Category: blog

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Once upon a time a scholar stepped onto a ship with a saga in hand; it sounds like the recipe for a bad joke, or a half-forgotten tale scribbled in the margins of manuscript come down from the Middle Ages. But this is how a modern-day saga starts, my saga of teaching Old Norse literature and culture aboard the Tecla, begins.

As a second-year DPhil in Old Norse at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English, my closest encounter with ships and seafaring prior to this year were the terse accounts of Norse voyages and the not infrequently sparse descriptions of ships in the medieval Icelandic sagas. My imagination could skim across the waters of the North Atlantic with Egill Skallagrímson, Óláfr Tryggvason, or Eiríkr hinn rauði but my body was rooted in Oxford. The Turville-Petre room to be exact. 

When the opportunity came to travel as a guest lecturer in Old Norse literature and culture aboard a 1915 traditional Dutch herring drifter, I dropped my pens and grabbed (my metaphorical) sailing boots to join a voyage which would span almost the breadth of the North Atlantic an embark on an adventure through these storied landscapes. 

Figure 2 The Tecla, Greenland

Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor

Over a six-week period from the beginning of September to the middle of October 2024 the Tecla sailed from Nuuk, Greenland to Ullapool, Scotland, a voyage of over two thousand nautical miles. This was not only a journey through space, but also a journey backwards through time. Sailing from the western end of the North Atlantic to its eastern fringes, the Tecla retraced routes once taken by Norse sailors and traders who plied these waters over a thousand years ago as they sailed from Greenland eastwards to Iceland and on to Norway or south to Scotland. 

The first region the Tecla sailed through, Greenland, was one of the last places to be settled by the Norse. The Vinland sagas tell how Greenland was first discovered and settled by Eiríkr hinn rauði and his followers, but they also recount the first Norse voyages to North America under Eiríkr’s son Leifr and his daughter Freydís. Over the course of the Tecla’s voyage, the sagas, the works of Arí inn fróði, and the Icelandic annals were just some of my literary companions as I lectured on topics ranging from how and why the Viking Age began, the history of the Greenlandic settlements and later on, the Icelandic settlements as we approached Iceland, how the Norse built their houses and farmed, the myths, Christianisation, the laws, how society was organised, weapons, and ships. 

The Greenlandic settlements are also the only Norse settlements which did not survive into the modern era and so much of the discussion onboard during this part of the voyage centred on the environmental and population factors which may have caused the decline of these communities. Witnessing this landscape from the perspective of sailing through it gave me a sense of its hostility to human inhabitation and the fragility of medieval and modern settlements along its coasts.

During this leg of the sailing trip, I had two rare experiences of teaching. The first of these came at the end of the first week of travelling. After seven days of brutal winds, fog, and cold rains, the weather finally cleared enough to move out from the inshore passages and set the sails. The sun blazed from clear skies and the ice cap sat almost at the water’s edge amidst grey gravel banks deposited by the receding glaciers on the coastline while the wind whistled through the stay sail and mizzen sail. The Tecla was skimming the water’s surface and finally, I understood the joy of sailing. 

For this day’s lecture, I decided on a change of scenery. I typically gave lectures in the salon where the guests and I could shelter from the weather and I had a the use of a projector. However, I realised that few things beat being outside on a sailing boat when the weather is on your side. And what is more, even fewer things beat sitting on a traditional sailing ship with a saga in hand talking about Norse history while the Greenlandic coast slides by. 

Figure 3 Me, sailing and teaching outside aboard Tecla as sail down the Greenlandic coast 

Photo Credits: Jorrit Harrsema

The second, and very much surreal, teaching experience during the Greenlandic leg came when the Tecla anchored off Hérjólfsnes and everybody on board went ashore. Hérjólfsnes is a very small headland jutting out into the waters at the mouth of a fjord system close to Greenland’s southern tip. The remains of a longhouse built around a thousand years alongside some smaller buildings including the remains of a chapel built later litter the bare headland. According to the sagas, Hérjólfr Barðarson was amongst the first settlers to Greenland and Hérjólfsnes has been identified as the location of his farm. Unlike the more touristic and developed Eiriksfjorðr, Hérjólfsnes stands bare of tourist trails, modern glass heritage centres, and queues of tourists. The headland is extremely beautiful, but also well positioned along sailing routes, and it is easy to see why it was chosen for a farm site. Located at the edge of a fjord, ships could stop by bringing goods and news as they travelled north to the Western Settlement or could refuel before making the crossing to Iceland or perhaps Norway. 

The farm has been left more or less untouched for a thousand years. It is exposed to the raw elements of the weather with nothing but a little sign and an archaeological site plan to indicate its importance. Standing at the threshold of the longhouse I could finally bring to life how longhouses were built how people may have lived and farm in a place like Hérjólfsnes. To be able to stand in such an important archaeological site is a rare experience of history and it is only by stepping into places life Hérjolfsnes that I truly gained a sense of how special these places are.

