Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (46 page)

brought home was the baculum of male walruses, a bone like a straight rod
about one foot long that forms the core of the walrus penis, because it
proved to be of just the right size and shape (and, one suspects, conversa
tion value) to make into an axe handle or a hook.

The Nordrseta hunt was dangerous and expensive in many ways. To be
gin with, hunting walruses and polar bears without a gun must have been
very dangerous. Please imagine yourself, equipped with just a lance, spear,
bow and arrow, or club (take your choice) trying to kill a huge enraged wal
rus or bear before it could kill you. Please also imagine yourself spending
several weeks in a small rowboat shared with a live, trussed-up polar bear or
its cubs. Even without a live bear as companion, the boat journey itself
along the cold stormy coast of West Greenland exposed hunters to risk of
death from shipwreck or exposure for several weeks. Apart from those dan
gers, the trip constituted expensive use of boats, manpower, and summer
time for people short of all three. Because of Greenland's scarcity of lumber,
few Greenlanders owned boats, and using those precious boats to hunt walruses came at the expense of other possible uses of the boats, such as going
to Labrador to acquire more lumber. The hunt took place in the summer, when men were needed to harvest the hay required to feed livestock
through the winter. Much of what the Greenlanders obtained materially by
trade with Europe in return for those walrus tusks and bearskins was just
luxury goods for churches and chiefs. From our perspective today, we can't
help thinking of seemingly more important uses that the Greenlanders
could have made of those boats and man-time. From the Greenlanders' per
spective, though, the hunt must have brought great prestige to the indi
vidual hunters, and it maintained for the whole society the psychologically
vital contact with Europe.

Greenland's trade with Europe was mainly through the Norwegian ports of Bergen and Trondheim. While at first some cargo was carried in ocean
going ships belonging to Icelanders and to the Greenlanders themselves, those ships as they aged could not be replaced due to the islands' lack of
timber, leaving the trade to Norwegian ships. By the mid 1200s, there were
often periods of several years in which no ship at all visited Greenland. In
1257 Norway's King Haakon Haakonsson, as part of his effort to assert his authority over all of the Norse Atlantic island societies, sent three commis
sioners to Greenland to persuade the hitherto-independent Greenlanders to
acknowledge his sovereignty and pay tribute. Although the details of the re
sulting agreement have not been preserved, some documents suggest that
Greenland's acceptance of Norwegian sovereignty in 1261 was in return for

the king's promise to dispatch two ships each year, similar to his simultaneous agreement with Iceland which we know stipulated six ships each year.
Thereafter, Greenland's trade became a Norwegian royal monopoly. But Greenland's association with Norway remained loose, and Norwegian authority difficult to enforce because of Greenland's distance. We know for
sure only that a royal agent resided in Greenland at various times during the
1300s.

At least as important as Europe's material exports to Greenland were its
psychological exports of Christian identity and European identity. Those
two identities may explain why the Greenlanders acted in ways that
—we to
day would say with the value of hindsight—were maladaptive and ulti
mately cost them their lives, but that for many centuries enabled them to maintain a functioning society under the most difficult conditions faced by
any medieval Europeans.

Greenland converted to Christianity around
a.d.
1000, at the same time as the conversions of Iceland and the other Viking Atlantic colonies, and of
Norway itself. For more than a century the Greenland churches remained
small structures built of turf on some farmer's land, mainly on the largest
farms. Most likely, as in Iceland, they were so-called proprietary churches,
built and owned by the landowning farmer, who received part of the tithes
paid to that church by its local members.

But Greenland still had no resident bishop, whose presence was required
for performing confirmations and for a church to be considered conse
crated. Hence around 1118 that very same Einar Sokkason whom we have already encountered as a saga hero killed by an axe blow from behind was sent by the Greenlanders to Norway in order to persuade its king to provide
Greenland with a bishop. As inducements, Einar took along to give the king
a large supply of ivory, walrus hides, and
—best of all—a live polar bear.
That did the trick. The king, in turn, persuaded that Arnald whom we al
ready met in Einar Sokkason's saga to become Greenland's first resident
bishop, to be followed by about nine others over the succeeding centuries.
Without exception, all were born and educated in Europe and came to Greenland only upon their appointment as bishop. Not surprisingly, they
looked to Europe for their models, preferred beef over seal meat, and directed resources of Greenland society to the Nordrseta hunt that enabled
them to buy wine and vestments for themselves, and stained glass windows
for their churches.

A big construction program of churches modeled on European churches followed Arnald's appointment, and continued to around 1300,
when the lovely church at Hvalsey was erected as one of the last. Green
land's ecclesiastical establishment came to consist of one cathedral, about
13 large parish churches, many smaller churches, and even a monastery and
a nunnery. While most of the churches were built with stone lower walls
and turf upper walls, Hvalsey Church and at least three others had walls en
tirely of stone. These big churches were all out of proportion to the size of
the tiny society that erected and supported them.

For instance, St. Nicholas's Cathedral at Gardar, measuring 105 feet long
by 53 feet wide, was as large as either of the two cathedrals of Iceland, whose
population was ten times that of Greenland. I estimated the largest of the
stone blocks of its lower walls, carefully carved to fit each other and trans
ported from sandstone quarries at least a mile distant, to weigh about three tons. Even larger was a flagstone of about 10 tons in front of the bishop's
house. Adjacent structures included a bell tower 80 feet high, and a ceremo
nial hall with a floor area of 1,400 square feet, the largest hall in Greenland
and nearly three-quarters the size of the hall of the archbishop of Trond-
heim in Norway. On an equally lavish scale were the cathedrals' two cow barns, one of them 208 feet long (the largest barn in Greenland) and fitted
with a stone lintel weighing about four tons. As a splendid welcome to visi
tors, the cathedral's grounds were decorated with about 25 complete walrus
skulls and five narwhal skulls, which may be the only ones preserved at any
Greenland Norse site: otherwise, archaeologists have found only chips of
ivory, because it was so valuable and was almost all exported to Europe.

