The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (18 page)

The differences are very small. The tests are painstaking and tedious. But the bones from Brattahlid seem to show that Gudrid’s diet while she lived there would have been between 22 and 50 percent seafood, including whale and seal. The later Greenland Norse, close to the collapse in the 1400s, ate up to 81 percent seafood.

Jared Diamond interprets this change to mean that the later Norse were having trouble making hay. They couldn’t keep enough cows to feed their growing population and were forced to turn to seal or starve. Maybe. The paper she published in
Radiocarbon
in 1999, Jette told me, was only “a small project” to test the method. She is unwilling to build an edifice, as Diamond did, on twenty-seven bones. In the last six years, she and her colleagues have tested many more bones, including those dug up by Gudny Zoega at Keldudalur in Iceland. As Jette sees it, she has “just started trying to make some human conclusions.”

Georg Nyegaard, who dug side by side with Jette at the Farm Beneath the Sand, thinks her 1999 results showed not a chronological difference, but a geographical one. “Jette’s article had a very little number of individuals,” he told me, “and the later individuals are all from graveyards on the coast. You always have more seal bones at sites on the outer coast.” He expects her results will change now that she has a larger sample size.

Georg’s own research shows no change in diet during three hundred years of Norse settlement in Greenland. When not organizing exhibits for the museum in Nuuk, Georg has been analyzing animal bones from a bog in the valley north of Brattahlid, beside a farm a mile and a half from the sea. Settled in the second wave—about the time Gudrid and her father arrived—it has a midden with a difference: In the bog water, bones were very well preserved. And no one had disturbed it before Georg came, which means that the chronology of his samples, calculated from their depth in the bog, is better than for any previous collection of bones.

Judging from the 50,000 mammal bones he has dated, Georg said, “It was a small farm, but there seems to have been very little change through time. We can compare whatever layer we want to any other and we’ll see the same overall picture, the same ratio of cows to sheep. We have goat bones and pig bones as well. Quite seldom do you find pig bones, but at this bog site, we found them in all the different layers. There seems to have been a few pigs all the time—which is not what the theories say. They had a few horses, and they ate them, too. We see the cracked marrow bones. Then there’s the dog bones in several sizes, big and small. And for the first time we found cat bones in Greenland. But at this site we see no change toward more marine adaptation. The marine part of the diet was a major part right from the start of the farm. We have many seal bones.

“They left the farm around 1300. In the final phase, we find the same percentage of cattle bones as at the beginning. If you have problems with the vegetation, with feeding the domestic stock, the first thing that would happen is a decrease in the number of cows. The cow is very expensive to feed in the winter. It’s much cheaper to feed goats, and goats provide a lot of milk. But they go on with the same number of cows, maybe six or seven if you look at the cowshed, for three hundred years.”

It’s frustrating when a handsome theory like Jared Diamond’s collapses, but the science simply doesn’t support the idea that the Vikings ate themselves out of house and home and then starved, rather than lowering themselves to eating Inuit food. Georg Nyegaard’s study argues instead that overgrazing in Greenland was not severe. The Vikings had no need to give up their honored cows. Nor did they hesitate to eat seafood.

Rather than dying out, they are more likely to have packed up and left, slowly, over a hundred years or more, the younger folk finding berths (or husbands) aboard the trade ships that still sailed fairly regularly from Iceland and Norway in the 1300s; by the early 1400s, the British were also plying Greenland waters in search of cod. The ships would have brought news of the Black Death, which killed half the population of Iceland between 1402 and 1404—or some 20,000 to 35,000 people, ten times the total Norse population of Greenland—and left hundreds of valuable farms unoccupied. Doubtless Sigrid Bjornsdottir, whose marriage to an Icelandic ship’s captain in the church at Hvalsey in 1408 is the last historical record of the Greenland Norse, was not the only heiress. The plague gave this young Greenlandic woman ownership of Stora-Akrar (Big Grain Fields), a wealthy farm in Skagafjord, Iceland, where, six hundred years later Sigridur Sigurdardottir, the curator of the museum at Glaumbaer, would grow up.

The sailors would also have told the Greenlanders that their caches of walrus ivory—Greenland’s chief export—were now worthless. Elephant ivory became easy to get in the 1300s and, with the market flooded, all ivory had become cheap and unfashionable by the end of the century.

