradition of tripling their goddesses, for instance Brigit, who made a smooth transition from pagan deity to St. Brigit, Catholic saint.

The
Edda
of Snorri Sturluson refers to the Norns as the “three mysterious beings.” Because they write the book of destiny and know past and future, they're also called, in German,
die Schreiberinnen,
“women who write.” Other names for them are Become, Becoming, and Shall-Be. Or Fate, Being, and Necessity—Urth, Verthandi, and Skuld. Skuld was the Norse death-Norn, who cut the thread of life. The Norns were associated with the giving of names; they were often present at the birth of a child and could foretell its destiny. In Norse mythology, fate is woven of separate threads that give each of us a cloth to wear. The Norns are weavers; they give us threads that lead us into mystery and out again. These threads are full of wind, tied in knots.

E
ACH MORNING
on my way to the library I passed through the woods and each afternoon returned under a hail of disdainful cawing.

“I hate those crows,” said Mrs. Harris. “I wish we could kill them. They make such a racket, and a terrible mess.” Mrs. Harris was a very tidy woman. The house, which, on closer inspection, had two decorating motifs—maps and mementos of the Falkland Islands, and ceramic and crystal swans—was spotless. Each morning I had a new personal bath mat.

I said I didn't think they were crows, known to be solitary,
but rather rooks, ancient and sociable birds—at least social among themselves.

“Rooks, crows, they're nasty birds, here and all around St. Magnus Kirk, too. It's a shame we can't have a bit of woods without all those evil-looking birds.”

I sometimes felt the same, that the rooks were rather sinister. Yet I also knew that their relative, the raven, was a sacred bird, revered among many northern peoples, particularly in my own Pacific Northwest, for its swift flight and intelligence. I was fascinated by these birds, too. Whenever I walked in their woods, I stared up at them until they grew annoyed and swooped at me and sometimes shat. In olden times a group of these birds was called a “parliament of rooks.” They did indeed look like rows of irritable backbenchers, waiting for their day to shine.

Sunday morning I walked down to the town center to find all the tearooms and most of the shops closed. I gravitated to the cathedral, the only public building that was open, and sat through two services to keep out of the wind. St. Magnus is small as cathedrals go, very pleasingly faced with an alternating pattern of ochre and red sandstone. It is Romanesque, built over the course of three centuries, beginning in 1137, and dedicated to the peaceable Norse earl who was murdered for trying to carry out Christian principles in his leadership. Next to the medieval cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, St. Magnus is the finest surviving example of a Norse church building and evokes the many centuries of Norwegian rule in Orkney. The cathedral is still the natural center of the town; it sits on Kirk Green, next to the ruins of the Renaissance Earl's Palace and the twelfth-century Bishop's Palace. All these structures are grand, and quite overwhelm the next spate of construction, from the nineteenth century, when landowners, rich from potash production,
put up townhouses. In the seventeenth century all the houses would have been smaller than those standing today. How the cathedral must have loomed above the market square then.

The Church of Scotland service was safe and kindly. A woman next to me took my hand when the minister asked us at the end to turn to our neighbor, and she welcomed me to Orkney and seemed pleased I was in church. But outside the cathedral I found the walks slippery with rook droppings, and their cries tore up the air in a haunting, angry refrain. Their beady downward looks of irritation were personal. They didn't wish me or any of my kind well.

The next day, back upstairs in the comfort of the library's Orkney Room, I thought about St. Magnus and the rookeries in the sycamores around its old stones as I began to read about Orkney's seventeenth-century witch trials, many of which had been conducted here in Kirkwall, in the cathedral. The Calvinist kirk in post-Reformation Scotland wasn't made up of kindly churchgoers like those I'd met the day before. The ruling order was composed of men of the church dedicated to rooting out sin wherever they might find it, which often seemed to be in women's bodies.

It was here in the library that I first came across the curious story of a woman seafarer whose very abilities were seen as evidence of witchcraft: Janet Forsyth, the “Storm Witch of Westray.” In 1627, Janet was twenty, living with her father on the outer island of Westray. She loved a young man called Benjamin Garrioch, who put off to sea one morning with friends. Janet had begged him not to; she'd had a terrible dream the night before. Sure enough, although the day was cloudless at first, a fog soon came up and the boat and its crew vanished.

Weeks passed and Janet fell into melancholia. Soon after,
her father died. She took to putting out to sea in her father's boat, especially when the wind blew strongly. That she always came back safe and sound impressed no one. Instead, her neighbors started to call her the Storm Witch and to say that when she sang plaintive songs to herself at night (local boys knew this from peering into her poor, thatched house), she was calling the Storm King from his caverns deep in the sea. Her neighbors began to blame her for shipwrecks and drownings. One day, during a terrific gale at sea, a large ship was sighted offshore. The island folk stood waiting on shore, making no move to help the crew. They expected the ship to break up on the rocks, and were ready to scramble for the spoils.

Then Janet came down to the shore and set off in her small boat. In spite of the rough seas that obscured her craft from the onlookers' view at times, she managed to sail up to the foundering vessel and to board it. She took the helm, giving the crew a series of orders that brought the ship into harbor. The captain tried to reward her with a purse of money; the crew crowded around to thank her. But she hurried away, saying only that she wished that someone might have done the same for her poor Ben.

