Listening to beads

It's amazing how something as small as a glass bead can have so much to say.

In one of the loneliest places I have ever visited, high on a heath on the east coast of Iceland, the remains of a young woman from the Viking Age lay unknown for more than a thousand years.

She was discovered twenty years ago, sitting in a small cave near the river’s source. Time, weather, water and snow had scattered her into fragments: bones, brooches, and more than five hundred colourful glass beads, all embedded in the rock, the earth and the riverbed. 

The enormous number of beads is what first caught my attention.

It was not a handful of beads carried in a small pouch as currency or treasure, and  not the remains of a broken necklace.

They represented something much more significant. The sheer amount meant something. 

That was when I began to believe she could have been  a Völva, a Viking-age seeress, a woman who knew how to listen beyond worlds and time, where others could not.

In Eiríks saga rauða, there is a description of a Völva called Þorbjörg lítilvölva. She was called upon during a time of hardship in the doomed Viking settlement in Greenland, when people were starving, scared, and desperate to know what would happen next. The Völva was summoned because ordinary knowledge was  no longer enough. People need someone who could  see beyond the visible, someone who could listen into uncertainty and speak from that deeper place.

The Saga presents her in great detail: her cloak, her staff, the beads around her neck, and the multitude of beads sewn into her cloak making her shimmer when she moved.

There are careful details of how she was  received, seated, fed, honoured, and asked to see beyond ordinary knowing. Her appearance is not incidental. The beads matter because they marked her as a woman set apart; a woman people recognise as someone who stood at a threshold between the human world and the unseen.

The young woman sitting in her small cave with her many brooches  and extraordinary amount of beads feels unmistakably like a Völva. The river source, the cave, the isolation, the adornment and the beads all point towards a woman whose presence would have been recognised before she spoke.

Even in death, she was extraordinary.

The beads she carried were mostly made in Europe ,but some came from much further away; even from as far as the Silk Road. It’s astonishing to think that this  young woman carried on her body objects from a distant world, but it also speaks of ships, voyages and trade. And yet once they were worn by her, they became part of her body’s language.

I can almost hear the faint chiming sound of glass  as she moved, the small brightness they must have cast  in that grey and difficult landscape. 

Photos from the exhibition "Landnámskonan-The settlement Woman at East Iceland Heritage museum (Minjasafn Austurlands)

And then, around the year 950 the threads broke and her beads were  no longer held together but taken into the keeping of the land. For centuries they were held by earth, water, frost, stone and silence, until someone followed the river to its source and the fragments began to surface.

The beads demonstrate  how Iceland gives back its past: not whole, not simple, not neatly arranged, but in fragments. A bead in a riverbed; a bone discovered when digging house foundations;  a name on a map that belonged to someone; a story about a rock that must not be disturbed. 

A place is never only what it appears to be at first glance. A river source is not only water coming from the ground. A cave is not only a hole in rock. A bead is not only a bead. The land holds many kinds of memory, some that can be excavated and catalogued, and others that have to be sensed, approached, and listened for.

This hidden landscape is everywhere once you begin to notice.  It is in the feeling that the visible world is only the top layer, and that beneath it lies another land: older, stranger, more inhabited, and still speaking.

The beads are part of that hidden landscape. They were not silent while they lay in the ground. They were held inside the land’s long memory, waiting until someone found them. When they emerged from the ground, they did not give us one neat answer. The land rarely speaks in complete sentences. It speaks through fragments, through what rises from soil and water, through what refuses to be fully explained.

Perhaps that is why deep listening matters.

Deep listening is not only listening with the ears. It is a way of opening ourselves to the possibility that the landscape has a voice, even if that voice does not sound like ours. It asks us to listen with the body, with memory and  with imagination. It asks us to pay attention to the visible and the invisible, to stone and water, to the human past and the more-than-human presence of nature spirits, hidden beings, rivers, mountains and weather.

To listen deeply is not to invent meaning where there is none. It is to stop assuming that silence means absence. It is to recognise that the land may already be speaking, but in a language that is older and less direct.

The beads do not give us the whole story, but they  ask us to stay with the scattered things, the half-seen things, the places where story and spirit touch. They  ask us  to listen to the land as something alive, layered, and wanting to communicate with.

They ask us to listen more carefully to what remains.