21/12/2024, by aezcr

5. Time to relax (and worry) with friends… plus some Christmas travel chaos

With the tendency to gather in followers and retainers in winter’s darkest days Christmas seems to have also been a good time to find people at home, and with the men in the saga acting like… men in a saga… this was a good time to go visiting.

In Gairsay we find Sveinn Ásleifarson at home at Christmas. We can picture the scene. Sat in a large hall he, the saga’s antihero, the cunning and violent Sveinn, is drinking, chewing the fat and pondering things:

It happened on the tenth day of Christmas in Gairsay that Sveinn Ásleifarson sat drinking with his servants. He began to speak and rubbed his nose, ‘It is my belief that Earl Haraldr is on his way to the islands.’ His servants, they say that that would be unlikely because of the storms which were brewing. He said he knew they would think in this way, ‘Now I will,’ he says, ‘not let the earl know of my foreboding, but I suspect that that is a worse decision.’ That conversation was dropped and they drank as before (chapter 95).

Here we also get a sense of the extent of the Christmas period, with Sveinn continuing his festivities into day ten. And whilst he did that, ‘Earl Haraldr began his journey out to the Orkneys at Christmas; he had four ships and one hundred men; he laid up for two nights at Graemsay’. Here we learn of the perils of traveling at this time of year, since after landing at Hamnavoe,

‘on the thirteenth day of Christmas they went from there to Firth. They were in Maeshowe while a sudden hailstorm blew up; two of their men went mad there, and it was a great hindrance to their journey’ (chapter 95).

As Earl Haraldr found out, and as we all know, travelling over the festive period is never the easiest.

Tune in tomorrow for episode 6! ‘A strange Christmas visitor in a (blue) cape and a hood’.

Matthew Blake

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