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By Root 1981 0

a smaller boat up the streams and ponds of Vatna Hverfi, which would mean that the corpus would have to be carried part of the way, but would get there in one day rather than two. This dispute soon grew acrimonious, and the Norwegians declared that the Greenlanders intended disrespect to the ombudsman, while the Greenlanders scoffed at the ignorance of the Norwegians, who knew nothing of the treacheries of the open sea at this time of year, especially if challenged in a small boat such as those that were the only ones to be had in Hrafns Fjord just then. After this, the Norwegians began accusing those Greenlanders of blindness and stupidity, whose task it had been to watch for contestants in distress, and some of the men fell to fighting and there was no one with sufficient authority to halt the fray, for Osmund Thordarson the lawspeaker had stayed at home in Eriks Fjord, and the bishop, of course, was at Gardar. Now the fight spread all over the field, and some women standing together were knocked down and the corpus itself was stepped on, so that the fighters desisted and were shamefaced.

The corpus was put into a small boat with four oarsmen, two Greenlanders and two Norwegians, and was rowed up Hrafns Fjord to the waterfall to the south of Vatna Hverfi district, and from there by various streams and lakes, it went to Einars Fjord and Gardar, where it lay before the altar but did not revive, and so the ombudsman was buried on the south side of the cathedral, and there was much discussion concerning who would now be the representative of the king in Norway. Martin of Chester and the Norwegians considered that this post should fall to another Norwegian, but among themselves the Greenlanders declared that with Kollbein Sigurdsson and Skuli Gudmundsson both dead, there was little to make of King Hakon and Queen Margarethe in Greenland.

Soon enough the end of summer came round, and the Norwegians looked about themselves at the snowy waste, and in the spring they set sail for Bergen. The Greenlanders considered their ship to be poorly provisioned and ill-repaired, and no Greenlanders chose to go off with them. In later years it was said by some that the ship had been wrecked on the ice at Cap Farvel, and that pieces of it had drifted back to Herjolfsnes, and others said that the ship had come to Norway late in the year, all aboard safe. But these tales were merely Greenlanders’ tales and the truth of the matter was never discovered.

And it came to pass that a year to the day after the death of Kollbein Sigurdsson, that is, two days before the mass of St. Bartholomew, the servingwoman Anna Jonsdottir discovered Bishop Alf dead in his bed when she went to him in the morning, and she saw that his eyes were open wide and his hands gripping the coverlet so tightly that she could not take it from them. Anna stood quietly near the bedcloset for a long while, for though she was an old woman and had seen many dead folk, as had every Greenlander, she had never known such a one as Sira Jon, priest or layman, and she shrank not a little from carrying her news to him. The talk among the servants was that he didn’t even know how ill the bishop was, so little notice did he seem to take of the old man, but each day spoke to him of all the episcopal concerns. Nor did he prepare his uncle to meet the Lord of Heaven, as the servingwomen considered that he should, saying prayers with him or confessing the old man’s sins, but he chattered on and on about masses or cattle or the weather or the accounts, as if Alf had not left that behind him months or years past. Anna looked at the bishop’s face and the grip of his hands. It was said among the Greenlanders that every man saw something in his mortal moment. Anna always imagined seeing her brother Bjartur, who had drowned as a boy, standing among the saints.

Anna went out of the room and found the priest, Audun, and gave him the news. Before she could suggest that he tell Sira Jon, he said, “Sira Jon will want to know that. He is sitting in the great hall,” and he slipped into his chamber and