Viking Tales Part 22

While this trading was going on and everybody was good-natured, a bull of Thorfinn's ran out of the woods bellowing and came towards the crowd.

When the strangers heard it and saw it they threw down whatever was in their hands and ran to their canoes and paddled off as fast as they could.

The Nors.e.m.e.n laughed.

"We have lost our customers," Biarni said.

"Did they never see a bull before?" laughed one of the men.

Now after three weeks the Nors.e.m.e.n saw canoes in the bay again. This time it was black with them, there were so many. The people in them were all making a horrible shout.

"It is a war-cry," Thorfinn said, and he raised a red shield. "They are surely twenty to our one, but we must fight. Stand in close line and give them a taste of your swords."

Even as he spoke a great shower of stones fell upon them. Some of the Nors.e.m.e.n were hit on the head and knocked down. Biarni got a broken arm.

Still the storm came fast. The strangers had landed and were running toward the Nors.e.m.e.n. They threw their stones with sling-shots, and they yelled all the time.

"Oh, this is no kind of fighting for brave men!" Thorfinn cried angrily.

The Nors.e.m.e.n's swords swung fast, and many of the strangers died under them, but still others came on, throwing stones and swinging stone axes.

The horrible yelling and the strange things that the savages did frightened the Nors.e.m.e.n.

"These are not men," some one cried.

Then those Nors.e.m.e.n who had never been afraid of anything turned and ran. But when they came to the top of a rough hill Thorfinn cried:

"What are we doing? Shall we die here in this empty land with no one to bury us? We are leaving our women."

Then one of the women ran out of the hut where they were hiding.

"Give me a sword!" she cried. "I can drive them back. Are Nors.e.m.e.n not better than these savages?"

Then those warriors stopped, ashamed, and stood up before the wild men and fought so fiercely that the strangers turned and fled down to their canoes and paddled away.

"Oh, I am glad they are gone!" Thorfinn said. "It was an ugly fight."

"Thor would not have loved that battle," one said.

"It was no battle," another replied. "It was like fighting against an army of poisonous flies."

The Nors.e.m.e.n were all worn and bleeding and sore. They went to their huts and dressed their wounds, and the women helped them. At supper that night they talked about the fight for a long time.

"I will not stay here," Gudrid said. "Perhaps these wild men have gone away to get more people and will come back and kill us. Oh! they are ugly."

"Perhaps brown faces are looking at us now from behind the trees in the woods back there," said Biarni.

It was the wish of all to go home. So after a few days they sailed back to Greenland with good weather all the way. The people at Eric's house were very glad to see them.

"We were afraid you had died," they said.

"And I thought once that we should never leave Wineland alive," Thorfinn answered.

Then they told all the story.

"I wonder why I had no such bad luck," Leif said. "But you have a better shipload than I got."

He was looking at the bundles of furs and the kegs of wine.

"Yes," said Thorfinn, "we have come back richer than when we left. But I will never go again for all the skins in the woods."

The next summer Thorfinn took Gudrid and Snorri and all his people and sailed back to Iceland, his home. There he lived until he died. People looked at him in wonder.

"That is the man who went to Wineland and fought with wild men," they said. "Snorri is his son. He is the first and last Winelander, for no one will ever go there again. It will be an empty and forgotten land."

And so it was for a long time. Some wise men wrote down the story of those voyages and of that land, and people read the tale and liked it, but no one remembered where the place was. It all seemed like a fairy tale. Long afterwards, however, men began to read those stories with wide-open eyes and to wonder. They guessed and talked together, and studied this and that land, and read the story over and over. At last they have learned that Wineland was in America, on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the United States, and they have called Snorri the first American, and have put up statues of Leif Ericsson, the first comer to America.[15]

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See note about Eskimos on page 199.

Descriptive Notes

_House._ In a rich Norseman's home were many buildings. The finest and largest was the great feast hall. Next were the bower, where the women worked, and the guest house, where visitors slept. Besides these were storehouses, stables, work-shops, a kitchen, a sleeping-house for thralls. All these buildings were made of heavy, hewn logs, covered with tar to fill the cracks and to keep the wood from rotting. The ends of the logs, the door-posts, the peaks of gables, were carved into shapes of men and animals and were painted with bright colors. These gay buildings were close together, often set around the four sides of a square yard. That yard was a busy and pleasant place, with men and women running across from one bright building to another. Sometimes a high fence with one gate went around all this, and only the tall, carved peaks of roofs showed from the outside.