Figure 4 Herjólfsnes, Greenland

Photo Credits: Willemijn Koenen

During the second leg of the voyage and with a new group of passengers, I turned the focus of my lectures to the Norse settlements on the other side of the Atlantic: Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, and Hebrides. These islands too are their share of stories and so my attention was turned to the worlds of Færeyinga saga, Orkneyinga saga, and the many references to travellers from these islands in the Icelandic Family sagas. With the exception of Faroes, these islands are places with long histories of settlement before the arrival of the Norse. The pattern of Norse settlement here therefore varies immensely from the history of the farmsteads in Greenland and Faroes which were unoccupied before the Norse made their homes there. The islands off the coast of Scotland have been inhabited for at least 4500 years and the traces of these earlier communities are scattered across the landscape. Stone circles, howes, brochs, wheelhouses, and barrows create a landscape imprinted with human touches reaching down through history.  In many places, the Norse built their houses on top of these earlier sites and so these places offer a window into how the Norse negotiated and co-existed with the people who came before. 

Figure 5 Kallur Lighthouse, Kalsoy, Faroes

Photo Credits: Gijs Sluik

The first stop after Iceland was Faroes. This small group of islands, standing out in the Atlantic about halfway between Norway and Iceland, was home to Norse communities from about 800 AD. On the island of Straumoy I moved my lecture theatre once again into the open air and took the group to Kvivík, an excavated longhouse with an adjacent cow-byre. This was once a high-status settlement dated to 1000 AD and gives a sense of what an important farm in Faroes might have looked like. 

Figure 6 Kvívik, Streymoy, Greenland

Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor

A few days later, we arrived in Shetland into Burrafirth on Unst. In the neighbouring bay, Haroldswick, there is a reconstruction of a longhouse, and a longship modelled on the Skidbladner. Ships were the lynchpin of Norse expansion and the Viking Age and it was here that I had the perfect teaching materials to show Norse technological innovations in shipping and to explain why these ships were so successful for raiding and travel. Although they are a far remove from modern ships and experiences of travel like on the Tecla, the reconstructed ship on Unst serves to highlights the dangers and risks of this kind of travel but also the successes of Norse ship-building. 

On Mainland, Shetland I took the group to Jarlshof. Jarlshof was first inhabited about 2500 years ago when the first broch was built there. Late on, Pictish wheelhouses were built on top of the earlier brochs and then even later, the Norse built longhouses at the same site. The site offers multiple layers of time through its excavated sections and illustrates the different ways people thought about architecture and living in the same place in the landscape.  Bringing the group to Jarlshof was important in highlighting the way in which the Norse settlers took over earlier sites of importance in communities but also to show how they imprinted their culture and power structures onto the lands they settled. 

Figure 7 Longhouse, Haroldswick, Unst, Shetland

Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor

St Magnus, an earl of Orkney, was killed by his kinsmen in a feud, and later canonised as a saint. His cult quickly spread across Orkneys and Shetland during the medieval period and the traces of his importance to people’s lives are reflected in the numerous churches dedicated to Magnus throughout these isles. In Orkney, on the isle of Egilsay, Magnus was betrayed and murdered by his cousin Hakon Paulsson and the island became a local pilgrimage site attracting visitors for centuries. It was to Egilsay that we too made a journey to the island from where the Tecla was docked on Rousay. Switching from my previous classrooms of longhouses and ships, the remains of St Magnus’ church became my latest classroom. Amidst the grey walls of the holy site where people once learned about the word of God, I taught about the history of Christianity in the Orkneys and the life of St Magnus as it is found in Orkneyinga saga. 

Figure 8 St Magnus Church, Egilsay, Orkney

Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor

The Hebrides were the last group of isles to pass through before the Tecla arrived at her final port in Ullapool. By the time the Norse arrived in the Hebrides these islands were heavily Gaelicised by the Irish kingdom of Dal Ríada. The Norse anchored fleets in the Hebrides for raids south into the Irish Sea and control of the islands was frequently contested by the Norse of Dublin and Man and the Norse in the Orkneys. One of the most important sources of evidence for Norse occupation in Scotland are the placenames. Shetland and Orkneys are almost entirely dominated by Scandinavian place-names whereas the Hebrides have a wide mixture of Gaelic and Norse place-names. Travelling through these islands, I delved into the theories of why the Norse did not culturally dominate the Hebrides as they did elsewhere in the Scottish isles and explained some of the theories about the early patterns of Norse raiding and occupation in this area.

Standing aboard the Tecla, a traditional sailing ship, with a saga in hand in the North Atlantic is a rare experience of history and of seeing the world the Norse explored and inhabited a thousand years ago. As an Old Norse DPhil student, to teach Norse history and to share a little of my passion as we sailed through the North Atlantic was an even rarer gift and perhaps a stranger saga of modern times that is only possible thanks to Tecla, her crew, and her captain. Sailing while teaching with sagas was a new experience for me working in public engagement but it is something that I have found great joy in and look forward to finding more ways to bring my work and the wonders of the medieval Icelandic sagas to audiences beyond academia. 

Main photo: The Tecla, Prince Christian Sund, Greenland. Photo Credits: Mary Catherine O’Connor