In fact, Ozur’s relative Simon, a big strong man, said that this was not the time for merely big talk. He gathered his friends Kolbein Thorljotsson, Keitel Kalfsson, and many men from Western Settlement. An old man named Sokki Thorisson offered to mediate between Simon and Einar. As compensation for having murdered Ozur, Einar offered some articles including an ancient suit of armor, which Simon rejected as rubbish. Kolbein slipped around behind Einar and hit him between the shoulders with his axe, just at the moment when Einar was bringing down his own axe on Simon’s head. As both Simon and Einar fell dying, Einar commented, “It is only what I expected.” Einar’s foster-brother Thord rushed at Kolbein, who managed to kill him at once by jabbing an axe into his throat.
Einar’s men and Kolbein’s men then started a battle against each other. A man called Steingrim told them all to please stop fighting, but both sides were so mad that they thrust a sword through Steingrim. On Kolbein’s side, Krak, Thorir, and Vighvat ended up dead, as well as Simon. On Einar’s side, Bjorn, Thorarin, Thord, and Thorfinn ended up dead as well as Einar, plus Steingrim counted as a member of Einar’s side. Many men were badly wounded. At a peace meeting organized by a level-headed farmer called Hall, Kolbein’s side was ordered to pay compensation because Einar’s side had lost more men. Even so, Einar’s side was bitterly disappointed in the verdict. Kolbein sailed off to Norway with a polar bear that he gave as a present to King Harald Gilli, still complaining about how cruelly he had been treated. King Harald considered Kolbein’s story a pack of lies and refused to pay a bounty for the polar bear. So Kolbein attacked and wounded the king and sailed off to Denmark but drowned en route. And that is the end of this saga.
Another male skeleton at the same churchyard has a knife blade between the ribs. Two female skeletons from Sandnes cemetery with similar cut wounds of the skull testify that women as well as men could die in feuds. Dating from later years of the Greenland colony, at a time when axes and swords had become vanishingly rare because of scarcity of iron, are skulls of four adult women and one eight-year-old child, each with one or two sharp-edged holes between half an inch and one inch in diameter and evidently made by a crossbow bolt or arrow. Domestic violence is suggested by the skeleton of a 50-year-old woman at Gardar Cathedral with a fractured throat bone called the hyoid; forensic pathologists have learned to interpret a fractured hyoid as evidence that the victim was strangled by a hand choke hold.
Along with that violent streak coexisting uneasily with an emphasis on communal cooperation, the Greenland Norse also carried over from Iceland and Norway a sharply stratified, hierarchically organized social organization, such that a small number of chiefs dominated owners of small farms, tenants who didn’t even own their own farms, and (initially) slaves. Again like Iceland, Greenland politically was not organized as a state but as a loose federation of chiefdoms operating under feudal conditions, with neither money nor a market economy. Within the first century or two of the Greenland colony, slavery disappeared, and the slaves became freedmen. However, the number of independent farmers probably decreased with time as they were forced into becoming tenants of the chiefs, a process that is well documented in Iceland. We don’t have corresponding records for the process in Greenland, but it seems likely there too, because the forces promoting it were even more marked in Greenland than in Iceland. Those forces consisted of climate fluctuations driving poorer farmers in bad years into debt to richer farmers who lent them hay and livestock, and who could eventually foreclose on them. Evidence of those farm hierarchies is still visible today among Greenland farm ruins: compared to poor farms, the best-located farms had a larger area of good pasture, larger cow and sheep barns with stalls for more animals, bigger hay barns, larger houses, larger churches, and smithies. The hierarchies are also visible today as the higher ratios of cow and caribou bones to sheep and seal bones in garbage middens at rich farms compared to those at poor farms.
Still like Iceland, Viking Greenland was a conservative society resistant to change and sticking to old ways, compared to the society of the Vikings who remained behind in Norway. Over the centuries, there was little change in styles of tools and of carvings. Fishing was abandoned in the earliest years of the colony, and Greenlanders did not reconsider that decision during the four-and-a-half centuries of their society’s existence. They did not learn from the Inuit how to hunt ringed seals or whales, even though that meant not eating locally common foods, and starving as a result. The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.
