Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  It is now possible to use increasingly sophisticated scientific analyses to examine the environmental impact of the Norse settlers in the North Atlantic colonies. In Greenland, the colonists left their own ‘footprint’ on the landscape, and it is visible in the archaeological record. It has been estimated that up to 5 percent of the Greenland flora is of Norse origin, imported with the settlers and distributed across the pasturelands surrounding the settlements.

  The Greenland Norse certainly signalled a Scandinavian identity, but as in the Faroes and Iceland, there are some undeniably local adaptations to the immediate environment. Literacy seems interestingly high, for example, as runic inscriptions are comparatively more common there than elsewhere in the Viking world and are moreover applied to a much greater range of objects than is usually the case. A number of items bear ownership marks, including a spade from Vatnahverfi inscribed with “Gunnar owns” and a spindle whorl from the same area featuring the words “Sigrid made”. While fairly mundane in themselves, these inscriptions demonstrate a high level of everyday runic fluency; clearly, fast and accurate communication was in wide demand. The inscriptions from late Norse Greenland also reveal the existence of a developed cult of the Virgin Mary, whose name can be found inscribed on everyday things such as spindle whorls—perhaps evidence for the kind of frontier religion that can take root with great conviction.

  In contrast to the many runic inscriptions preserved in the medieval levels of Norwegian towns such as Bergen and Stavanger, in Greenland there are almost none directly relating to trade. However, a profusion of tally sticks seems to indicate that the Greenlanders spent a lot of time counting things, presumably commodities of various kinds. It is hard not to sense an obsessive need here, repeatedly making sure they had enough to get by.

  Life in Greenland, as in the other Norse Atlantic colonies, was harsh and sometimes short. The margins of subsistence were clearly, at times, very small; for example, at the GUS site, the land around became progressively denuded as the environs of the farm were overexploited. A particularly traumatic record of the realities of farmstead life survives in the thin layers of accumulating soils inside the buildings there, and in the environmental evidence they contain. Careful analysis has revealed that the GUS inhabitants almost certainly starved to death in the houses. The record shows a brief but very significant rise in the presence of carrion flies—an outdoor species that for a short period came inside. No bodies were found at GUS, so it appears someone removed them at a later date. As the environmental analyst of the site observes, three successive bad years in Greenland would have been enough to take out even the most well-prepared farm.

  The sheer toughness of life on the margins of the North Atlantic—the risk and vulnerability—goes much further towards explaining the extraordinary oceanic voyages of discovery than any supposedly innate sense of Norse adventure. The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again. No sagas were written for them, and they just vanish from history into the waters of the Atlantic. That this was seen as a natural hazard of maritime life can be understood from the shockingly laconic (to a modern mind) notations of such ship losses that we find in the sagas. From the Saga of the Greenlanders:

  In the summer in which Eirík the Red set off to colonize Greenland, twenty-five ships sailed from Breidafjord and Borgarfjord [in Iceland], but only fourteen reached there.

  Curiosity, but also a degree of necessity, played a role in probably the most famous incident in the creation of the Viking diaspora: the first European encounter with North America. Our textual sources for this are meagre indeed—only the two sagas already mentioned, which contain a wealth of detail but also many contradictions. While both tell a similar story, they differ in a number of respects. For example, while the Saga of the Greenlanders credits Bjarni Herjólfsson (son of the local magnate at Herjolfsnes) as first sighting North America in 986, when his ship was storm driven while attempting to reach Greenland, the Saga of Eirík the Red (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his family) credits Leif Eiríksson as discovering it when coming back from Norway. According to both sagas, the initial sightings induced later attempts to explore the newly discovered lands.

  In a sense, the Vinland voyages were marginal events involving only a few ships and a couple of hundred individuals, and there is no particular indication that they were important to the Norse as anything more than an epic story (that the tale was famous is shown not only by the sagas, but also by the fact that the voyages were clearly remembered for centuries). However, they also marked something else: the unique moment in human history when the populations that had begun expanding out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier finally linked up from east and west, completing the full circle of settlement and encounter around the globe. It is a story worth examining in some detail.

  In the sagas, the North American region settled by the Norse is referred to as Vinland, ‘vine-land’, due to the settlers’ discovery of wild grapes. The way to reach it is charted in the texts: one initially sailed north up the west coast of Greenland, way beyond the Western Settlement, before turning west to head across open water for two days. According to the sagas, on reaching the far coast, Norse explorers turned south, first passing a land of flat stones (referred to as Helluland, likely Baffin Island) and one of dense forest (Markland, probably Labrador). There is a description of endless beaches with dazzlingly bright sand that also fits this course. Vinland, the focus of Norse activity in the sagas, is encountered south of Helluland and Markland, but exactly where it was is unclear. It is here the two texts diverge most dramatically, both in the nature of the voyages and where they went.

  In the popular imagination today, the Vinland voyages are primarily associated with Leif Eiríksson—Leif ‘the Lucky’—but in both sagas it is clear that the main Norse explorers were the married couple Thorfinn karlsefni and Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir.

