A History of the Vikings
Chapter 14
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churches, so that in all, even in the period of her utmost prosperity, the Norse population of Greenland could not have numbered much more than two or three thousand souls. Much further to the north, around Disko Island, were the cabins of the summer hunting and fishing grounds, the headquarters of some of the colonists during the short season they spent in hunting seals, whales, and walrus, in preparing 'seal-tar' (congealed blubber), and in collecting driftwood. And right up the coast, perhaps far into Baffin Bay, these Greenland farmers explored; thus, on the island of Kingiktorsuak in latitude 72° 55' there was found in 1824 a tiny stone, only 4 inches in length, bearing a Runic inscription that recorded how, on a certain day probably in the fourteenth century, Erling Sighvatsson and Bjarni Thordarson and Eindridi Jonsson built cairns there.
The introduction of Christianity among the Greenland vikings in the year AD 1000 was the work of Leif, son of Eric the Red. For in 999 he went on an expedition to Norway and there joined the court of that great proselytizing king, Olaf Tryggvason, where he was, of course, speedily converted to the new faith. When, in the following year, he proposed to return to Greenland, he was invited by the king to preach Christianity to the people of this far-off colony, and this, though not without some misgivings, Leif said he would do; so he was given a priest to take with him. Soon after his arrival in Greenland he set about his task and it was not long before his mother, Thjodhild, consented to be baptized; she had a church built in the neighbourhood of their Brattahlid homestead, but old Red Eric himself was stubborn and preferred that his wife should live away from him rather than that he should betray the gods beloved of his fathers. Nevertheless Leif and the priest sent by King Olaf made many converts.
No doubt here, as in Iceland, Christianity soon received the formal sanction of the Althing as the official religion of the republic, for by the middle of the eleventh century the colony, together with Scandinavia and Iceland, was recognized as a part of the great archbishopric of Bremen, and as early as the time of Archbishop Adalbert (1043-1073) came messengers from Greenland to the prelate at Bremen begging him to send them clergy. In 1103 the Greenland Church was transferred to the ecclesiastical province of Lund, but in the '20S of the twelfth century the pious and neglected colonists, dismayed at the lack of priests in their remote country, subscribed together for the endowment of a bishop's see and obtained the permission of the Norwegian king that Greenland should have its own resident prelate. In
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the saga of Eric the Red it is related that the custom in Greenland was to bury men on the farms where they died, in unconsecrated ground, and to set a stake rising up from the corpse's breast; then, later on, when the priest came, the stake would be drawn up and holy water poured down the cavity and a funeral service sung over them. Sometimes this happened a very long time after the burial of the body. In 1124 the Norwegian Arnald was consecrated to the new see by the archbishop of Lund and in 1126, after two years of travel and delay, the first bishop of Greenland landed in his far-off diocese. He dwelt at Gardar and there was built the cathedral, a little cruciform church between 70 and 80 feet in length, that was dedicated to St. Nicholas. Arnald proved himself to be an able and influential man; indeed, when he departed from his diocese in 1150 he had created for his successors in the see an authority that established the bishop of Greenland henceforth as the chief personage in the colony, its temporal, and not merely its spiritual head. Ten years after his leaving the already close bond between Greenland and Norway was strengthened by the transference from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Lund to that of the archbishop of Nidaros.
It was just over a hundred years later, in 1261, that the free state of Greenland, after more than 250 years existence as an independent republic, became a crown colony of Norway. This was an inevitable sequel to the now almost complete economic dependence of Greenland upon Norway, and the promise of the payment of taxes to the Norwegian king was little more than a desperate measure to secure by purchase that frequent coming and going between Europe and Greenland necessary for the supply to this distant land of such vital commodities as corn and timber. But it was a political move with disastrous and disappointing results, for shortly afterwards there came about a decline in Norse trading-enterprise, largely the result of the rapidly increasing power of the Hanseatic League, and the isolation of Greenland was now made more terrible inasmuch as the Scandinavian kings, jealous of their rights, forbade private commerce with the Greenlanders. Only the royal knerrir (merchant-ships), sailing from Bergen, were allowed to trade with the colony, and in the fifteenth century, upon the further decline of Norway as a sea-power, even this kingly monopoly was neglected and rare indeed became the visit of a knörr. At last, forgotten of the civilized world, these poor dwellers in the distant north knew themselves faced with ruin and extinction; then slowly and inexorably this
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worst tragedy of all viking history played itself out; alone and unwatched of men, without hope of help, the Greenland vikings died.
The last record of a foreign vessel having reached Greenland, an Icelandic boat driven out of her course by storm, and the last recorded sailing of a knörr from Bergen, date from the first decade of the fifteenth century, but before this date shadows of the doom impending had darkened over the far-off colony. In 1345 the Greenlanders, because of their extreme poverty, were excused by the pope the payment of a tithe, and ten years later it was reported to the king of Norway that some of the colonists were forsaking Christianity and Christian behaviour for the faith and habits of the Eskimo; so a knörr was hastily equipped and sent off to them, the first for nine years. From 1349 to 1368 there was no resident bishop of Greenland, and in 1377 died Alf, the last prelate who lived in the country. In 1492 a papal letter of Alexander VI declared that the inhabitants of Greenland lived on dried fish and milk, that there was no knowledge of a ship having visited them during the previous eighty years, and that most of them had abandoned their Christian faith, having nothing else to remind them thereof save an altar-cloth (corporale) which was exhibited once a year and whereon the body of Christ had been consecrated at the last mass said in the country a hundred years ago. (1)
But though the history of the decline of the colony is incomplete, and the story of its final extinction lost, yet the archaeologist has something to tell about the life of these poor colonists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this thanks to those pathetic and wonderful discoveries that fill several wall-cases of the National Museum at Copenhagen, the result of the extraordinary excavations of Dr. Poul Nörlund of this museum at Herjolfsness in 1921 and at Gardar in 1926. (2) The first site was the cemetery of Herjolfsness (now Nassarmiut) near Fredericksdal, and here, indeed, though poverty and sickness were fast undermining the little settlement,
1. J. C. Heywood, Documenta selecta e tabulario secreto vaticano, etc. Rome, 1893, No. 10, p. 12; trans. in F. Nansen, Northern Mists, 11, p. 121.
