Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas

338 Pages·2016·15.802 MB·English

by  Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/16, SPi
beyond the northlands
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/16, SPi
Beyond the
northlands

viking voyages and the

old norse sagas
Eleanor Rosamund
Barraclough
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/16, SPi
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/16/16, SPi
For Lindsey, Richard, Imogen, Christian, Rowena,
and Benjamin, my own viking warband.
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ACKNOwLEDGEMENTS
There’s a word in Old Norse—heimr—that means both ‘world’ and ‘home’.
This says a lot about how the Norse viewed things. Over the course of
researching and writing this book, I’ve explored many worlds and found
many homes, thanks to the kindness of those I met on the way. In fact, I’ve met
so many people that someone is bound to have slipped off these pages, in
which case apologies and thanks to you too. Mistakes, typos, oversights,
bloopers, inaccuracies, clangers—all are of course my own.
I found my first home as an undergraduate at Cambridge, in the Depart-
ment of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC). Many thanks to Judy Quinn,
for introducing me to the joys of Old Norse, whetting my appetite for adven-
tures in far-flung northern climes, and good-naturedly refusing to accept my
panic-stricken letter of resignation during the first term of my Ph.D. Heartfelt
thanks also to Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, for her boundless generosity in read-
ing and commenting on anything and everything I sent her, including a full
draft of this book. Thanks also to Jonny Grove for setting me on the right
research track several times, first with trolls, then with landscapes, both of
which fed into this book one way or another. For their masochistic insistence
on reading tortuous early draft chapters that no one should have been sub-
jected to, I am eternally grateful to Rosie Bonté and Denis Casey. warmest
thanks also to Pamela welsh and Dan Carr, who were unfortunate enough to
befriend an ASNCer, kind enough to read the whole book, and now know
more about vikings than they ever wanted to. Finally, there’s no way I could
ever thank Paul Russell enough, so I’m not going to try. Hopefully he knows.
Moving onto Oxford I found another home. To Heather O’Donoghue, who
supported me throughout my time there, thank you. I am deeply grateful to
Carolyne Larrington for countless reasons, not least for reading an entire
draft of this book. From her comments I have learnt many useful things, not
least that ‘hoards’ and ‘hordes’ are not interchangeable entities, there is no
travel-guide series called Lonely Plant, private parts are not covered in public
hair, vikings do not sail in hips, and the adjective ‘weird’ should be used spar-
ingly. I found another extraordinary home and extraordinary friends as an
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· acknowledgements ·
Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, thanks to
Rebecca Beasley, Paul Madden, and many other fellows and staff. Becky, you
helped me in so many wonderful ways with this project. To John Blair, thank
you for your guidance, support, and friendship. To Chris Salamone, who
walked me around the Botanic Garden when my brain needed unknotting
and acted as my partner in crime when there were chocolate biscuits to liber-
ate from the tea cupboard, thank you. To Alison Madden, thank you for giving
me a place to lay my head and for your stirring performance as Byrhtnoth in
our ‘Battle of Maldon’ re-enactment. Sorry for choosing the coldest day of the
year for that road-trip. And to those at the Leverhulme Trust who took a punt
on me and offered me the Early Career Fellowship to write this book, thank
you from the bottom of my heart.
I’m very grateful to Durham University for giving me my next home, and to
Elizabeth Archibald most of all for her unwavering support and friendship.
Like Halley’s Comet, people like Elizabeth only appear once or twice in a life-
time, and I’m very lucky to have caught her mid-orbit. Through Elizabeth, I
also found myself part of another family, St Cuthbert’s Society: thank you to
JCR and SCR members alike for enduring, even encouraging, so many viking-
themed conversations. I am extraordinarily lucky to have found such good
friends at Durham, many of whom fuelled my writing with tea and cake, read
chapter drafts and even provided photographs for this book. Thank you par-
ticularly to Helen Foxhall Forbes, Megan Cavell, James Brown, Mandy Green,
Phil Bolton, and Frances Leviston. Thank you also to Daniel Newman for his
help with Arabic translations, and to Giles Gasper for the elephant tip-off.
Beyond Cambridge, Oxford, and Durham, I am grateful to be part of an
extraordinary network of Norse scholars. First and foremost, thank you to
Judith Jesch at Nottingham, who is always on hand to impart wisdom, how-
ever daft my questions. Thank you to Matthew James Driscoll at the Arna-
magnæan Institute in Copenhagen, who has also endured more than his fair
share of my daft questions over the years. Takk fyrir to Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir
and Haukur Þorgeirsson at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
in Reykjavík, and to everyone in both institutes who helped me out with man-
uscripts. Thank you to Dale Kedwards and Tom Birkett for not pretending my
multiple emails had got lost in the post. Thank you to John Shafer, for direct-
ing me to his Ph.D. thesis (available online for all interested readers). Thank
you to Turi King, who helped explain viking DNA to a bear of very little brain.
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· acknowledgements ·
And thank you to my ‘Supernatural North’ partners in crime, Stefan Donecker
and Danielle Cudmore, whose ideas helped to shape my own.
Unexpectedly, I also found myself another home in which to finish this
book, over the ocean at the University of wisconsin–Madison (which is even
further than Leif the Lucky got). Deepest thanks to the Department of Scandi-
navian Studies for welcoming me with open arms, and to Kirsten wolf and
Peggy Hager in particular. Thank you also to the Institute for Research in the
Humanities, especially Ann Harris, who looked after me so well that at one
point I had two offices. As I’m sure the vikings also knew, ports in storms can
come from unexpected directions.
Researching this book has taken me on all sorts of far-flung adventures of
my own, thanks to the generosity of many funding bodies: the Leverhulme
Trust, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, The
Queen’s College and Faculty of English Language and Literature in Oxford,
and the Department of English Studies, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Durham. Thanks
to all of these sources of funding, I have been knighted by a walrus penis bone
in the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society and terrified out of my wits in a
deserted Arctic lighthouse. I have skinny-dipped in a Greenlandic fjord, devel-
oped saddle-sores from too many weeks on the back of an Icelandic horse,
and been rescued by a Greenlandic farm dog who sensed that a hungry polar
bear had come ashore. I have been proposed to by a spice merchant in Istan-
bul’s Grand Bazaar, and danced all night in Rome at a party to honour a trans-
vestite prostitute called Renata. I’ve also done a fair amount of research on the
way. All these adventures mean that I have quite a few more people to thank.
In Greenland, little did I know that the man I sat next to when cadging a ride
with a boatful of archaeologists would become such a good friend and guide
to Norse Greenland. Georg Nyegaard has already told me off for saying thank
you too many times, but I have a thousand reasons to thank him so I’ll get
round it with a simple tusind tak. Thank you also to everyone at Grönlandsresor
for their many kindnesses and for keeping me alive in Greenland that first
summer: Monika Larsson, Silke Gersdorf, and of course Jytte Christensen, one
of the toughest and most capable individuals I have ever encountered. Talking
of tough and capable individuals, thank you to also to Michael Rosing—
caribou hunter, politician, sailor, and reindeer cookbook author—and Miilla
Lennert, both of whom kept me alive the second summer with such panache.
Heartfelt thanks also to Henrik Skydsbjerg at Tupilak Travel in Nuuk, and to
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