The remaining adjective that characterizes Greenland Norse society is “Eurocentric.” From Europe, the Greenlanders received material trade goods, but even more important were non-material imports: identities as Christians, and as Europeans. Let us consider first the material trade. What trade items were imported into Greenland, and with what exports did the Greenlanders pay for those imports?
For medieval sailing ships, the voyage to Greenland from Norway took a week or more and was dangerous; annals often mention shipwrecks, or ships that sailed and were never heard from again. Hence the Greenlanders were visited by at most a couple of European ships a year, and sometimes only one every few years. In addition, the capacities of European cargo ships in those days were small. Estimates of the frequency of ship visits, ship capacities, and Greenland’s population let one calculate that imports worked out to about seven pounds of cargo per person per year—on the average. Most Greenlanders received much less than that average, because much of that arriving cargo capacity was devoted to materials for churches and luxuries for the elite. Hence imports could only be valuable items occupying little space. In particular, Greenland had to be self-sufficient in food and could not depend on bulk imports of cereals and other food staples.
Our two sources of information about Greenland’s imports are lists in Norwegian records, and items of European origin found in Greenland archaeological sites. They included especially three necessities: iron that the Greenlanders were hard-pressed to produce for themselves; good lumber for buildings and furniture, of which they were equally short; and tar as a lubricant and wood preservative. As for non-economic imports, many were for the church, including church bells, stained glass windows, bronze candlesticks, communion wine, linen, silk, silver, and churchmen’s robes and jewelry. Among secular luxuries found in archaeological sites at farmhouses were pewter, pottery, and glass beads and buttons. Small-volume luxury food imports probably included honey to ferment into mead, plus salt as a preservative.
In exchange for those imports, the same consideration of limited ship cargo capacity would have prevented Greenlanders from exporting bulk fish, as did medieval Iceland and as does modern Greenland, even if Greenlanders had been willing to fish. Instead, Greenland’s exports, too, had to be things of low volume and high value. They included skins of goats, cattle, and seals, which Europeans could also obtain from other countries but of which medieval Europe required large quantities to make leather clothes, shoes, and belts. Like Iceland, Greenland exported wool cloth that was valued for being water-repellent. But Greenland’s most prized exports mentioned in Norwegian records were five products derived from Arctic animals rare or absent in most of Europe: walrus ivory from walrus tusks, walrus hide (valued because it yielded the strongest rope for ships), live polar bears or their hides as a spectacular status symbol, tusks of the narwhal (a small whale) known then in Europe as unicorn horns, and live gyrfalcons (the world’s largest falcon). Walrus tusks became the only ivory available in medieval Europe for carving after Moslems gained control of the Mediterranean, there
by cutting off supplies of elephant ivory to Christian Europe. As an example of the value placed on Greenland gyrfalcons, 12 of those birds sufficed in 1396 to ransom the Duke of Burgundy’s son after he was captured by the Saracens.
Walruses and polar bears were virtually confined to latitudes far to the north of the two Norse settlements, in an area called the Nordrseta (the northern hunting ground), which began several hundred miles beyond Western Settlement and stretched farther north along Greenland’s west coast. Hence each summer the Greenlanders sent out hunting parties in small, open, six-oared rowboats with sails, which could cover about 20 miles per day and could hold up to a ton-and-a-half of cargo. Hunters set off in June after the peak of the harp seal hunt, taking two weeks to reach the Nordrseta from Western Settlement or four weeks from Eastern Settlement, and returning again at the end of August. In such small boats they obviously could not carry the carcasses of hundreds of walruses and polar bears, each of which weighs about a ton or half-a-ton respectively. Instead, the animals were butchered on the spot, and only the walrus jaws with the tusks, and the bear skins with the paws (plus the occasional live captive bear), were brought home, for the tusks to be extracted and the skin to be cleaned at leisure back in the settlements during the long winter. Also brought home was the baculum of male walruses, a bone like a straight rod about one foot long that forms the core of the walrus penis, because it proved to be of just the right size and shape (and, one suspects, conversation value) to make into an axe handle or a hook.
