03 | Saga Land | The story of Gisli

In the remote north-west of Iceland, Kári Gislason and Richard Fidler follow in the doomed footsteps of Gísli, the most uncompromising of the saga heroes – this is a tale about the complexity of family life, and the difficult choices which can come with it. Back in Reykjavik, Kári begins to unravel the knotty threads of his own Icelandic heritage and is suddenly faced with a choice. Credits: Writers - Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason Producer - Richard Fidler Sound Engineer - Steve Fieldhouse Music composition - Richard Fidler Saga Land https://harpercollins.com.au/products/9780733339707 is written by Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason, published by Harper Collins/ABC Books, 2018

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  Welcome to ABC Rewind and the series Sagarland. Ten years ago, Richard Fidler, who you might know from the Conversations podcast, travelled to Iceland with his friend, the writer Kari Gisleisen. They went there to explore the remarkable Icelandic sagas, Viking stories of revenge, love and humanity, and also to try and unravel the mysterious threads of Kari's family history. And believe me, his own story is as compelling as the centuries-old tales we've been hearing. In this episode, Kari is faced with a difficult choice. Here's Sagarland.

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  Iceland is a tiny island tucked up under the Arctic Circle between Europe and America. The island was uninhabited until the Vikings came here in the Middle Ages. Life was hard on this impossible island, but they had it all to themselves. I've come here to Iceland with my friend, Kari Gisleisen. Kari's a writer and an academic, and he was born here, and he thinks and dreams about Iceland all the time.

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  It's said in Iceland that you can be homesick there even while you're at home. They have this attachment, and it's an attachment that hurts. And I have that.

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  For Kari, that attachment has been deepened and strengthened again and again by the sagas of Iceland, the stories of the first Viking families that settled here in the Middle Ages.

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  This was a rich culture that left no real material, artefacts. There are no grand buildings, there are no ruins. Everything disappeared.

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  Except the stories.

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  The saga of Gisli is one of the wildest and bloodiest stories of the sagas. It's the story of a family where everyone just lives too close together.

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  We're in the Arni Magnusson Institute in Reykjavik, the place where the precious saga documents are stored. Kari and I are here to see its director, Gudrun Naudal.

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  Oh, Gisli saga, this is a saga about a family. These relationships are so complicated. It's like they're doomed in their intricacies. Almost like your Christmas party, that you have to meet them every year, every birthday. You're always meeting the same people, you're so related and you can't get away from it. So many insights in that story about human nature and secrecy. And if you go to the valley where it happens, it's so dramatic, it's like a Greek tragedy. It really is.

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  So where does Gisli's story start?

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  It begins in the western fjords of Iceland.

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  What's the area like?

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  It's an enormous assembly of fjords with steep sides that spill into the sea and flattened mountain tops pressed down by glaciers.

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  Kari and I have come to the little fishing town of Isafjordur, the place which simply means ice fjord. The town is set on the water's edge. It's squeezed in on two sides by these massive, massive cliff walls that reach right up to the clouds. It's summer, so the light never really goes away and it's surprisingly warm. But in winter, the sun can completely disappear for months at a time. Kari used to teach English here years ago.

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  Well, when I first came to Isafjordur, straight away there was media interest and the local newspaper ran a cover story.

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  That's not true, you're making that up.

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  No, I'm not making that up. The story was something like, man moves back to Iceland and chose Isafjordur.

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  That was front page news here.

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  And then I got a call from the national paper, you know, they saw the local story and thought, well, this is big news, man moves back to Iceland. And so they interviewed me. And I ran in the daily paper. And then I got a call from the, from one of the TV channels.

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  What?

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  And they asked me to come down to Reykjavik to be interviewed for the man back in Iceland story.

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  This is all about this returning to Iceland thing, isn't it?

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  It matters.

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  It matters.

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  What kind of a man is Gisli?

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  He's a man who wants to do the right thing, even if it means breaking apart his family.

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  The story of Gisli unfolded here in the fjords. It begins with four friends. There's Gisli, his brother Thorkeil, and Thorgrim, his brother-in-law, and there's Gisli's best friend, Viesten. And just to make it even more complicated, there's Gisli's sister, Thordis, who's married to Thorgrim, and there's Gisli's wife, Oif. Like I said, it's complicated, but don't get too hung up on the names. What's important for you to know at this point is that some of these friends are fated to kill each other.

