The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [110]
“I am very fond of Orm,” said Birgitta, “and it is a great pleasure to me to have him as a neighbor again.” And she put her hand over Lavrans’ hand, where it was resting on the planks of the table.
“Even so,” said Olaf, “in these Hvalsey Fjord steadings the folk are always stumbling over each other and there is hardly the elbow room to lift your spoon.”
“It seems to me,” said Birgitta, “that you are always overflowing with complaints,” and her eyes flashed at him, so that Lavrans saw that they would soon fall to bickering, and he settled himself on his stool and told a tale.
There was a man, said Lavrans, whose name was Thorbjorn, and he lived with his folk in the oldest house in the district, a house that had been built by a relative of his many years before, when folk first came to Hvalsey Fjord. This was a long house, such as they build in Norway and Iceland, and it had many sturdy buildings around it, and Thorbjorn’s ancestor had retrieved many beams from the shores of Markland, for men in those days were great seafarers, and thought little of going to Markland for a load or two of wood. These beams were hewn into staves and porches and attached to the buildings, and carved with fantastic designs, and folk admired them a great deal, and came from other districts to look over these carvings. The carver, in fact, was a Norwegian called Bjarni the Easterner, and he went back to his home district after coming to Greenland, and made a name for himself there as a carver. The result was that in every respect, this Hvalsey Fjord steading came to look exactly like those of the great lords of Norway, with an outer court and an inner court and separate buildings for every activity, except that the buildings were built of Greenland stone, and only faced on the outside with staves. This ancestor would have no turf.
Now it happened that the folk at this steading strove to live in every way as they live in Norway, with hangings on the walls and lots of chairs and the livestock scattered all over the countryside, and they lived so for two generations, in much greater magnificence than anyone else in Hvalsey Fjord. Each generation was full of seafarers, and these men brought a wealth of goods with them at the end of every journey. They fought in many wars, especially those between the kings and the nobles of Norway, and they received rich rewards, and their women rocked the children back and forth in cradles mounted with gold and silver and swaddled them in brightly colored silk. They went often enough to Markland that they had much to trade in the way of marten furs and black bear skins and, of course, great beams of wood were always piled in the outer courtyard of the farmstead, so much wood that these folk thought nothing of burning it on their winter fires to drive away the cold.
Soon enough other houses were being built in Hvalsey Fjord, for the other districts were getting full, especially Vatna Hverfi district. These new farmers, however, were not so wealthy as Thorbjorn’s lineage, and they built more humbly, with stone surrounded by turf and all the buildings linked together, for sheep on the north and cows on the south are like the low glow of a whale oil lamp—you only notice when they are gone that the house is darker than dark and colder than cold.
It happened that these folk who were Thorbjorn’s kin became steeped in pride, for they were thought considerable men even in Norway, and were the first Greenlanders to be so honored. One of these kings (here Lavrans shook his head, for he could not remember the name of this king) made one of these men a lord at the Norwegian court. Earl Skeggi he was to be called, but it happened that this king was killed in battle, and Skeggi remained Skeggi the Greenlander. In this year, when Skeggi almost became an earl, Thorbjorn was some fifteen winters old, and of all his kin he was the most proud, although he was a sickly fellow and left the warrior’s life to