The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (16 page)

Climbing the pink-gravel road out of Brattahlid proper, I hiked for two hours until the sheep pastures gave way to a fjord filled with icebergs. There were no head-high thickets to wriggle through, and no thick stands of winter-gold grass; just scattered sheep and sturdy woven-wire fences standing four feet tall with a strand of barbed wire on the top. The rare birch I passed had been browsed back; nothing was budding here, though spring comes sooner at Brattahlid than Sandnes. I saw no flowers. The hills were smooth and groomed almost bare by the sheep.

Green valleys, full of modern sheep fences alongside Viking stonework, finger out all along the thirty-mile length of Eiriksfjord, with sixty farming families now providing 30,000 lambs a year to the abattoir in the market town of Narsaq, a three-hour boat trip south. The farmers in Brattahlid are descendants of Otto Frederiksen, who established a sheep farm there in 1924. As a guidebook published by the Danish National Museum notes: “The fact that the Eskimos who wanted to be farmers chose Brattahlid is due to the simple fact that they, like Eirik the Red, could see that the richest grazing areas in the whole country were to be found there.” Between the time each spring when the lambs go up to the mountain pastures to graze and when they come down again in October, the farmers make hay. That I saw ranks of round bales wrapped in white plastic behind the barns in mid-May, after spring had arrived and the sheep were being turned out on grass, testified that there was more than enough hay to go around.

The same could not be said in Eirik the Red’s day. The biggest difference between raising sheep then and now is the haymaking technology: Today’s Greenlanders have tractors and balers and plastic wrapping. Eirik the Red had a short-handled sickle with an iron blade, and even those were scarce. Although a few Greenlandic bogs and brooks show the ruddy tint of iron ore, archaeologists have found no signs of ore smelting. All the iron in the Vikings’ tools, they learned by looking at bits of nails and knives under a scanning electron microscope, came from Norway in the form of “blooms”: ore that had been roasted, crushed, and cooked in a hot charcoal furnace until most of the impurities ran out. This lump of solid iron was squeezed and shaped into a ball, then split, while hot, into two or more “fingers” that were easily transported and sold. Eirik the Red (or his blacksmith) would heat a finger of iron over a charcoal fire in a soapstone hearth, purify it further, and then forge it into a tool. It was expensive, time-consuming, and essential to making hay. An iron sickle blade also had to be resharpened every day during haymaking, which required heating it in a bed of charcoal. If you were out of charcoal, you couldn’t make hay—which is why the modern Icelandic phrase
úrkul vonar,
literally “out-of-charcoal hopes,” means “hopeless.”

The estimates of how many sheep a chieftain like Eirik the Red might have owned range from fifty to 3,000, depending on how wild the writer assumes those sheep were. If his sheep wintered in sheds and were fed hay during the worst weather, then fifty. If expected to “fend for themselves outside all year,” as the sagas say sheep did during the first years of Iceland’s settlement, browsing the ground cover entirely away, then 3,000, more like the numbers kept in Brattahlid today. But Eirik the Red not only kept sheep, he also raised cows, which modern Greenlanders have given up on, after a brief assay at dairying in the early twentieth century. At last count, there were sixteen cows in all of Greenland; the stores sell no fresh milk. Not cold-hardy like sheep, cows cannot survive outside, as the old Icelandic saying puts it, “between the devil and the frost.” The Vikings built sturdy byres to protect their cows, with tall flat stones standing on edge to divide the stalls. Counting those partitions, archaeologists estimate that a chieftain like Eirik may have kept up to twenty cows. Since they had to stay in their stalls for 200 days of the year, they required 55 tons of hay, or 500 horse loads. Eirik needed some hay for his horses, too, though like the sheep they usually could fend for themselves. He also kept goats, which can digest brush and scrub even better than sheep.

As in Iceland, the amount of hay Eirik the Red could make each summer depended on the labor at his call—how many men cutting the grass with sickles, how many women raking and drying the hay, how many horses carrying it to the turf-covered haystacks or the barns. But it also depended on the weather and on what the sagas call the “richness of the land.” Greenland has a more continental climate than Iceland, and the Viking sites were subject to summer droughts. Elaborate lidded stone channels have been found on many Viking farms, diverting rivers to irrigate the hayfields (and, in some cases, into the houses to provide running water). It is not known if the Vikings manured their fields systematically, but even if they did, the watered and fertilized fields were large enough to feed only five to seven cows through the long winter. The additional hay had to be cut and hauled from the natural lowland marshes—which meant herding the cows in summer, and the sheep much of the year, away from that grass and into the highlands, a job that called for both shepherds and dairymaids, for the sheep and goats, as well as the cows, were milked.

