#68.6, Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen
 

         Gunnar, one of the sailors on the boat that stopped for Sjókona, is telling me what has become of her.

We are both assuming Sjókona’s demand for a “god” could be met by any man. I was hoping her idea of a Christian god was not a horrible misunderstanding of both Christianity and God and also a misunderstanding of my own mortal oddity of life and life again. Those thoughts are heaped onto my guilt in abandoning her.  Then Gunnar, and apparently the others who were with him, believed that Sjókona herself is an immortal mother of sea creatures which allows her to make her request of a god even though she is well-past her prime.

He goes on, “Of course we offered, but she would have no part of that. And there is no honor in taking a woman by force unless you own her.”

         There are so many things I don’t want to hear said in this future world I’ve awakened into. Honor is just one mystery.  Here, there are no books and gods are ancient and only sometimes immortal and not always heroic. And the Christian notions of love for neighbor have nothing at all to do with honor, unless your neighbor happens to be a king, which seems to me, an indiscriminate assignment of power.

         I ask Gunnar.

         “So then, was Sjókona returned to her homeland?”

         “When the tide went out and the winds were calm, as we waited there, she probably decided her longing for a mother and daughter reunion was fulfilled so she came along with us anyway when we rowed back to her homeland.”

         I try to explain. As a wayfarer I know so little of this place. I came over to this side with her because I thought Sjókona would bridge my curiosity into a useful reality, but all I learned from her was that I don’t even know where to start asking.”

         He smirks. “What is there to know?”

“She was showing me runes. Is the reading of the runes something that common people do here?”

         “Everyone knows what is said in the rune stones. The stories of our people are affirmed by the tellers of the stories. The runes make the grim stories victorious.”

         “All around us now ships and men are gathering to cross the sea but why? Is there an enemy to conquer, a trade to make, a ritual that is often done at this time, or maybe an exploration of a land unknown? .. so much I don’t know…”

(Continues tomorrow)


#68.5, Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen

 “Mothers grieve for their lost daughters. And this deceased mother of many warriors grieved for one daughter, Sjókona, once set out for exposure. She couldn’t rest in death until she visited the wretched place one more time hoping to reunite with the daughter.”

         Gunnar is telling me what they found when they moored at the ruin of the house.

         “When the ancient mother returned to the place where the daughter had been put out, she found a silver haired-woman waiting for an infant of her own to be delivered wanting to save a daughter as she had been saved when she was the infant. So it was, that Sjókona’s own mother found the daughter she grieved after, and Sjókona was also looking for the bond of a mother and daughter. The jade dragon pendant affirmed their belonging to one another.

         “So Sjókona gave her mother the pendant to clutch in her hands, and they walked together to the rocky shore. The elder laid down on the rocks. Sjókona spread her mother’s silver hair out and kissed her mother good-bye, as had happened to her when she was an infant, all those years ago.  They spoke soft words and it would seem both found their unquenched longings met.

         “The tide carried the mother to a grave befitting the grandmother of the monsters of the sea.

“When it was high tide and the mother was gone, we untied from the mooring post.  And all of this is what we saw there. Only truth be told.”

“Yes, I know Sjókona went there anticipating some kind of mother/child reunion. But I think she was expecting another infant to be delivered from another grieving thrall mother required to give up a daughter.”

Gunnar explained it. “She was there to become a mother one way or another. She said another mother could give her child up to the wind, or a god could plant his seed for a daughter. Her intention was the mother—daughter bond before she returned across the sea. But then her own mother passed away and her so-called ‘god’ left her there.”

“So, did she find another ‘god’ among the sailors?”

“Well, you know the kindly nature and willingness in a boatload of sailors. But she said he had to actually be a ‘god’.” 

         “And you had no gods among you who could satisfy her need?”

         “Any one of us would rally to the cause, even though she clearly was passed her prime. Oh, do you suppose that was why she only wanted a ‘god’?”

(Continues tomorrow)

#68.4, Thursday, May 8, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen

I’ve found Gunnar, one of the sailors who brought us over, the one I had told that Sjókona was alone in the house with no door. I had heard a storyteller’s version spinning up a yarn of strange details and now I am hearing the story from Gunnar who was actually there.

He explains, “When we stopped for her, she told me there had been two visitors with her there, and both were gone, so she was alone. Had she remembered you, there would have been three.”

“Three would make it a magical tale.”

“Yes, a better story that would be indeed with a little mortal truth to it. But the first, she said, was the Christian god. He shape-changed into a man, but he feared the power of her touch and ran away.”

I smirked. My reaction demanded an explanation.

“You know the Christian God is invisible, all encompassing, Creator of everything, not likely to shape change into a man.”

