[8 mins reading time]

Ru Sen Man Gy

Nature once was abundant. Then it wasn’t.

The seas were filled with fish. Then they weren’t. Birds sang, became silent.

The River Laxa flows down through a lovely wide dale down to the fjord. This was, oh, about a thousand years ago.

Each summer, salmon swum in and up. The clear waters rushed over riffles, there were sheep in the pastures and the farms were well.

It was said at the time of settlement, when a farmer drove his sheep to distant market, the first animals arrived when the last still had not left the fields. This was the farm where Hallgerðr grew up, she who later became the wife of Gunnar of the handsome Hlinderendi slopes of southern Iceland. In the dale was once held a feast for a thousand guests, the second largest gathering ever in the country.

The people called this place Running Waters Full of Fish.

One day at the time of the hay harvest, when the sun always shines, the old fighting man called Bersi the Dueller was laid out on a wooden bed beside the baby Halldór. Bersi had grown ill over the summer, and was warming in the bright sun, singing to the baby.

There was distant laughter, the rhythmic swish of scythes. Bees hummed, the salmon splashed over stones in the shallows. There was the distant bleating of sheep.

All was well, until Halldór’s cradle tipped to one side.

Over it went and the baby rolled out on the grass, and each of them was deserted and all alone in the world.

All around was abundance. Yet that afternoon, they both were stranded. Bersi could do no more than carrying on crooning from his bed:

 

“Here we lie, flat on our backs,

Halldor and I, helpless and frail,

Old age does this to me, and youth ails you,

You’ve hope of better, but I’ve none at all.”

 

There were sounds of the hay harvest continuing in the far fields as the sun dipped slowly into horizon clouds. Still Bersi quietly sang, and still the baby lay gurgling on his back.

A group of men passed around the back of the farm longhouse, on their way to cut timber for shipbuilding. Two were talking of a tafl game they’d been playing. Three girls’ voices were heard too, talking of arm-rings they were sure they’d be given when they were married, silver and gold.

Then came the young girl called Guðrún, daughter of Osvif. She had already been called the most beautiful girl in all the dales, maybe in all of Iceland. She came running to the rescue, and picked up the baby, and sang to him too. Bersi asked her to fetch the fine wooden container from the kitchen. This he had carried the isles far to the south, a gift from a princess or a queen perhaps, he had never said.

He gave to Guðrun three ribbons, each was laid in perfumed paper, and she tied the red one into her hair. The sun broke through the low cloud.

By now two infants were wrestling, another girl was playing a flute. There was an old white horse in the paddock by the church.

There would come a time when everyone would hear of Bersi and the baby. And know too the story of Guðrún Osvifsdottir.

A famed saga was written about the people who lived in the dale, their lives and loves over two hundred years. The story spirals around events and people overlapping and interacting. No one is sure who wrote it. In later life she became a nun and anchoress, blue-eyed with high cheekbones, fair but not tall.

Her life had been a story of connections, not separation.

The story of the people and the vale began when Unn the Deep-Minded arrived by longship from the Hebrides in the late 800s. The winds were strong, and she lost her comb as they came ashore on a promontory in Breiðafjord.

This place became known as Kambsnes, and she became the female leader of a great family estate. Five generations later the extended family tree would bring together our Guðrún with Kjartan and his foster brother Bolli.

Guðrun grew up at the north end of the fjord, on a farm in a hanging valley, the place with the perfectly round hot-pool, a circle set in stone and ringed with well-fitting stones. It stands there still, steaming in the Arctic air.

Many a time, when they were young, the three sat together and laughed in the stone-lined hot-pool. They were the closest of friends.

Guðrun also had five brothers, all bold fighters. She was, said the saga, no less clever than she was good looking, and she was shrewd, articulate and generous. It seemed this place of abundance made people kind, though not aways.

Guðrún became a famed healer, she knew the qualities of every plant. She had four famed dreams, and came to be married four times. She lived to a great age, yet it was Kjartan she never married. One day, Guðrun said to then husband Bolli, I have spun twelves ells of cloth this morning, and you, you have killed Kjartan. Later Kjartan’s relatives killed Bolli in revenge.

Yet the web of life was so strong, it was not entirely teased apart by conflict.

Guðrún we are told, famously said to her son Ingunn, blind as she was by then, “I did the worst, to him I loved the most.”

“Such quarrels,” said her son.

Yet when people are in storytelling mode, they tend to find the good in people. She was such a keen listener that trees leaned toward her.

She died in 1008 CE, and her marble grave is at the base of Helgafell, the holy mountain.

She lived at the monastery as an elder, when the writing surely found her. She fell upward in life. She felt in earlier life she’d been walking in shoes too small. Now she had let those feelings go as the world expanded all around.

Throughout history, many such people have created their best written and art work after the age of sixty. Such generativity, it can bring people together.

At this, she lived out a well-kept secret, this third age of life. All the excitement of dreams and four marriages and lives and deaths of friends, all had receded. It was a good old age, full of colours of the world that entered her home.

She set out from the known, and climbed upwards to the clouds.

Each morning she walked up the mountain, whatever the weather. Each day was different. Her soul was a sea of abundance. At the top was the gorgeous view, the whole world hooped and laid out below.

The panorama from the top of sacred Helgafell is lake and marsh, drumlin and pasture farm, a thousand isles and swan flocks roosting on the open waters of the side-fjord. This is their place for a luminous pause between migrations, seven weeks and all of them with their flight feathers lost. This was why so many writers came here, gathering quills.

To the north is the port of Stikkisholmur and the Assembly mound of Thorsnes. It is from here that the ferry runs daily to Flatey isle and then onward to the Westfjords. To the north and far west lie Laugar farm and pool, Kambsnes and its lost comb, and Laxdæla itself.

And this is still a landscape to dash a breath away. A wet world of barrelling mosquito, dark stone cliff and the water turning blue when the spring sun shines. This was fjord known for wind and dangerous currents, and strong salmon.

She became a great story-teller.

It was an act of generosity, to tell this story of abundance. Guðrun came to know of alchemy, she generated assets.

She turned little bits of rubble into gold.

Jules Pretty

[Ru Sen Man Gyo]

 

 

 

Commentary

This chronicle centres on the idea of abundance. Nature was plentiful and rich, and so it can be again. It’s just that we chose to do something different for the last couple of centuries.

We might observe we now live in a modern era of scarcity. Scarcity of attention, play, laughter, listening. Abundance just looks and feels better.

When damage is done to nature, then it is also social systems that become unravelled. Abundant salmon in the river mean successful living. They bring nutrients from the oceans, and donate protein to the rivers and the people. In Alaska, most of the nitrogen in trees originates from the oceans, carried upstream by the fish, and then into the forests by bears. All is connected.

We may feel helpless in the face of losses, yet hope holds out a prospect of divergent future paths. Thus the commentary from Bersi could work for another ten centuries hence. We lie helpless, yet hope creates agency.

If we get the systems of use and care right, they could again be self-sustaining.

There are no ruins on the plains below Helgafell, for no farms there have been abandoned.

In the Landnamabok, the foundational book of names of farm settlements, there are 4560 farms listed for all of Iceland. A thousand years later, there are still 4500 farms. Not many industrialised countries have seen such sustained rural and cultural stability, where place and identity have remained so strong.

No one seems certain who composed the Laxdaela Saga, so why not Guðrun. She was at the monastery for the last decade of her life, and we know her son Ingunn had asked her who she loved the most.

No wise person, it has been said, wishes to be their younger selves.

What is the most important quality of being old, the Dalai Lama was asked?

Cheerfulness, he replied.