Gardar Cathedral and the other Greenland churches must have consumed horrifyingly large amounts of scarce timber to support their walls
and roofs. Imported church paraphernalia, such as bronze bells and com
munion wine, were also expensive to Greenlanders because they were ulti
mately bought with the sweat and blood of Nordrseta hunters and competed
against essential iron for the limited cargo space on arriving ships. Recur
rent expenses that their churches cost the Greenlanders were an annual tithe
paid to Rome, and additional Crusade tithes levied on all Christians. These
tithes were paid with Greenland exports shipped to Bergen and converted
to silver there. A surviving receipt for one such shipment, the six-year Cru
sade Tithe of 1274-1280, shows that it consisted of 1,470 pounds of ivory
from the tusks of 191 walruses, which Norway's archbishop managed to sell for 26 pounds of pure silver. That the Church was able to extract such tithes

and complete such building programs testifies to the authority it commanded in Greenland.

Church-associated land ultimately came to comprise much of the best land in Greenland, including about one-third of the land of Eastern Settle
ment. Greenland's church tithes, and possibly its other exports to Europe, went through Gardar, where one can still see the ruins of a large storage shed standing immediately next to the cathedral's southeast corner. With
Gardar thus boasting Greenland's largest storage building, as well as by far
its largest cattle herd and richest land, whoever controlled Gardar con
trolled Greenland. What remains unclear is whether Gardar and the other
church farms in Greenland were owned by the Church itself or else by the farmers on whose land the churches stood. But whether authority and own
ership rested with the bishop or with the chiefs doesn't alter the main con
clusion: Greenland was a hierarchical society, with great differences of
wealth justified by the Church, and with disproportionate investment in
churches. Again, we moderns have to wonder if the Greenlanders wouldn't
have been better off had they imported fewer bronze bells, and more iron with which to make tools, weapons to defend themselves against the Inuit, or goods to trade with the Inuit for meat in times of stress. But we ask our question with the gift of hindsight, and without regard to the cultural heri
tage that led the Greenlanders to make their choices.

Besides that specific identity as Christians, Greenlanders maintained
their European identity in many other ways, including their importation of
European bronze candlesticks, glass buttons, and gold rings. Over the cen
turies of their colony's existence, the Greenlanders followed and adopted changing European customs in detail. One well-documented set of exam
ples involves burial customs, as revealed by excavations of bodies in Scandi
navian and Greenland churchyards. Medieval Norwegians buried infants
and stillborns around a church's east gable; so did the Greenlanders. Early
medieval Norwegians buried bodies in coffins, with women on the south
side of churchyards and men on the north side; later Norwegians dispensed
with coffins, just wrapped bodies in clothing or a shroud, and mingled the
sexes in the churchyard. Greenlanders made those same shifts with time. In continental European cemeteries throughout the Middle Ages, bodies were laid out on their backs with the head towards the west and the feet towards
the east (so that the deceased could "face" east), but the position of the arms
changed with time: until 1250 the arms were arranged to extend parallel to
the sides, then around 1250 they were bent slightly over the pelvis, later bent

further to rest over the stomach, and finally in the late Middle Ages folded
tightly over the chest. Even those shifts in arm positions are observed in
Greenland cemeteries.

Greenland church construction similarly followed Norwegian European
models and their changes with time. Any tourist accustomed to European
cathedrals, with their long nave, west-facing main entrance, chancel, and
north and south transepts, will immediately recognize all those features in
the stone ruins of Gardar Cathedral today. Hvalsey Church so closely re
sembles Eidfjord Church in Norway that we can conclude that Green-
landers must either have brought over the same architect or else copied the blueprints. Between 1200 and 1225, Norwegian builders abandoned their
previous unit of linear measurement (the so-called international Roman
foot) and adopted the shorter Greek foot; Greenland builders followed suit.

Imitation of European models extended to homely details like combs
and clothes. Norwegian combs were single-sided, with the tines on just one side of the shaft, until around 1200, when those combs went out of fashion and were replaced by two-sided models with sets of tines projecting in op
posite directions; Greenlanders followed that switch in comb styles. (That
calls to mind Henry Thoreau's comment, in his book
Walden,
about people
who slavishly adopt the latest style of fashion designers in a distant land: "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.") The excellent preservation of garments wrapped
around the corpses buried in the permafrost at Herjolfsnes Churchyard
from the final decades of the Greenland colony's existence shows us that
Greenland clothes followed smart European fashions, even though they
seem far less appropriate to Greenland's cold climate than the Inuit one-
piece tailored parka with fitted sleeves and attached hood. Those clothes of
the last Greenland Norse included: for women, a long, low-necked gown
with a narrow waist; for men, a sporty coat called a
houpelande,
which was a long loose outer garment held in by a belt at the waist and with loose sleeves
up which the wind could whistle; jackets buttoned up the front; and tall cylindrical caps.

All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Green-
landers paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them
in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, "We are Europeans,
we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit."
Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than
Britain itself, Europe's most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had ex-