Probably her neighbors were angry that they'd missed the chance to scavenge; perhaps they were ashamed to have been shown up by a mere girl in front of the foreign crew. At any rate, instead of being rewarded, Janet's heroism at sea was taken as conclusive proof she was a witch. She was arrested and brought to trial in the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall.

No place in Orkney is without a sea witch story or two, and in many of the tales the witch is killed without benefit of trial. On the Isle of Stronsay, my next stop after Kirkwall, there is a natural seat in a cliff overlooking Mill Bay, called the Maiden's Chair. This is where Scota Bess used to sit and predict the
weather at sea. One day the men of the local kirk decided she was a witch who must be killed. Scota Bess was dragged from her cliffside seat by Stronsay men and beaten with flails washed in communion water. But the day after they buried her she rose to the surface. After this happened twice more, in desperation the men flung her body into the Muckle Water and then brought boatloads of dirt out to cover her. In this way, it's said, they created the sole island on the Muckle Water, and Scota Bess stayed buried.

But Janet Forsyth did have a trial. Its record opens with her crime:

In the first ye the said Jonet ar indytit and accusit for airt and pairt of the abominable superstitioun and superstitious abusing and disceveing of the people within the said Isle and for practeising of the wicked and devilish pointis of witchcraft and devilrie done by yow.

Witnesses were brought forth to describe how they'd been bewitched. In Janet's case, Robert Reid testified that he had been taken ill at sea and had to be brought back by his mates to land. He then sought Janet out and accused her of bringing his “seiknes” upon him. For answer she seems to have thrown a bucket of salt water on him—in irritation or in an attempt to cure him, it's not recorded, though he did seem to feel well enough the next day to return to the sea.

Janet Forsyth had numerous accusers. No one stood up for her. At the end of the trial she was, unsurprisingly, found guilty. Such was the fate of hundreds of women and a few men in Orkney during the seventeenth century, at the height of witch-hunting fever. Many were hanged or burnt because a cow
stopped giving milk, or a child fell ill; others for crimes to do with the sea, for selling the threads to raise the winds or causing storms or casting spells on ships offshore. Whatever respect and reverence women had been accorded in ancient times for their connection with the forces of life and for their abilities as healers were transformed to suspicion and murderous hatred within the Calvinist church.

Janet's recorded trial ends with the verdict that she must be “taine be the lockman and conveyit to the place of execution with her hands bund behind her back and worried at ane staik to the dead and brunt in assis.”

In other words, she must be hung on Gallows Hill in Kirkwall and burnt to ashes.

There is another version of her trial, however, told in an old collection of nineteenth-century newspaper columns called
Around the Orkney Peat-Fires.
The story, “The Westray Storm Witch,” has an unexpected conclusion, one I'd like to believe is true. In this story her trial took place in the cathedral before a crowd violently and noisily against her, but Janet defended herself bravely from all charges: “In saving the crew of the vessel referred to, I had no assistance but from God, with a powerful arm to guide the tiller of my boat, and a quick eye to avoid the breakers which surrounded me.”

The judge nevertheless found her guilty and sentenced her the next day “to be fastened to a stake, to be worried to death by the hangman, and her body thereafter to be burnt to ashes.”

As this sentence was being delivered, some sailors from the Royal Navy came into the court and cheered along with the crowd. Contemptuously Janet turned to face the crowd; she suddenly said, “Save me, Ben,” and fainted. In a moment, one of the sailors was beside her. They pulled him off and took Janet to her
cell. She would be hung the next day with great ceremony. The crowd assembled in Broad Street, and at ten in the morning the cathedral bell began to toll. Everyone awaited Janet's appearance. But when there was no sight of her or the hangman, the sheriff went to her cell. He found the door open and the hangman and guards dead drunk.

Some years later, when an Orkney man was passing through Manchester, England, he saw a shop sign with the Orkney name “Benjamin Garrioch.” When he went inside, he found Janet Forsyth at the counter, looking years younger. She told him that her Ben and his companions had been picked up in the fog by a ship from the Royal Navy and press-ganged into service in the French wars. His appearance in Kirkwall the morning of the trial was his first return to Orkney in two years. He hadn't let her hang, but had spirited her away to the ship she'd saved from destruction a few weeks before. The captain gladly took her aboard and deposited her in Liverpool until Ben could join her. They never returned to Orkney—who could blame them?—but made a success of their business in Manchester, and lived there ever after.

O
N MY
last evening in Kirkwall I returned from the library through the woods as usual, and stood a while looking out over the hill that led down to town and the harbor. The wind, unquiet, muttered around my shoulders and tried to tease the scarf from my neck. You could sooner imagine someone making a living in Orkney calming the wind than raising it. Could I unloose the wind just by chanting an incantation? The rooks stood out like black candles on the strange, thickened gray branches of the sycamores.

“I am Norna of Fitful-head!” I shouted on impulse. “Double, double, toil and trouble!”

One of the birds flew up and headed toward me. The wind roared. Anybody watching would have thought I was mad. Or maybe just a witch.

CHAPTER V

HERRING LASSIES