The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (17 page)

Despite the attractive environmental message in Diamond’s
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, I have problems accepting this model of the Viking economy. How do we know that Vikings prized pork and despised goat meat? Our main source for Viking culinary practices, other than scattered references to food in the sagas, is the volume of Old Norse mythology written in the early 1200s by the chieftain Snorri Sturluson. In Snorri’s
Edda,
the cow is given pride of place: Her copious milk fed the giant Ymir, from whose body the chief god Odin created the world. Pork is the meat eaten in Valhalla, the great hall in the Otherworld to which Odin welcomes warriors slain in battle; the same old boar is boiled each night in a huge cauldron, and in the morning he comes back to life. The other pig mentioned in the myths is not eaten, but ridden—by the fertility god Frey. Odin himself is said to never eat, living on wine alone; yet in another tale, he and two lesser gods butcher an ox and roast it on a spit over a wood fire. A goat, meanwhile, produces mead instead of milk for the dead heroes in Valhalla to drink. Goat is also the favorite food of the war god Thor; the two goats that pull his chariot allow him to butcher and boil them every night. Provided that he saves every bone and wraps them up in the skins, unbroken, the goats will come back to life in the morning. Given the number of children named after Thor—one-quarter of the names in the Icelandic
Book of Settlements
are Thor combinations—his totemic animal seems unlikely to have been “despised.” Finally, three gods, Thor, Loki, and Njord, are all associated with fishing. In particular, Loki, the trickster god, is said to have turned himself into a salmon and invented a net. Noticeably missing from the gods’ meals are sheep.

Jette Arneborg, an archaeologist at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, pointed out to me the second problem with Diamond’s model of the Viking diet. It assumes that the Vikings were tidy, that they carefully cleared the table and carried all their dinner scraps out to the garbage midden. But there were no tables in treeless Greenland. And bones were valuable. Housewives collected them back into the pot and boiled them to make soup, then pickled them in whey to make “bone-jelly porridge.” Toys, dice, flutes, and game pieces were carved out of them, and needles and needle cases. They were crushed and dried and fed to cows as a calcium supplement. Or spread on the fields as fertilizer—still a common practice in northern Norway in the nineteenth century. Bones were often burned, although they gave off a bitter, foul-smelling smoke. In profligate households, they were tossed to the dogs or simply left on the floor.

Archaeologists have long bemoaned the “fetid,” “squalid” conditions of the Greenland Vikings’ floors. Layers of twigs, hay, and moss served an insulating function—they kept the permafrost from thawing and the floor from turning to muck. Sifting through samples of such carpeting, scientists have identified flies that feed on carrion and feces, as well as human lice, sheep lice, and the beetles that live in rotting hay. Shards of bone are scattered throughout, “a few clearly having passed through the gut of the farm’s dog,” as one excavator writes, others the detritus of whittling. On the floor of the Farm Beneath the Sand, archaeologists even found fish bones.

Archaeologists have been agonizing over Greenland’s missing fish bones for over thirty years. Whereas piles of fish bones are found on Viking sites in Iceland, they are “extremely rare,” “nearly absent” from the bone collections in Greenland.

Jared Diamond thinks they should stop worrying about it. He writes in
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“I prefer instead to take the facts at face value: Even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.” His explanation draws on his own painful reaction to a batch of spoiled shrimp. “Perhaps Eirik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an equally awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is for you, and how we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desperate grubby ichthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.”

“That’s not how it was!” laughed Jette Arneborg, when I relayed Diamond’s theory to her. In her cluttered office at the Danish National Museum, a converted Renaissance palace in downtown Copenhagen, Jette seemed worlds away from her job as codirector of the dig at the Farm Beneath the Sand. She had already described her days there: going in by helicopter, using sandbags to hold the river back, excavating three to four inches of soil, then waiting for the sun to melt the next layer of permafrost. Wrapping every bone, every chip of wood, in wet paper and bagging it in plastic, the glacial river roaring past inches away:
It was very fast, very deep,
she had told me.
If you fell into it, you wouldn’t survive.
An open box on her desk held two animal bones from Greenland; they had been sent to the diet-analysis group, where someone saw a cross had been cut into each one and returned them to her, reclassified as artifacts.

