The Vikings (44 page)

Snorri’s story might well contain concessions to the idiom of folklore, but it conveys a compelling sense of Olaf’s fanatical devotion to his self-appointed task of unifying the country in the name of one religion. The obsession occupied the brief span of his reign so completely that Norway and its people must always have remained a foreign land to him, a man who had spent almost his entire life outside its boundaries.

Olaf seems to have shared Harald Finehair’s clear sense that a country settled by so many Norwegians must also logically belong to him, and one of the enterprises of his short reign was the attempt to convert the Icelanders, now over 100 years into their settlement and still to all intents and purposes a Heathen people. The matter struck him as so urgent that after just one year on the throne he had dispatched a missionary bishop named Thangbrand to remedy the state of affairs.
⁴⁵
This marked the first step in what is probably the most striking and well-documented account of the conversion to Christianity of any of the Viking Age peoples. We shall look at its continuation in a later chapter.

14

Greenland and North America

Although Icelandic society had no executive force to implement the sentences arrived at by the courts, the strong were not always exempt from punishment. Ari the Learned assures readers of the
Book of the Icelanders
that ‘many chieftains were convicted or exiled for manslaughter or assault’ during the later years of the Saga Age.
¹
The fate of Erik the Red, leader of the Viking Age colonists who settled Greenland, is proof that there was substance to Ari’s claim.

Erik’s father Thorvald had emigrated to Iceland after being outlawed from Norway for some killings. In the early 980s, as a grown man, Erik himself became involved in a feud over the death of some slaves, in the course of which he killed a neighbour, Eyjolf Sauer, and a man known as Hrafn the Dueller.
²
Relatives of Eyjolf took the case to court and Erik was found guilty and sentenced to outlawry.
Grágás
distinguished between three degrees of severity for such a sentence. For the most serious crimes a man might be declared a
skógarma
ð
r
, literally a ‘man of the forest’, compelled to live apart in forests and other deserted places. His property was confiscated, none was allowed to shelter him and it was a crime to help him leave the country. Should he manage to do so he was forbidden ever to return. In Iceland he might be killed by anyone without retribution, abroad he might be killed with impunity by any Icelander.
³
For the least of crimes a sentence of
hera
ð
ssekt
was passed which entrained exile from a particular district for a period of time. On the presumption that the author of the saga was referring to these laws, it would seem that the court decided Erik’s punishment should fall between these two degrees of severity and sentenced him to the Lesser Outlawry, in contrast to the Full Outlawry of the
skógarma
ð
r
. The conditions of the Lesser Outlawry were that he pay a fine, leave Iceland within three summers and remain away for another three.
⁴
Three places where he might live in sanctuary while waiting to leave were indicated to him by the court, each no more than a day’s journey from the other. The roads between these places were also his sanctuary, to a distance of a bow-shot from the main track, provided that he did not use them more often than once a month, and on his way to take ship out of the country. Erik left his home at Haukadale in the south of the country and presently settled on the island of Eyxney. Here he became involved in an obscure dispute over personal property which a neighbour had borrowed and failed to return. In the ensuing fight Erik and his party again came out on top. Again the relatives of the men who were killed took them to court and at the assembly at Thorsness Erik and his men were sentenced to the Full Outlawry. Erik at once set about planning to leave the country. As he was getting his ship ready to leave, the relatives of his victims scoured the countryside for him in a bid to kill him before he could get away.

Some seventy years prior to this train of events, a man named Gunnbjørn Ulfsson who had set sail for Iceland from Norway had been driven off course and sighted unknown land in the south-west, to which he gave the name Gunnbjørn’s Skerries. These are believed to have been islands off Tasiilaq, on the east coast of Greenland.
⁵
Other Icelanders before Erik had been tempted to follow up these sightings; some are even said to have made landings on the north-east coast of Greenland, though their names are not recorded and they are not regarded as the European discoverers of the island. Erik sailed from Iceland with the intention of locating this land and possibly settling it, and
Erik’s Saga
describes his explorations of its south and south-west coasts over the next three years. Erik’s power, or perhaps the status that came with this voyage, seems to have earned him special treatment, for the saga tells us that he then returned to Iceland.
⁶
He named the island Greenland, according to the saga because ‘people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name’.
⁷
This was about midway through the Medieval Warm Period, and the relatively mild temperatures in the region and ice-free approaches from the sea will have made the name seem less fanciful than we might now be inclined to suppose.

The Book of the Settlements
names ten chieftains whom Erik persuaded of the attractions of the new land, and when the fleet set sail it comprised twenty-five ships. These would in the main have been not longships but
knarrs
, like the Skuldelev 1 ship found in Roskilde fjord, more sturdily built than the warship, with decking fore and aft and around the sides, broad in the beam, high at the stem and stern and with a prow that bent inward. The
knarr
had a large, square sail, but when necessary it could be rowed by oarsmen seated on the fore and after decks. The families, their livestock and possessions would have travelled in the open, central cargo hold which in harsh weather would have been covered in hides for protection. The ships that were used in the colonization of Iceland are known to have lasted well into the tenth century. The timber native to Iceland was not tall enough for the construction of new, large ships, and at least some of the vessels used for the Greenland crossing were probably the patched-up remnants of the fleet that had transported the settlers to Iceland 100 years previously.
⁸
In good weather the voyage might have taken four days; for a heavily laden armada like this it must have taken considerably longer. Fourteen of the original twenty-five ships completed the journey.