2. Meddelelser om Grřnland, LXVII (1924) and LXXVI (1920): in English. For a summary of the Gardar excavations see Geografisk Tidshrift, XXXI (1028), p. 46. At Gardar the ruins of the little cathedral and bishop's dwelling have been investigated, and the tomb of Bishop Jon Smyrill (d. 1209) found, this containing besides the skeleton the episcopal ring and a fine English-looking crozier-head of walrus ivory.
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the unhappy remnant of the people was still faithful and devout Christians. In the hundred odd graves that were explored it was found that the burial-customs of the Church were most scrupulously observed, and no less than fifty-eight of the bodies had wooden crosses laid upon their breasts, most of them ornamental and carefully made, some even bearing inscriptions in runes. 'God the Almighty guard Gudleif well' ran the prayer of one, and 'Thorleif made this cross in praise and worship of God the Almighty' said another.
The dead were laid to rest, some in wooden coffins and the remainder directly in the earth, shrouded in the miserable clothes, often threadbare and patched, that they had worn in life. These garments (Pl. XII ) were woven of sheep's wool, and, for both men and women, were long skirted gowns with full sleeves, following the European fashions of a somewhat earlier date; the common head-dress was a hood and cape combined, having a tail at the back, but there were five capes of simpler cut, and one of conical shape that cannot have been in vogue in Greenland long before the end of the fifteenth century. The skeletons of twenty-five individuals survived for examination, and it was found that the folk represented were of short stature (5 foot was tall for a man, while all the women were under 4 foot 9 inches) and of feeble build. Only five seem to have been of ordinary health, and of the twenty folk over eighteen years of age a half had died before their thirtieth year. Plainly did these miserable bones of a dying race betray the hard life and chronic under-nourishment that had ruined the sturdy physique of the old Norse settlers.
And at this time the end was near, for already nearly all intercourse with Europe had ceased. But there remains one tragic picture of the passing of these lonely colonists. About the year 1550 an Icelander, aboard a German merchant-ship, was blown far out of his course and found himself off the coast of Greenland. The ship put into a fjord where there were many islands, some inhabited by Eskimos, and these natives the European crew dared not approach. But they landed on a seemingly uninhabited island upon which were some ruins, boat-houses and walls such as were familiar objects in Iceland. And there they found a man lying dead. He wore a well-made hood and clothing of coarse woollen material and sealskin; by his side lay an iron knife, almost worn away by long use and much resharpening. Who he was they knew not, but this stiffened and lonely corpse must have been the last Norseman of the old colony who was seen by Europeans, and there he lay, dead and unburied, by his deserted dwelling with the wasted knife at his side, a pitiful
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emblem of the civilization to which he belonged, the civilization that had forgotten and deserted him. (1)
There were, however, two contributory causes, in addition to European neglect, that had made life for the Norse in Greenland too hard to be endured. One was a gradual and serious deterioration of the climate during the centuries following the original settlement, and the other, itself a consequence of the now increasing cold, was the southward movement of the Eskimo. When the Norsemen first came to Greenland they found the ruined dwelling-places and stone implements of the Skraelings, as they called these nomad native folk, but discovered that the Eskimo themselves were then living far away to the north. But by the thirteenth century the southward movement had begun and finally, about 1325, the western settlement was abandoned by the white men. In 1355 it was told in Norway that many of the Greenland Norse had become tainted with Eskimo heathendom; but there was, nevertheless, a continued hostility between the two races, and another attack by the Skraelings took place in 1379, this time upon the eastern settlement, where a large number of the white men were killed.
What finally happened is unknown. The Eskimos never seem to have been a naturally quarrelsome folk and there was perhaps some ordinary and peaceful intercourse with the Skraelings, enough at any rate to lend some probability to the belief of Dr. Nansen that the Norse, finding themselves deprived of the comforts of their own civilization, were compelled by the hard necessity of imitating the Eskimo manner of life to abandon what had survived of their own faith and customs, this ending at last in the complete absorption of the remaining white men by the far more numerous Eskimos. Yet the excavations at Herjolfsness revealed nothing that pointed to an intermingling of the two races, and it seems more likely that the children of the vikings died surrounded by natives who regarded unmoved and without sympathy the sufferings of the enfeebled and starving folk who clung so desperately to this inhospitable country where now only the hardy Skraelings dared hope to live.
And so it was almost as an unknown country that Greenland was rediscovered in 1576 by Martin Frobisher. He landed on
1. This story, which is admittedly of dubious historical value, is taken from an account written in 1625 by Björn Jónsson, a noted Icelandic author, wherein it is related how this adventure befell 'within living memory' another Icelander named Jón Greenlander (Grönlands historiske mindesmaerker, III, 1845).
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the west-coast in 1578, and finding that the Eskimos had a few pieces of iron, some spearheads of this metal, a bronze button or two, and knew gold when they saw it, he concluded that they must have had intercourse at some time with Europeans. But of these he knew and heard nothing. Yet the memory of the Norse settlers had not wholly passed away, for in 1721 the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede landed in Greenland to discover, if he could, their fate and to preach to them the Christianity that Leif Ericsson had first taught in the country over seven hundred years before. But Hans Egede found only the Skraelings in the land where once his countrymen had lived.
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