  In the Saga of Eirík the Red, Leif discovers Vinland but does not land there. Only one settlement voyage is made, led by Thorfinn with three ships and 140 (or 160) men made up of various relatives and retainers of Eirík the Red, including Leif’s brother and sister. Two separate settlements are founded in Vinland—one at ‘Straumfjörðr’, where the group overwinters, and a second at ‘Hop’, which seems to have lasted longer. Here they encounter indigenous peoples whom the texts refer to as skraelingar—a derogatory term meaning something like ‘savages’. After a cautious first meeting, the locals return in large numbers and begin to trade, although they are afraid of the Norse bull, an animal they have never seen. This seems to sour relations, and after a period of absence the indigenous people return and attack the Norse camp. The explorers are saved by Leif’s sister, Freydís, who seizes the sword of a fallen man and bares her breast, which according to the saga so startles the attackers that they retreat. A complicated series of episodes follows, involving more murders of indigenous people and the death of Leif’s brother at their hands, squabbles among the Norse, and a rather drawn-out voyage back to Greenland. The dream of Vinland is abandoned. The region is ambiguously described in Eirík’s saga, and its geography does not make internal sense. Its northern limit is a headland the saga calls Kjarlarnes, but the same text also mentions that some of the Norse wish to look for Vinland to the west of that point.

  The Saga of the Greenlanders, by contrast, is more detailed in many ways and describes several separate journeys to the New World. Its events seem to have been rather awkwardly compressed into the single voyage of the other saga. The chronology is also shifted slightly later, in that Bjarni waits several years before reporting his sighting of a new land, and it is not until c. 1000 that Leif Eiríksson hears of it and sets out to go there. In this text, he is the one who first lands. Adding to the difficulties of interpretation, only one settlement is mentioned in the Saga of the Gr
eenlanders. This place is built by Leif and is named, accordingly, Leifsbuðir (‘Leif’s Houses’); he lends the site to the voyagers that follow him, although he personally does not return to Vinland.

  When Leif gets home to Greenland, a new expedition is launched by his brother Thorvald. They, too, reach Leifsbuðir, and in fact stay there over three winters while they spend the summers exploring the coast. According to this version, it is clear that the Norse gained considerable knowledge of the region and also that they ranged far from their base—which has implications for the archaeological data, as we shall see. This mission ends in disaster when the Norse unexpectedly encounter (as Leif never did) people whom this saga also calls skraelingar; unlike the Eirík’s saga account, the contact is violent from the start. Thorvald and his men kill several of them, before being attacked in numbers and making a fighting retreat to the ships. In the process, Thorvald is killed by an arrow, as he is in the ‘combination voyage’ of Eirík’s saga.

  The ships eventually make it back to Greenland, and their exploit is followed by the voyage that is the focus of the Saga of the Greenlanders—when Thorfinn karlsefni and Gudríd travel to Vinland accompanied by sixty men and five women. They bring with them trade goods and livestock, intending to stay, and initially their encounters with the indigenous people are peaceable. They barter for milk and cloth (the colour red seems especially popular), but soon there is a misunderstanding when one of the locals tries to grab a Norse weapon and is killed. Here the account seems to converge with that of the Saga of Eirík the Red, as the Norse are attacked in force but manage to fight their way out and return to Greenland. The saga includes a final coda, with an additional voyage (making four in all) jointly led by Leif’s sister, Freydís. This has clear links to the Eirík’s saga narrative, but here ends in murderous discord between the settlers (several of whom Freydís personally kills with an axe—she is clearly her father’s daughter).

  In both sagas, Leif’s other brother, Thorstein, leads an abortive voyage to find Vinland, spending months lost at sea before being driven back to Greenland and dying of illness. He is married to Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir at the time, and it is in her widowhood that she meets her future husband, Thorfinn.

  In both sagas, the indigenous people are described in some detail: moving in small flotillas of skin boats, whirling some kind of noise-makers, wielding bows and arrows, sleeping in skin ‘bags’. The tragic details of colonial first encounter are familiar from later times, and convincing for that reason: initial trade, with very different value systems (the Norse can’t believe the locals are willing to trade beautiful furs for nothing more than milk), but soon turning violent and deadly, often in relation to supposed ‘thefts’ of weapons. There is even the kidnapping of people to be taken home and taught the ways of ‘civilisation’—change the names and these could be episodes from Cook’s journals. Given the saga geography and the archaeological data, the scholarly consensus today is that the First Nations people encountered by the Norse were probably the ancestors of the Beothuk, recorded in early modern times as living throughout Newfoundland. Their later history was one of colonial damage and loss; the Beothuk were declared extinct in 1829, although some individuals may have survived longer into the nineteenth century.

  Over the centuries, the memory of the Norse expeditions to Vinland dimmed and then faded altogether. It was not until the 1960s, following years of searching, that excavations identified a Norse site at l’Anse aux Meadows, at Épaves Bay on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The remains of eight buildings were found, grouped into three complexes. These included both dwellings and workshops, one of which was a smithy where bog iron had been processed. There was also evidence for wood-working activity and ship repair, in something resembling a boat shed. The architecture of the settlement is classic Norse in the North Atlantic style, familiar from the Faroes to Greenland.

