Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (55 page)
Read Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 Online
Authors: John Haywood
There are few recorded contacts with Greenland after Thorstein and his wife left for Norway in 1410. The Danish cartographer Claudius Clavus visited Greenland around 1420, travelling as far north as the Nordsetr and encountering Inuit, and it was probably he who took news of the pirate raid in 1418 to the outside world. In 1426, a Greenlander called Peder visited Norway, but it is not known if he ever went home. Clothing preserved in graves from the cemetery at Herjolfsnes shows that the Greenlanders were still managing to keep up to date with European fashions until around 1450, but there is no evidence for contacts after that time. By the late fifteenth century, the Norse Greenland colony had become a distant memory. No sea captains who knew the way to Greenland could be found at Bergen in 1484. In 1492 Pope Alexander VI wrote about Greenland as a lost land:
‘The people there have no bread, wine or oil but live on dried fish and milk. Very few sailings because of the ice on the sea and these only in the month of August, when the ice has melted. It is thought that no ship has sailed there for eighty years and that no bishop or priest has lived there during this period. Because there are no priests, many of the people there who were formerly Catholics, have renounced the sacrament of baptism and have nothing else to remind of the Christian faith than a sacred altar cloth which is exhibited once a year, which was used by the last priest to say mass a hundred years ago.’
Ironically, Alexander was writing in the same year that Christopher Columbus made his first trans-Atlantic voyage. Europeans now possessed the technology to achieve what had been beyond the resources of the Greenlanders’ Viking ancestors, the colonisation of the Americas.
The fate of the last Norse Greenlanders may never be known for certain, but it is likely that, by the time Pope Alexander was writing, their settlements were already deserted and abandoned. Certainly, seafarers who visited Greenland in the sixteenth century met only Inuit. It is romantic to imagine the last Norse Greenlanders, doomed by their cultural conservatism, struggling stubbornly to maintain their European ways as every winter the glaciers advanced a little further down the valleys. Forgotten and abandoned by the outside world, they died one by one of malnutrition and cold until none were left or until a few desperate survivors begged the Inuit to take them in. The fate of the settlement might have been altogether less desperate, however. Among fifteenth-century burials in the settlements there is a marked lack of women of child-bearing age. Death of complications associated with childbirth was sadly very common in Medieval Europe, so this absence must be significant. Sigrid Bjornsdottir had relations in Iceland and that was where she eventually settled after she left Greenland with her husband. Faced with increasing social and economic isolation and a choice between living on seal meat or starving, was Sigrid the only young woman who, seeing a way out, took it? The evidence of the cemeteries suggests not. This is part of a pattern of rural depopulation the world over. The young men, who stood to inherit farms, would have stayed longer, but as it became impossible for them to find wives, they would have begun to drift away too, perhaps signing on as crew on the few ships that still came to Greenland. Only those who felt too old to start a new life would have remained and, with the young people gone, the extinction of the colony was just a matter of time. The last outpost of the Viking world may simply have died of old age.
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1. The three major Viking pagan gods: (from left) the one-eyed high god Odin; hammer-wielding Thor; and the fertility god Freyr as depicted in a twelfth-century tapestry from Skog, Sweden.
2. Reconstructed chieftain’s longhouse at Borg in the Lofoten Islands, Norway. Housing both people and livestock under one roof, the longhouse was the typical Viking Age dwelling.
3.
Ancestors of the Viking longship: Bronze Age ships with raiding parties on petroglyphs from Tanumshede, Sweden.
4.
Evidence of state formation: the Vendel Period burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, traditionally associated with the proto-historic Yngling dynasty.
5.
The 23-metre long Gokstad ship, built
c.
895–900, could carry a crew of around sixty-five men on long open sea voyages.
6.
The tenth-century Viking helmet from Gjermundbu in Norway is the most complete ever found. There is no evidence that Viking helmets ever had horns.
7.
King Edmund of East Anglia is martyred by the pagan Danes in 869, in a fifteenth-century wall painting from Pickering church, North Yorkshire.
8.
Irish monastic round tower at Glendalough: used as bell towers, treasuries and emergency refuges, dozens of such towers were built during Ireland’s Viking Age.