When she first came to Brattahlid with her father, Gudrid, as an unmarried girl of fifteen, would have been sent into the hills with the other young people to work as a dairymaid for the summer. This again would have been her summer chore when she returned to Brattahlid, a widow at age seventeen. In the hills, she lived in a small house, close to wood and water, and spent her days making butter, cheese,
skyr
—a thick yogurtlike dish—and whey to feed the household over winter. Based on Icelandic practice in later centuries, we can guess that both cows and sheep were milked once a day, the cows in the field as they grazed, the ewes after being driven into a pen. Records from the 1400s say three women should be able to milk twelve cows and eighty ewes. While working, they should keep an eye out for butter imps, little demons that sucked the teats of other people’s cows. These imps not only stole milk to carry home for their master’s butter, “they had a habit of crawling between women’s legs and going about their business there, too,” as one folklorist puts it.

The day’s milk was filtered through a mesh strainer, knotted up from the coarse hairs of cows’ tails. Then it was left in a shallow, square wooden trough for thirty-six hours, until the cream collected on top. By laying an arm on one lip of the trough, and tilting the trough, Gudrid could quickly skim off the cream—in Icelandic, skim milk is still called
undanrenna,
what “runs under” the arm. The cream was churned into butter, kneaded into a block, squeezed to get every last bit of buttermilk out of it, and stored in a box. Unsalted, it would sour, but keep for decades. Later landowners filled their treasuries with butter; in the 1500s, an Icelandic bishop amassed twenty-five tons of it. In Ireland a common archaeological find is a barrel of butter dug up from a bog; the Norse also stored butter this way. Bog-butter grows hard, gray, and cheeselike, but stays edible: The specimens in the Irish National Museum, dated to the seventeenth century, are still “quite free from putrefaction.”

From the skim milk, Gudrid would have made cheese and
skyr.
To make
skyr,
she heated the milk until a skin formed, then cooled it to body temperature and added a bacterial culture from the previous day’s
skyr,
along with rennet, an enzyme from the dried, crumbled stomach of a calf a few days old. If the
skyr
tub was kept warm, the
skyr
would curdle by morning. Then it was sieved through cheesecloth, the curds (the
skyr)
and the liquid whey kept in separate wooden barrels to ferment. Once the whey was sour enough, it could be used to pickle blood sausages and other delicacies like rams’ testicles; mixed with water, it made a healthy drink, especially when the whey was made from sheep’s milk, which has three times the vitamin C of cows’ milk. A diet of fish and sheep’s whey will keep a worker healthy “for a long period of time,” an Icelandic writer in the 1800s noted, whereas people drinking water with their fish soon lost their strength.

Making cheese instead of
skyr
called for more rennet and none of the bacterial culture. Once hard, cheeses were stored in a cool, damp larder and washed frequently to keep down the mold. Or they could be carried up to a convenient snowbank and put on ice.

The essential tool for dairying, as important as an iron sickle blade to haymaking, is a watertight bucket. In the National Museum of Greenland—a series of handsome wooden warehouses clustered by the old harbor in Nuuk—Georg Nyegaard took me to the conservator’s workshop to see the plethora of wooden artifacts that had been retrieved from the Farm Beneath the Sand. Most were splintered bits of what he called “coopered vessels”—buckets and barrels, no doubt including milking pails,
skyr
tubs, whey barrels (large enough for a man to hide in), cheese forms, and butter boxes.

Wearing white cotton gloves, Georg opened a plastic bag and gently removed two wooden plates, one round, one oval, each hardly longer than my palm. “These are bottom disks,” he said. “They put staves all around here and tied them together with baleen.”

Opening another bag, he drew out a thin board about ten inches long. “Here is a very fine piece of a stave, with a groove at the bottom for the disk.” There was a matching groove near the top, but Georg couldn’t explain its purpose. “There are so many objects like this one that we don’t know the function of. So many strange shapes.”