“No, no. I’ve been to many Christian ports. I know the Christians have many gods and they actually do shape-change into mortal humans all the time. There is that Jesus on the cross. And then their gods die off and leave bones on the altars for sacrifice. People crowd to these shrines to get the miracles. Of course, you have to believe in the Christian things to get any miracles.  But otherwise, the shrines are places where Christians leave their riches for Vikings to gather up.”

What can I say? Christianity perceived through Pagan imagination is Pagan. But, of course, Paganism perceived from the Christian perspective still isn’t Christian, it’s also Paganism.

Dear God thank you for staying close to us, for listening to our prayers, for speaking with touch and always reminding us of your loving presence. But now I wonder if the Pagan magic is a reminder of your closeness to all people, or a blinder separating us from you. Let me always find you even through the haze of human whimsy. Thank you.

Gunnar tells me more of this. “She told us that after the ‘Christian god’ left, then her own mother came down to the house by the shore as she did often, it seems. Her mother was a thrall taken from a faraway land in the east to become a concubine for a powerful Norseman who intended his sons to be as powerful as Huns. So, an infant daughter had no place in his imagination. And, of course, this woman’s infant daughter had to put out for exposure.”

(Continues Tuesday, May 13)


#68.3, Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen

         I’ve found the fellow, Gunnar, from the longship that brought Sjókona and I to this land and he’s the one I told of her circumstance alone and waiting at the ruin of the house where it was known that sorrowing thralls put their infant girls out for exposure. He asks me what I know of her story.

         I said, “Sjókona journeyed to that place with a longing for family, maybe twisted to fantasy by her own life story. She believed the pendant that saved her in infancy made her a goddess, immortal and wise. Her own mother had placed the pendant punched with lacing holes in her mouth instead of the suffocating cloth used to ease other infant girls to their deaths. She had breath when she was rescued from the rocks and taken into life by Auld Bjorn who let her grow up always believing herself to be a fantastical mother of something others would discard – a girl child, maybe, or a sea monster by myth. So, there she was where I left her longing to rescue an infant of her own or perhaps to give birth to a sea creature or a god or an immortal.

“So how did you find her?” I dared ask Gunnar.

“It was low tide when we moored at those rocks, and walked ashore. We saw a woman there, stretched out as though sleeping, but closer, we found she was dead, and those of us from the previous voyage, expecting to find Sjókona, were surprised that she was a different woman – older, wearing rich colors and silks, laid out on a bed of rocks as though the rocks were pillows. Surely, where she was then, the next tide would carry her into the sea. And it did.

“I looked toward the gapping ruin of a house, and there was Sjókona, in her cloud color robes luffing and shifting as a high cloud does on the breeze. Others believed she was the ghost of the old woman. If I hadn’t been on the boat bringing her over before that, I might have thought that too. I wasn’t really afraid of her, so much as I was curious. So, I went toward her and she invited me into the ruin of the house as though it were her own house. She passed me a wineskin of rancid water, pretending she was serving tea.

“We talked for a time.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#68.2, Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen

         As the story continued this account of sailors meeting Sjókona sent the Norsemen chanting and cheering, though for me, it was painful. The story was finished and now there are only the murmers of a drunken party. I asked the storyteller, so what of Sjókona? 

         “Was Sjókona carried back to her homeland? Is she safe?”

         He dismissed my question without an answer. I followed him to the beer keg.

         “Tell me, what do you know of Sjókona?”

         He fills a horn, and takes a swig and hands it to me.

         “Red Shirt, I told a tale I heard from others. If you want to know truths you have to wait for the ones who were there. Surely, they will return anytime now on this new wind.”

         So, this has become a tale to be passed along with twists of truth and amazing wonders and horrors just to captivate listeners. But with my pangs of guilt, I listened and believed the truth of it, because a few pieces of it were accurate.

         We wait here for the gathering of the ships. And sure enough, the new wind brings more ships from across the sea.  Some are sailing a ship that looks very familiar to me and three more of the sailors I’ve known are bringing that newest longship that was being constructed with the gunwales carved by Auld Bjorg, and its monster’s head made over from a Sphinx head. These are the same men who brought Sjókona and I over; and the one of them named Gunnar is the one I told of Sjókona’s need as they were preparing to make another crossing to her homeland, rowing against the wind.

          I had asked Gunnar the favor of checking on her. I found him approachable, among these brooding and intense sorts who are always preparing for a fight. And now, here he is, so I ask him for the truth of the story.

         “First,” he asks, “what have you heard of this?”

         “A storyteller here said you found the corpse of an old woman, in silken dress, clutching the jade pendant I had known Sjókona to wear. Sjókona told me that pendant was used in place of a cloth to stifle an infant’s cries when an infant was put out for exposure.”

         “Ah, that explains a lot. We did find the corpse of a very old woman just where you told us we would find the goddess of the sea.

         “But that wasn’t Sjókona?”

