Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (36 page)

We already encountered those same conflicts of interest for Easter Island chiefs and Maya kings (Chapters 2 and 5), and they also had heavy consequences for the fate of Greenland Norse society (Chapter 8).

When the Vikings began their overseas expansion in the
a.d. 800s,
they still
were "pagans" worshipping gods traditional in Germanic religion, such as the fertility god Frey, the sky god Thor, and the war god Odin. What most horrified European societies targeted by Viking raiders was that Vikings
were not Christians and did not observe the taboos of a Christian society.
Quite the opposite: they seemed to take sadistic pleasure in targeting
churches and monasteries for attack. For instance, when in
a.d.
843 a large
Viking fleet went plundering up the Loire River in France, the raiders began
by capturing the cathedral of Nantes at the river's mouth and killing the
bishop and all the priests. Actually, though, the Vikings had no sadistic spe
cial fondness for plundering churches, nor any prejudice against secular
sources of booty. While the undefended wealth of churches and monasteries
was an obvious source of easy rich pickings, the Vikings were also pleased to
attack rich trading centers whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Once established overseas in Christian lands, Vikings were quite pre
pared to intermarry and adapt to local customs, and that included em
bracing Christianity. Conversions of Vikings overseas contributed to the
emergence of Christianity at home in Scandinavia, as overseas Vikings re
turning on visits brought information about the new religion, and as chiefs and kings in Scandinavia began to recognize the political advantages that
Christianity could bring them. Some Scandinavian chiefs adopted Chris
tianity informally, even before their kings did. Decisive events in Chris
tianity's establishment in Scandinavia were the "official" conversion of Denmark under its king Harald Bluetooth around
a.d.
960, of Norway be
ginning around
a.d.
995, and of Sweden during the following century.

When Norway began to convert, the overseas Viking colonies of Orkney,
Shetland, Faeroe, Iceland, and Greenland followed suit. That was partly be
cause the colonies had few ships of their own, depended on Norwegian
shipping for trade, and had to recognize the impossibility of remaining
pagan after Norway became Christian. For instance, when Norway's King
Olaf I converted, he banned pagan Icelanders from trading with Norway,
captured Icelanders visiting Norway (including relatives of leading Iceland
pagans), and threatened to mutilate or kill those hostages unless Iceland re
nounced paganism. At the meeting of Iceland's national assembly in the

summer of
a.d.
999, Icelanders accepted the inevitable and declared themselves Christian. Around that same year, Leif Eriksson, the son of that Erik
the Red who founded the Greenland colony, supposedly introduced Chris
tianity to Greenland.

The Christian churches that were created in Iceland and Greenland after
a.d.
1000 were not independent entities owning their own land and build
ings, as are modern churches. Instead, they were built and owned by a lead
ing local farmer/chief on his own land, and the farmer was entitled to a
share of the taxes collected as tithes by that church from other local people.
It was as if the chief negotiated a franchise agreement with McDonald's, under which he was granted a local monopoly by McDonald's, erected a
church building and supplied merchandise according to uniform McDonald's standards, and kept a part of the proceeds for himself while sending the rest of the proceeds to central management
—in this case, the pope in Rome via the archbishop in Nidaros (modern Trondheim). Naturally, the
Catholic Church struggled to make its churches independent of the farmers/
owners. In 1297 the Church finally succeeded in forcing Iceland church
owners to transfer ownership of many church farms to the bishop. No
records have been preserved to show whether something similar also happened in Greenland, but Greenland's acceptance (at least nominally) of Norwegian rule in 1261 probably put some pressure on Greenland church
owners. We do know that in 1341 the bishop of Bergen sent to Greenland an
overseer named Ivar Bardarson, who eventually returned to Norway with a
detailed list and description of all Greenland churches, suggesting that the
bishopric was trying to tighten its grip on its Greenland "franchises" as it
did in Iceland.

The conversion to Christianity constituted a dramatic cultural break for
the Viking overseas colonies. Christianity's claims of exclusivity, as the sole
true religion, meant abandoning pagan traditions. Art and architecture became Christian, based on continental models. Overseas Vikings built big
churches and even cathedrals equal in size to those of much more populous
mainland Scandinavia, and thus huge in relation to the size of the much smaller overseas populations supporting them. The colonies took Chris
tianity seriously enough that they paid tithes to Rome: we have records of
the crusade tithe that the Greenland bishop sent to the pope in 1282 (paid
in walrus tusks and polar bear hides rather than in money), and also an of
ficial papal receipt in 1327 acknowledging the delivery of the six-years' tithe
from Greenland. The Church became a major vehicle for introducing the
latest European ideas to Greenland, especially because every bishop ap-

pointed to Greenland was a mainland Scandinavian rather than a native Greenlander.

Perhaps the most important consequence of the colonists' conversion to
Christianity involved how they viewed themselves. The outcome reminds
me of how Australians, long after the founding of Britain's Australian
colonies in 1788, continued to think of themselves not as an Asian and Pacific people but as overseas British, still prepared to die in 1915 at far-off
Gallipoli fighting with the British against Turks irrelevant to Australia's na
tional interests. In the same way, Viking colonists on the North Atlantic islands thought of themselves as European Christians. They kept in step with mainland changes in church architecture, burial customs, and units of measurement. That shared identity enabled a few thousand Greenlanders to co
operate with each other, withstand hardships, and maintain their existence
in a harsh environment for four centuries. As we shall see, it also prevented
them from learning from the Inuit, and from modifying their identity in
ways that might have permitted them to survive beyond four centuries.

