Hermit in 14th-century French manuscript - (British Library)
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Grettir’s half-brother Thorstein was a surprisingly good singer. Indeed, he was an exceptionally powerful one. So much so that as he set aside the grim, meathook realities of his situation in that cold and unpleasant call, waiting for death alongside a fellow-prisoner who had already lost all hope, his voice rang out through the walls and into the streets outside, so much so that his cell-mate’s spirits were immediately lifted and he was filled with joy, so much so that a woman named Spes, passing by with a large retinue of servants, was stopped in her tracks by his voice and went out of her way to go looking for its source.
Who was this extraordinary singer, she wondered, and then, once she’d located him there in the cell, what had he done to get there, and was he as capable in other areas as he was as a singer? As to this last question, Thorstein replied in a dryly modest fashion that there was little evidence of this, but Spes was not put off by his answers or by the trouble that she found him in. Would the mysterious singer mind if she were to pay his ransom, would he, as she put it, “accept [his] life from [her]”?
As you might imagine, Thorstein would indeed accept the generous gift of life and freedom—he wasn’t itching to die—but he didn’t grab at the offer as desperately as one would think. He insisted that he’d only come out with the stipulation that she also ransom his cell-mate, a man he scarcely knew. Otherwise, he said when Spes questioned the value of this second apparently nameless prisoner, they’d just both stay where they were and be content with their lot, but the two of them would not need to. She arranged for both of them to be released and then took Thorstein away to conceal him in her home, for Thorstein must have been a remarkable singer indeed.
In today’s conclusion to the Grettir Saga, we follow the story of Thorstein and Spes home with them, finishing up a saga that was suddenly something of a romantic comedy and, maybe even more surprising, was going to tie it all together with a neat little bow of Christian morality.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that follows the stories of medieval travellers, from friars and envoys to weak-armed avengers with startlingly attractive singing voices. And it is a podcast with a Patreon, one which you can find at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can hear episodes early, often, and without the annoyance of advertising, all on a pay what you can/will basis. Thank you, all of you who are already doing so or have done for any length of time in the past. I really do appreciate it.
And now, back to the story, back to the end of the story of Grettir Saga, really and truly the end this time, the actual last episode of the series.
We pick it up where Thorstein leaves the cell where he’d waited for death—it seems not to have been a long stay—says farewell to his cellmate, and heads home with his benefactor Spes.
Spes was quite wealthy—you probably got that already. She was besides that popular, respected, connected, and very much already married, joined in a marriage which displeased her to a rich man named Sigurd, and this Sigurd started to notice certain changes around the house once Thorstein moved in. It was apparently a large house because he didn’t actually notice Thorstein himself, or the time which Spes increasingly spent with him, but he did notice the way Spes’s mood seemed to have changed, and he noticed that money and valuables seemed to be flowing from the household, his money and valuables. Sigurd suspicions grew until he felt sure enough to confront his wife.
“You pay no heed to our property,” he said to her. You squander it. “You act as though you are sleepwalking, and never want to be in the same place as I am.” He walked right up to the brink of the accusation that she was “keeping some man,” as he indeed she was, but Spes pushed back, reminding him of the independence that she and her kin had claimed for her when they’d married, insisting on it, and concluding that if Sigurd did accuse her of “this unverifiable foul charge,” then the two of them would “never speak alone again.”
You might expect the confrontation to serve as something of a warning shot to the couple, a cause for newfound caution in their time spent together, but it seems that the opposite was the effect. Now, they were increasingly free in their enjoyment of one another’s company, “not careful to shield themselves from the gossip of malicious people, because [Spes] trusted in her own cleverness and popularity,” and their behaviour together reflected this confidence.
