The Vikings (46 page)

 

 

The King’s Mirror
, that handbook of advice and knowledge which we consulted earlier for its descriptions of some of the natural phenomena of the populated Arctic north, puts in the mouth of the omniscient Father a neat summary of the immense difficulties faced by the Greenland settlers:

But in Greenland it is this way, as you probably know, that whatever comes from other lands is high in price, for this land lies so distant from other countries that men seldom visit it. And everything that is needed to improve the land must be purchased abroad, both iron and all the timber used in building houses.
³⁰

The reference in this thirteenth-century source to their having to buy even the timber with which to build their houses sounds an oblique epitaph for the demise of what was, along with the adventures among the tribes of the Volga and the Arabs of the Iberian peninsula, among the most surprising of Viking Age adventures: the apparent attempt to extend the Greenland colony across the Davis Strait and into North America. It may have been the activities of hunters working far to the north of the Western Settlement, north of Disko Island in the area they called Nordsetre, that first excited the notion of crossing the waters of the Davis Strait to see what lay on the other side. That hunters did penetrate this far north would seem to be indicated by the find of a rune-stone on the island of Kingigtorssuaq, at Upernavik, 200 miles north of Disko. The inscription is little more than the familiar announcement of a presence, and six enigmatic runes that have never satisfactorily been interpreted and may only be a recording of the date.
³¹
Hunters following the summer ice drifting from the north and the walrus that used it would presently reach a point at which the narrow Davis Strait was further narrowed by the accumulation of drift-ice. Following the walrus through open water along the curve of this ice would have driven the hunters west, to a point at which Baffin Island on the other side of the water was visible.

From excavations carried out recently under Patricia Sutherland of the Canadian Museum of Civilization at a site near the present-day trading post of Kimmikut in southern Baffin Island, evidence has emerged to suggest that Europeans - perhaps hunters like these - may have crossed these waters many years prior to the date of about 1000 traditionally given for the first such crossing to North America. The finds include a small carved wooden mask with a long and possibly bearded face, yarn spun from the fur of the arctic hare, and notched tally-sticks. As neither yarn nor wood was part of Inuit culture at the time, these have been identified as of Scandinavian origin. Though the rat was not native to the Arctic, microscopic amounts of rat droppings found at the Kimmikut site may also attest to the presence there of Scandinavians, with the first results of radio-carbon analysis of samples of rat-hairs indicating that this was some 75 to 100 years before 1000.
³²

The dating and interpretation of these finds remains provisional, however, and the established history of the North American adventure is based on literary sources in the form of two sagas, the
Saga of the Greenlanders
and the
Saga of Erik the Red
, known together as ‘the Vinland sagas’ and both written over 200 years after the events they describe. The story begins with an account of a voyage from Iceland made in about 985 by a man named Bjarni Herjolfsson to see his father in Greenland. Bjarni drifted off course in thick fog and found himself well to the south of his intended goal. Tacking back northward, he sailed past what had seemed to him three new and unknown lands, upon each of which he single-mindedly refused to land on the grounds that they were not Greenland.
³³
The
Saga of the Greenlanders
, believed to be the older of the two, describes five expeditions to the new lands in the west, one of which failed to arrive. In this account, the first person to see the new lands after Bjarni Herjolfsson was Erik the Red’s son, Leif, who carried out the first dedicated journey of discovery some fifteen years after Bjarni’s sighting, with further explorations being carried out by other members of Leif’s family.

The
Saga of Erik the Red
conflates all the journeys into a single, full-scale adventure, under the leadership of Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, with Leif’s role reduced to that of the initial and accidental discoverer. The Icelander Ólafur Halldórsson is one of a number of modern scholars who find in the
Saga of Erik the Red
clear traces of the genealogical obsession of the era, which led the author to promote Thorfinn as the discoverer of Vinland in order to enhance the prestige of his descendants, and in particular to strengthen the campaign for the canonization in the thirteenth century of a direct descendant of the couple, Bishop Björn Gilsson.
³⁴
Other differences of detail and focus between the two sagas seem to have been made on literary grounds, or possibly as a result of new sources of information coming to light.
³⁵
Hauk Erlendsson, in his fourteenth-century redaction of the
Saga of Erik the Red
, is known to have altered a number of details in his version, including the sailing directions given in Chapter 8 of the saga, and it is hardly possible to know whether his reasons were political, literary or even practical.

Three distinct regions of the journey southwards after the crossing of the Davis Strait were named by the explorers, each reflecting the topography and to some extent also the economic value to them of the region. The first was Helluland, which translates as something like ‘land of rocky slabs’, and was clearly the large and barren Baffin Island. Sailing past the southern tip of the island, the first site of practical interest to the explorers in their search for timber and iron would be Ungava Bay, in the north-east corner of Labrador, a densely forested region of black spruce and larch that marked the beginning of the vast Markland. Following the coastline brought the explorers to the Strait of Belle Isle, with land visible on both sides for the first time as they slipped through the 18-km-wide channel between Labrador and Newfoundland that brought them into the Gulf of St Lawrence. Where the idea of Markland ended and Vinland began is unclear, but the Gulf forms an almost self-enclosed sea and following its coastline would have brought the explorers back to their starting point, in the Strait of Belle Isle.
³⁶
It was here, on the north-eastern tip of Newfoundland, that they established the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, which remains the only authenticated Viking Age settlement site discovered in North America.
³⁷

