A Heap of Dried Fish from which a Swishing Cow-Tail Emerges
In his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937) Rudyard Kipling recalls his childhood visits to Edward Burne-Jones’s house ‘The Grange’, in Fulham. On one of these he encountered William Morris:
As a rule Morris took no notice of anything outside what was in his mind at the moment. But I remember one amazing exception. My cousin Margaret and I, then about eight, were in the nursery eating pork-dripping on brown bread when we heard ‘Uncle Topsy’ in the hall calling, as he usually did, for ‘Ned’ or ‘Georgie.’ The matter was outside our world. So we were the more impressed when, not finding the grown-ups, he came in and said he would tell us a story. We settled ourselves under the table and he, gravely as ever, climbed on to our big rocking-horse. There, slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow’s tail waving from a heap of dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards, when I was old enough to know a maker’s pains, it dawned on me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal, which was then interesting him. In default of grown-ups, and pressed by need to pass the story between his teeth and clarify it, he had used us. [Kipling, Something of Myself, ch 1]
Kipling, however, is mistaken here: Morris was reciting, or perhaps recasting, not Burnt Njal but Eyrbyggja Saga, ‘The Saga of the People of Eyri’. This lengthy Saga, not as famous as some of the other Icelandic Sagas, tells of Snorri Thorgrímsson, the chieftain of Snæfellsnes in western Iceland. Snorri, wise and brave, though also ‘enduring in wrath and deep in hatred’, has converted to Christianity and moreover declared Christianity the official religion of Iceland. Nonetheless, much of this Saga, as with the other Sagas, concerns the feuds between people: varying slights, from theft to murder, provoking retaliatory violence and murder, eventually being brought before the bar of the Althing. As this anonymous post on Astral Codex Ten puts it:
When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits.
Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes — suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past six months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi). Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side — usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” — in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer.
It is indeed striking how much of the Icelandic sagas, by weight, is slaying, revenge-slaying, lawsuits, arbitration, fines and so on. Certainly Eyrbyggja Saga is very much about this: Snorri and his foster brothers kill Arnkel on his farm. During the court case that follows Snorri’s foster-brother Thorleif Thorbrandsson is convicted and outlawed, but Snorri sides with Thorbrandsson in his feud with the Thorlaksson family. Eventually this is resolved, and Snorri marries his daughter to the son of Thormod Thorlaksson. But Snorri also attempts to kill Bjorn Asbrandsson, because he had an affair with his sister Thurid while she was married to Thorodd — and Snorri also fights Ospak Kjallaksson, a Norseman whose band of raiders is pillaging Snorri and his neighbors. Snorri kills Ospak but spares Ospak’s son which is storing up trouble for later. And so on.
Interspersed with all this feuding and slaying are a number of ghost stories, and it was these, rather than the constant murderous bickering, that attracted Morris. Here, in its entirety, is Eyrbyggja Saga chapter 52: ‘The Beginning Of Wonders At Frodis-Water’.
At Frodis-water was there a great fire-hall, and lock-beds within, as the wont then was. Out from the hall there were two butteries, one on either hand, with stock-fish stored in one, and meal in the other. There were meal-cakes baked every evening in the fire-hall, as the wont was, and men mostly sat thereby or ever they went to meat.
Now that same night, as men sat by the meal-fires at Frodiswater, they saw how by the panelling of the house-wall was come a half-moon, and all might see it who were in the house; and it went backward and widdershins round about the house, nor did it vanish away while folk sat by the fires. So Thorod asked Thorir Wooden-leg what that might bode. Thorir said it was the Moon of Weird, ‘and the deaths of men will follow thereafter,’ says he.
So a whole week this thing endured, that the Moon of Weird came in there evening after evening.
The ‘stock-fish’ are dried or smoked fish, heaped in a big pile in one of the house’s larders. ‘Meal’ means corn. The moon travelling ‘widdershins’, or the wrong way, around the hall is the prelude to various dreadful wonders. The first is a shepherd who dies in the house and is buried in the churchyard. As is the Icelandic way, a hole is made in the house-wall, the corpse being pushed through it and the hole afterwards sealed. It was thought that if a corpse were carried through the front door its ghost would know how to come back inside and haunt the inhabitants. But despite this precaution, the shepherd’s ghost bothers the dwellers of Frodis-Water.
A little after that great hauntings befell; and on a night as Thorir Wooden-leg went out for his needs, and turned off aside from the door, when he would go in again, he saw how the shepherd was come before the door. Then would he go in again, but the shepherd would nowise have it so; and Thorir was fain to get away, but the shepherd went at him, and got hold of him, and cast him homeward up against the door. At this he was affrighted exceedingly; yet he got him to his bed, and he was by then grown coal-blue all over. From this he fell sick and died, and was buried there at the church; but ever after were the twain, the shepherd and Thorir Wooden-leg, seen in company, and therefrom were folk full of dread, as was like to be.
The next is a supernatural seal-head that rises from the floor of the house: ‘it fell out at Frodis-water, when the meal-fires were lighted and men came gathering into the hall, that they saw how a seal’s head came up through the floor of the fire-hall.’ Various people try thwacking this apparition on its bonce to get it to go down again: a home-woman and a house-carle both try hitting it with a club but it does no good. Then ‘the swain Kiartan’ bashes it with a sledgehammer, and though at first this has no effect Kiartan persists until the seal-head sinks into the ground again.
Next we come to the bit that Kipling remembered:
And after this the time came when need was of stock-fish, and men went to search the heap; and the man who went up thereon saw that up from the heap came a great tail as big as a brindled cow’s tail, and it was short-haired and seal-haired; he who went up on to the heap caught at the tail and tugged, and called on other men to come help, him. So folk fared up on to the heap, both men and women, and tugged at the tail, and to no avail, and they thought none otherwise than that the tail was dead; but lo, as they pulled, the tail drew down through their hands, so that the skin came off the palms of those who had the firmest hold thereon, and nought was known afterwards of that tail.
Then was the stock-fish heap taken apart, and every fish therein was found torn from the skin, so that there was no fish found in his skin in the lower part of the heap; but nothing living was found therein.
Weird! The follow-up to this involves ghost-Thorir and the other ghosts haunting the house at Yule feast: they enter the house and shake their dirty clothes (ghost clothes, one presumes) all over the place, throwing mud on the guests. This happens for three consecutive nights; wherever Kiartan moves his guests the ghosts follow, chucking ghost-mud everywhere and killing servants and farm-hands. The situation is eventually resolved by Snorri (he’s Kiartan’s uncle), who exorcises the house with Christian rituals, banishing the ghosts from Iceland altogether.
What is going on with the cow-tail swishing out of the heap of smoked fish? Ghosts are uncanny iterations of something that has died but not died. The baked meal-cakes don’t bother the Icelanders, since they were never fully alive; but seals, fish, cattle, are all at our disposal: to be killed and eaten. What’s odd about the specific image that Morris related to 8-year-old Rudyard K. (and which stuck in the latter’s mind) is the strange mixture of land and sea, of turf and surf: not only is this a land-animal’s tail thrashing about in a pile of sea-creatures, that land-animal’s skin is as rough as sealskin. Why would a poltergeist-y cow bother a heap of dead fish, of all things? It seems to have something to do with the idea of flaying skin off things: from dead fish, and living human palms. Ripping away the surface appearance of things, rending the veil, revealing the terrifying uncanny deathly reality behind the comforting illusion.