The wood, he explained, was driftwood: It bore the telltale signs of shipworm. Driftwood comes to Greenland with the drift ice, “whole trees, roots and all,” as the missionary Otho Fabricius wrote in 1807. The trees are knocked from the wooded banks of great rivers in Siberia when the ice breaks up in spring, and float north to the pack ice of the Polar Sea, in which they travel, soaked and ground, stripped of bark and branches, for five to twenty years, following the current down the east coast of Greenland and around the tip north as far as Nuuk. Wood is tossed ashore in West Greenland at a rate of eighty to 120 cords a year, and most of it, according to Fabricius, is “crooked, twisted, or full of cracks and wormholes, or rotten.” Another author describes it as “intractable” and requiring “much ingenuity” to carve: “The wood has lost most of its original flexibility. It feels ‘dead.’” Very rarely is there a workable log, but it was all the Vikings had besides head-high birches and spindly willows and juniper.

Upstairs in the magazine, the main storage room, Georg opened box after box. An iron knife, whetted to a sliver. A polar bear tooth. A horn spoon. A partial basket made of willow roots, twined in a spiral. Beads of soapstone and walrus tusk. A small soapstone pot. A large soapstone basin for watering cows. A wooden ladle, broken centuries ago and stitched together with roots. A whalebone butter paddle.

We peered at scraps of a dark, woven cloth through the clear lid of a plastic box. “I remember this weaving room we excavated,” Georg said. “There were so many kinds of textiles. There were spindle whorls in different shapes made of soapstone—it’s a very common find. You see a lot of implements committed to this industry. You get an impression they spent a lot of time at it.”

He put the box back and opened one next to it. “Here’s one of the most beautiful objects to find,” Georg said, “because you get so close to history. It’s a last for a shoe.” He took out of the box a smooth, dark foot carved of wood and cradled it in both hands. “When you take such a piece from the soil, you feel so close to the person. It’s made for
one
person’s feet.

“These people were very busy,” he said as we left the magazine. “During the summer they had a lot of activities going on. The economy was quite complex. They recognized themselves as farmers, but when you look at the bones, a major part of the bones were seal and reindeer bones, so they were hunters, too.”

Looking at the bones dug up before the Farm Beneath the Sand was found, archaeologists created a story of this economy, a story whose ulterior goal was to explain the puzzle that captivates most people about Viking Greenland: Why, after surviving over four hundred years, did its people disappear without a trace? Jared Diamond draws on this work in his popular book
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
arguing that the livestock the settlers brought with them, based on the Norwegian “ideal farm,” didn’t suit Greenland’s colder, drier conditions. Diamond writes: “Although pigs found abundant nuts to eat in Norway’s forests, and although Vikings prized pork above all other meats, pigs proved terribly destructive and unprofitable in lightly wooded Greenland, where they rooted up the fragile vegetation and soil. Within a short time they were reduced to low numbers or virtually eliminated.” For similar environmental reasons, he says, the Vikings were forced to limit the number of “honored cows” they kept and increase their herds of “despised goats.” A main cause of the “collapse,” in his view, is that the Norse refused to give up their unsuitable livestock altogether and become dedicated seal hunters like the Inuit, who began moving south into Viking territory in the 1200s. He also thinks they turned up their noses at fish.

Seal bones are found in significant numbers in late-Norse middens in Greenland, but most are from harp seals. A migratory carnivore, the harp seal followed the capelin into the fjords for a few weeks in the spring, and the sand eels in the fall. The spring run was particularly timely, coming when the stored milk products were running out.

Diamond argues that only people at “small poor farms” ate seal meat—that it was famine food. In one garbage heap from the last days of occupation at a small farm on the Lysufjord, 70 percent of the bones were seal. People at the large, upper-class Sandnes, next door, preferred venison, if they couldn’t get pork or beef. But as the climate worsened and the fragile vegetation was destroyed by overgrazing, they failed to see that seal or fish were their only options. Rather than change their eating habits—and adapt to their environment, the way the Inuit did—the Vikings starved. Diamond doesn’t blame them. He had forced himself to taste seal meat while he was in Greenland, and had not “gotten beyond the second bite.”