Chieftains & the Uncanny
The Ere-Dwellers & Snorri goði
The holy headland
Eyrbyggja begins in devotion. Þórólfr Most-Beard, a great worshipper of Thor driven from Norway, threw the high-seat pillars of his temple overboard as he neared Iceland and settled where they came ashore, on the headland he named Þórsnes. There he raised a temple to Thor and hallowed the whole promontory — and the mountain Helgafell, the Holy Fell, he held so sacred that none might look on it unwashed, and no living thing be harmed upon it.[1]
He set up the Þórsnes assembly, one of the oldest in Iceland, with its sacred ground and its rules. The saga is laying its foundation: a district built on holiness and law together, where the temple and the Thing are the twin poles of order. Everything uncanny that follows will be measured against that order — and, remarkably, even the ghosts will end up answering to the law.
The source text · 1
Thorolf Most-Beard made a great sacrifice, and asked of Thor his well-beloved friend whether he should make peace with the king, or get him gone from out the land and seek other fortunes. But the Word showed Thorolf to Iceland; and thereafter he got for himself a great ship meet for the main, and trimmed it for the Iceland-faring, and had with him his kindred and his household goods; and many friends of his betook themselves to faring with him. He pulled down the temple, and had with him most of the timbers which had been therein, and mould moreover from under the stall whereon Thor had sat.— eyrbyggja saga
Þórólfr Most-Beard hallows Þórsnes and Helgafell (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
Snorri goði
The saga's true centre is Snorri goði — Snorri the Priest — who gets Helgafell and the chieftaincy young, and presides over the rest of the saga as its coolest intelligence.[1] He is unlike the saga heroes we have met: not the strongest or the boldest, but the most shrewd — patient, calculating, a master of law and timing who wins by knowing exactly when to act and when to wait.
The same Snorri threads through the wider corpus: it is to him that Guðrún turns in Laxdæla, and at his Helgafell that she ends her days. Eyrbyggja is, among other things, his portrait — the chieftain as strategist, holding a turbulent district together not by force but by judgement. Around him swirl rivals like the noble Arnkell, witches, berserks, and the dead, and Snorri navigates all of it with the same unhurried cunning.
The source text · 1
At the Spring Thing the next summer Snorri claimed his father's heritage from Bork. Bork answered that he would yield him his heritage. "But I am loth," said he, "to share Holyfell asunder, though I see that it is meet for us not to dwell in one stead together. So I will redeem my share of the land." Snorri answered: "It is most fair that thou shouldst lay the land at as dear a price as thou wilt, but fair also that I choose which of us shall redeem it."— eyrbyggja saga
Snorri gets Helgafell and the chieftaincy (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
Witch-ridden
The uncanny enters early, and it wears a woman's face. A young man is found witch-ridden — ridden near to death in the night by an unseen rider — and the wise-woman Geirríðr is accused of it. She is summoned to the Þórsnes Thing, and the case turns on oaths and the testimony of who truly works such craft; Geirríðr is cleared, and Snorri goes between the parties to keep the peace.[1]
But there is real witchcraft in the district. Katla is a true sorceress, and she shields her son Odd's killings with illusions — making him seem a distaff, a goat, a hog to those who come hunting him — until at last her spells are stripped away by a stronger wise-woman, and mother and son are run down: Odd hanged, Katla stoned and hanged after him.[2] The saga draws the line carefully: some accused women are innocent, but the power itself is real, and the saga treats it as a fact of the world.
