Vikings in America (9 page)

The hall was identical with those found in Iceland, and elsewhere back across the stepping stones to the Faroe, Orkney and Shetland islands. Further south turf was more often replaced with stone as a building material. Viking halls were both functional and comfortable – a style of building that has withstood the test of time. Indeed, the Viking style of building offered a greater level of comfort than was offered in some areas of Britain even in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, as recently as the 1960s Scotland's Western Isles had many families living in ‘black houses', single rooms with an open fire in the centre, and this one room divided by a wattle screen to provide a living space, and a byre into which they brought their livestock, perhaps a cow and a few sheep, into one end of their living room. Such poverty, requiring animals to be housed alongside people, was unknown to the Vikings. Reconstructions of long-houses in Iceland show the hall to be a functional room which can reasonably be imagined as comfortable.

The hall room itself was where the men worked and slept, and where the whole community prepared food and ate. Often there was a social distinction between one side of the hall, which was occupied by the farm owner and his male relatives, and the other, occupied by the hired farm labourers. From the far end of the hall a door led to another room, usually called the women's room. This provided sleeping space for the women of the farm, as well as space for a vertical loom. Weaving was a year-round occupation, necessary to manufacture the cloth needed for clothing, for sail cloth and for export. Another room opening off the hall is usually called
the kitchen or the dairy, though its primary function was not the preparation but the storage of food, the cooking taking place on the fire in the hall. One final room opened from the porch. Writers have often chosen to call it a bathroom; yet in most cases it was simply a latrine. The Vikings in Greenland had indoor toilets 1,000 years ago; in Britain, outdoor latrines persisted into the 1970s.

In close proximity to the hall were other farm buildings. In Greenland a byre was a requirement to over-winter sheep and to stable horses, as well as to house cattle and pigs when they were kept. Frequently a farm would have had a workshop, and therefore had a specialised industry associated with that specific farm. Farms might, for instance, have a forge and work metal. They might specialise in the production of a specific household artefact, perhaps as potters. Or they might have a special role in fishing or shipbuilding. While farms were self-sufficient on a day-to-day basis, trade between farms was needed to exchange specialist goods, while trade with Norway was carried out by groups of farms that between them could equip and crew a ship, and assemble a cargo for trade. Farms in Greenland needed to co-operate, and they did this despite the considerable distances that frequently separated them. The distance between farms was too great for them to coalesce into villages, but there were groups nonetheless to which the term ‘settlement' is conventionally applied.

The 200 or so farms supported up to around 5,000 people, widely scattered over many hundreds of miles of coast. The indented nature of the coast encouraged travel by sea; indeed there is no evidence that pathways became established between the farms, and even today in Greenland there are no two modern settlements with a road joining them. Despite the logistic difficulties for travel, Greenland established a basic democracy on the Icelandic system, with each farmstead sending a representative to a
Thing
or parliament. These annual meetings helped to forge a sense of identity for Greenland.

Settlement in Greenland from its inception was in two main areas. In the south, just around Cape Farewell, was the Eastern Settlement; while around 300 miles to the north around the present-day capital of Nuuk was centred the Western Settlement. Both were on the west coast, despite the misleading name. The Vikings' use of the points of the compass differs from ours. In Britain John o' Groats is established as the northernmost point, while Land's End is the westernmost coast. To the Vikings a journey from anywhere in Britain in the direction of John o' Groats would also have been a journey north; one towards Land's End a journey west. Thus a traveller
could leave Land's End and go north to John o' Groats; however, the return journey to Land's End would be described as a journey west. When the Vikings named their settlements they had this sort of logic in mind. For the Vikings the Eastern Settlement was en route to the east; the Western settlement en route to the west.

