The Pirate Queen (31 page)

       
I loved the heaper of riches.

       
So my sorrow I cannot hide.

       
I sit alone, I tell my tragedy.

We walked back and forth on the beach, as Gulli attempted to get the attention of the Germans by pointing at his watch. “Helga never liked men afterward. She spent one winter in someone's house, often playing her harp because she couldn't sleep. A Norwegian came to her at night. They struggled and when they parted, his right arm and his left leg were broken.”

“It's one of the strange things about the sagas,” I said, “that they're always so specific. His
right
arm and his
left
leg.”

“Many people thought she was a troll. But she was a nature spirit, too. She couldn't live in houses for the most part. She was usually in small caves. There are many caves named after Helga in Iceland.”

He continued, pulling me down to the water. “This is what you need to know about Iceland! We believe in the divine in nature and that is the Celtic heritage. And now they want us to celebrate a thousand years of Christianity this year, and the government is spending millions on it. What a waste of money. That is not the Icelandic religion, not really.”

Gesturing at the big green waves, Gulli said to me, “It's important to work with the energy of nature. When you stand in front of the wind, shout ‘Kari, kari, kari.' When you stand in front of the ocean, shout ‘Ægir, ægir, ægir.'” We stood and shouted for a while until the Germans came back. Doubtless they thought we were calling them.

T
HE SNÆFELLSNES
Peninsula is riddled with craters, some of them lined with moss, like green nests, and with caves. Not far from Hellnar is the so-called Singing Cave, where Bard is rumored to have spent his first winter in Iceland. At the end of the afternoon, after many hours of driving around the
peninsula, our two cars charged up the steep one-way road that led to the Singing Cave and gave us a grand, stomach-twisting view of the lava fields and sea below. It wasn't only Gulli's enthusiasm that made me think this one of the most extraordinary landscapes I'd ever seen. The hardened lava flow covering the plain below us, right down to the sea cliffs, was blackened as if the last eruption had been recent, not centuries ago. Waterfalls spurted out of the hills and at almost every turn we saw some aspect of the glacier, and some new coloration that ranged from shadow blue to lemon ice.

The Germans, I noticed, had gotten quieter and seemed exhausted. Perhaps this accounted for the fact that when Gulli had squeezed us into the tiny cave and demanded that we sing something, they balked completely. “We don't know any songs,” said the photographer.

“Don't be ridiculous. You have folk songs, you have your national anthem. What is your national anthem?”

“We don't sing our national anthem,” said the woman, as stubborn as her husband.

“Barbara, you sing!”

I obliged with “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” It sounded extremely good in the acoustical cave.

Then Gulli gave us a rendition of Iceland's national song, and it made him proud and a little teary. The Germans looked sad. The melancholy fact is that Germans are not allowed to be patriotic the way Icelanders, for instance, can be. I thought their son could probably have given us a good rendition of any song by U2, but he wasn't asked. Instead, Gulli broke into “Oklahoma,” and I joined him.

Back at my little pine-paneled cabin in Hellnar, I wrote up my notes before dinner. I scribbled down everything I remembered
Gulli saying, even the confusing bits (Pope is keeping Icelandic sagas in basement of Vatican?? What
about
Nebuchadnezzar and the Celtic-Jewish people?). Then I rested, thinking of Helga. Much as I was entranced by the story of Helga's iceberg journey to Greenland, I couldn't imagine it as very likely. Yet even as saga or myth, it's one of the few tales I'd come across on my travels of a woman making a voyage alone. Not until the mid-twentieth century would women cross oceans again in solitude. We know, of course, that all the women who colonized Iceland arrived by boat, and that some of them journeyed farther, to Greenland or back to Norway or to Ireland or the Hebrides. Here and there in the Icelandic histories and sagas are a few tantalizing lines about women voyagers. In
Celtic Women
Peter Ellis mentions several Irish women who bore the name Muirenn (Sea-fair), “one of whom is said to have led a band of Irish travellers to Iceland and is mentioned in the Icelandic
Landnámabok [Book of Settlements]
in the form of ‘Myrun.'” Aud the Deep-Minded's ninth-century journey from Scotland to Orkney, the Faroes, and Iceland is well documented. It was not far from here that she first put in after crossing the Atlantic. Another saga makes mention of a widow, Thorunn, who commandeered a boat to return to Norway after her husband died in Iceland. There was also a woman called Thorgunna. She appears in
The Saga of Eirík the Red
as the Hebridean lover of Leif Eiríksson, who had been blown off course on a voyage between Greenland and Norway. When he was ready to leave those Scottish Isles, she asked to go with him, but he demurred because she was nobly born and it would have been seen as abduction. She told him she was with child and would send her son to him and would herself come to Greenland in the end.

The Icelandic sagas, most of them written at least two hundred years after the events they describe, are a tantalizing brew of biography and history, sometimes quite realistic and specific and sometimes mixed with bits of skaldic verse from earlier times and with ghost tales, all of it completely readable and not quite reliable as history. In the sagas the supernatural and violent are anchored by the minutiae of verisimilitude. Hauntings and dreams are bracketed by meals; acts of vengeance take place while people are tending the sheep. Often, after peculiar and tragic events, characters just return home to a spouse who asks, “So where have you been?” Helga had zoomed off on an iceberg, yes, but afterward she fell in love with a man in Greenland, went to Norway, then returned to Iceland, where she lost him to another woman. She was heartbroken, and that sounds like the story of a real woman.