The source text · 2
On a day at the beginning of that winter wherein Snorri first kept house at Holyfell, it befell that Gunnlaug Thorbiornson fared to Mewlithe, and Odd Katlason with him. Gunnlaug and Geirrid talked long together that day, and when the evening was far spent Geirrid said to Gunnlaug: "I would that thou go not home this evening, for there will be many ride-by-nights about, and oft is a fiend in a fair skin; but methinks that now thou seemest not over-lucky to look upon."— eyrbyggja saga
Geirríðr accused of witch-riding; cleared at the Thing (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
Thereafter they stoned her with stones that she died under the Head there; and fared afterwards to Mewlithe, and were there through the night; but the next day they rode home. Now were all these tidings known at one time, and of that tale no folk thought harm: and so the winter wore.— eyrbyggja saga
Odd hanged, Katla stoned — the end of Katla and Odd (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
The berserks
Two Swedish berserks — men who fell into killing-rages, howling and biting their shield-rims, near-impossible to fight — come into the district in service to Snorri's rival. When one of them demands a wife above his station, a cunning plan disposes of them: they are set an impossible labour, a road and a wall across a lava-field, and then trapped and killed in a bath-house heated scalding while they lie exhausted from the work.[1]
The episode is pure Eyrbyggja — a supernatural menace (the berserk fury) defeated not by greater strength but by craft and trickery, the district's recurring method. The road and the wall the berserks built across the lava, the saga notes, can still be seen. The uncanny, again, is overcome by the cool intelligence the saga prizes above raw force.
The source text · 1
Now that happed to tell of next which is aforewritten, that the Bareserks were with Stir, and when they had been there awhile, Halli fell to talking with Asdis, Stir's daughter. She was a young woman and a stately, proud of attire, and somewhat high-minded; but when Stir knew of their talk together, he bade Halli not to do him that shame and heartburn in beguiling his daughter.— eyrbyggja saga
The berserks set an impossible task and killed in the bath-house (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
The walking of Þórólfr Halt-Foot
The saga's darkest figure is Þórólfr Bægifót — Halt-Foot — a cruel, grasping old man whose malice does not stop at death. When he dies, glaring and upright in his seat, they carry his body out through a hole broken in the wall, not the door, and bury him far off. It is not enough.[1]
He walks. The oxen that drew his corpse go mad; cattle near his howe bellow themselves to death; birds that light on the grave fall dead. A herdsman is found 'all coal-blue, and every bone in him broken.' Farms empty as the dead man strides the dale by night killing men, and all who die are afterwards seen in his ghastly company. Only near his son Arnkell does the haunting cease.[2] At last they dig him up — undecayed and hideous — drag him off behind foundering oxen, and wall his howe so high none but flying birds can cross it. He lies quiet, the saga says, as long as Arnkell lives.
The source text · 2
Now Snorri the Priest let work Crowness wood, and let much wood cutting go on. Thorolf Halt-foot thought that the wood was spoilt thereby, and rode out to Holyfell, and bade Snorri give back the wood, and said that he had lent the wood and not given it. Snorri said that would be clearer when they bore witness who were by at the handselling, and said that he would not give up the wood unless they gave it against him. Then Thorolf took himself off, and was in the worst of minds. He rode in to Lairstead to see his son Arnkel.— eyrbyggja saga
The death of Þórólfr Halt-Foot (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
After the death of Thorolf Halt-foot many folk deemed it worse to be abroad as soon as the sun was getting low. But as the summer wore, men were ware of this, that Thorolf lay not quiet, and men might never be in peace abroad after sunset. And this happed withal that those oxen which had been yoked to Thorolf were troll-ridden, and all such cattle as came nigh to Thorolf's howe went mad, and bellowed till they died. Now the herdsman at Hvamm often came home in such wise that Thorolf had given chase to him. And so it befell in the autumn at Hvamm that one day neither herdsman nor beasts came home; and in the morning men went to seek them, and found the herdsman dead, a little way from Thorolf's howe, and he was all coal-blue, and every bone in him was broken. He was buried beside Thorolf. And of all the cattle that had been in the dale, some were found dead, and some fled into the mountains, and were never found again; and if fowls settled on Thorolf's howe, they fell down dead.— eyrbyggja saga
Þórólfr walks; the coal-blue herdsman; the second burial.
The Moon of Weird
Years later the haunting returns, greater and stranger, at Fróðá — the farm of Snorri's sister Þuríðr. It opens with an omen: a half-moon of weird that appears on the wall of the hall each evening and travels backward, withershins, against the sun's course. An old man reads it rightly — it is the Moon of Weird, and the deaths of men will follow.[1]
They do. A shepherd turns strange and peevish, then dies, then walks — seizing a man at the door and casting him down so that he too sickens, turns coal-blue, and dies. One after another the household dies, six and then more, through the dark of the Yule-fast.[2] And worse is coming: a fishing crew drowns at sea, and on the night the news arrives the drowned men walk into the hall, sea-soaked and dripping, and sit down by the fire — and keep coming back, night after night, the dead crowding out the living at their own hearth.