A ship came to Greenland from Norway that summer. Its captain was a man named Thorfinn Karlsefni. He was the son of Thord Horse-Head, a son of Snorri Thordarson from Hofdi. Thorfinn Karlsefni was very rich. He spent the winter at Brattahlid with Leif Eiriksson and soon fell in love with Gudrid.

—
The Saga of the Greenlanders

W
ALRUS IVORY BROUGHT KARLSEFNI TO GREENLAND
. In the Viking Age, walrus ivory was as valuable as gold, and the only place to get it was in the north, where the seas are iced over nine months of the year, and mussels, the walrus’s favorite food, seed the shallow bottoms of the bays. Five hundred miles north of Sandnes, the walrus congregated on the beaches each August. Eirik the Red’s men would sail to Sandnes, replenish their supplies, and set out in hunting parties for Nordsetur—the Northern Camp. Then came the slaughter.

The Norse had no harpoons, so they trapped the huge beasts on land, where they were clumsy. They came at the animals with lances and spears, like Sir James Lamont did in 1858 in Spitsbergen, in northern Norway. “In all my sporting life I never saw anything to equal the wild excitement of these hunts,” he writes. Sixteen men stole along the sea’s edge, then rushed at the thousands of walrus lounging on the rocks, stabbing those nearest the water.

The passage to the sea soon got blocked up with dead and dying walrus. When drenched with blood and exhausted, and their lances from repeated use became blunt and useless, [the men] returned to their vessel, had their dinner, ground their lances, and then returned, killing nine hundred walrus.

Even today, writes Robert McGhee in
The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World,
the beaches of Spitsbergen are “carpeted with thick and heavy bones, the massive skulls with missing tusks.”

The Vikings also left most of the bones on the beach. They took the skins to make a strong rope highly prized as sail rigging and anchor cables. Each skin could rig two or three ships. They cut off the penis. Walrus have a thick bone stiffening the male member; it made a good club. They knocked off the front of the skull, taking it home to do the careful work of extracting the valuable ivory tusks at leisure. And they took a joint or two for food.

Ivory was the perfect trade good. It was light, it kept indefinitely, and until elephant ivory nudged it out of the marketplace in the 1300s, it was essential to aristocratic Christian life. The finest reliquary boxes for holding the remains of saints were made of ivory. Crosses and crucifixes and bishops’ croziers were intricately carved of ivory, as were the palm-sized religious plaques fastened to the covers of holy books. Nonecclesiastical uses included sword hilts, belt buckles, dice, and chess pieces—like the twelfth-century set found on the Isle of Lewis.

The Greenlanders kept very little ivory for themselves. The bishop’s crozier—a staff of office in the shape of a shepherd’s crook—was retrieved from the bishops grave when the church at Gardar in South Greenland was excavated; the designs on its curved ivory head date it to the late 1100s. The churchyard also contained thirty walrus skulls with tusks intact, some in a row along the church’s east gable, others buried in the chancel itself. As Jette Arneborg deadpans, these totemic animal burials were “not quite according to normal Christian practice.” Otherwise, archaeologists have found only a few ivory buttons and some tiny amulets. Two icons unearthed at one Norse farm were polar bears; a third might be a walrus. (It wasn’t finished before it was lost.) A human figure thought to be a chess queen was found in an Inuit camp.

It may have been over a chess game played with ivory pieces that Gudrid first spoke to Karlsefni about Vinland. According to
The Saga of Eirik the Red,
Karlsefni was a sensible merchant esteemed for his seamanship—not an adventurer. He is described as wealthy and well connected, from a large and noble family, with kings in his lineage. His grandfather was one of nineteen children, so Karlsefni was related to most of the families in the prosperous valley of Skagafjord in northern Iceland. He was five or ten years older than Gudrid, having had time to establish himself in his profession, and he was an only son, owner of a substantial estate being looked after by his widowed mother.

