Gutasaga

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Gutasaga opens with an island that does not want to be found. Gotland, according to the saga, lay submerged beneath the sea every day and rose above the water only at night, as if hiding from human settlement. The spell broke the moment a man named Þieluar lit a fire on the shore. From that single act, an entire people would eventually trace their origins.

  Recorded in the 13th century and surviving in only a single manuscript, the Codex Holm. B 64, the Gutasaga is a text that raises questions as fast as it answers them. Why does a creation myth so closely echo the movements of the historical Goths across Europe? How did a small island off the Swedish coast come to assert, in writing, that its relationship with the Swedish kingdom was one of mutual agreement rather than conquest? And why, after centuries, does Gotland's church still divide itself according to boundaries a medieval saga said three brothers drew in a womb?

• 2. A Manuscript on the Edge

  ›

  The Codex Holm. B 64, dated to around 1350, is kept at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm alongside the Gutalag, the legal code of Gotland. The pairing is not accidental. A saga about the island's origins and a law code governing its inhabitants belong together; one explains where the Gutes came from, the other explains how they were to live.

  The text was written in Old Gutnish, a variety of Old Norse distinct enough to be considered its own language. By the time the surviving manuscript was copied, Old Gutnish was already giving way to other tongues, which makes the Codex Holm. B 64 a rare record of a dialect that might otherwise have vanished without trace. The saga itself was composed earlier, in the 13th century, meaning the manuscript is a copy of a copy, shaped by scribes working generations after the original author.

• 3. The Dream and the Verse

  ›

  Þieluar's son Hafþi married a woman named Hwitastierna, whose name in English means White-star. After their first night together, she dreamed of three snakes entwined in her bosom. Hafþi read the dream as a prophecy: she was pregnant with three sons. He named them before they were born.

  At that moment the prose pauses, and the saga quotes an old alliterative verse that the author believed came from oral tradition. The verse names the three sons directly: Guti, Graipr, and Gunfiaun. The prose then assigns each of them a third of Gotland, called a þriþiungr in Old Gutnish. There is a discrepancy here that the saga itself acknowledges. The verse places Guti first, making him the oldest, while the prose says Graipr held the northern third and was the eldest. The author noted the contradiction and left both versions standing. That honesty about a conflicting source suggests a writer conscious of working with material older than the text itself. The three-part division the brothers supposedly made lasted in Gotland's legal structure until 1747, and the church still observes it today through three Deaneries.

• 4. Gotland's Wandering Descendants

  ›

  After the three brothers fathered the Gutes, the population grew until the island could no longer feed everyone. The saga describes what happened next in direct terms: they drew lots, and every third person was sent away, taking their possessions but surrendering their land. The expelled group tried to remain at Þorsburg, then at a place called Faroy, then on an island near Estonia called Dagaiþi, where they built a fortress the saga says was still visible at the time of writing. They could not stay anywhere. Eventually they traveled along the river called the Dyna and up through Russia until they reached Greece.

  Eusebius of Caesarea reported that the Goths devastated Macedonia, Greece, the Pontus, and Asia in 263, which sits in loose agreement with where the saga places these emigrants. The Dvina river mentioned in the saga also fits the archaeology of the Wielbark culture. Historically the Goths followed the Vistula southward, but by the Viking Age the Dvina-Dniepr waterway had replaced the Vistula as the main route connecting the Baltic to the Byzantine world. The saga seems to have absorbed that later geography into an older migration story. The author believed the descendants of these emigrants still lived in Greece at the time of writing, noting that they "still have something of our language."

• 5. Gotland and the Swedish Crown

  ›

  The Gutasaga devotes considerable attention to how Gotland came to be part of the Swedish kingdom, and the phrasing is careful. The saga insists the arrangement was based on mutual agreements, spelling out what the Swedish king and bishop owed to Gotland as well as what Gotland owed in return. That framing is a political argument embedded in historical narrative: Gotland was not conquered, it negotiated.

  The man credited with arranging this agreement is named Awair Strabain. The timing places the event before the end of the 9th century, when Wulfstan of Hedeby reported that the island was subject to the Swedes. The saga's insistence on the voluntary and bilateral nature of the relationship was not merely historical record-keeping. It was a written claim about Gotland's autonomy, composed at a time when that autonomy was a live question.

• 6. Names That Outlasted the Saga

  ›

  Tjelvar, the saga's fire-bearing founder, left his name scattered across the Gotland landscape. A stone ship in Boge is called Tjelvar's Grave. The same parish holds the bay Tjäldersvik and the island Tjäldersholm. In Garde, a cairn known as the Digerrojr is also called Graips rojr, carrying the name of one of the three founding brothers.

  In 2011, the Swedish Astronomical Society hosted a competition in Visby to name a newly discovered Apollo asteroid. The asteroid was named 137052 Tjelvar, after the man who, in the saga's telling, first lit a fire on an island that had been hiding under the sea. A medieval myth about Gotland's origins now travels through the solar system.