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That decision-making is flexible and sensitive, but it is also conservative. Even my Icelandic friends describe their society to me as conservative and rigid. The Danish government that ruled Iceland after 1397 was regularly frustrated by that attitude whenever it made genuine efforts to improve the Icelanders’ condition. Among the long list of improvements that Danes tried to introduce were: growing grain; improved fishing nets; fishing from decked rather than open boats; processing fish for export with salt, rather than just drying them; a rope-making industry; a hide-tanning industry; and mining sulfur for export. To these and any other proposals involving change, the Danes (as well as innovative Icelanders themselves) found that Icelanders’ routine response was “no,” regardless of the potential benefits for the Icelanders.
My Icelandic friends explained to me that this conservative outlook is understandable when one reflects on Iceland’s environmental fragility. Icelanders became conditioned by their long history of experience to conclude that, whatever change they tried to make, it was much more likely to make things worse than better. In the first years of experimentation during Iceland’s early history, its settlers managed to devise an economic and social system that worked, more or less. Granted, that system left most people poor, and from time to time many people starved to death, but at least the society persisted. Other experiments that Icelanders had tried during their history had tended to end disastrously. The evidence of those disasters lay everywhere around them, in the form of the moonscape highlands, the abandoned former farms, and the eroded areas of farms that survived. From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don’t ask us to change.
Iceland’s political history from 870 onwards can be quickly summarized. For several centuries Iceland was self-governing, until fighting between chiefs belonging to the five leading families resulted in many killings of people and burnings of farms in the first half of the 13th century. In 1262 Icelanders invited Norway’s king to govern them, reasoning that a distant king was less of a danger to them, would leave them more freedom, and could not possibly plunge their land into such disorder as their own nearby chiefs. Marriages among Scandinavian royal houses resulted in the thrones of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway becoming unified in the year 1397 under one king, who was most interested in Denmark because it was his richest province, and less interested in Norway and Iceland, which were poorer. In 1874 Iceland achieved some self-government, home rule in 1904, and full independence from Denmark in 1944.
Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Iceland’s economy was stimulated by the rise of trade in stockfish (dried cod) caught in Iceland waters and exported to the European mainland’s growing cities whose urban populations required food. Because Iceland itself lacked big trees for good shipbuilding, those fish were caught and exported by ships belonging to an assortment of foreigners that included especially Norwegians, English, and Germans, joined by French and Dutch. In the early 1900s Iceland at last began to develop a fleet of its own and underwent an explosion of industrial-scale fishing. By 1950, more than 90% of Iceland’s total exports were marine products, dwarfing the importance of the formerly dominant agricultural sector. Already in 1923, Iceland’s urban population overtook its rural population in numbers. Iceland is now the most urbanized Scandinavian country, with half its population in the capital of Reykjavík alone. The flow of population from rural to urban areas continues today, as Iceland’s farmers abandon their farms or convert them to summer houses and move to the towns to find jobs, Coca-Cola, and global culture.
Today, thanks to its abundance of fish, geothermal power, and hydroelectric power from all its rivers, and relieved of the necessity to scrape up timber for making ships (now constructed of metal), Europe’s former poorest country has become one of the world’s richest countries on a per-capita basis, a great success story to balance the stories of societal collapse in Chapters 2-5. Iceland’s Nobel Price-winning novelist Halldór Laxness put into the mouth of the heroine of his novel Salka Valka the immortal sentence that only an Icelander could utter: “When all is said and done, life is first and foremost salt fish.” But fish stocks pose difficult management problems, just as do forests and soil. Icelanders are working hard now to repair past damage to their forests and soils, and to prevent similar damage to their fisheries.
With this tour of Iceland history in mind, let’s see where Iceland stands with respect to the other five Norse North Atlantic colonies. I had mentioned that the differing fates of those colonies depended especially on differences in four factors: sailing distance from Europe, resistance offered by pre-Viking inhabitants, suitability for agriculture, and environmental fragility. In Iceland’s case two of those factors were favorable, and the other two caused trouble. Good news for Iceland’s settlers was that the island had no (or virtually no) prior inhabitants, and that its distance from Europe (much less than that of Greenland or Vinland, though greater than that of the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faeroes) was close enough to permit bulk trade even in medieval ships. Unlike the Greenlanders, the Icelanders remained in ship contact with Norway and/or Britain every year, could receive bulk imports of essentials (especially timber, iron, and eventually pottery), and could send out bulk exports. In particular, the export of dried fish proved decisive in saving Iceland economically after 1300 but was impractical for the more remote Greenland colony, whose shipping lanes to Europe were often blocked by sea ice.
On the negative side, Iceland’s northerly location gave it the second most unfavorable potential for food production, after Greenland. Barley agriculture, marginal even in the mild early years of settlement, was abandoned when the climate became cooler in the late Middle Ages. Even pastoralism based on sheep and cows was marginal on poorer farms in poorer years. Nevertheless, in most years sheep thrived sufficiently well in Iceland that wool export dominated the economy for several centuries after settlement. Iceland’s biggest problem was environmental fragility: by far the most fragile soils among the Norse colonies, and the second most fragile vegetation after Greenland.