_Names._ An old Norse story says: "Most men had two names in one, and thought it likeliest to lead to long life and good luck to have double names." To be called after a G.o.d was very lucky. Here are some of those double names with their meanings: "Thorstein" means Thor's stone; "Thorkel" means Thor's fire; "Thorbiorn" means Thor's bear; "Gudbrand"

means Gunnr's sword (Gunnr was one of the Valkyrias[16]); "Gunnbiorn"

means Gunnr's bear; "Gudrid" means Gunnr's rider; "Gudrod" means Gunnr's land-clearer. (Most of the land in old Norway was covered with forests. When a man got new land he had to clear off the trees.) In those olden days a man did not have a surname that belonged to everyone in his family. Sometimes there were two or three men of the same name in a neighborhood. That caused trouble. People thought of two ways of making it easy to tell which man was being spoken of. Each was given a nickname. Suppose the name of each was Haki. One would be called Haki the Black because he had black hair. The other would be called Haki the Ship-chested because his chest was broad and strong. These nicknames were often given only for the fun of it. Most men had them,--Eric the Red, Leif the Lucky, Harald Hairfair, Rolf Go-afoot. The other way of knowing one Haki from the other was to tell his father's name. One was Haki, Eric's son. The other was Haki, Halfdan's son. If you speak these names quickly, they sound like Haki Ericsson and Haki Halfdansson. After a while they were written like that, and men handed them on to their sons and daughters. Some names that we have nowadays have come down to us in just that way--Swanson, Anderson, Peterson, Jansen. There was another reason for these last names: a man was proud to have people know who his father was.

_Drinking-horns._ The Nors.e.m.e.n had few cups or goblets. They used instead the horns of cattle, polished and trimmed with gold or silver or bronze. They were often very beautiful, and a man was almost as proud of his drinking-horn as of his sword.

_Tables._ Before a meal thralls brought trestles into the feast hall and set them before the benches. Then they laid long boards across from trestle to trestle. These narrow tables stretched all along both sides of the hall. People sat at the outside edge only. So the thralls served from the middle of the room. They put baskets of bread and wooden platters of meat upon these bare boards. At the end of the meal they carried out tables and all, and the drinking-horns went round in a clean room.

_Beds._ Around the sides of the feast hall were shut-beds. They were like big boxes with doors opening into the hall. On the floor of this box was straw with blankets thrown over it. The people got into these beds and closed the doors and so shut themselves in. Olaf's men could have set heavy things against these doors or have put props against them. Then the people could not have got out; for on the other side of the bed was the thick outside wall of the feast hall, and there were no windows in it.

_Feast Hall._ The feast hall was long and narrow, with a door at each end. Down the middle of the room were flat stones in the dirt floor.

Here the fires burned. In the roof above these fires were holes for the smoke to go out, but some of it blew about the hall, and the walls and rafters were stained with it. But it was pleasant wood smoke, and the Nors.e.m.e.n did not dislike it. There were no large windows in a feast hall or in any other Norse building. High up under the eaves or in the roof itself were narrow slits that were called wind's-eyes. There was no gla.s.s in them, for the Nors.e.m.e.n did not know how to make it; but there were, instead, covers made of thin, oiled skin. These were put into the wind's-eyes in stormy weather. There were covers, too, for the smoke-holes. The only light came through these narrow holes, so on dark days the people needed the fire as much for light as for warmth.

_Foster-father._ A Norse father sent his children away from home to grow up. They went when they were three or four years old and stayed until they were grown. The father thought: "They will be better so. If they stayed at home, their mother would spoil them with much petting."

_Foster-brothers._ When two men loved each other very much they said, "Let us become foster-brothers."

Then they went and cut three long pieces of turf and put a spear into the ground so that it held up the strips of turf like an arch. Runes were cut on the handle of the spear, telling the duties of foster-brothers. The two men walked under this arch, and each made a little cut in his palm. They knelt and clasped hands, so that the blood of the two flowed together, and they said, "Now we are of one blood."