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I arrived in Haukadalur, a remote valley in the Westfjords of Iceland, on a mild September day. It had been a long trip—some four days since I’d left Brisbane.
I was fairly used to it, though. I was born in Reykjavik and I go back every year or two. I know the Westfjords well; I once taught at the high school in the district capital, Isafjordur. I was returning now because of The Saga of Gisli, a medieval story set in the tenth century that had long captured my attention. I hoped to use the tragic tale as the basis of a historical novel—although, that makes the project sound like it was in better shape than it was. I had some character sketches, rough outlines, questions about the source texts and my own summaries of them. Pages and pages of notes on the scholarship surrounding the saga.
However none of that felt quite like a story yet. Instead, I was drawing circles around a central goal, which was to understand the life of a character, a young Viking woman called Thordis, and how she lived through the remarkable and intensely difficult experiences of her life. I thought that being in the setting of the work, inhabiting the places of her life, might help me to inhabit her point of view as well.
A reasonable goal, I suppose. Use field work—walking, listening, being present in an environment—to make the setting of my novel resemble what Thordis might have seen and experienced. From there, allow her character to develop through her relationship with the world around her: the landscape, weather, objects, sounds and so on.
What did it mean to inhabit a character, a point of view?
But if that was my method, I also had doubts about what could emerge. After all, what did it mean to inhabit a character, a point of view? It was a term you heard often enough, a creative writing dictum, and I understood that it was necessary to try to see things from your characters’ perspectives. But I was such a different person from Thordis: a middle-aged man living a comfortable life on the other side of the world, a thousand years on. As much as I might want to create a sympathetic character in my Thordis, I had to admit she was even more remote than the setting into which I’d arrived.
*
I slept well that first night, and the next morning I tried to set aside my doubts as the normal insecurities of the creative process. I was getting ahead of myself. I was here, in the Westfjords; the first task was simply to attend as well as I could to the landscape of The Saga of Gisli.
Haukadalur had hardly changed since it was first written. There were a few farm buildings. Steep, cramping walls brace the valley, a tightness that helps to make the saga one of the most claustrophobic of all the stories of medieval Iceland. It tells of an exile. Thordis and her family are driven out of Norway and need to make a new home in Iceland. It is also a story of terrible fighting between siblings, of sexual jealousy and violent acts of revenge. At its climax, the protagonist, Thordis’s brother Gisli, kills her husband. Gisli does this in the dead of night, secretly, while Thordis’s husband is sleeping next her. At the time, Thordis is pregnant with the couple’s first child.
It is a traumatic scene. But the prose style used to convey this moment is concise and unemotional. That is, not only is Thordis very different from who I am, the story that carries her experiences doesn’t offer much direct guidance about how she feels and thinks. Such is the saga form, that the reader must interpret the emotional significance of events for themselves. Meanwhile, modern readers expect to find characters who develop, and whose thoughts and emotions are seen—for, how else do we know what they want or how their desires change, intensify, diverge from the other people in the story? Writers today may avoid telling too much, but in comparison with the Icelandic sagas, the modern novel as a form seems to possess its characters’ inner lives completely. Was that my task with Thordis? Is that what it meant to inhabit her character?
*
It was all a bit imponderable. But being in Haukadalur on a clear day did its work and offered a less insistent mode of tracing out solutions. My wanderings took me down to a pebble beach and then along reed ponds that separated it from a dirt road. I followed the slope of a gully near the first fences of a farm, taking pictures. It was brilliantly clear; the fields were divided by block shadows cast from by the steep mountains above.
In comparison with the Icelandic sagas, the modern novel as a form seems to possess its characters’ inner lives completely.
I thought these sharp lines between light and dark reminded me of the style of the saga narratives. Because these ancient stories don’t tell you much about how people are feeling, changes in the action can seem very sudden—but actually that’s also when the reader sees the depth of emotions at play and you do get a bit more direct guidance. One such moment comes after Thordis has lost her husband, when she commits what is, in her own society of strict family obligations, an act that shocks those around her. She turns against her brother and reveals his identity as the killer to her husband’s family. By doing so, Thordis sides with her dead husband over a sibling to whom she owes her loyalty as a blood relation. The disclosure brings about Gisli’s death.
For decades, readers have puzzled over why she does it. Rather too often, they’ve judged her very harshly, which was one of the reasons I wanted to tell her story. I agree with more sympathetic readers who point out that Thordis is distressed and grief-stricken. She’s lost her child’s father even before the child is born. Surely, she hates her possessive, violent brother. But it’s also the case that years on, when Gisli is killed, Thordis responds by attacking his killers. That is, she observes the very kinship code that she broke and seems to show that she still cares for her brother. What we may have in the saga—more so than a portrait of a singularly good or bad person—is a very human and incomplete portrait of someone with conflicted emotions.
*
Incomplete. As, I suppose, all stories must be—modern novels and also the stories we’ve inherited from long ago. I felt the need to get closer to Thordis; that task was driving my research, my coming all the way to Haukadalur, as well as the shape of the novel. But I also began to suspect that the first step in writing her story was to accept that I did so more as a returning visitor than as an inhabitant. I could walk towards Thordis, even if I would never reach her fully.
Behind me, I heard the sound of a car; it was a farmer. He called out and introduced himself, and for a while we spoke about the two farms mentioned in the saga and where they might have been located. As we said goodbye, he implored me to walk to the end of the valley. He said it was the only way to really understand the area.
I could walk towards Thordis, even if I would never reach her fully.
At its top, Haukadalur was sheltered and warm, and though it narrowed it was also more open-seeming and welcoming. Still jet-lagged, I lay down in the grass and closed my eyes and fell asleep. I don’t think I’d ever fallen asleep in a field before, and of course I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t taken the farmer’s advice. I’m glad I did, for when I woke up, it was to the feeling that Thordis was sitting next to me—almost as if she’d followed me up the valley. ‘I must be going mad,’ I told myself, as I walked back down. But the truth was that I was elated that she’d decided to join me. Or, rather, that I seemed to be becoming more willing to believe that she could, because I was also more accepting of the limits of my storytelling.
That night, the mild weather was blown away by a storm that rattled the windows and filled the valley with new pools and streams: the valley turned more metal-grey, the warning colours of the approaching winter. After the storm settled, I walked back down to the beach, and used my phone to record light waves on the pebbles, moving them slightly. That sound is in the book that I wrote about Thordis—I describe it when she, too, takes a walk along the beach. Another moment the book invents is when she falls asleep at the top of the valley, not long after the family first arrive in Haukadalur from Norway, and then wakes feeling stronger about the work she has ahead of her.