As a good merchant, he would have been brave but also “discreet,” according to
The King’s Mirror,
a thirteenth-century handbook that gives this advice to businessmen: “On the sea ... be alert and fearless. When you are in a market town, or wherever you are, be polite and agreeable; then you will secure the friendship of all good men.” The writer, a priest who served three kings of Norway as chancellor and military adviser, asserts: “I regard no man perfect in knowledge unless he has thoroughly-learned and mastered the customs of the place where he is sojourning,” chief among those customs being the language. He also admonishes any would-be trader to learn arithmetic, navigation or “how to mark the movements of the ocean,” and the proper care of a ship. Finally, to be a good trader, you must “keep your temper calm” and “be not in a hurry to take revenge.”

Karlsefni owned his ship in partnership with another Icelander, Snorri Thorbrandsson of Swan Fjord. This Snorri may have been ten or fifteen years older than his friend, and had certainly never heard
The King’s Mirrors
advice. He and his brothers, along with Gudrid’s father, were Eirik the Red’s chief supporters in his feud with Thorgest the Old over those bench boards. After Eirik the Red left Iceland, the Swan Fjord brothers filled his role of district troublemaker. Besides being unruly and clannish, they were known for wearing tight, fashionable trousers. Snorri Thorbrandsson and one brother, Thorleif Kimbi, finally went to Greenland a year or two before Gudrid arrived, having forced their chieftain—the cunning and ambitious Snorri of Helgafell—to get them out of trouble once too often. One feud, for instance, started when Thorleif Kimbi grabbed a cooking pot away from another Viking, spilling the mans evening porridge, and was whacked with the hot ladle on his neck. In the last battle of this disagreement, two men died and the chieftain arrived just in time to save his foster-brothers’ lives: Thorleif Kimbi had lost a leg and Snorri Thorbrandsson had taken an arrow through the throat. As proof of his manliness, were told that he snapped off the shaft and didn’t mention the arrowhead at the base of his tongue until he was sitting down to dinner that evening and noticed it was hard to swallow. Karlsefni’s partner was tough and touchy, but he was a loyal friend—none of the feuds he fought in were his own. He had also lived in Greenland before setting up his trading route, and his friendship with Eirik the Red ensured Karlsefni’s welcome.

The partners crossed the icy North Atlantic in convoy with a second trading ship crewed by Icelanders. They beached their boats in front of Brattahlid (a sonar survey of the fjord has found that the beach was 300 feet broader in those days) and unloaded their goods into Eirik’s capacious warehouses, signs of which archaeologists can still see in the turf.
The Saga of Eirik the Red
next details the courtly dance of give-and-take that passed for a business transaction in the Viking Age. The two ships’ captains invited Eirik to take anything he wanted from their cargoes. “Then Eirik showed them he was a great man, too,” as the saga says, by offering to feed and house both ships’ crews over the long Greenlandic winter. “They lacked nothing,” the saga says, and enjoyed themselves until Christmas, when Eirik started going about the house with a long face. After a bit of polite prying, Karlsefni learned that Eirik feared he would tell everyone back home in Iceland that he had never had a poorer Christmas feast than that one at Brattahlid. Eirik was out of beer. “That’s no problem,” said Karlsefni. “We still have malt and grain from the ship. Take it and brew up a feast greater than any before.” After a discreet pause, Karlsefni asked Eirik for Gudrid’s hand in marriage, and this drunken, happy Christmas feast was extended into a wedding.

With Gudrid—at least, with the rich Gudrid of
The Saga of Eirik the Red
—Karlsefni gained half of Sandnes, her husband’s farm. He got her father’s farm, across the fjord from Brattahlid, and her father’s ship. It’s clear Karlsefni had no plans to put down roots in Greenland, given the value of his property back in Iceland. He would have sold Gudrid’s farms in the spring for their worth in walrus tusks and hides, other skins (ox and goat for leather, polar bear for luxury), and perhaps one or two white falcons, which were highly prized by the Arabs. He would also have taken in trade whatever foodstuffs he needed to restock his ship for the return journey.

The haul might have been less than he had expected, divided up among his and the other ship’s sailors, and he may not have had much of value left to trade. He had already donated his malt and grain to Eirik for the feast. He had probably given Eirik the other foodstuffs in his cargo, too—how else could Eirik have fed so many unexpected mouths over the long winter? Eirik would have chosen the iron tools and ingots in the cargo first off, when the captains gave him his pick of the goods. That left some linen or other fine cloth, wood for housewares or boat repair, candle wax and wine for the church, tar for sealing ships’ timbers, and perhaps some bronze or silver jewelry and other finery. Fiddling with the arithmetic in his head, Karlsefni might have wondered if sailing through the ice and storms to Greenland had been worth the risk.