What about Icelandic history from the perpective of the five factors that provide the framework for this book: self-inflicted environmental damage, climate change, hostilities with other societies, friendly trading relations with other societies, and cultural attitudes? Four of these factors play a role in Icelandic history; only the factor of hostile outsiders was minor, except for a period of pirate raids. Iceland illustrates clearly the interaction among the other four factors. Icelanders had the misfortune to inherit an especially difficult set of environmental problems, which became exacerbated by climatic cooling in the Little Ice Age. Trade with Europe was important in enabling Iceland to survive despite those environmental problems. Icelanders’ response to their environment was framed by their cultural attitudes. Some of those attitudes were ones that they imported with them from Norway: especially, their pastoral economy, their initial overfondness for cows and pigs, and their initial environmental practices appropriate to Norwegian and British soils but inappropriate in Iceland. Attitudes that they then developed in Iceland included learning to eliminate pigs and goats and to downplay cows, learning how to take better care of the fragile Iceland environment, and adopting a conservative outlook. That outlook frustrated their Danish governors and in some cases may have harmed the Icelanders themselves, but ultimately helped them survive by not taking risks.
Iceland’s government today is very concerned about Iceland’s historical curses of soil erosion and sheep overgrazing, which played such a large role in their country’s long impoverishment. An entire government department has as its charge to attempt to retain soil, regrow the woodlands, revegetate the interior, and regulate sheep stocking rates. In Iceland’s highlands I saw lines of grass planted by this department on otherwise bare moonscapes, in an effort to establish some protective plant cover and
to halt the spread of erosion. Often these replanting efforts—thin green lines on a brown panorama—struck me as a pathetic attempt to cope with an overwhelming problem. But Icelanders are making some progress.
Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understand that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists. That is not the case in Iceland, where the effects of erosion that began 1,130 years ago are obvious, where most of the vegetation and half of the soil have already been lost, and where the past is so stark and omnipresent. Many studies of medieval Icelandic settlements and erosion patterns are now under way. When one of my archaeologist friends approached the Icelandic government and began to deliver the usual lengthy justification required in other countries, the government’s response was: “Yes, of course we realize that understanding medieval soil erosion will help us understand our present problem. We already know that, you don’t have to spend time convincing us. Here is the money, go do your study.”
The brief existence of the most remote Viking North Atlantic colony, Vinland, is a separate story fascinating in its own right. As the first European effort to colonize the Americas, nearly 500 years before Columbus, it has been the subject of romantic speculation and many books. For our purposes in this book, the most important lessons to be drawn from the Vinland venture are the reasons for its failure.
The coast of northeastern North America reached by the Vikings lies thousands of miles from Norway, across the North Atlantic, far beyond direct reach of Viking ships. Instead, all Viking ships destined for North America sailed from the westernmost established colony, Greenland. Even Greenland, though, was far from North America by Viking sailing standards. The Vikings’ main camp on Newfoundland lay nearly 1,000 miles from the Greenland settlements by a direct voyage, but required a voyage of 2,000 miles and up to six weeks by the actual coast-hugging route that Vikings took for safety, given their rudimentary navigational abilities. To sail from Greenland to Vinland and then return within the summer sailing season of favorable weather would have left little time for exploring Vinland before setting sail again. Hence the Vikings established a base camp on Newfoundland, where they could remain for the winter, so as to be able to spend the entire subsequent summer exploring.
The known Vinland voyages were organized in Greenland by two sons, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law of that same Erik the Red who had founded the Greenland colony in 984. Their motive was to reconnoiter the land, in order to see what products it offered and to gauge its suitability for settlement. According to the sagas, those initial voyagers took along livestock in their boats, so that they would have the option of making a permanent settlement if the land seemed good to them. Subsequently, after the Vikings had given up on that hope of settling, they continued to visit the coast of North America for more than 300 years in order to fetch lumber (always in short supply in Greenland), and possibly in order to extract iron at sites where plenty of wood was available to make charcoal (also in short supply in Greenland) for iron-smithing.
We have two sources of information about the Vikings’ attempt to settle North America: written accounts and archaeological excavations. The written accounts consist mainly of two sagas describing the initial Vinland voyages of discovery and exploration, transmitted orally for several centuries and finally written down in Iceland during the 1200s. In the absence of independent confirming evidence, scholars tended to dismiss the sagas as fiction and to doubt that the Vikings ever reached the New World, until the debate was finally settled when archaeologists located the Vikings’ Newfoundland base camp in 1961. The saga accounts of Vinland are now recognized to be the oldest written descriptions of North America, although scholars still debate the accuracy of their details. They are contained in two separate manuscripts, termed the Greenlanders’ Saga and Erik the Red’s Saga, which are in broad agreement but have many differences of finer points. They describe up to five separate voyages from Greenland to Vinland, within the short span of barely a decade, each voyage involving only a single ship, except that the last voyage used either two or three ships.
