Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (40 page)

CHAPTER
7

Norse Greenland's Flowering

Europe's outpost
■ Greenland's climate today · Climate in the past ■

Native plants and animals Norse settlement
■ Farming ■

Hunting and fishing > An integrated economy
■ Society ■

Trade with Europe
■ Self-image
■

M

y initial impression of Greenland was that its name was a cruel misnomer, because I saw only a three-colored landscape: white, black, and blue, with white overwhelmingly predominant. Some
historians think that the name really was coined with deceitful intent by
Erik the Red, founder of Greenland's Viking settlement, so as to induce
other Vikings to join him. As my airplane from Copenhagen approached
Greenland's east coast, the first thing visible after the dark blue ocean was a vast area of brilliant white stretching out of sight, the world's largest ice cap
outside Antarctica. Greenland's shores rise steeply to an ice-covered high
plateau covering most of the island and drained by enormous glaciers flow
ing into the sea. For hundreds of miles our plane flew over this white
expanse, where the sole other color visible was the black of bare stone mountains rising out of that ocean of ice, and scattered over it like black islands. Only as our plane descended from the plateau towards the west coast
did I spot two other colors in a thin border outlining the ice sheet, combin
ing brown areas of bare gravel with faint green areas of moss or lichens.

But when I landed at southern Greenland's main airport of Narsarsuaq
and crossed the iceberg-strewn fjord to Brattahlid, the site that Erik the Red
chose for his own farm, I discovered to my surprise that the name Green
land might have been bestowed honestly, not as false PR. Exhausted by my
long plane flight from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and back to Greenland,
involving shifts of 13 time zones, I set out to stroll among the Norse ruins
but was soon ready for a nap, too sleepy even to return the few hundred
yards to the youth hostel where I had left my rucksack. Fortunately, the ruins lay amidst lush meadows of soft grass over a foot high, growing up out
of thick moss and dotted with abundant yellow buttercups, yellow dande
lions, blue bluebells, white asters, and pink willow-herbs. There was no

need for an air mattress or pillow here: I fell into a deep sleep in the softest
and most beautiful natural bed imaginable.

As my Norwegian archaeologist friend Christian Keller expressed it,
"Life in Greenland is all about finding the good patches of useful resources."
While 99% of the island is indeed uninhabitable white or black, there are green areas deep inside two fjord systems on the southwest coast. There,
long narrow fjords penetrate far inland, such that their heads are remote
from the cold ocean currents, icebergs, salt spray, and wind that suppress
growth of vegetation along Greenland's outer coast. Here and there along the mostly steep-sided fjords are patches of flatter terrain with luxuriant
pastures, including the one in which I took a nap, and good for maintaining
livestock (Plate 17). For nearly 500 years between
a.d.
984 and sometime in
the 1400s, those two fjord systems supported European civilization's most remote outpost, where Scandinavians 1,500 miles from Norway built a cathedral and churches, wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European fashions in clothing
—
and finally vanished.

The mystery of their disappearance is symbolized by the stone church at
Hvalsey, Norse Greenland's most famous building, whose photograph will
be found in any travel brochure promoting Greenland tourism. Lying in
meadows at the head of the long, broad, mountain-rimmed fjord, the
church commands a gorgeous view over a panorama of dozens of square miles. Its walls, west doorway, niches, and gables of stone are still intact: only the original roof of turf is missing. Around the church lie the remains
of the residential halls, barns, storehouses, boathouse, and pastures that sus
tained the people who erected those buildings. Among all medieval Euro
pean societies, Norse Greenland is the one whose ruins are best preserved, precisely because its sites were abandoned while intact, whereas almost all
major medieval sites of Britain and continental Europe continued to be occupied and became submerged by post-medieval construction. Visiting
Hvalsey today, one almost expects to see Vikings walking out of those build
ings, but in fact all is silent: practically no one now lives within twenty miles
of there (Plate 15). Whoever built that church knew enough to re-create a
European community, and to maintain it for centuries
—but not enough to
maintain it for longer.