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  There was a man called Thorbjörn Sjör, son of Thorkeil. He married a woman called Thorra, daughter of Röður. Their son was called Gisli.

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  A thousand years ago, a man called Gisli attended the local assembly and he took with him three friends. And they were walking through the assembly rather too proudly. They were making a show of themselves and people began to notice them a little too much. People asked, I wonder how long those four will be friends? And Gæst Oddlefsen, a man who was known for his prophecies, answered the question.

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  Those four men won't be as close in three years as they are now.

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  Gisli heard this and decided to do something about it. He'd keep them together, this group of four, through a pact of blood brotherhood. And so they cut out a long strip of turf and then pitched it up high enough so that the men could walk underneath it. They then cut themselves and the blood dripped down their arms and into the soil, but they mixed it with their hands. And then they were ready to swear allegiance to each other.

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  At the crucial moment, Thorgrim stepped back and said,

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  "I feel myself to be bound enough if I swear allegiance to Gisli and his brother Thorkeil without being bound to the fourth, Viesten."

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  And when Gisli heard this, he too recoiled and said, "Well, I can't bind myself to you, Thorgrim, if you won't bind yourself to Viesten." Then the whole thing fell apart.

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  There was something going on under the surface. None of them said what it was, but afterwards things weren't the same between the four friends. And what was once a band of four, split into two bands of two: Gisli and his best friend Viesten, and Thorkeil and his best friend, Thorgrim.

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  So for the next part of the saga, we've got to go to a tiny place called Hoke Dala in the next fjord.

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  Geasly came back here to Hoke Dala, this farm in the very heart of the west fjords, and continued farming with his brother, Thorke. Geasly was a diligent man, worked hard as a farmer. His brother, though, well, not so good. He's lazy. He doesn't seem to share Geasly's outlook on family life and doesn't help much around the farm. Thorke stays inside and mopes around. And one day, he goes for a walk up the hall and he hears two women of the house talking.

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  Who are these women?

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  It's his wife, Askert, talking to Geasly's wife, Oith.

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  And they're doing their work, actually cutting out some shirts for the men, talking to each other as they work and maybe going over old things in the past.

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  And Thorke hears his wife, Askert. "Would you cut out a shirt for Thorke for me?"

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  Oith replies,

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  "You wouldn't be asking me to do that if it was for my brother, Viestet."

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  Askert replies, "Well, I hear you spent a lot of time with Thorgrim before you married Geasly."

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  Thorke hears this

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  and says, "There's blood in those words."

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  What has he understood by what he's just heard, that he wasn't supposed to hear?

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  Well, he's heard two women talking about something in the past. He's just heard his wife confess that she loved another man and that his brother's wife did as well. And suddenly, everything is a mess. These are not two farms. This is the beginning of a feud and everybody is implicated.

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  Thorke can't stand it and that night he tells his wife that she's not to come into bed with him. He won't, he won't sleep with her for some time, he says. And so she puts her arms around his neck and she says, "Thorke, you either take me back into this bed right now or I'm going to divorce you and take all my property with me." And he backs down and they sleep together that night. And Thorke's venom is no longer directed at her. It has to find a new home, a new victim.

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  Viestet is here visiting at Geasly's farm. And one night, a heavy storm blows through the valley with very, very heavy rain. And all the men need to go outside to cover the hay. And Viestet, of course, wants to help, but Geasly says, "No, stay inside" because he doesn't want him to be exposed. The rain is coming in to the house and so Viestet has to run his bed longways along the hall. And just before morning, someone comes into the house

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  and walks up to his bed,

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  lifts the covers

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  and drives a spear through him.

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  And Viestet is dead.

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  A servant sees what's happened and runs up to the body, but won't take the spear out.

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  Whoever does that will be honour-bound to avenge Viestet. And when Geasly walks in and sees his friend's body, he takes the spear out and puts it in her chest for later.

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  So he will now have to be the one to avenge the murder of his best friend?

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  Yeah. Only Geasly will be able to do it. But who does he do it to? Who's killed his best friend? Is it Thorke, his brother, out of jealousy? Or is it Thorke's best friend, Thorgrim? Did he sneak in and commit the act?

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  They held the burial for Viestet and during the service, they put shoes on him. They call them hell shoes. And they're meant to ease your way into Valhalla.

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  Thorgrim, Geasly's brother-in-law, walks up to the corpse and fastens the laces on the shoes. And he turns to the others and he says,

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  "I don't know how to tie hell shoes if these come off."