The source text · 2
Now that same night that the corpse-bearers carne home, as men sat by the meal-fires at Frodiswater, they saw how by the panelling of the house-wall was come a half-moon, and all might see it who were in the house; and it went backward and withershins round about the house, nor did it vanish away while folk sat by the fires. So Thorod asked Thorir Wooden-leg what that might bode.— eyrbyggja saga
The Moon of Weird circles the wall withershins (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
This happed next to tell of at Frodis-water, that the shepherd came in exceeding hushed. Little he said, and what he said was peevish; so men deemed it most like that he was bewitched, for he fared in distraught wise, and was ever talking to himself; and so things went on awhile.— eyrbyggja saga
The shepherd dies and walks; the household begins to die.
The ghosts put on trial
And here Eyrbyggja does the thing no other saga does. To rid Fróðá of its dead, Snorri's son Kjartan and a priest do not fight the ghosts or exorcise them with prayer alone. They hold a door-doom — a formal lawsuit — and summon each of the walking dead by name, charging them with trespass on the living, and pronounce lawful judgement of outlawry against them.[1]
And it works. As each dead man is named and sentenced, he rises and goes, grumbling, out the door into the dark — 'I sat while sitting was good,' one says as he leaves — until the hall is cleared of them. Then a priest carries fire and holy water through the house to seal it. It is the most Eyrbyggja moment imaginable: in this district even the supernatural is subject to law, and a haunting is ended by correct legal procedure. The temple and the Thing of the first chapter have their answer to the dead.
The source text · 1
Now when those wonders had gone so far, one day Kiartan went east unto Holyfell to go see Snorri the Priest, his mother's brother, and asked rede of him what he should do in the matter of those wonders that had fallen on them. At that time was come to Holyfell the priest that Gizur the White had sent to Snorri the Priest. So Snorri sent the priest out to Frodis-water with Kiartan, as well as his son Thord Kausi, and six men more. Thereto he added the counsel to burn Thorgunna's bed-gear, and summon all those who walked, to a door-doom; and he bade the priest sing the hours there, and hallow water and shrive all folk. So these summoned men from the nighest steads on the road, and came to Frodis-water on the eve of Candlemas at such time as the meal-fires were lighted.— eyrbyggja saga
The door-doom: the dead summoned, charged, and outlawed (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
The wise chieftain's end
Through all of it — witches, berserks, the walking dead, and the ordinary human feuds that fill the rest of the saga — Snorri goði abides, managing his turbulent district with the same patient cunning, until in old age he dies quietly in his bed, the most accomplished chieftain of his age.[1]
The saga ends by tracing his great line of descendants, for Snorri's blood runs through much of later Iceland. Eyrbyggja is his monument and his district's: a chronicle less of one tragedy than of a whole community and its long argument between order and the uncanny — temple, Thing, and chieftain on one side; witchcraft and the restless dead on the other — with the cool intelligence of Snorri goði holding the balance to the end.
The source text · 1
Snorri the Priest dwelt at Tongue for twenty winters, and at first had a power there somewhat begrudged, while those brawlers were alive, Thorstein Kuggison to wit, and Thorgils the son of Halla, besides other of the greater men who bore him ill-will. Withal he cometh into many stories, and of him the tale also telleth in the story of the Laxdale men, as is well known to many; whereas he was the greatest friend of Gudrun, the daughter of Osvif, and of her sons. He also hath to do with the story of the Heathslaughters, and most of all men, next indeed to Gudmund the Rich, lent aid to Bardi after the manslayings on the Heath.— eyrbyggja saga
The kindred of Snorri the Priest; his death (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
4 connection questions mark the end of this journey — and earn its keepable artifact.
More journeys → Follow a thread →