Yet even sensible merchants did not go to Greenland solely for gain. As
The King’s Mirror
notes, they went to win fame, by sailing where others had sunk, and out of curiosity: “For it is also in man’s nature to wish to see and experience the things that he has heard about, and thus to learn whether the facts are as told or not.” And Karlsefni, as events would show, was both ambitious and curious.

Among the entertainments at Eirik’s feast, and throughout that gay winter, the saga lists chess (or a game like it,
hneftafl
or “tables”) and storytelling. Leif Eiriksson was easily cajoled into telling the story of his discovery of the rich new land to the west: Vinland. No one knows which version he related. He was blown off course, he may have said, on his way west from Norway four years ago. He spied a strange country and, landing, found it to be a paradise. Three things in particular struck him—three things which today no one can positively identify: fields of “selfsown wheat,” well-grown “wine wood,” and trees “big enough for house timbers” of a valuable wood called
mösurr.

On the other hand, Leif may have told Karlsefni how he had cleverly retraced, backward, the route of another seaman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had been blown off course coming to Greenland and had refused to set foot on the three strange lands he had spotted farther west than any land ought to be. The northernmost land Leif named Helluland (“Flat Stone Land”). A little south was Markland (“Forest Land”). Then came Vinland (“Wine Land”), which had sweet dew on the grass, huge salmon, “wine wood” and “wine berries,” and wide forests. In this story, Leif and his crew stayed the winter, first putting up “booths,” or temporary shelters roofed by sailcloth, and then building large houses. They filled the ship with timber, and the towboat with wine berries.

Lured by Leif’s stories of this land of riches, and inspired by Gudrid’s eagerness for adventure—she had already gone looking for Vinland once before, she would have told him—Karlsefni made ready to sail when the ice went out in June. According to one saga, he took sixty-five people in one ship; in the other saga, his expedition had three ships (one of them Gudrid’s) and 160 people. Says
The Saga of the Greenlanders,
they took along “all kinds of livestock,” presumably from Gudrid’s farms, “because they meant to settle there if they could.”

Before he set sail, Karlsefni asked Leif to let him have the large houses he had built there to overwinter in.

“I won’t
give
them to you,” Leif said. “I’ll
lend
them to you.”

The sagas do not mention walrus, but likely they were on Leif’s list of Vinland’s riches. From Nordsetur, thought to be Greenland’s Disko Island, you can sometimes see Baffin Island on the Canadian side, and the Vikings may have rowed well out into the Davis Strait to hunt the herds on the ice. This is the course Karlsefni and Gudrid took—north to Sandnes, north again to Nordsetur, west across the Davis Strait, and then south following the currents along the coastline of Canada. Gudrid may have warned Karlsefni not to head west too soon; that’s how she and her previous husband ended up tossed about by the sea all summer. As a practiced ocean navigator, Karlsefni would have learned everything he could about the prevailing winds and currents.

They would have seen icebergs, and walrus, the whole way as they sailed south past Flat Stone Land or, as one scholar interprets it, “So-So Land,” now thought to be Baffin Island; and Forest Land or “Useful Land,” now identified with Labrador; until they arrived in Wine Land or “Luxury Land.”

Where exactly is Wine Land? Georgia. Or between Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Or New York harbor. Boston, on the Charles River near Harvard University. Rhode Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Cape Cod or the coast of Maine. New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, the St. Lawrence Valley, or back in Greenland. All of these places have been suggested in serious manner between 1757 and today. As the irrepressible BBC television host Magnus Magnusson said at a conference in Newfoundland in 2000, “Enthusiasts have twiddled the texts, selected from the texts, conflated the texts, and compromised the texts in endless attempts to create a coherent story that will ‘prove’ their particular hypothesis. But frankly, the sailing directions which dozens of eager researchers have tried to follow are not much more explicit than the old Icelandic adage for getting to North America: Sail south until the butter melts, and then turn right.” Though folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson believes the Vinland sagas hold a coherent “mental map” of Viking explorations along the coast of North America, he concedes that “perhaps the most striking feature of the attempts to locate Vinland is that each and every person to have made one has disagreed with everyone else.”