Yggdrasil · Humankind

Þjóðhildr: A Church Within the Household Landscape

A Greenland saga where a farmer’s wife turns Christian and builds a church, straining her marriage.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Sephton’s translation

Eirik took coldly to the proposal to forsake his religion, but his wife, Thjodhild, promptly yielded, and caused a church to be built not very near the houses. The building was called Thjodhild’s Church; in that spot she offered her prayers, and so did those men who received Christ, and they were many. After she accepted the faith, Thjodhild would have no intercourse with Eirik, and this was a great trial to his temper.

Myth and literature

The story

Poetic account: a later Icelandic saga says that a woman in Norse Greenland changed her religion before her husband did, and it is a story told about a household, not a record of a myth.

In Eiríks saga rauða, Eiríkr the Red’s son Leif comes home to Brattahlíð from Norway and preaches Christianity through Greenland. Eiríkr is cool to the idea of giving up his religion. His wife Þjóðhildr yields at once. She has a church built a little way from the houses, and the saga says that she and the others who took Christ, many of them, prayed there. After her conversion she would no longer share his bed, which the saga calls a great trial to his temper. The household thus holds two faiths under one roof.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: in the saga, Þjóðhildr’s conversion, a church placed apart from the farm buildings, prayer there by her and other new Christians, and her refusal of her husband. The excavated chapel at Brattahlíð is named after her in the Wikipedia article, and the link rests on the saga’s account and the site’s identification.

What is not recorded: the saga does not say where the church stood, so tying the excavated chapel to her is a proposed connection and not a proven one. Nothing here shows what a Christian household or a heathen one believed in daily practice, and the saga does not describe Eiríkr’s own worship.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The story is in Eiríks saga rauða, “the saga of Eiríkr the Red”, an Icelandic saga about the settling of Greenland and the voyages to North America. It was written down long after the events, so the details are the saga author’s. This entry uses J. Sephton’s English translation of 1880, which is in the public domain; the passage is in Chapter 5 of that text. A separate line of evidence is archaeological. Wikipedia’s article on Brattahlíð, the settlement in southern Greenland where the saga puts Eiríkr’s farm, describes a small turf-and-timber chapel found there in 1961, about 2 by 3.5 metres inside, with a surrounding wall and a churchyard holding 144 burials, no grave goods and no inscribed markers. That article calls it Þjóðhildarkirkja, “Thjodhild’s church”; the Canadian Mysteries page on Thjodhild retells the saga account.