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  What does he mean by that?

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  He means, "This man is dead and he's going to stay dead."

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  What does Geasly think when he hears Thorgrim say that?

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  Well, I think he must begin to wonder who the murderer is. He probably thought it was his brother. But he hears Thorgrim boasting over the dead body, rubbing it in.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Thorke, Geasly's brother, says to Geasly, "Brother, I want things to go back to the way they were between us." And Geasly replies, "Yeah, that's well said. But promise me this. If you ever feel the pain that I feel now, you are going to be as good to me as I am being to you."

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  And Thorke agrees.

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  Geasly feels bleakness and grief. But Thorgrim keeps needling him.

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  And the grief hardens into hatred. Geasly must avenge his dead friend.

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  And that night, he walks along this stream that's in front of us, from the farm here to the farm on the other side.

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  And he breaks in through the back and he goes past the farm animals and into the hall. There's still some lights on, but he puts them out. And then in the dark, he works his way through to Thorgrim's bedroom.

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  Thorgrim, who's lying there with his wife, Geasly's sister, Thordis.

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  And Geasly goes into the bedroom and he puts his hand under the covers and touches his sister's breast.

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  She wakes up and says, "Why is your hand so cold, Thorgrim?" He replies, "Would you like me to roll over?"

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  Geasly waits. And when they fall asleep again, he lifts the covers

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  and drives his spear so deep into Thorgrim that it fastens to the planks at the base of the bed.

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  And Thorgrim is dead.

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  The alarm has sounded and Geasly makes an escape back along the stream. People come from Thorgrim's farm to Geasly's farm to see what's happening there. And Thorke walks in and goes up to Geasly's bedroom and he sees Geasly's snow-covered shoes on the floor. And he pushes them under the bed. He's making sure his brother isn't caught for the killing of Thorgrim, his best friend. Even though nobody knows who did the murder of Thorgrim, of course, suspicion shifts to Geasly. And one day during a ballgame that they play here on the ponds, Geasly gets angry and he utters a verse that he should have kept to himself.

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  [Singing] "Teina sauk i tuni, tal grims vénar faule. Geisde gek of feitak, gynbleks tháwa miggla. Nú hefi'r gnístair an gera, grímur throbt of sótan, than let sundur of lendan. Land kostuð á branda."

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  When Geasly's sister, Thordis, hears this verse, she realises that Geasly killed her husband, Thorgrim.

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  When she's leaving this valley one day and she goes past her dead husband's burial mound, she tells Thorgrim's kinsmen that Geasly did it. So they bring an action against Geasly at the assembly and a judgement is made against Geasly, a judgement of outlawry that means that his enemies can attack and kill him if they can catch him. Geasly now has no choice but to go into hiding.

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  Now, Kari and I are going further out,

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  to the remote fjord where Gisli, where Tölvis is a fugitive. This is a rocky and barren and windblasted place. And it was just here that Gisli set up a little farm for his wife and his foster daughter. But he spent most of his time up here, high up on the ridge, where he could conceal himself and see who was coming in and out of the fjord.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  This is the bleakest place you've taken me to in Iceland.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm shocked at how it looks. I can't believe how barren it is, how rocky it is, but also how protected it is. I mean, he picked a place that was almost impossible to reach.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Now that I'm here, all I can think of is Gisli's loneliness. I know he had Oud with him and his wife, and I know he had their foster daughter as well.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  But what else? There's nothing else here.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  So he comes here as a fugitive?

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he sets up a farm. But a lot of the time, he has to be on the run, getting help where he can. A rather humiliating life of asking for help from those who can't help him or won't.

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  He comes back and stays with his wife, Oud.

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  And this goes on for 13 years.

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  In a really desolate place.

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  But he kept having these terrible dreams, and he would tell them to Oud. Some of them involved a good dream woman who would visit him and attest to his honour and his dignity. But other dreams, it was a bad dream woman, he called her. And she wanted to bathe him in blood and pour bile on him. And that's his death that's chasing him here to this place. And eventually, I think he'd had enough. He couldn't sleep one evening, and they decided to go up to his hideout.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  It was early winter, and there was a frost on the ground.