Compounding the mystery, the Vikings shared Greenland with another people, the Inuit (Eskimos), whereas the Iceland Norse had Iceland to themselves and faced no such additional problem to compound their own
difficulties. The Vikings disappeared, but the Inuit survived, proving that

human survival in Greenland was not impossible and the Vikings' disap
pearance not inevitable. As one walks around modern Greenland farms,
one sees again those same two populations that shared the island in the
Middle Ages: Inuits and Scandinavians. In 1721, three hundred years after
the medieval Vikings died out, other Scandinavians (Danes) came back to
take control of Greenland, and it was not until 1979 that Native Green-landers gained home rule. I found it disconcerting throughout my Green
land visit to look at the many blue-eyed blond-haired Scandinavians
working there, and to reflect that it was people like them who built Hvalsey
Church and the other ruins that I was studying, and who died out there.
Why did those medieval Scandinavians ultimately fail to master Green
land's problems while the Inuits succeeded?

Like the fate of the Anasazi, the fate of the Greenland Norse has often
been laid to various single-factor explanations, without agreement being
reached as to which of those explanations is correct. A favorite theory has been climatic cooling, invoked in overschematic formulations approximating (in the words of archaeologist Thomas McGovern) "It got too cold, and
they died." Other single-factor theories have included extermination of the Norse by the Inuit, abandonment of the Norse by mainland Europeans, environmental damage, and a hopelessly conservative outlook. In fact, the
Greenland Norse extinction is a richly instructive case precisely because it involves major contributions of all five of the explanatory factors that I dis
cussed in the introduction to this book. It is a rich case not only in reality,
but also in our available information about it, because the Norse left written
accounts of Greenland (whereas the Easter Islanders and Anasazi were not literate), and because we understand medieval European society much better than we understand Polynesian or Anasazi society. Nevertheless, major
questions remain about even this most richly documented pre-industrial
collapse.

What was the environment in which the Greenland Norse colonies arose,
thrived, and fell? The Norse lived in two settlements on Greenland's west
coast somewhat below the Arctic Circle, around latitudes 61 and 64 degrees
north. That's south of most of Iceland, and comparable to the latitudes of
Bergen and Trondheim on Norway's west coast. But Greenland is colder than either Iceland or Norway, because the latter are bathed by the warm
Gulf Stream flowing up from the south, whereas Greenland's west coast is bathed by the cold West Greenland Current flowing down from the Arctic.

As a result, even at the sites of the former Norse settlements, which enjoy
the most benign climate in Greenland, the weather can be summed up in
four words: cold, variable, windy, and foggy.

Mean summer temperatures today at the settlements are around 42 de
grees Fahrenheit (5-6 degrees Celsius) on the outer coast, 50
°F (10°C) in
the interiors of the fjords. While that doesn't sound so cold, remember that
that's only for the warmest months of the year. In addition, strong dry
winds frequently blow down from Greenland's ice cap, bringing drift ice from the north, blocking the fjords with icebergs even during the summer,
and causing dense fogs. I was told that the large short-term climate fluctua
tions that I encountered during my summer visit to Greenland, including
heavy rain, strong winds, and fog, were common and often made it impossible to travel by boat. But boats are the main means of transport in Green
land, because the coast is so deeply indented with branching fjords. (Even today, there are no roads connecting Greenland's main population centers,
and the sole communities joined by road are either located on the same side
of the same fjord or else on adjacent different fjords separated by just a low
spine of hills.) Such a storm aborted my first attempt to reach Hvalsey Church: I arrived by boat at Qaqortoq in nice weather on July 25, to find
ship traffic out of Qaqortoq on July 26 immobilized by wind, rain, fog,
and icebergs. On July 27 the weather turned mild again and we reached
Hvalsey, and on the following day we steamed back out of Qaqortoq Fjord
to Brattahlid under blue skies.

I experienced Greenland weather at its best, at the site of the southernmost Norse settlement in peak summer. As a Southern Californian accus
tomed to warm sunny days, I would describe the temperatures that I
encountered then as "variably cool to cold." I always needed to wear a wind-
breaker over my T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, and sweatshirt, and often added
as well the thick down parka that I had acquired on my first trip to the Arctic. The temperature seemed to change quickly and in wide swings, repeat
edly within each hour. It sometimes felt as if my main occupation while out
walking in Greenland consisted of taking my parka on and off to adjust to
those frequent changes in temperature.

Complicating this picture I have just drawn of modern Greenland's av
erage climate, the weather can change over short distances and from year to
year. The changes over short distances partly account for Christian Keller's
comment to me about the importance of finding the good patches of re
sources in Greenland. The changes from year to year affect each year's
growth of pasture hay on which the Norse economy depended, and also af-

feet the quantities of sea ice that in turn affect seal hunting plus the possi
bility of ship travel for trade, both of which were important to the Vikings.
Both the weather changes over short distances and from year to year were critical, as Greenland was at best marginally suitable for Norse hay production, so being at a slightly worse site or in a slightly colder-than-usual year
could translate into not having enough hay to feed one's livestock through
the winter.

