B0046ZREEU EBOK Read Online Free PDF

loaves into quarters and smear them with butter. I remember burning my fingers eating them, while butter dripped down my chin and over my fingers, and I used to lick it up afterwards like a cat washing itself on a Roman doorstep. By spring the grain would be long gone, and we’d be eating our butter with fish again as usual. But the loaves were my favourite, and I’ve never forgotten them.
    Late summer was the best time for food. I liked haymaking, and milking in the ring on fine evenings, and the days when we lit a fire outside for dyeing wool or boiling meat. Perhaps because I’d known hunger first of all it satisfied me hugely to see the barrels being filledfor winter – layers of meat and fish laid down and preserved in sour whey; barrels of butter and skyr; dried fish and hunks of dried beef and pork and seal meat. Two – or was it just one? – lucky winters we had a whale, and then there was meat hanging to dry everywhere. I liked to see the hay brought in and piled in the barn, and know we could feed enough cattle for the eight months they’d need it, and maybe give extra to a milking cow so we’d even have fresh milk till spring. I suppose those early years have left me with an immense interest in food. I’m a good cook, though I say so myself, and I love to see guests at my table. I love to press food on them and stand over them while they eat as much as they possibly can. My sons used to laugh at me – just as well, perhaps, because luckily they never grew fat. Snorri was always thin, and although Thorbjorn was a chubby baby he soon grew as lean and tough as his brother.
    I liked cooking the best of the indoor work. In winter we had to do mostly weaving, and that was all right, but I hated sewing. Halldis wasn’t strict; her way wasn’t to punish, but to find ways of helping me to like what I must learn. When I was nine she gave me an engraved bone needlecase to hang round my neck, with six needles of different sizes. I liked the case because it was pretty, but I still didn’t like sewing. It took me years to discover why I found it harder than other girls. I used to think I was stupid because I could never learn to thread my needle by lamplight, though sometimes I could manage if I went outside into the daylight. Oddly enough it was Freydis who first said, ‘But can’t you see ?’ during that first winter at Brattahlid, when I was still trying to impress them all. ‘Look,’ she went on, and shoved a white cloth on to my lap. ‘Try that. Can you see the thread now?’ I could, too. Isn’t it strange that Freydis should realise at once that I couldn’t see, whereas Halldis, who loved me, never understood that what I saw with my eyes was different to what she saw with hers? But to this day I’ve never learned to like sewing. I used to reward my thralls for embroidering my tunics and Karlsefni’s shirts, because I gave up trying to do fine work after I married him, and I’ve never done any since. That’s shocking, isn’t it, for a wellborn woman like me to be so poor in accomplishments?
    Perhaps it was because of my sight that I always preferred to beoutdoors. I’ve always loved the light, and I dread the dark of winter. I remember Arnarstapi in the light: sun on snow; the mountains of Snaefelsnes white against a slate-blue sea; moonlit snow on a winter afternoon, or green and golden summer light, with the land smelling of flowers when the hay is ripening; or the damp grey light that comes with mizzling rain. I remember the paths worn through the grass between buildings. I liked to visit the thralls in their huts, the shepherd and the cowherd families. As a child I was welcome everywhere without ceremony, and I’d always accept food at any house I visited, a bit of dried fish, usually, or a bowl of skyr that I could scrape clean with a shell.
    You mustn’t think that we were lonely, even though we were distant from the main settlements along the north shore of Snaefelsnes. The next farm