“Of course they ate fish,” she said. “We do have one fishhook. We have sinkers. We have pieces of what I think were nets. We have fish bones from inside the house. If we sieve very carefully, we find them.” The Farm Beneath the Sand is the only house from Gudrid’s time in Greenland that has ever been fully excavated. “For the rest of the farms,” Jette said, “we have excavated only the top part,” the part from the 1300s. She explained, “These farms are ancient monuments. The walls are still standing. They are huge and marvelous. You can’t spoil them by digging under them. But here we could, because the river was taking it all away.”

And when they did, they found 24,643 bone fragments inside the house. Inge Bodker Enghoff of the University of Copenhagen’s Zoological Museum could identify 8,250 of them, representing four hundred years of occupation. Of these, 166 bones were fish bones—the largest collection of fish bones found at any Greenland Norse farm. (By comparison, Enghoff identified only one pig bone.) Because of the permafrost and slightly acidic soil, most bones were very well preserved, she writes, “with the exception of the fish bones.” Why only the fish bones decayed she did not know, but their poor state of preservation led her to conclude that “fishing may have played a larger role than the sheer number of fish bones indicates.”

The Norse name for the fjord close to the Farm Beneath the Sand is, after all, Cod Fjord. And the best salmon river in Greenland is a few hours away by horseback. Said Jette, “They fished. We have written sources talking about the good fishing spots. They knew where to catch halibut. There’s salmon and a lot of trout. They lived so close to the water, the trout jumped out of the lake at them.” Exactly that happened to C. L. Vebaek in 1949, as he excavated a Norse farm by a lake in South Greenland. “One day,” he writes, “one of these awful
nigeqs
[southeasterly gales] arose (lasting three days), and it blew so much of the water from the lake situated to the east that the water level suddenly fell considerably. As a result, nearly all the water in the river disappeared, and a large number of salmon (as far as I remember more than a hundred) were stranded in small pools—you could just walk out and collect the fish with your hands!”

Counting animal bones can’t tell us that Vikings in Iceland ate fish and their cousins in Greenland didn’t. We can’t “take the facts at face value,” as Diamond argues; archaeology is not so precise a science. But it is clear that the Greenlanders didn’t catch fish on the same scale. Icelanders bartered with it: A farmer with too much
skyr
could strap two bull’s-hide bags of it onto a horse, travel down to the coast, and purchase a horseload of dried fish. Clear signs of eleventh-century fish-processing sites on the seashore, as well as quantities of headless fish found high in inland farms, prove that some sort of fish business was going on in Iceland in Viking times. Still today, the way to dry fish is to gut it, behead it, split it open, and hang it on a rack by the sea, where the salt air permeates it. Light and long lasting, dried, headless fish travel well and make an excellent commodity. In Greenland, the similar farm-to-farm trade was between reindeer and seal. Bones of cheap, plentiful seal are found far from the sea, while the best cuts of reindeer seem to have traveled down from the highlands, where they were hunted, to the chieftains’ farms.

Jared Diamond cites another line of reasoning to prove that the Vikings’ dependence on livestock caused their culture to collapse: Jette Arneborg’s own study of human bones, published in the journal
Radiocarbon
in 1999.

In 1961 workers digging the foundation for a school dormitory near Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid discovered a tiny church surrounded by a circular graveyard.
The Saga of Eirik the Red
speaks of such a church. In the year 999 Leif Eiriksson abandoned pregnant Thorgunna in the Hebrides and sailed to Norway to meet the king, Olaf Tryggvason. King Olaf was at the time strenuously urging Iceland to become Christian—so strenuously that he impounded all the Icelandic ships and imprisoned all the Icelandic men who had visited Norway that year, including Kjartan and Bolli, the lovers of Gudrun the Fair. King Olaf’s arm-twisting led the Icelandic chieftains to declare Christianity the official state religion the next summer. Through Leif Eiriksson, Greenland followed suit: Leif returned home from his visit to the king with a priest, timber to build a church, and a vow to do the king’s saintly will. His mother, Thjodhild, converted instantly and had the chapel built, over her husband’s objections: “As a Christian, Thjodhild refused to sleep with Eirik the Red. This annoyed him greatly.”