(Continues tomorrow)

#68.1, Thursday, May 1, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Mooring at Bergenshalvoyen

Grief left me longing for familiar touch and fragrances of once love– the precious belonging. All the years I shared with Ana leave me grieving in a way that isn’t resolved simply by replacing the closeness of loved ones with new people. The hardest thing to accept are the good times. I’m really not ready yet to find a new love or even to nurture dreams.

         At the slightest offering of a woman’s touch, I simply left. I left Sjókona alone with no closure, or even the things she would need for her own well-being. I looked for a reason to blame her, but really there was none.  I looked for a way to release myself from the responsibility for leaving her as I did. And I found a boatload of Norsemen heading to the sea. I suggested they stop for her just to easy my own conscience.

         Now I find myself with so many ships and men gathering for a journey, waiting for orders, marking the wait with stories and songs. A storyteller steps up this night to tell us a tale of the mother of sea monsters known to wait at that house with no door.

         He describes something I don’t want to hear. It is a tale of an old woman in death, laid on the rocks just where I had left Sjókona. I know death devours the physical person, but he seems to be describing someone completely different from Sjókona. This woman was older, and dressed in red silks – Sjókona’s dress was tattered, gray linen. Only her straight silver hair was the same, but in this tale Sjókona’s jade pendant was clutched in the hands of the corpse.

As the storyteller unwinds the tale, the lusty shouts from this audience go from hoots and hollers to quiet contemplation. He continues.

“But that old woman was not the goddess of the sea, mother of monsters, mermaid, harpy or the seer of storms and death. The sailors waited to meet woman immortal and that they did. While they were gathered around the corpse, there, emerging from the vacant house came the sea mother, bold and angry, winds shifting her gowns of cloud like a luffing sheet on a sturdy mast.

“She shouted for the sailors to leave her mother be. She walked toward them with her terrifying presence, as fleshy as any human woman, but cold, riled in wrath, cursing and pointing and demanding a god among men to father her spawn!”  

(Continues Tuesday, May 6)


#67.14, Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Moorings at Bergenshalvoyen
 

The tale the storyteller offers tickles the sailors’ imaginations in one way. But for me, I think of her tender touch on my tired shoulders that day that set me grieving and leaving her there. Now I hurt for her all the more.

The one who is telling the story goes on.

“The wind was calm, the river like glass, the oars tipped deep and slow, with no more sound than a fish touching the surface. They came round the rock point, and there, laid out on the rocks, all alone, was…”

He is interrupted by the whooping and cheering of these men.

My guilty imagination sickens me. If I prayed for forgiveness, God would answer me to take the responsibility to make it right. What can I do now? Starring into the heavens, I chose not to pray for penance as so many brilliant colors parade across the winter’s night sky teasing my conscience like the laughter of a whole flotilla of drunken sailors. There is no beauty in the night’s dancing sky when I know, deep in my heart, the story he will tell is of a cruel abandonment.

He goes on, “Of course, they moored the ship, and each man there slipped over the gunnels and onto the rocks, creeping ever so closely toward the woman, laying there alone, facing skyward, unflinching.”

“They gathered around not to awaken her – she was wearing silken gowns in pinks and reds and golden strands of precious fibers…”

         This storyteller is taking license to tell it his own way. I know Sjókona’s dress is common cloth of gray.

         “Her hair flowed out on the pillow” – this story has a pillow? – “her hair in a lavish spread of silver – straight and pure…”

         He is describing Sjókona’s flow of silver hair, but her dress was plain, and there was no pillow.

         He continues, “Her lips were…” murmurs of anticipation among the listeners, “… were the cold blue of death.”

         I suck back my howl of hurt and touch the pattern of the cross to my forehead and shoulders.

         The teller of the story goes on, “Her skin was creased and crinkled with age, and her cheeks sunken in deep hollows. Her long, boney fingers were woven together over her heart, as she clutched a pendant of green jade, which those of us who are far travelers know is only found in the east.”

(Continues Thursday, May 1, 2025)

#67.13, Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Moorings at Bergenshalvoyen

Content warning – for sexual implications as told in a campfire story.

         Be careful what you ask for. Asking prayers bring the likelihood that God will turn the petition back on one’s own conscience. So, when asking for God to watch over the sick or the lonely the answer might be given by sending the one who asks to be the caring hands for the need.

         When I walked away from Sjókona and left her alone in a house with no door to close behind me, with her longing for a child, it still weighs on my conscience. But my own grief then kept me from touching her. I prayed for her and the prayer was turned back on me. I told the sailors who would be passing by there that she was alone. Of course, they stopped there – a boat load of adventure seeking norsemen finding one woman, needy and starving.

And now, I dared to ask if she was returned safely to her homeland. The answer begins with a playful grin that pours into the story that tonight promises to entertain this lot of men gathered around the fire. It’s already being told all around.

         This storyteller moves around the bonfire to address each cluster of men on the upwind side of the smoke.