They were nearly caught one evening when Spes had asked Thorstein to sing for her, both of them comfortable in the belief that Sigurd was away drinking. Thorstein had been singing for a while when they heard the crash at the door. Fortunately they’d at least locked it, but now Sigurd and his men were on the other side, demanding to be let in, and there was no other way out. There was nowhere for Thorstein to go but into a large treasure chest which Spes had unlocked to show him its contents and now ushered him into, urging him not to make a sound. She’d just locked it back up when the door burst open, and her husband exploded into the room.
“Why force your way in with such a commotion?” she demanded. “Are your enemies after you?”
But Sigurd was not so easily put off. He’d heard the sound of singing, clearly not hers, and he was, not inaccurately, sure that there was another man in there with Spes and that she liked this man’s singing more than his own. All of this he told her, but she just told him that if he was so very certain then to produce this man with the magical voice.
And Sigurd looked. There were no other exits, and he and his men searched, and they searched with steadily decreasing confidence, never bothering with that treasure chest, until Spes finally spoke again. Well, she said, “Why haven’t you taken him, since you are so sure of yourself?”
Sigurd was actually still sure of himself, but as he turned to his men for support, they seemed much less so, especially in the face of Spes’s anger. They started to speak in wishy-washy mutterings of how “One often hears things that are not really there.” Finally, Sigurd gave up and left, but he hadn’t given up on the idea that Spes had a secret lover. It was now very much that kind of story, and it wouldn’t be long before they were nearly caught again.
This time they were in the room where the household clothes and fabrics were kept, and Spes had some of them out to show Thorstein when again there was a noise at the door, and again Sigurd and his men began to break it down. This time, Spes hastily concealed Thorstein under a pile of fabric and was leaning casually against it when Sigurd made it through the door and demanded to know if she still denied his accusations. “There are now people here,” he said, “who saw you both.”
But Spes remained calm. Go ahead and look, she shrugged. Search the whole room, if it pleases you, “only leave me in peace, neither touching nor pushing me in any way.” And of course they found no one. She asked him if he would now retract his “slanderous accusation,” but he would not.
After that, the couple was a little more careful. Thorstein mostly stayed away with the Varangians, taking counsel from one of them in particular, a future King of Norway named Harald Sigurdarson, who the saga credits for how events were going to play out. He mostly stayed away until it was known that the husband would be away on some business. Now he and Spes spent their time mostly in a part of the house that protruded over the sea and featured a hidden trapdoor known only to them. Now, when Sigurd caught them—because he had not really gone anywhere, instead remaining to watch the house—he quietly brought his ever-present men around to the room’s window and had them peek in one after another to confirm what he saw. Now they all agreed that Spes was indeed within the room with another man. Now, he thought, hurrying up to the door, there was no way the secret lovers could get away with it, not this time.
But when they burst into the room, Thorstein had already disappeared through that trapdoor and into the water below, and Spes had already sealed it up behind him. As much as Sigurd and his men knew for certain that a man had been there, and as much as they searched, they found no one there but Spes herself, putting on a great show of nonchalance about it all. “It is just as in the old saying,” she said, referencing an old saying with which I am unfamiliar. “By the third time everything is clear. And so it is with you, Sigurd. You have now … disturbed me three times, but are you now more knowledgeable than you were at the start?”
“This time I am not alone in making the claim,” he retorted, and “I will not in any way allow this dishonour to go unpaid.” “You will have to prove your innocence.”
“As far I am concerned,” she replied, “you are proposing exactly what I would have myself offered,” but “Meanwhile, you might consider the consequences.”
It was agreed that they would go to the bishop to finally settle the dispute, the public nature of Sigurd’s claims demanding no less, and Sigurd went away satisfied that he’d at last have justice. Spes stayed there by the water until evening when she could see from the flame of Thorstein’s signal fire that he had swum to safety.
Arrangements with the bishop were soon made. Sigurd’s charge, that she had been giving away his treasure to another man, was voiced and a day set when Spes would answer to it, not so much with evidence as with oaths.