As for the changes with location, an important difference is that one of the two Viking settlements lay 300 miles north of the other, but they were
confusingly called Western and Eastern Settlement instead of Northern and
Southern Settlement. (Those names had unfortunate consequences cen
turies later, when the name "Eastern Settlement" misled Europeans looking
for the long-lost Greenland Norse to hunt for them in the wrong place, on
Greenland's east coast, instead of on the west coast where the Norse had
actually lived.) Summer temperatures are as warm at the more northerly
Western Settlement as at the Eastern Settlement. However, the summer
growing season is shorter at Western Settlement (just five months with aver
age temperatures above freezing, instead of seven months as at Eastern
Settlement), because there are fewer summer days of sunlight and warm temperatures as one gets further north. Another change in weather with lo
cation is that it is colder, wetter, and foggier on the seacoast at the mouths of
fjords, directly exposed to the cold West Greenland Current, than in the
sheltered interiors of the fjords far from the sea.

Still another change with location that I couldn't help noticing during
my travels in Greenland is that some fjords have glaciers dumping into
them, while others don't. Those fjords with glaciers constantly receive ice
bergs of local origin, while those without glaciers only receive whatever ice
bergs drift in from the ocean. For example, in July I found Igaliku Fjord (on which lay Viking Greenland's cathedral) free of icebergs, because no glacier
flows into it; Eirik's Fjord (on which lay Brattahlid) had scattered icebergs,
because one glacier enters that fjord; and the next fjord north of Brattah
lid, Sermilik Fjord, has many big glaciers and was solidly clogged with ice.
(Those differences, and the great variations of size and shape among the
icebergs, were one of the reasons why I found Greenland such a constantly interesting landscape, despite its few colors.) While Christian Keller was
studying an isolated archaeological site on Eirik's Fjord, he used to walk
over the hill to visit some Swedish archaeologists excavating a site on Sermi
lik Fjord. The Swedes' campsite was considerably colder than Christians
campsite, and correspondingly the Viking farm that the unfortunate Swedes

had chosen to study had been poorer than the farm that Christian was
studying (because the Swedes' site was colder and yielded less hay).

Weather changes from year to year are illustrated by recent experience of
hay yields on sheep farms that resumed operation in Greenland beginning
in the 1920s. Wetter years yield more growth of vegetation, which generally
is good news to pastoralists because it means more hay to feed their sheep,
and more grass to nourish the wild caribou (hence more caribou to hunt).
However, if too much rain falls during the hay harvest season in August and September, hay yields decrease because the hay is hard to dry. A cold sum
mer is bad because it decreases hay growth; a long winter is bad because it
means that animals have to be kept indoors in barns for more months and
require more hay; and a summer with much drift ice coming down from
the north is bad because it results in dense summer fogs that are bad for hay growth. Year-to-year weather differences like those making life dicey for modern Greenland sheep farmers must have made it dicey for the medieval
Norse as well.

Those are the climate changes that one can observe from year to year, or
from decade to decade, in Greenland today. What about climate changes in the past? For instance, what was the weather like at the time that the Norse
arrived in Greenland, and how did it change over the five centuries that they
survived? How can one learn about past climate in Greenland? We have three
main sources of information: written records, pollen, and ice cores.

First, because the Greenland Norse were literate and were visited by literate Icelanders and Norwegians, it would have been nice for those of us in
terested today in the Greenland Vikings' fate if they had bothered to leave
some accounts of Greenland's weather then. Unfortunately for us, they
didn't. For Iceland, though, we have many accounts of weather in different
years
—including mentions of cold weather, rainfall, and sea ice—from inci
dental comments in diaries, letters, annals, and reports. That information
about the climate in Iceland is of some use for understanding the climate in
Greenland, because a cold decade in Iceland tends to be cold in Greenland as well, though the agreement isn't perfect. We are on more secure ground in interpreting the significance for Greenland of comments about sea ice around Iceland, because that was the ice that made it difficult to sail to
Greenland from Iceland or Norway.

Our second source of information about past Greenland climates con
sists of pollen samples from sediment cores drilled into Greenland lakes and