[6 mins reading time]

[Bi Saka Mu Kyo]

 

 

The old sagas had something to say about this: will we want to save and look after places and nature we do not care about?

Maybe not so much.

And how do we come to care?

Often by being in places where things of importance happen to us, both as visitor and as resident. Where they settle into emotion and memory.

Perhaps a place doesn’t look like much to others, a slope above a plain, a farm with a view of distant mountains, a small woodland of pine and fir.

An Icelandic saga describes the southern coast this way: “Nothing but sand and vast desert and a harbourless coast, and outside the skerries a heavy surf.”

Yet Gunnar of Hliderendi said, “The slopes are beautiful”, and so he would not leave.

Gunnar was well-known for his good eye and arrow accuracy, his wife Hallgerðr for being able to pick an argument with a rock or tree, their best friends and neighbours were Njál and Bergthora: both would be burned to death across the flats at Bergthórshvoll.

Across this plain flows the Markafljót, the Mart-fleet, a great interlace of river that takes to marshlands and skirts the slope-land farms.

These days the electric ferry from the Westmann Islands docks at the new harbour of Landeyjahöfn, and you are soon crossing the plain on ridged roads of ash.

And there at the apron base of the slopes at Hliderendi will be Reyfar the Fox, dressed in summer fur.

He will be sitting by the cattle grid on the dry road. All around will be the chatter of water rushing off the slope.

“Lovely is this hillside,” says Reyfar. “It has always been this way. Welcome and come long.”

The next thing Reyfar the trickster says, for this is his role, makes you stop.

“There are enemies too, and only some are ghosts. Some are at the crossings on the moor, they will be in the river valleys, they are in the factories and in the warming skies.”

So it is that any journey across a fine land can be stopped, beaten back.

The trickster takes you up the hill to Gunnar’s mound, there by the windy copse of pine.

When the moon is full, Gunnar’s figure is often seen, sitting in the open air and smiling. Long ago, there had been his farmhouse here, and in the barrow he and his wife Hallgerðr still hold hands and beam at the view.

They were sticky ghosts. They resolved never to leave the green slopes of home.

The seas were lovely too. And the whales did not need to leave either.

Nor the geese and swans, nor fox and salmon, nor smaller fishes at the shore, it was not written that the road to Ragnarök was advancing fast. On any given day, there might be terrible heat and tremendous winter, and the one last giant battle.

A person alone in a cave can end up being somewhat unhinged.

You would think the same of those buried in a mound. Yet Gunnar and Hallgerðr are here on bright nights, looking round at the slope and view, at the wooden church with white walls and red corrugated roof. The very church singed by the hot ash of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, the one that closed the skies of Europe.

Gunnar was blue-eyed, so swift with a sword it seemed there were three people in the air at once, he had blond hair, a little thin now, and swam like a seal. Hallgerðr is still beautiful, her hair fine as silk, it came down to her waist, and none of her nails were chipped or broken. The saga said she always wants to be the centre of attention, she’s not so even-tempered as Gunnar.

They both had loved Sámr their dog, so warmly greet Reyfar whenever he brings visitors. Samr had been killed at this very home by the jealous neighbour Morð, the same night as Gunnar was killed.

Forty men came down the hollow road to the farmhouse from the fell pastures, enticed his dog Sámr away to kill him, and Gunnar said, you’ve been cruelly used, my foster-child Sámr, and it is expected our deaths are meant to be close together. They were attacked, he repelled them with his bow, he injured fourteen and killed two, but his bow was cut by Thorbrand.

Gunnar’s friend Njál buried him in the mound. Even when dead, Gunnar still had to see the magic of the southern light on the hills.

“The slopes are beautiful,” repeated Gunnar, this is why they’d never leave.

Gunnar was killed by treachery in 992CE, having been outlawed by opponents who won an argument at the Althing.

Gunnar ought to have stayed away, but had to stay at his home of beloved Hliderendi:

 

“How lovely the slopes are,

More lovely than they ever seemed to me before,

Golden cornfields and new mown hay,

I am going back home, and I will not go away.”

[Njál’s Saga]

 

So now Gunnar and Hallgerðr walk with Reyfar around the slopes in the evening moonlight. They all are cheerful. The minister at the church, he calls a greeting from the porch, as they walk around the meadow.

 

Jules Pretty

[Bi Saka Mu Kyo]

Commentary

Trouble today is brewing.

The world’s heat has come to places distant from the main sources of pollution. Places and nature are being sacrificed for material progress.

The earth, it could be said, needs more of us to recognise how lovely it is, and to state we will not leave. We should not let the bands of forty thieves led by modern Morðs take it all away.

Story and saga have a role beyond entertainment. They are also a way of looking after places, giving them a sub-song of emotion and meaning that could last across the centuries. After all, people have been hearing about and coming to Hliderendi to see the farm of Gunnar and Hallgerðr for a thousand years.

A century after the settlement of Iceland, there were 4560 farms. Today there are still 4500. Not many industrialised countries have managed such stability of rural places.

The koan question may then centre how the particularities of each place can be made special, and how this could help in conservation and regeneration.

Let there be fog, let there be ways past the trolls, for there will be wondrous sights for all who follow.

And Gunnar says, be careful, for there always were thieves and rogues on the road, ready to steal your land and places away.

 

[Photos: the slopes at Hliderendi (Gunnar’s farm) and Bergthórshvoll (Njál’s farm); the black and white sketch is from 1898 in W G Collingwood and Jón Stafánsson handsomely illustrated Pilgrimage of the Saga-Steads].