The Eastern Settlement was where Eirik the Red settled, and where the best grazing land was to be found. It was also a little closer to Iceland and Norway, and throughout the Viking period tended to be a little more prosperous. By contrast the Western Settlement had better access to hunting grounds, which in the Arctic environment improve the further north one goes, but its grazing land was somewhat poorer than that of the Eastern Settlement. The two settlements complemented one another. Between them a smaller settlement developed, called simply the Middle Settlement. As the colony developed, these settlements virtually flowed into one another, so a Viking making the 300-mile voyage between the Eastern and Western Settlements would have found farmhouses at the head of almost every bay and fjord along the coast. North from the Western Settlement stretched around 500 miles of coast that was inhabited in the summer, and where Vikings sometimes over-wintered. This is the Nordresetr or North Shore.

It is from the North Shore that the northernmost example of Viking runic writing has been found, on Kingiktorssuaq Island in Upernavik District. In 1832 a party of Inuit visiting the island dismantled part of a cairn and found within it a stone with a clear inscription in runic. The style of the runes is widely accepted as fourteenth century. The inscription reads: ‘Erlingur Sigvatsson, Bjarni Thordarson and Enridi Oddsson built this cairn the Saturday before Rogation Day.'

The names of these three Viking adventurers are otherwise unrecorded. Rogation Day is not generally observed today. To the mediaeval church there were in fact four rogation days – the Major Rogation, which was a fixed day (25 April), and the three days of Minor Rogation, which were the three days before Ascension Day. Major Rogation is a seventh-century adoption by Pope Gregory the Great. Presumably this inscription with the singular form for Rogation Day refers to the Major Rogation, 25 April. This is too early a date by which to have reached Upernavik by sea in that season, as the sea ice is still present in April, and suggests that the Vikings had over-wintered in the location, perhaps trapping animals for their valuable winter coats.

The ultimate violent demise of Viking Greenland means that there are no surviving Greenlandic archives with which to trace the history of this nation. What information has survived is from European sources, and is fragmentary. Notwithstanding this, there is enough to provide an outline history of this Viking nation.

Of the years immediately following Eirik the Red's settlement there are glimpses from the Icelandic
Saga of the Greenlanders
. A culture is revealed which is based upon belief in the Norse religion, with the concomitant set of ethical values. Christianity is found in Greenland from the beginning – and some of the most impressive Viking remains from Greenland are in fact churches – but Christianity exists alongside the old beliefs, rather than as the sole faith. Christianity is supported by contacts with Europe, and was a necessary requirement for those contacts to exist, but there is little to suggest that it was more than a veneer. Important decisions were made under the advice of pagan soothsayers. Thus we hear that one Thorbjorn takes advice from a seeress called Thorbjorg – presumably a relative, in view of the similar name – before moving his home. This stands in contrast with a voyage made by Leif Eiriksson to Norway in 999–1000 when he over-winters with the king of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason. Olaf had converted to Christianity in the course of an expedition to England eight years before, and nominally converted his own country; he now encouraged Leif to convert. Leif returned to Greenland with a mission from King Olaf to bring about the conversion of Greenland, presumably as a precondition of trade with Norway. This is part of the process by which Christianity was sweeping through the whole Viking world. Thus in 1000 Iceland adopted Christianity by means of a vote taken at the
Althing
. While the old beliefs still continued in Iceland, Christianity was in the ascendant. In Greenland the religious position seems comparable, with growing adherence to Christianity. Many of the records for the centuries that follow are related to the Church, and may seem to suggest that Greenland was fully converted. Yet personal names in Greenland, as in Iceland, remain predominantly Nordic, honouring the gods of the north.