 “This thrall here who gathers the wood asked what became of Sjókona, mermaid, woman of the sea.  He told one of those who has yet to return that she was alone on the rocks singing her sorrowful song, waiting for sailors to find her and fill her longing for a child with the seed of …!”

He is drowned out by loud guffaws and cheers– obscenities in colors befitting the display of lights in the northern night skies. He shouts for quiet so he can continue. This ritual is nothing sacred like a priestly call for psalm response and tender affirmations of “amens.”

The crowd turns deadly silent to hear what happens next.

“Now this wood gathering slave asks what’s become of her.”

Listeners’ imaginations elicit more whooping and shouting. Even my own imagination paints the story with lurid imagery. And for me, this telling touches the terrible pain of my own bad conscience. We all imagine Sjókona laid out on the rocks with her tunic turned back exposing her woman’s nakedness – a house with no door.  This image taunts the story and haunts my conscience, leaving Sjókona so vulnerable.

The storyteller promises to tell us something more.

(Continues tomorrow)


#67.12, Thursday April 24, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Moorings at Bergenshalvoyen

         We are up the coast briskly, by the sail alone. At Bergenshalvoyen we take up the oars and follow the river along the peninsula to the rocky beach section of the harbor. My personal things, deerskins, and now my new shirt are folded next to the foot of my rowing stool. Emil is sorting through his personal trunk for his shirt – an undyed wool, pale cream as a white sheep’s wool. Now, he sees my shirt is red.

         “You’re a thrall! I thought you were one of us! I showed you my personal things! And you never even told me what you were.”

         “I didn’t know until I was assigned a shirt. Does that make a difference?”

         “Of course!  We are different now. I shouldn’t have let you see my Christian things.”

         As we are making our way onto the shore some worn waxed sails from the ships are already spread as tarps for camping on the beach. I have deer skins that make a fine lean-to. I invite Emil to share the shelter with me, since there is room enough for two people. I should have realized that “share” is not something he understands. Now he has taken my extra hide. So, now I will be sleeping out on the rocks with the other thralls.  With night fires burning, no one is freezing.

         Tonight, the clear skies are stunning. And I am thinking of Sjókona, telling me I needed to stay with her because there were things I didn’t know. She said there was ‘dagaz’ for light of the gods. Are these beams of pinks and greens that dance through these nights the thing she said I didn’t know? Does anyone know this?

         More ships are arriving each day and here is that ship that brought Sjókona and I on the West wind. It’s landed here, along with others that have come from across that same sea. I’m watching that particular ship. I told one of the sailors that Sjókona was there alone and that she needed to return across the sea to her home.  Now lots of longships are arriving here, so I am asking if anyone knows of her, and if she is safe.

         One grizzly Norseman raises an eyebrow and grins.

         “Ah, yes, Woman of the sea, mother of the serpents, she said she was waiting there to receive the child of the gods.  We, being generous men of the sea offered – Ah, but you have to wait to hear this story told.”

(Continues Tuesday, April 29, 2025)

#67.11, Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         We are leaving here this morning to sail on the fresh wind into the harbor of Bergenshalvoyen just north of us, our meeting place. The coxswain announces this is the place where these ships will join with others and in greater numbers we will set our sails anew.  We will make our camp site on the beach area, behind the rocky shore on the bay side. Emil is grumbling that the Norsemen weren’t told to bring their own tarps and tents.  I happen to have deerskins for a tarp, so now I find the only thing I have happens to be the very thing I need. Our ship’s coxswain finishes his instructions, then calls me aside.

         He makes good on his promise to pay for my work as a rower, giving me a woven woolen shirt. He provides one that was once dyed red, which seems very fine quality and I suppose the color would add to the cost. I humbly offer to take an undyed shirt if that would be a savings.  He gives me a long incredulous glare.

         “The red is for the thrall, you know.”

         “No, I wouldn’t have thought that.  It would be more expensive to make.”

         “It is more expensive, because it is owned by one who is wealthier than the wearer of the shirt.”

         “So, my new red shirt is owned by a wealthy man?”

         “Yes, you are owned by a wealthy man who provides a shirt for you.”

         “You mean, I am here as a thrall and not a free man as when I came?”

         He doesn’t affirm that assumption with an actual answer.

         “Whose thrall am I?” I ask.

         “All the red shirts you see belong to one man who is the trader of slaves.”

         “I understand.” What else could I say?

         The shirt is wonderful, warm and soft, stretching to fit perfectly. It is a luxury to wear a shirt now and not simply a deerskin with fang holes here and there. It would be expected that a foreigner, such as I am here, would be a slave. I know that I’m at the whims and mercy of Norsemen masters. But learning that I am a thrall is more of a shock than I had expected. I’m in a place where I don’t know the structures of power; as a thrall, at least the expectations for me will be assigned.

(continues tomorrow)