Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (45 page)

A Typical Week in the Life of a Greenland Bishop: The Saga of Einar Sokkason

W

hile off hunting with 14 friends, Sigurd Njalsson found a
beached ship full of valuable cargo. In a nearby hut were the
stinking corpses of the ship's crew and its captain Arnbjorn, who had
died of starvation. Sigurd brought the bones of the crew back to Gar-dar Cathedral for burial, and donated the ship itself to Bishop Arnald
for the benefit of the corpses of the souls. As for the cargo, he asserted
finders/keepers rights and divided it among his friends and himself.

When Arnbjorn's nephew Ozur heard the news, he came to Gar-
dar, together with the relatives of others of the dead crew. They told
the Bishop that they felt entitled to inherit the cargo. But the Bishop
answered that Greenland law specified finders/keepers, that the cargo
and ship should now belong to the church to pay for masses for the souls of the dead men who had owned the cargo, and that it was
shabby of Ozur and his friends to claim the cargo now. So Ozur filed a suit in the Greenland Assembly, attended by Ozur and all his men and
also by Bishop Arnald and his friend Einar Sokkason and many of
their men. The court ruled against Ozur, who didn't like the ruling at
all and felt humiliated, so he ruined Sigurd's ship (now belonging to Bishop Arnald) by cutting out planks along the full length of
each side. That made the Bishop so angry that he declared Ozur's life
forfeit.

While the Bishop was saying holiday mass in church, Ozur was in
the congregation and complained to the Bishop's servant about how
badly the Bishop had treated him. Einar seized an axe from the hand
of another worshipper and struck Ozur a death-blow. The Bishop
asked Einar, "Einar, did you cause Ozur's death?" "Very true," said
Einar, "I have." The Bishop's response was: "Such acts of murder are
not right. But this particular one is not without justification." The Bishop didn't want to give Ozur a church burial, but Einar warned that big trouble was on its way.

In fact, Ozur's relative Simon, a big strong man, said that this was
not the time for merely big talk. He gathered his friends Kolbein
Thorljotsson, Keitel Kalfsson, and many men from Western Settle-

ment. An old man named Sokki Thorisson offered to mediate be
tween Simon and Einar. As compensation for having murdered Ozur,
Einar offered some articles including an ancient suit
of
armor, which Simon rejected as rubbish. Kolbein slipped around behind Einar and hit him between the shoulders with his axe, just at the moment when
Einar was bringing down his own axe on Simon's head. As both Simon
and Einar fell dying, Einar commented, "It is only what I expected." Einar's foster-brother Thord rushed at Kolbein, who managed to kill
him at once by jabbing an axe into his throat.

Einar's men and Kolbein's men then started a battle against each
other. A man called Steingrim told them all to please stop fighting, but
both sides were so mad that they thrust a sword through Steingrim.
On Kolbein's side, Krak, Thorir, and Vighvat ended up dead, as well as
Simon. On Einar's side, Bjorn, Thorarin, Thord, and Thorfinn ended
up dead as well as Einar, plus Steingrim counted as a member of
Einar's side. Many men were badly wounded. At a peace meeting orga
nized by a level-headed farmer called Hall, Kolbein's side was ordered to pay compensation because Einar's side had lost more men. Even so, Einar's side was bitterly disappointed in the verdict. Kolbein sailed off
to
Norway with a polar bear that he gave as a present to King Harald
Gilli, still complaining about how cruelly he had been treated. King Harald considered Kolbein's story a pack of lies and refused to pay a bounty for the polar bear. So Kolbein attacked and wounded the king
and sailed off to Denmark but drowned en route. And that is the end
of this saga.

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signs of bone healing, implying that the victims survived the blow to die much later, the wounds of three others exhibit little or no healing, implying
a quick death. That outcome isn't surprising when one sees photos of the
skulls, one of which had a piece of bone three inches long by two inches
wide sliced out of it. The skull wounds were all on either the left side of the
front of the skull or the right side of the back, as expected for a right-
handed assailant striking from in front or behind, respectively. (Most sword
combat wounds fit this pattern, because most people are right-handed.)

Another male skeleton at the same churchyard has a knife blade between
the ribs. Two female skeletons from Sandnes cemetery with similar cut
wounds of the skull testify that women as well as men could die in feuds.

Dating from later years of the Greenland colony, at a time when axes and
swords had become vanishingly rare because of scarcity of iron, are skulls of
four adult women and one eight-year-old child, each with one or two
sharp-edged holes between half an inch and one inch in diameter and evi
dently made by a crossbow bolt or arrow. Domestic violence is suggested by
the skeleton of a 50-year-old woman at Gardar Cathedral with a fractured throat bone called the hyoid; forensic pathologists have learned to interpret
a fractured hyoid as evidence that the victim was strangled by a hand choke
hold.