The early years of the eleventh century saw rapid exploration, both to America and within Greenland. Greenland voyaging included visits to the inhospitable east coast of Greenland. One Thorgils Orrabeinfostre was wrecked with his crew at an unknown location on the east coast. Here they encountered people they described pejoratively as ‘witches'. Earlier Icelandic
exploration of the southern section of the east coast made no mention of people living there, and the archaeological record has not found evidence of settlement there at that time. It is likely that Thorgils had travelled further north than previous Vikings, to the region of Scoresbysund. Here it is possible that Dorset Culture people may have been encountered – indeed, it is hard to imagine who else these people might have been. Thus, the Vikings encountered a last remnant of an American people who had once flourished in parts of Greenland, but who had largely vanished before the Viking arrival. Thorgils and his crew took three years to walk from the scene of their shipwreck south to Cape Farewell and north to the Eastern Settlement – a truly epic feat of survival, and one which demonstrates the resilience of the Vikings. The food resources of the southern portion of the east Greenland coast are meagre, and for the most part inadequate to support a settled population either of hunters or farmers. However, a band of men passing through can find food to support them for a short time in each area, though at the price of seriously depleting the resources there. The survival of Thorgils and his crew must be a story of endurance, and it is only because of their achievement that we have a mention in the sagas of an encounter with the very last of the Dorset Culture people in east Greenland, a people fast facing extinction in this location as a result of the warmer climate leading to a reduction in their food resources.

Trade with Europe was a prime concern for Greenland. Around the middle of the eleventh century, Greenland furthered its trade with Denmark by the gift of a polar bear to the king of Denmark. It is most unlikely that the Greenlanders were able to capture an adult bear; far more likely that they killed the mother and took a cub. Much of Greenland, including the area of both the Eastern and Western settlements, is not part of the range of polar bears, and only very rarely are polar bears encountered in the area of the central west coast. For example, the modern community of Kangerlussuaq – further north than either settlement – records just two polar bears in the period 1945–2005, both starving (and therefore particularly aggressive) adults that seem to have got lost on the central ice cap. That the Greenlanders could capture a polar bear cub suggests that they were visiting a breeding area, presumably the north-west of Greenland, and there acquired their gift. The polar bear survived the long sea voyage, and lived for a time in Denmark. One of the stranger items of trade is described in the
Saga of the Greenlanders
: a ship's figurehead carved from New World wood – probably maple – which was sold as a curiosity to a man from Bremen, for one gold mark.

In 1053 Greenland received its first ‘official' mention. Pope Leo IX defined the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen to include alongside its north German heartland all the Nordic lands, which are listed by him as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Greenland. It took a further three years to appoint the first bishop for Greenland, Isleif Gizuerarson, himself a Greenlander. From this time on Greenland was a part of European Christendom, at least in name – part of an archbishopric, with its own bishop, and paying tithes to the Church. That within two generations a settlement founded by a band of outlaws and extolling the Viking virtues of independence had been persuaded to pay taxes to a very distant Rome indicates both the power of Christianity, and the absolute necessity for the Greenlanders to conform with the culture of Europe in order to trade. Further European recognition is accorded to Greenland by a history book,
Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum
, written by Adam of Bremen and describing the lands of the Archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. Greenland is here, along with Iceland and Vinland. And at the end of the century,
c.
1100, Saxo Grammaticus includes Greenland in his
History of the Danes
.

Some time in the mid to late eleventh century, the Greenland Vikings must have first encountered the Inuit. This people was undergoing a rapid expansion. Many centuries previously they had expanded from Siberia across the Bering Strait to Alaska and the Barren Grounds of Northern Canada. From the eleventh century another wave of migration led them north and east, through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and on to northern Greenland. Where the Vikings and Inuit first met is not recorded, though as archaeology comes to understand more about both Viking and Inuit expansion a location may one day be identified. Within Greenland the Inuit continued their expansion, and by the early twelfth century had reached as far south as Disko Bay. From this time on the Viking and Inuit populations lived alongside one another within Greenland. Perhaps surprisingly there seems to have been peaceful coexistence. It seems that as farmers and hunters respectively the two communities made different demands on the resources of the vicinity, and were able to trade to their mutual benefit. The two groups were not in direct competition. That said, the peaceful coexistence of two peoples in one land is a sufficiently unusual human achievement to be worthy of comment. The first written record of the Inuit is from around 1150, and from a most unexpected source. This is in the
World Geography
written by a Sicilian Arab, Al Idrisi. He provides very little information, but confirms that by the middle of the twelfth century not only had the Vikings met the Inuit, but
that descriptions of the Inuit had been passed back to Europe and through European Christendom to the Islamic lands beyond.