When that day came, she proceeded to the church in the company of kinsmen and friends, of whom she had many, and they were well on their way when a curious scene unfolded. The road ahead was flooded by stagnant water, and Spes was hesitating at the edge when one of the beggars who gathered there stepped forward and offered to carry her. He was tall and thin, very weak looking, and she declared her doubt that he could manage the task, threatening him with flogging if he could not. “Be that as it may,” he said, “it would be proof of your humility,” and onto his back she climbed.
The crossing was an incredibly dramatic display, the poor man swaying unsteadily beneath her weight and actually supporting himself with crutches as he stumbled slowly forward. At times, it seemed that he would not make it all, and then, when he had gathered his strength and just about reached about the other side he fell forward. With one last heave, he managed to place Spes onto dry earth, but his hand also grabbed out to catch his balance, touching her knee and sliding across her thigh.
She reacted in disgust and anger, heartily cursing the stranger until the people around her pleaded on his behalf and she at last shook the gold coins from her purse, saying “This is for you, old man. It is proper that you not be denied full payment, after my treating you so harshly. We now part with your receiving a return for your labour.” Spes and her party continued to the church without further incident. Only two who had been there knew the significance of what had happened.
At the church, a large crowd had assembled to see her face Sigurd’s accusation, to hear his charges of infidelity and of giving his gold to some other man, and to those charges, she said this:
“I give no credence to your accusation. But what is the name of the man that you claim to have seen with me in the house? … I declare myself above reproach. I am prepared to swear an oath that I have given gold to no man, nor has any man touched my body in a defiling manner, except for my husband and that foul tramp who put his dirty hand on my thigh while carrying me over the ditch today.”
And on this statement, that she’d shared neither gold nor inappropriate contact with no man but her husband and that old man at the ditch, she swore her oath. There was general agreement that it had been well-spoken, more than satisfactory, and the witnesses of the incident with the, quote, “foul tramp” said it had indeed gone exactly as she’d said.
Next her kin piled in, railing against what was, if not a true accusation, then certainly a slanderous insult that could not be allowed to go unanswered. Spes must be compensated. With their support, she pushed for and received a divorce, along with the bulk of the couple’s property. The unfortunate Sigurd was left with very little and was forced to leave the city.
It would eventually be talked of that there had been something a little rehearsed in Spes’s oath, and it would come out that of course that “foul tramp” had been Thorstein himself, for on that fact Spes’s ability to be truthful in her vow had hinged. Some thought that Harald, that future king, had devised the whole scheme to rid them of Spes’s husband, but by then it was too late for Sigurd.
Thorstein and Spes married and lived two years together in Constantinople before travelling back to his home in Norway, this trip, with their large retinue and substantial wealth, a much different one than that which had initially brought him to the Byzantine capital. They thrived in Norway, had children together there. Spes was well-loved and Thorstein was famous for having gone all the way to Constantinople to avenge Grettir the Strong. He was said to have served as retainer to King Magnus. Though Grettir had laughed at his spindly arms, Thorstein, of the two, had won a much happier life through good fortune, trickery, and an excellent singing voice. He’d been maybe a little too fortunate.
That was not quite the end of the story for himself and for Spes, though it might very much seem like it, for Frodo and the other ringbearers still had not departed Middle Earth by boat. This saga, which had swung between Christian and strikingly pre-Christian elements, would have an ending decidedly in keeping with the former.
King Magnus died, and there were many who urged Thorstein to enter the service of King Harald, who had since returned from Constantinople, but Spes urged him not to. “We owe more of a debt to another king,” she said, a debt which could be “settled neither by [their] kinsmen nor by [their] wealth.” “We both are now getting older, and our youthful days are behind us. We have until now been more concerned with our own desires than with Christian teaching or the call of righteousness.” It was time for them to pay that debt, and it was an accounting that she said could only be made in Rome. Thorstein, who had made the decision for them to come to Norway, agreed that she should make this one. So arrangements were made.