The suggestion that the Vinland of the sagas was L’Anse aux Meadows was made as early as 1914 by a Newfoundlander, W. A. Munn; but it was not until 1960 that the Norwegians Helge and Stine Ingstad located a likely site and began the excavations that presently unearthed what were indisputably the remains of a Norse settlement. Scholars were long of the opinion that the site could not be the Vinland of the sagas; but with the gradual revelation of its full extent and of the resources that would have been required to construct it, this has changed and the identification is now widely, though not universally, accepted.
³⁸
Among the more persuasive factors are modern estimates that the three residential halls unearthed could have provided living accommodation for between seventy and ninety people. With a population at this early stage of no more than about 500, this represented a sizeable proportion of the colony’s human resources. Estimates based on the modern reconstruction of the site indicate that a work-force of about sixty men would have needed about two months to build the three houses, and it seems unlikely that a fledgling settlement like Greenland could have afforded the manpower and the time necessary to build and maintain more than one such site.

About a third of the 150 radio-carbon dates for the L’Anse aux Meadows site are connected to the period of Norse settlement there, dating it between 980 and 1020. Three houses, two of which were on the scale of the largest halls of Icelandic
go
ð
i
, were built on a terrace about 100 metres up from the shoreline and looking eastward across Epaves Bay. A stream now named Black Duck Brook meandered across in front of them on its way to the sea. On the far side of the brook the remains of a charcoal pit kiln identifies the location of the community’s smithy, which seems largely to have been employed in the manufacture of iron nails: eighty-one fragments were found in the vicinity of a small building on the eastern side of the northernmost house of the settlement, where repairs to the boats were carried out.

The Greenland colonists in North America, with the site of the excavated settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows.

The houses were built of turf, with timber roofs which could not have been expected to last more than twenty or at the most thirty years in the wet coastal climate, and they show no signs of having been repaired.
³⁹
The explorers brought cattle with them, but neither barns nor stabling were found, perhaps another indication that this was not intended as a permanent settlement but rather as a base for the preparation and forwarding of timber for the homeland.

The
Saga of the Greenlanders
refers to just one Vinland camp, Leifsbudir, or Leif’s camp. The
Saga of Erik the Red
names two, Straumfjord, or Fjord of currents, and Hóp, or small and land-locked bay. Birgitta Wallace, an archaeologist who worked on the site for many years, identifies Straumfjord as the L’Anse aux Meadows site, with Hóp as the summer camp well to the south, too small and too infrequently occupied to leave any significant archaeological trace. On the strength of the find of white walnuts within Norse woodworking waste at the main site, she locates Hóp somewhere below the northern limit for this tree, specifically in north-east New Brunswick, which also defines the northern limit of the grape-vines for which the explorers named the region. Wallace is able to explain the name by pointing to the high status of wine in the north in the Viking Age. For Leif and his family to have access to their own supply of grapes was a development that must have been as surprising as it was welcome.

But they were not left in peace to enjoy these luxuries. The sagas describe the souring of relationships between the Norsemen and the local inhabitants, a tribe of native Americans encountered at Hóp, whom they also referred to as ‘Skrellings’. Modern research identifies them as the ancestors of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq, tribes whose fascination with the colour red the Greenlanders were able to exploit in trading furs for red woollen cloth. Mutual suspicion and cultural misunderstandings were rife, however, and fighting broke out. Men were killed on both sides. For the colonists, life itself was the most dangerously scarce of all their resources and, rather than risk significant and irreplaceable losses, they withdrew and made their way back to the base at Straumfjord. It was probably the realization of how thickly ringed around with hostile neighbours these as well as any future settlements were going to be that put an end to the Greenlanders’ attempts to establish themselves on the new continent. The possibility of making their own wine may have been attractive, but only timber was a necessity of life.

Markland had it in plentiful supply. It was closer and without the disadvantage of a population of hostile natives, and there can be little doubt that the trip across the Davis Strait to Ungava Bay to cut timber and gather bog-iron for use in the Greenland smithies was made with such regularity that it was no longer considered worthy of further note by those keepers of the Icelandic record who made occasional notes of events concerning their neighbours. Recent finds at the late culture layer of the ‘farm beneath the sand’ of the hair of bison and brown or black bears, neither of which is indigenous to Greenland, suggest the colonists may also have hunted across the water.
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The Icelanders, it seems, were interested in Greenlandic affairs primarily where these directly involved themselves. The only further references in their annals to crossings of the Davis Strait are the report that an Icelandic-born bishop of Greenland set off to look for Vinland in 1121, with what result we are not told; and the entry for 1347 regarding a small ship with a crew of seventeen or eighteen Greenlanders carrying timber from Markland back to Greenland which had been driven off course and landed in Iceland. The narrowed focus seems to show that a sense of something akin to national identity had arisen among the Icelanders. We have no way of knowing whether their neighbours in the west ever had time to cultivate such a luxury, before the extinction of the colony. Probably not. Probably life was simply too hard, too desperate to allow of it. A wooden crucifix, found beneath a bench during excavations on a farm at the head of Austmannadalen in the Western Settlement, depicts not the strutting and muscular Christ Triumphant characteristic of much early Viking Age Christianity, but a mournful, emaciated, suffering Christ, slumped on the cross. In conception and execution it is as far removed from the Jelling stone as could be imagined, and it makes apt symbolic comment on the harsh fate endured by these Norse Greenlanders.