The site and dating of the church found at Brattahlid match the story, and in spite of being professionally wary of the sagas, archaeologists refer to it as “Thjodhild's Church.” In the churchyard were 155 graves: men to the south, women to the north, children and babies to the east. Twelve men and a boy were buried in a common grave, their bones “in wild disorder” except for the skulls, which were lined up facing east. More than one commentator has remarked that these must be the bones of Gudrid’s husband, Thorstein Eiriksson, and the men who died with him during that terrible winter at Sandnes. As the saga says, “The bodies were carried to the church in Eiriksfjord, and priests performed the proper Christian rites.”

It is likely that the bones of Thjodhild, Eirik the Red, and Leif Eiriksson, too, are among the skeletons that now reside in a climate-controlled room at the museum in Copenhagen. It was definitely a family cemetery—a dentist can see the family resemblance in the skeletons’ teeth—and in use for only a short time in the first half of the eleventh century. Studies of the bones show that Eirik’s people were healthy and tall, the men averaging five-foot-ten, and the women five-foot-five. Their teeth are especially good, with no cavities and little tooth loss—overall, better than either the Norwegians or Icelanders of the time. Icelanders, in particular, lost three times as many teeth before death.

Their teeth did show some wear by abrasion, probably due to grit in their food. Because of a dearth of large iron pots in which to boil their pork and goat (as the gods would do), the Greenlanders generally roasted meat outdoors in pits, laying it on the embers and packing earth over it. Chewing air-dried meat was also hard on the teeth; air drying, in dry-stone sheds, was a common way to preserve meat for the winter.

To learn how the Vikings’ diets might have changed between Eirik the Red’s Land-Taking in 985 and the last word from Norse Greenland in 1408, Jette Arneborg and her colleagues drilled tiny samples of bone from twenty-seven skeletons, some from Thjodhild’s cemetery and some from five other graveyards. These bone bits were then analyzed for their concentration of three forms of carbon: the radioactive carbon 14 and the two stable isotopes, carbon 12 and carbon 13. For comparison purposes, the scientists also analyzed bits of cloth found in the graves and an ox bone that had slipped into the mass grave at Brattahlid by mistake.

Carbon 14, or radiocarbon, has been used by archaeologists for half a century to date wood, bone, and anything else that contains carbon. Being radioactive, carbon 14 decays over time; its proportion in a bone tells you when that bone stopped taking in carbon—that is, when it died. By measuring the carbon 14 in the annual rings of ancient trees like the very-long-lived bristlecone pine, scientists have been able to create a carbon-14 calibration curve that extends back over 10,000 years. By matching your bone sample against the tree-ring curve, you can date it to within about thirty years. The problem with applying this technique to human bones is that it is affected by what the human was eating for the ten years before he or she died. If the food came from the sea, the tree-ring curve will give dates several hundred years too old. For example, when analyzed this way, one young woman in Jette’s sample was 420 years older than her clothes.

The dates are skewed by what scientists call the marinereservoir effect. While the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 to carbon 14 in the air is more or less constant, seawater holds very little carbon 13. The amount of carbon 14 depends on the water’s depth, with more carbon 14 at the surface and less in the deeps.

Carbon is drawn out of the air or water by green plants during photosynthesis, and gets into human bones through the food chain. A person who eats primarily milk, mutton, and venison will show in her bones the carbon taken out of the air by the grass, twigs, and lichens eaten by the cow, sheep, or deer. A person who eats primarily fish or seal will show in her bones the carbon taken out of the water by plankton, one-celled aquatic plants that feed the fish fry and larvae on which ocean predators ultimately dine. The ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 for these two skeletons will not be the same.

Carbon-14 dates can be corrected for the marine-reservoir effect—so that a skeleton matches her burial clothes—if you know how much seafood the person ate. In reverse, skeletons dated by other means from cultures whose eating habits are known can tell us what ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 to look for to learn whether the Vikings buried at Brattahlid ate more mutton or seal meat.