Their property was divided, half left in the hands of those of his family who would be charged with raising their children, some donated, some taken. They invited all their relations and each gave parting speeches. “Look after everything that I leave behind, as though I shall not return to Norway,” he said. Soon after, they departed for Rome.
That journey is not covered in the saga, but their time there is, their confessions, their absolution—for it was looked well upon that they had sought it out of their own volition—and their decision after, when they had been urged to live pure lives from then on.
At Spes’s direction, they arranged for two stone huts to be built. Then, quote:
“At the conclusion of this work, when the time was suitable and all matters attended to, they ended their worldly life together. They did so of their own accord, that they might instead enjoy eternal life together in the next world. Each then entered a stone cell, and there they lived for as long a time as God chose. And so ended their lives.
Many say,” read the saga, “that Thorstein and his wife Spes were among the luckiest people, considering their troubles. There is no account that any of [their] children or any of [their] descendents have ever come to Iceland.”
So concludes the Saga of Grettir the Strong, which tells as with its last words that Grettir was judged by Sturla the Lawman to be incomparable with other Icelandic outlaws, for he was the cleverest, the strongest, and unlike all others, had been avenged in far-off Constantinople, a kind of exotic cherry placed atop the whole thing, which is sort of like this Thorstein conclusion itself. It seems a little stapled on, doesn’t it, a little bit like a later addition to the story, which indeed it is thought to be.
In their introduction to Jesse Byock’s translation, Byock and Davide Zori suggest that Thorstein’s “amorous adventures” were “almost certainly late additions …, probably added by the fourteenth century author or a later scribe,” and that they had been borrowed from the chivalric Romance of Tristan of Isolde. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a narrative purpose here in the saga. Thorstein’s good luck contrasts sharply with that of Grettir, living under Glaumr’s curse, and his Christian ending contrasts just as sharply with Grettir’s, the one of them withdrawing from the profane world to a monkish cell in order to live out a purer life, the other withdrawing to an outlaw’s hideout, an island-bound hut where he is struck down by the old magic.
With all this talk of magic and of struggles beneath the earth and above it, with trolls, the returned undead, etc, you might question the historical basis of the entire thing. What is this story doing on a history podcast, you might even be wondering, but it is, despite those supernatural elements, a story with roots in history, with a basis in the effort to chronicle events drawn from older written and oral sources, some of which the author themselves identifies in text—in-text citations, one might say—some of which can be otherwise identified. It is a story peopled with familiar historical characters, with known kings and bishops for example, and it is also largely not about monsters, and certainly not about gods. It’s about the settlement of Iceland to begin with, and then mostly about feuds, small-scale fights, personal disputes, and legal struggles at the assembly.
The story left a landscape marked by its events, in its many “Grettir’s Lifts” which we heard of in the series, a “Grettir’s Hut” where his head had been stored, a “Grettir’s Mound” where that head was buried, and so on, and not just in the author’s own time and within the story. There are many places which bear his name now, a hot-spring near Drangey, a cliff and a water source on the island itself, a number of spots around one of his outlaw encampments and where his hut had sat near a lake, a number around the family homestead, a very striking looking landscape where farming is still done and where you can see a monument to his mother, Asdis. It’s a large stone, of course, and on each of its sides a scene from the saga is depicted in relief: Grettir’s head being placed before her, he and Illugi parting from her company, the spearing of her other son in the doorway of their home, the gifting of the sword from her to Grettir before he first left as an outlaw, still in his teens. Something to look out for should you find yourself in Iceland.
I hope you enjoyed my telling of this saga. I may cover other such sagas in the future, but probably not for a solid while. There are so many other stories to tell.
Thank you for listening to this one. I’ll be back soon with some bonus listening on the Patreon and soon after with a full new episode and possibly the start of a full new series.
I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
Grettir's Saga, translated by Jesse Byock. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Grettir's Saga, translated by Denton Fox and Hermann Palsson. University of Toronto Press, 1974.