The colonists established themselves in two settlements. The Eastern Settlement, on the southern tip of the island, was the larger of the two, extending from the area around Cape Farewell to Tigssaluk fjorden, north of Ivigtut. Erik built himself a farm near the top of what became known as Eiriksfjord (now Tunugdliarfik), to which he gave the name Brattahlid. The name means ‘steep slope’, though the slope is not notably steep. The smaller Western Settlement was 400 miles further up the west coast, in the Nuuk area around Godthaab (Good Hope) and Lysufjord, where Erik’s youngest son Thorstein owned a half-share in a farm. There can have been no shortage of good-quality farming land for such a small group of settlers, so Erik must have had other reasons for encouraging some families to start a second settlement, among them possibly the fact that the more northerly settlement cut the distance to the rich fishing whale- and seal-hunting grounds around Diskos Island by half, providing an obvious benefit for the export trade in walrus ivory, a commodity that became much prized in Europe.
⁹

Early written sources put the number of farms in the Eastern Settlement at 190 and in the Western at 90;
¹⁰
but by the late twentieth century, the archaeological traces of about 220 farms had been discovered in the larger settlement and about 80 in the smaller.
¹¹
Estimates of the total population during the colony’s best years put it at somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000. Government apparatus appears to have been minimal, with local power residing in the chieftains as family heads. The idea of an
althing
or General Assembly was imported from Iceland, and in all likelihood it met at Erik’s farm at Brattahlid. While he lived, Erik was the undisputed leader of the colony, and after his death Brattahlid continued to be a site of special authority.

It was at Brattahlid that the first church was built, although not on Erik’s initiative. The story told in
Erik’s Saga
of Christianity being brought to the island by his son Leif on the instructions of Olaf Tryggvason is probably only a part of the hagiography that grew up around Olaf after his death,
¹²
but there is otherwise a good correspondence between the information in the saga about this church and the discovery of an ancient cemetery made in 1961 by workmen digging the foundations for a school dormitory on the site who came upon a large number of skulls. Archaeologists took over the site for the next few summers and excavated, in all, the remains of 144 men, women and children from the cemetery. The outlines of a tiny, U-shaped church were also discovered at the centre of the graveyard, 2 metres wide on the inside and 3.5 metres long, with turf-and timber walls that were over a metre thick. At most there would have been room for a congregation of between twenty and thirty people inside. The saga attributes the building of this church to Erik’s wife, Thjodhild, and says that her Christianity was a source of dissension between the couple. Erik was reluctant to abandon his Heathendom, and Thjodhild refused to live with him after she was converted. Her piety, says the saga, ‘annoyed him greatly’.
¹³
The statement that the church at K’agssiarssuk, as Brattahlid is now known, was built ‘not too close to the farmstead’, was a metaphorical illustration of the split between them which the archaeological evidence reinforces: the remains of Thjodhild’s church were found about 200 metres south of the main building on the site that is presumed to have been Erik’s farmhouse. Identifying the sex of the dead and estimating their ages at death posed formidable practical problems, but researchers concluded that a majority of the sixty-nine men were between the ages of thirty and fifty, and that ten of the thirty-nine women were between twenty and thirty and another ten between thirty and fifty. The average height of the men was 171 cm, with several individuals as tall as 185 cm, about the same height as the average Danish male at the time the excavations were undertaken. The average height of the women was 156 cm. Particular interest attached to three bodies found buried close to the church wall. By the tenets of medieval theology these would have been first in line for resurrection when Judgement Day came, and the obvious privilege of their situation has led archaeologists to speculate that they may be the remains of Thjodhild, Erik - a reluctant Christian perhaps, but the founder of the colony - and their son Leif. Only a few of the others had been buried in coffins, perhaps reflecting the scarcity of native timber. The remainder were probably buried in shrouds, in accordance with the basic church requirement that a corpse be not buried naked, though no traces of shrouds were found. By contrast, the clothes of those buried in the cemetery of a later church at Herjolfsnæs that marked the southern limit of the Eastern Settlement, excavated by Poul Nørlund in 1921, had been remarkably well preserved in the frozen earth and provided a unique insight into the daily wear of the Greenland colonists.
¹⁴
The find included some thirty gowns, seventeen hoods, five hats and six stockings, woven and not knitted, for the art of knitting had not then been invented.
¹⁵

To the degree to which it was practicable, daily life for the ordinary settler reflected the patterns familiar from Iceland and Norway. Families minded small fields in the vicinity of their homes. Cows, horses, pigs and goats were farmed, and sheep kept for their wool and milk rather than meat. Bear, reindeer, hares and birds were hunted and trapped and whale, walrus and seal hunted at sea. The fjords were fished for cod and salmon. A farm discovered by two hunters in 1990, at the head of a branch of the Ameralik fjord, east of Nuuk and at the heart of the Western Settlement, became the subject of an extensive archaeological excavation that has provided us with a vivid narrative of the everyday life of the tenants. The farm was occupied for some 300 years, from about the middle of the eleventh into the fourteenth century.
¹⁶
At a distance of roughly 60 miles from the outer coastline, it was located on the eastern side of a plateau, about 60 metres above sea-level, on a rim of thinly vegetated land some 3 metres above the level of the plateau. A thousand years ago this was wetland and meadow, very amenable to the kind of animal husbandry with which these settlers were familiar. The site was not isolated, with neighbours less than a mile away at Nipaitsoq, a settlement at Sandnes, which could easily be reached by water.
¹⁷
This latter was possibly the farm mentioned in the early thirteenth-century
Saga of the Greenlanders
as being part-owned by Erik’s youngest son, Thorstein.

Climate variations over the year could range from 25° centigrade in the summer to -50° in the winter, so that maintaining heat was a primary concern of the successive families who lived there. Stone and turf were the materials used for the first house built on the site, with walls that were in places 2 metres thick. Wood was used for interior partitioning, ceiling posts and panelling. Benches ran along the walls on both sides of the main room. The remains of what may have been a cooking pit were found at one gable-end, where the house faced out towards the meadows. It seems this first house was later turned into stabling for animals and that it burnt down not long afterwards.