When I was just three, Grandma Charlotte began telling me a story. It was about a beautiful, headstrong princess named Thira, who lived in Germany, who was a great, great, great grandmother of mine, who lived along a river in her father’s castle, refusing to marry suitor after suitor, for they were old, ugly, and disgusted her. Her father, a great lord, began to regret ever educating her at all, let alone, allowing her to hunt, and practice sport with her brothers, including falconry.
One day, after she had turned down yet another suitor, because of his poor wit, her father, being very perplexed and vexed with her, heard of Vikings coming up the river, plundering their way along. Their leader’s name was Gorm, and this Viking’s name was greatly feared in the land now known as Germany. He was fierce, and known to never lose a battle, nor an argument once he had engaged.
Thira’s father sent emissaries from his castle with an offer he hoped Gorm could not refuse. He offered Gorm a beautiful engaging young wife who could read and write, a thing Gorm could not do, and so, he was tempted. He also was engaged by the fact that the lord of the castle, Thira’s father, promised him a great amount of land as a dowry, along with Thira’s gold.
However, before sealing the prospective deal, Gorm, who had traveled to Egypt and had been with many alluring, sporting, and intelligent women, wanted to test this prospective young bride to be, and so he did, much to the chagrin of Thira’s father. He tested her in many ways with riddles, with her abilities to read and write, and finally with Joseph’s dreams he interpreted in the Bible, changing the facts and claiming they were his own.
Thira passed all these tests with flair. For to her parent’s surprise, Thira found Gorm not only ultra-masculine, extremely handsome, and completely fascinating, this match fulfilled my great grandmother’s longed-for dreams of adventure. She acted out with great flair the answers to Gorm’s riddle’s until he grabbed her lithe form into his lap, laughing with delight. A wedding was accomplished with great haste, as soon as Gorm was baptized, and the two sailed off for the great North, beyond where the great ice bridge once lay.
Now, Gorm did not want Thira merely for her gold, property, nor her beauty, no; he had something much greater in mind. On the trip home, he set Thira the task of tutoring him in the language arts. Gorm may have been illiterate, but he was cunning and brilliant. By the time they reached the Northern territories of what is now Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, all of the Norwegian countries, Gorm was himself literate. For Thira had at his request and at her own behest, brought her personal library.
Their great love story spawned not only thirteen living children to maturation and marriage, all of whom Thira arranged to great houses in Europe, but Gorm and Thira came together to rule ALL of Scandinavia and its surrounding territories. They were the first to unite the tribes of the Vikings under one rule of law and order, and that it was Christian was no small feat as well.
Thira’s abilities did not end in the literary realm, for she wrote a tome of their adventures together. This queen ancestor of ours designed and commissioned a dyke be built which was not only the largest ever, but the first. It was considered a wonder of the world at the time which fortified and protected their major city as a stronghold against invaders and buffeted raging northern storms, as well.
Now, this was told to me in the form of a once upon a time fairy tale, which I believed growing up until I was of an age that I ceased to believe in fairy tales and the like. I came to believe it was a lovely myth my beautiful grandmother had woven from a smidgeon of truth from somewhere long, long ago, and that Gorm and Thira were a lovely little story that my Swedish ancestors had passed along by and by. Oh, I was also told that that was where my little brother, Stephen Harold, Crowned Prince of Warriors, had gotten his name, that Harold had been the name of their first son, and had been passed down for over a thousand years in our clan.
I too shared this fairy tale with my daughters as they grew up. One day my oldest and I were sharing a cup of coffee and chatting over the phone when we happened upon the sweet story of Gorm and Thira. My daughter is a computer whiz who began to futz around on hers while we were engaged in the story. I should remark, we only knew the name, Harold, not Gorm’s, nor Thira’s, ONLY the facts of the tale. Suddenly, my daughter said, “Mom, you aren’t going to believe this.”
“Believe what?” I countered.
“The Viking and the Princess, they’re real. They were real people. I just found them on Wikipedia.”
“You did not.” I said, disbelieving. This could not be by any stretch of my imagination, but it was. She sent me the link. There could be no denying it. All the way down to the writing of a book, the building of a dyke, the 13 children, and Thira being tested by Gorm with prophetic stories. And so, my friends, that is how we learned that our family lore was fact, and that Gorm and Thira’s son, King Harold the Bluetooth, created the Jelling Stones, even as his father Gorm had commissioned the Jelling Stone be carved in honor of his mother, Thira, for all she had done for him and the Viking people.
The Jelling Stones are a story unto themselves, where and when they were discovered and unearthed. But they are my family’s monuments and testimonies of honor, devotion, and true love toward one another. They are their forever love notes, and I am moved to tears to be one of their many, many descendants.
May God always bless Gorm and Thira and their great love for adventure, for learning, for conquest, for one another, but mostly for bringing Christianity to the North. In case you have never seen a blood eagle invoked … well, Christian punishment was kinder.
To be able to trace my family to the year 954 is quite a thing. To know that my baby brother’s name comes from Harold Bluetooth’s, well, my goodness. But mostly to know that I am the second woman to have written a book in our family, I know that Grandmother Thira is watching over me and is proud.
The Jelling Stones were not discovered until the nineteenth century in Jelling, Denmark. They are beautiful rune covered stones that tell stories and are monuments of love and honor from Gorm to Thira, and from Harold to his parents, and on and on. I am astounded to come from the likes of Gorm and Thira, but when I look into my children’s eyes, I am not surprised.