The Nordrseta hunt was dangerous and expensive in many ways. To begin with, hunting walruses and polar bears without a gun must have been very dangerous. Please imagine yourself, equipped with just a lance, spear, bow and arrow, or club (take your choice) trying to kill a huge enraged walrus or bear before it could kill you. Please also imagine yourself spending several weeks in a small rowboat shared with a live, trussed-up polar bear or its cubs. Even without a live bear as companion, the boat journey itself along the cold stormy coast of West Greenland exposed hunters to risk of death from shipwreck or exposure for several weeks. Apart from those dangers, the trip constituted expensive use of boats, manpower, and summer time for people short of all three. Because of Greenland’s scarcity of lumber, few Greenlanders owned boats, and using those precious boats to hunt walruses came at the expense of other possible uses of the boats, such as going to Labrador to acquire more lumber. The hunt took place in the summer, when men were needed to harvest the hay required to feed livestock through the winter. Much of what the Greenlanders obtained materially by trade with Europe in return for those walrus tusks and bearskins was just luxury goods for churches and chiefs. From our perspective today, we can’t help thinking of seemingly more important uses that the Greenlanders could have made of those boats and man-time. From the Greenlanders’ perspective, though, the hunt must have brought great prestige to the individual hunters, and it maintained for the whole society the psychologically vital contact with Europe.
Greenland’s trade with Europe was mainly through the Norwegian ports of Bergen and Trondheim. While at first some cargo was carried in oceangoing ships belonging to Icelanders and to the Greenlanders themselves, those ships as they aged could not be replaced due to the islands’ lack of timber, leaving the trade to Norwegian ships. By the mid 1200s, there were often periods of several years in which no ship at all visited Greenland. In 1257 Norway’s King Haakon Haakonsson, as part of his effort to assert his authority over all of the Norse Atlantic island societies, sent three commissioners to Greenland to persuade the hitherto-independent Greenlanders to acknowledge his sovereignty and pay tribute. Although the details of the resulting agreement have not been preserved, some documents suggest that Greenland’s acceptance of Norwegian sovereignty in 1261 was in return for the king’s promise to dispatch two ships each year, similar to his simultaneous agreement with Iceland which we know stipulated six ships each year. Thereafter, Greenland’s trade became a Norwegian royal monopoly. But Greenland’s association with Norway remained loose, and Norwegian authority difficult to enforce because of Greenland’s distance. We know for sure only that a royal agent resided in Greenland at various times during the 1300s.
At least as important as Europe’s material exports to Greenland were its psychological exports of Christian identity and European identity. Those two identities may explain why the Greenlanders acted in ways that—we today would say with the value of hindsight—were maladaptive and ultimately cost them their lives, but that for many centuries enabled them to maintain a functioning society under the most difficult conditions faced by any medieval Europeans.
Greenland converted to Christianity around A.D. 1000, at the same time as the conversions of Iceland and the other Viking Atlantic colonies, and of Norway itself. For more than a century the Greenland churches remained small structures built of turf on some farmer’s land, mainly on the largest farms. Most likely, as in Iceland, they were so-called proprietary churches, built and owned by the landowning farmer, who received part of the tithes paid to that church by its local members.
But Greenland still had no resident bishop, whose presence was required for performing confirmations and for a church to be considered consecrated. Hence around 1118 that very same Einar Sokkason whom we have already encountered as a saga hero killed by an axe blow from behind was sent by the Greenlanders to Norway in order to persuade its king to provide Greenland with a bishop. As inducements, Einar took along to give the king a large supply of ivory, walrus hides, and—best of all—a live polar bear. That did the trick. The king, in turn, persuaded that Arnald whom we already met in Einar Sokkason’s saga to become Greenland’s first resident bishop, to be followed by about nine others over the succeeding centuries. Without exception, all were born and educated in Europe and came to Greenland only upon their appointment as bishop. Not surprisingly, they looked to Europe for their models, preferred beef over seal meat, and directed resources of Greenland society to the Nordrseta hunt that enabled them to buy wine and vestments for themselves, and stained glass windows for their churches.