The sagas had given me some of the oldest and most interesting stories of women at sea; yet what stories might there have been, what stories might have been lost or deliberately forgotten or unrecorded? What was the origin of the story about Helga on the iceberg? Had there ever been a woman who voyaged across the oceans alone? Had women ever traveled together by ship without men?

That night after dinner I decided to walk to Arnarstapi, about four kilometers distant, by way of a coastal path that led through lava fields and overlooked a coast of blowholes, arches, and bird cliffs. With the crash of surf and the screech of birds, it was not a still evening, but there was quiet underneath. How strange the situation of sea birds: so free in the spaciousness of the air, but as crammed together as tenement dwellers when it came time to nest. When I first set off on my walk, there were patches of green here and there, with ragged and alarmed black
sheep precipitously chewing, but after a while there was only lava.

All day I'd looked at lava, crumbled, exploded, cracked. No longer as raw as when it was first spewed forth, now much of it was covered with moss, pale yellow with a gray or green tinge. All day similes had gone through my mind, and oddly, many of them made me hungry. The lava fields looked like vanilla cake batter poured over a thick jumble of dates, walnuts, and chocolate chips. In the sun the moss could also look like lemon yogurt spooned generously over granola.

This evening, with a fish and potato dinner inside me, and with the shadows falling over the path, I could more easily picture the beautiful, heartbroken Helga frying up a plucked puffin in a cave, or one of the hidden people playing a game of checkers in a lava community center: gnomes, probably. Gnomes were very tiny, only about twelve centimeters tall, while lovelings were slender, the size of ten-year-old children. Light-fairies resembled lovelings, angels, and flower-fairies, and were mainly to be observed in nature, especially near lakes. Dwarfs, on the other hand, were the size of three- to five-year-olds, and they were not as nice as some of the others; they could be temperamental or unfriendly. Angels, of course, were radiant and good, and so were mountain spirits, who could be immensely tall, and who beamed out life force. It wasn't really so difficult to see the lava formations as resembling small houses and apartments.

I was someone skeptical of the supernatural, or so I said. My Christian Science upbringing had made me steer clear of the psychic world. Table rappings, ghosts, spirits, and fortune-telling were all anathema to Mary Baker Eddy and her followers. The truth of the universe was sunny and perfect; perhaps there was another altogether murkier substrata to life, but all we had to do was turn away resolutely and it would disappear. Ley-lines and
pyramids and clairvoyant visions about Mount Snæfellsnes were not a language I could speak; in fact, I was inclined to mock them. Yet, it was also true that all the fairy tales and myths I'd read as a child had left their mark on my imagination. I could believe in magic—of a certain kind. Abstractions never spoke to me, but the poetic always did. I couldn't feel myself traversing a ley-line deep below the lava shore, but yes, if I looked closely, I could imagine Helga in a cave or a dwarf peering out of an indentation in the volcanic rock. Some say the early Icelanders peopled the empty land they found with gnomes and spirits to make it less lonely. Others say that the hidden people were really the first inhabitants, whom the Vikings pursued and wiped out. (This may be a reference to Irish monks, who may have been here in small numbers when the colonizers first arrived.) The Irish, of course, had tales of leprechauns and fairies, the little people who still play a role in the Irish imagination.

At Arnarstapi I had a cup of tea in the café and wandered around the tiny fishing village, where a towering statue of Bard had been constructed many feet high near the edge of a cliff. He seemed to have been built from stone Legos, so rectangular was he, with a massive head and legs you could walk between. On the way back to Hellnar I was torn between a grand sense of freedom at being out so late at night in such a mysterious and unfamiliar landscape and a shrinking unease. The blackened lava piles through which the path wound along the coast, the eerie long single notes of the gulls, the chill wind, and the still-light evening all conspired to raise goose bumps. It didn't make me feel any more grounded to know I was on my way to ask advice about the inner voice that had directed me to change my name. At ten-thirty Gudrún was going to read my Viking cards at her kitchen table.

A
FTER THE
reading I went down to the sea again. I felt curiously awake, though it was almost midnight. Behind me, the glacier of Snæfellsnes was faintly rosy with something between a sunset and a sunrise reflecting off its icy surface, a pink-lemonade snow cone. A rowboat knocked against a short concrete jetty. It was a measure of how accustomed I'd become to the constant harsh cries of the gulls and other sea birds that I thought of the evening as quiet, and a measure of how accustomed I'd become to the northern summer that I thought of midnight as evening.

A slight mist rose off the surface of the water, a crocheted white spread over a dark-blue comforter. Mist and steam had come up twice in my Viking cards, in the form of the Sweat Lodge card. I was unclear about my name change, unclear how to explain it to myself or to others, the imaginary chorus with unsmiling faces that would sing the slow baritone question:
Whaddya mean / Change your name?
Not only did I have the miasma of the Sweat Lodge in my cards, but I was a Libra to boot. “That's the Libra tendency,” Gudrún sighed (she was one herself). “Always this need to ask the opinion of others, to consider their reactions, to please them.”

“But I'm so stubborn,” I'd protested. “I've always gone my own way.”

“That doesn't mean you don't care about what people think of you.”

We'd been sitting at her kitchen table, a plain wooden one, with the cards between us. Gulli had been reluctant to leave us; he'd wanted to talk about the film
Erin Brockovich.
Eventually he appeared, wrapped in a large bath towel, on his way to the
sauna. There were no candles, no mystic music. The house was wood-paneled and pleasant, filled with family photographs. Gudrún wore a blue work shirt and jeans; her voice was light and firm, not spooky. She gave me a glass of water, and set a tape recorder going, in case I didn't remember afterward what we said.