Along with that violent streak coexisting uneasily with an emphasis on
communal cooperation, the Greenland Norse also carried over from Ice
land and Norway a sharply stratified, hierarchically organized social organi
zation, such that a small number of chiefs dominated owners of small
farms, tenants who didn't even own their own farms, and (initially) slaves.
Again like Iceland, Greenland politically was not organized as a state but as
a loose federation of chiefdoms operating under feudal conditions, with
neither money nor a market economy. Within the first century or two of the Greenland colony, slavery disappeared, and the slaves became freedmen.
However, the number of independent farmers probably decreased with
time as they were forced into becoming tenants of the chiefs, a process that
is well documented in Iceland. We don't have corresponding records for the
process in Greenland, but it seems likely there too, because the forces pro
moting it were even more marked in Greenland than in Iceland. Those
forces consisted of climate fluctuations driving poorer farmers in bad years into debt to richer farmers who lent them hay and livestock, and who could
eventually foreclose on them. Evidence of those farm hierarchies is still visi
ble today among Greenland farm ruins: compared to poor farms, the best-
located farms had a larger area of good pasture, larger cow and sheep barns
with stalls for more animals, bigger hay barns, larger houses, larger churches,
and smithies. The hierarchies are also visible today as the higher ratios of
cow and caribou bones to sheep and seal bones in garbage middens at rich
farms compared to those at poor farms.

Still like Iceland, Viking Greenland was a conservative society resistant to change and sticking to old ways, compared to the society of the Vikings
who remained behind in Norway. Over the centuries, there was little change
in styles of tools and of carvings. Fishing was abandoned in the earliest
years of the colony, and Greenlanders did not reconsider that decision dur
ing the four-and-a-half centuries of their society's existence. They did not
learn from the Inuit how to hunt ringed seals or whales, even though that

meant not eating locally common foods, and starving as a result. The ulti
mate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may
have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute
their own society's conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the
Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they
succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many
generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be
conservative.

The remaining adjective that characterizes Greenland Norse society is "Euro
centric." From Europe, the Greenlanders received material trade goods, but
even more important were non-material imports: identities as Christians,
and as Europeans. Let us consider first the material trade. What trade items were imported into Greenland, and with what exports did the Greenlanders
pay for those imports?

For medieval sailing ships, the voyage to Greenland from Norway took a
week or more and was dangerous; annals often mention shipwrecks, or
ships that sailed and were never heard from again. Hence the Greenlanders were visited by at most a couple of European ships a year, and sometimes
only one every few years. In addition, the capacities of European cargo ships
in those days were small. Estimates of the frequency of ship visits, ship ca
pacities, and Greenland's population let one calculate that imports worked out to about seven pounds of cargo per person per year
—on the average.
Most Greenlanders received much less than that average, because much of
that arriving cargo capacity was devoted to materials for churches and luxuries for the elite. Hence imports could only be valuable items occupying little space. In particular, Greenland had to be self-sufficient in food and could
not depend on bulk imports of cereals and other food staples.

Our two sources of information about Greenland's imports are lists in Norwegian records, and items of European origin found in Greenland ar
chaeological sites. They included especially three necessities: iron that the
Greenlanders were hard-pressed to produce for themselves; good lumber
for buildings and furniture, of which they were equally short; and tar as a lubricant and wood preservative. As for non-economic imports, many
were for the church, including church bells, stained glass windows, bronze
candlesticks, communion wine, linen, silk, silver, and churchmen's robes
and jewelry. Among secular luxuries found in archaeological sites at farm-

houses were pewter, pottery, and glass beads and buttons. Small-volume
luxury food imports probably included honey to ferment into mead, plus
salt as a preservative.

In exchange for those imports, the same consideration of limited ship
cargo capacity would have prevented Greenlanders from exporting bulk
fish, as did medieval Iceland and as does modern Greenland, even if Green-landers had been willing to fish. Instead, Greenland's exports, too, had to be
things of low volume and high value. They included skins of goats, cattle, and seals, which Europeans could also obtain from other countries but of which medieval Europe required large quantities to make leather clothes,
shoes, and belts. Like Iceland, Greenland exported wool cloth that was val
ued for being water-repellent. But Greenland's most prized exports men
tioned in Norwegian records were five products derived from Arctic
animals rare or absent in most of Europe: walrus ivory from walrus tusks,
walrus hide (valued because it yielded the strongest rope for ships), live po
lar bears or their hides as a spectacular status symbol, tusks of the narwhal
(a small whale) known then in Europe as unicorn horns, and live gyrfalcons (the world's largest falcon). Walrus tusks became the only ivory available in
medieval Europe for carving after Moslems gained control of the Mediter
ranean, thereby cutting off supplies of elephant ivory to Christian Europe.
As an example of the value placed on Greenland gyrfalcons, 12 of those
birds sufficed in 1396 to ransom the Duke of Burgundy's son after he was
captured by the Saracens.

Walruses and polar bears were virtually confined to latitudes far to the north of the two Norse settlements, in an area called the Nordrseta (the
northern hunting ground), which began several hundred miles beyond Western Settlement and stretched farther north along Greenland's west coast. Hence each summer the Greenlanders sent out hunting parties in small, open, six-oared rowboats with sails, which could cover about 20
miles per day and could hold up to a ton-and-a-half of cargo. Hunters set
off in June after the peak of the harp seal hunt, taking two weeks to reach
the Nordrseta from Western Settlement or four weeks from Eastern Settle
ment, and returning again at the end of August. In such small boats they
obviously could not carry the carcasses of hundreds of walruses and polar
bears, each of which weighs about a ton or half-a-ton respectively. Instead,
the animals were butchered on the spot, and only the walrus jaws with the
tusks, and the bear skins with the paws (plus the occasional live captive bear), were brought home, for the tusks to be extracted and the skin to be
cleaned at leisure back in the settlements during the long winter. Also