A big construction program of churches modeled on European churches followed Arnald’s appointment, and continued to around 1300, when the lovely church at Hvalsey was erected as one of the last. Greenland’s ecclesiastical establishment came to consist of one cathedral, about 13 large parish churches, many smaller churches, and even a monastery and a nunnery. While most of the churches were built with stone lower walls and turf upper walls, Hvalsey Church and at least three others had walls entirely of stone. These big churches were all out of proportion to the size of the tiny society that erected and supported them.
For instance, St. Nicholas’s Cathedral at Gardar, measuring 105 feet long by 53 feet wide, was as large as either of the two cathedrals of Iceland, whose population was ten times that of Greenland. I estimated the largest of the stone blocks of its lower walls, carefully carved to fit each other and transported from sandstone quarries at least a mile distant, to weigh about three tons. Even larger was a flagstone of about 10 tons in front of the bishop’s house. Adjacent structures included a bell tower 80 feet high, and a ceremonial hall with a floor area of 1,400 square feet, the largest hall in Greenland and nearly three-quarters the size of the hall of the archbishop of Trondheim in Norway. On an equally lavish scale were the cathedrals’ two cow barns, one of them 208 feet long (the largest barn in Greenland) and fitted with a stone lintel weighing about four tons. As a splendid welcome to visitors, the cathedral’s grounds were decorated with about 25 complete walrus skulls and five narwhal skulls, which may be the only ones preserved at any Greenland Norse site: otherwise, archaeologists have found only chips of ivory, because it was so valuable and was almost all exported to Europe.
Gardar Cathedral and the other Greenland churches must have consumed horrifyingly large amounts of scarce timber to support their walls and roofs. Imported church paraphernalia, such as bronze bells and communion wine, were also expensive to Greenlanders because
they were ultimately bought with the sweat and blood of Nordrseta hunters and competed against essential iron for the limited cargo space on arriving ships. Recurrent expenses that their churches cost the Greenlanders were an annual tithe paid to Rome, and additional Crusade tithes levied on all Christians. These tithes were paid with Greenland exports shipped to Bergen and converted to silver there. A surviving receipt for one such shipment, the six-year Crusade Tithe of 1274-1280, shows that it consisted of 1,470 pounds of ivory from the tusks of 191 walruses, which Norway’s archbishop managed to sell for 26 pounds of pure silver. That the Church was able to extract such tithes and complete such building programs testifies to the authority it commanded in Greenland.
Church-associated land ultimately came to comprise much of the best land in Greenland, including about one-third of the land of Eastern Settlement. Greenland’s church tithes, and possibly its other exports to Europe, went through Gardar, where one can still see the ruins of a large storage shed standing immediately next to the cathedral’s southeast corner. With Gardar thus boasting Greenland’s largest storage building, as well as by far its largest cattle herd and richest land, whoever controlled Gardar controlled Greenland. What remains unclear is whether Gardar and the other church farms in Greenland were owned by the Church itself or else by the farmers on whose land the churches stood. But whether authority and ownership rested with the bishop or with the chiefs doesn’t alter the main conclusion: Greenland was a hierarchical society, with great differences of wealth justified by the Church, and with disproportionate investment in churches. Again, we moderns have to wonder if the Greenlanders wouldn’t have been better off had they imported fewer bronze bells, and more iron with which to make tools, weapons to defend themselves against the Inuit, or goods to trade with the Inuit for meat in times of stress. But we ask our question with the gift of hindsight, and without regard to the cultural heritage that led the Greenlanders to make their choices.
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