In those two Vinland sagas, the main North American sites visited by the Vikings are described briefly and given the Norse names of Helluland, Markland, Vinland, Leifsbudir, Straumfjord, and Hop. Much effort has been poured by scholars into identifying these names and brief descriptions (e.g., “This land [Markland] was flat and forested, sloping gently seaward, and they came across many beaches of white sand.... This land will be named for what it has to offer and called Markland [Forest Land]”). It seems clear that Helluland means the east coast of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and that Markland is the Labrador coast south of Baffin Island, both Baffin Island and Labrador lying due west of Greenland across the narrow Davis Strait separating Greenland from North America. In order to remain within sight of land as much as possible, the Greenland Vikings didn’t sail straight across the open North Atlantic to Newfoundland but instead crossed Davis Strait to Baffin Island and then headed south, following the coast. The remaining place names in the sagas evidently refer to coastal areas of Canada south of Labrador, including surely Newfoundland, probably the Gulf of St. Lawrence and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (which collectively were termed Vinland), and possibly some of the New England coast. Vikings in the New World would initially have explored widely in order to find the most useful areas, just as we know that they did in Greenland before picking the two fjords with the best pastureland to settle.
Our other source of information about Vikings in the New World is archaeological. Despite much searching by archaeologists, only a single Viking camp has been identified and excavated, at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northwest coast of Newfoundland. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the camp was occupied around A.D. 1000, in agreement with saga accounts that the Vinland voyages were led by grown children of Erik the Red, who organized the settlement of Greenland around 984, and whom the sagas describe as still alive at the time of the voyages. The L’Anse aux Meadows site, whose location seems to agree with the sagas’ description of a camp known as Leifsbudir, consists of the remains of eight buildings, including three residential halls large enough to hold 80 people, an iron smithy to extract bog iron and make iron nails for boats, a carpenter’s shop, and boat repair shops, but no farm buildings or farm implements.
According to the sagas, Leifsbudir was just a base camp at a location convenient for overwintering and going out on summer explorations; the resources of interest to the Vikings were instead to be found in those exploration areas termed Vinland. This is confirmed by a tiny but important discovery made during the archaeological excavation of the L’Anse aux Meadows camp: two wild walnuts known as butternuts, which do not grow in Newfoundland. Even during the centuries of warmer climate prevailing around A.D. 1000, the walnut trees closest to Newfoundland occurred south of the St. Lawrence River Valley. That was also the closest area where the wild grapes described in the sagas grew. It was probably for those grapes that the Vikings named the area Vinland, meaning “wine land.”
The sagas describe Vinland as rich in prized resources lacking in Greenland. High on Vinland’s list of advantages were a relatively mild climate, much lower latitude and hence longer summer growing season than Greenland, tall grass, and mild winters, making it possible for Norse cattle to graze outdoors for themselves throughout the winter, and thus sparing the Norse the effort of having to make hay in the summer for feeding their cattle in barns during the winter. Forests with good timber were everywhere. Other natural resources included lake and river salmon larger than any sa
lmon seen in Greenland, one of the world’s richest ocean fishing grounds in the seas surrounding Newfoundland, and game, including deer, caribou, and nesting birds and their eggs.
Despite the valuable shiploads of timber, grapes, and animal furs that the Vinland voyagers brought back to Greenland, the voyages were discontinued and the L’Anse aux Meadows camp was abandoned. Although the archaeological excavations of the camp were exciting in finally proving that Vikings had indeed reached the New World before Columbus, the excavations were disappointing as well, because the Norse left nothing of value. Objects recovered were confined to small items that had probably been discarded or else dropped and lost, such as 99 broken iron nails, a single whole nail, a bronze pin, a whetstone, a spindle, one glass bead, and a knitting needle. Evidently, the site was not abandoned hastily, but as part of a planned permanent evacuation in which all tools and possessions of value were taken back to Greenland. Today we know that North America was by far the largest and most valuable North Atlantic land discovered by the Norse; even the tiny fraction of it that the Norse surveyed impressed them. Why, then, did the Norse give up on Vinland, land of plenty?
The sagas offer a simple answer to that question: the large population of hostile Indians, with whom the Vikings failed to establish good relations. According to the sagas, the first Indians that the Vikings met were a group of nine, of whom they killed eight, while the ninth fled. That was not a promising start to establishing friendship. Not surprisingly, the Indians came back in a fleet of small boats, shot arrows at the Norse, and killed their leader, Erik the Red’s son Thorvald. Pulling the arrow out of his intestines, the dying Thorvald is said to have lamented, “This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my belly. We’ve found a land of fine resources, though we’ll hardly enjoy much of them.”