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  And they left behind them a trail made by their cloaks and by some shavings that were coming off a piece of wood that Gisli was carving runes on to. And that's how the attackers found them and found his hideout. He told them he wanted to fight, and he held them off. And so did his wife. She beat one of them with a club. He killed eight men and then made a final run for it up onto one of the crags here, called Einhmar, where he made his last stand.

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  And then he jumped off the ridge and struck his attacker. But as he did so, the attacker's spear came into Gisli and pierced him. And with that,

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  the man for whom honour was everything

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  was dead.

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  The man for whom honour was everything. So is that it? Is it Gisli's painful, moral inflexibility that ultimately makes him a doomed man? In Reykjavik, I put this to Gudrun Naudal at the Arni Magnusson Institute.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Yes, there's something in that, yes. He plays by the book, and he is honourable in that way.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  And insufferable. You know people like this? I mean, I do. They're very annoying people.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  Exactly, but then you see that his brother is annoying as well. He's sort of, he's lazy and he doesn't do... This one is hardworking, so you feel sorry for him. And then people are eavesdropping on this women's conversation when they're talking about men. And they think they're having a private conversation, and somebody asks, "Did you love him?" And when you're a woman, this is a very innocent question. Why not answer it? And why not just chit chat about this? It has no bearing on what's happening now. You're all married. But it has when somebody that should not be listening listens in. And Gisli goes into his sister's bedroom. He goes into her most private space.

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  And he puts his hand on her breast. And Thorgn wakes up, and he turns to her. You're made to believe, very succinctly told, that they made love. Gisli is watching. He waits till they're asleep, that he can kill him. Can you imagine this?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  In some ways, Gisli's saga is a story about a man who fails to come to terms with the complexity and messiness of families. Gisli thinks in straight lines, but families by their very nature have crooked lines and broken strands. And that brings us to the other reason Kari and I had come to Iceland, to follow up a question of ancestry. Most Icelanders can trace their roots all the way back to the Viking Age. But Kari hasn't been able to do this. Kari only ever met his father four times in his life. But on that last meeting, his father said something to him that just floored him.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  You know you're related to Snorri Sturlsson, don't you?

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  Snoddy Sturlsson, the most famous of the saga authors. But Kari's never been able to confirm the truth of what his father told him. Because as far as the official records are concerned, the connection to the father doesn't exist.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  So now we're going to Deco, a place that holds Iceland's genealogical records. But now, just as we're about to get out of the car, Kari's having second thoughts.

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  There's only one part of this project that I feel awkward about and that I sort of dread. And that's this first visit to the database.

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  Why? Why dread?

• 25:10Speaker 04

  There's some feeling of exposure in it, like I'll get there and I'm not meant to have access. Or it's also to do with having to explain who I am and my situation. You get to the point where you get sick of always having to tell people that your father isn't listed and you aren't correctly there, so could you please change this? And I think I'm tired of that, having to always establish myself.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Do you think it's raising old feelings of illegitimacy or something like that? Not being a legitimate, full Islander?

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the two combined. And I think maybe that's why Snorri is so important to me. It's because that link stands in for two missing links. One is a long absence from Iceland, and the other one is an absence of that side of my family.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  If we listen to that dread and we don't go there and we don't find this out, will there be a price to pay for that too?

• 26:27Speaker 04

  There's a price for silence. Like, the price for silence is heavier, I reckon, than the price of awkwardness.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Next time, in the final episode of Saga Land, we find out whether Kari has a blood connection to one of the greatest saga writers of all, Snorri Sturlsson. And we'll also hear the tale of Eðli, a killer and ruthless opportunist, but also one of the greatest court poets of the Middle Ages.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Where are we going now, Kari?

• 27:15Speaker 04

  We're off to Borg. We're going to the farm of the warrior poet Eðl Skatla Gremsson. It's one of the first Viking settlements from Norway.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  It's a windy afternoon here at Borg. The land is very green with lots of rocky ground and long grass. This is the farm that 1,100 years ago belonged to Eðl Skatla Gremsson.

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  There was a man called Skatla Gremur, the son of Gveld Ulvur. Ulvur was the son of Bjálvi and Hallpera, the daughter of Ulvur. She was the sister of Hallbjörn, half troll, the father of Kett. Skatla Gremur married Bera. She was Ingvar's daughter. Their son was called Eðl.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  And if you've missed any of the earlier episodes in this series, head to the Rewind page on ABC Listen and other podcast apps to catch them. This has been Rewind, a Radio National production.

• 28:22Speaker 06

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