The six Viking colonies on North Atlantic islands constitute six parallel ex
periments in establishing societies derived from the same ancestral source.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, those six experiments re
sulted in different outcomes: the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe colonies have continued to exist for more than a thousand years without their sur
vival ever being in serious doubt; the Iceland colony also persisted but had to overcome poverty and serious political difficulties; the Greenland Norse
died out after about 450 years; and the Vinland colony was abandoned
within the first decade. Those differing outcomes are clearly related to envi
ronmental differences among the colonies. The four main environmental
variables responsible for the different outcomes appear to be: ocean dis
tances or sailing times by ship from Norway and Britain; resistance offered
by non-Viking inhabitants, if there were any; suitability for agriculture, de
pending especially on latitude and local climate; and environmental fragility,
especially susceptibility to soil erosion and deforestation.

With only six experimental outcomes but four variables that might explain those outcomes, we cannot hope to proceed in our search for explanations as we did in the Pacific, where we had 81 outcomes (81 islands) compared to only nine explanatory variables. For statistical correlational
analysis to have any chance of succeeding, one needs many more separate
experimental outcomes than there are variables to be tested. Hence, in the

Pacific, with so many islands available, statistical analysis alone sufficed to determine the relative importance of those independent variables. In the North Atlantic, there are not nearly enough separate natural experiments to achieve that aim. A statistician, presented only with that information, would declare the Viking problem to be insoluble. This will be a frequent dilemma for historians trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: apparently too many potentially independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables' importance statistically.

But historians know much more about human societies than just the initial environmental conditions and the final outcomes: they also have huge quantities of information about the sequence of steps connecting initial conditions to outcomes. Specifically, Viking scholars can test the importance of ocean sailing times by counting recorded numbers of ship sailings and reported cargos of the ships; they can test effects of indigenous resistance by historical accounts of fighting between Viking invaders and the locals; they can test suitability for agriculture by records of what plant and livestock species were actually grown; and they can test environmental fragility by historical signs of deforestation and soil erosion (such as pollen counts and fossilized pieces of plants), and by identification of wood and other building materials. Drawing on this knowledge of intervening steps as well as of outcomes, let us now briefly examine five of the six North Atlantic colonies in sequence of increasing isolation and decreasing wealth: Orkney, Shetland, Faeroe, Iceland, and Vinland. The next two chapters will discuss in detail the fate of Viking Greenland.

The Orkneys are an island archipelago just off the northern tip of Britain, wrapped around the large sheltered harbor of Scapa Flow that served as the main base for the British navy in both world wars. From John O'Groats, the northernmost point of the Scottish mainland, to the nearest Orkney Island is only 11 miles, and from the Orkneys to Norway barely a 24-hour sail in Viking ships. That made it easy for Norwegian Vikings to invade the Orkneys, to import whatever they needed from Norway or the British Isles, and to ship out their own exports cheaply. The Orkneys are so-called continental islands, really just a piece of the British mainland that became separated only when sea levels rose around the world with glacial melting at the end of the Ice Ages 14,000 years ago. Over that land bridge, many species of land mammals, including elk (alias red deer in Britain), otters, and hares, immigrated and provided good hunting. Viking invaders quickly subdued the indigenous population, known as the Picts.

As the southernmost of the Viking North Atlantic colonies except for
Vinland, and lying in the Gulf Stream, the Orkneys enjoy a mild climate.
Their fertile, heavy soils have been renewed by glaciation and are not at seri
ous risk of erosion. Hence farming in the Orkneys was already being prac
ticed by the Picts before the Vikings arrived, was continued under the
Vikings, and remains highly productive to this day. Modern Orkney agricul
tural exports include beef and eggs, plus pork, cheese, and some crops.

The Vikings conquered the Orkneys around
a.d.
800, proceeded to use the islands as a base for raiding the nearby British and Irish mainlands, and
built up a rich, powerful society that remained for some time an indepen
dent Norse kingdom. One manifestation of the Orkney Vikings' wealth is a
17-pound cache of silver buried around
a.d.
950, unmatched on any other
North Atlantic island and equal in size to the largest silver caches of main
land Scandinavia. Another manifestation is St. Magnus Cathedral, erected in the 12th century and inspired by Britain's mighty Durham Cathedral. In
a.d.
1472 ownership of the Orkneys passed without conquest from Norway
(then subject to Denmark) to Scotland, for a trivial reason of dynastic politics (Scotland's King James demanded compensation for Denmark's failure
to pay the dowry promised to accompany the Danish princess whom he married). Under Scottish rule, the Orkney islanders continued to speak a
Norse dialect until the 1700s. Today, the Orkney descendants of indigenous
Picts and Norse invaders remain prosperous farmers enriched by a terminal
for North Sea oil.

Some of what I have just said about the Orkneys also applies to the next North Atlantic colony, the Shetland Islands. They too were originally occu
pied by Pict farmers, conquered by Vikings in the ninth century, ceded to
Scotland in 1472, spoke Norse for some time thereafter, and have recently profited from North Sea oil. Differences are that they are slightly more remote and northerly (50 miles north of Orkney and 130 miles north of Scot
land), windier, have poorer soils, and are less productive agriculturally.
Raising sheep for wool has been an economic mainstay in the Shetlands as
in the Orkneys, but raising cattle failed in the Shetlands and was replaced by
increased emphasis on fishing.

Next in isolation after the Orkneys and Shetlands were the Faeroe Islands, 200 miles north of the Orkneys and 400 miles west of Norway. That
made the Faeroes still readily accessible to Viking ships carrying settlers and
trade goods, but beyond reach of earlier ships. Hence the Vikings found the
Faeroes uninhabited except perhaps for a few Irish hermits, about whose
existence there are vague stories but no firm archaeological evidence.