  The finds are fairly meagre but include a ringed pin cloak fastener of a kind that is diagnostically Norse. There was also a spindle whorl and a fragmentary bone needle—evidence for (perhaps female?) textile working—as well as a glass bead. Pieces of wood were excavated that had clearly been shaped by iron tools, that the indigenous people did not possess.

  The buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows were burnt, either by First Nations people after the departure of the Norse or perhaps by the latter as an act of ritual closure. The site is generally dated to around 1000, but some of the material found appears to be earlier, implying the settlement may have been established prior to the Norse explorations recorded in the sagas (although the chronology is admittedly vague).

  The site at l’Anse aux Meadows could have potentially housed around one hundred people, but does not seem to have been occupied on a permanent basis. Rather than seeking to establish a colony, the wish to secure valuable timber supplies may have been the main motivation for the foundation of the settlement. Contrary to the story in the sagas, no evidence has yet been found for cattle, barns, or byres, which were essential to the long-term survival of any new colony. No graves have been discovered, either, which also indicates a relatively short-lived settlement. That said, new environmental work at the site suggests the Norse occupation, whether intermittent or not, may have lasted for up to a century.

  Several scholars believe l’Anse aux Meadows was, instead, essentially a way station used for resupply and boat repair between longer expeditions into the interior. The clear references to wild grapes—and indeed the name itself—imply that Vinland was not located in Newfoundland, as the northernmost latitude at which wild grapes grow is much farther south, around New Brunswick. The identification of butternuts and butternut wood at l’Anse aux Meadows, which also have their northern growth limits in the New Brunswick region, supports this suggestion. If the Norse did voyage farther south, then they potentially could have penetrated relatively deep into the St. Lawrence River in what is now Quebec Province, or headed south along the coast of Maine. Given the distance from their homes in Greenland and Iceland, and the vagueness of their geographical knowledge, perhaps Vinland was a name given by the Norse to the whole region.

  L’Anse aux Meadows today is an extraordinary place, precisely because its remains are so modest—the outlines of turf buildings as bumps in the grass around the bay, a reconstructed longhouse, an excellent museum—at the same time, the mind reels at what it represents. And all unknown to the people concerned. The Norse did not know where they were, and the First Nations people they met had no idea whom they’d encountered or where they had come from. The first time I ever saw the Northern Lights was in the skies above St. Anthony, the nearest modern settlement, and the whole site lives long in any visitor’s memory.

  Brief hopes of finding another site were raised when a satellite-based survey seemed to locate some kind of Norse outpost at Point Rosee, situated at the opposite, western end of Newfoundland. Some months later, however, follow-up excavations confirmed that the ‘cultural remains’ were all entirely natural in origin. The researchers had, quite properly, tested their initial hypotheses, found them to be erroneous and said so, and this is the way science sometimes goes. For now, the potential extent of any exploratory voyages into the south must remain a matter of speculation.

  It is clear that the Norse went back to Vinland repeatedly, and also that they had further contacts with the local people while there. Excavation of a grave in the Western Settlement of Greenland has revealed a man who died as a result of an arrow wound; the tip was still embedded in his body and was of First Nations manufacture. He had presumably been shot over there but made it home before succumbing to his injury. In another Greenland grave, traces have been found of a robe made from the hide of a North American buffalo—a species native to the plains. This can only have reached the east coast via internal trade, before finally going home with a Norse Greenlander, who may have liked it enough to be buried in it.

  Turning north from l’Anse aux Meadows, however, the situation is very different. In recent years, eviden
ce has been growing for Norse contact with the peoples of Arctic Canada and the far north-western reaches of Greenland—the Dorset Palaeo-Eskimos and, later, the Thule Inuit. Trading contacts are suggested by a number of finds identified at sites associated with aboriginal peoples. These include whetstones and soapstone artefacts from Baffin Island and northern Labrador, as well as small pieces of metalwork that have been found on the coast of Hudson Bay and the Hudson Strait. It seems that at least one Norse ship wrecked in the high Arctic on the Canadian shore, as scavenged materials including iron tools and the characteristic clench-nails used to hold the planks of the hull together have been found on Inuit sites. Some of these nails tell a tragic story, as they bear signs of heating—presumably the crew’s desperate repair attempts that failed as they could not make a fire hot enough to do the job.

  Possible indications of a fleeting Norse presence have also been identified at Nanook on Baffin Island. Here, excavations of a structure that has no clear parallels in indigenous or Norse architecture yielded a small crucible used for smelting copper, as well as cordage and whetstones used for sharpening metal implements. Could this represent the second known Norse occupation site in North America? If so, then it is conceivable that the Greenland colonists may have expanded the Norse sphere of influence even further than had previously been believed, making North America the last truly unexplored archaeological frontier of the Viking world. In a specialist’s bookcase, nearly a metre of shelf is taken up with ‘Viking America’ despite the fact that, as yet, there is still only L’Anse aux Meadows and a handful of signals from farther north along the Canadian seaboard. Beyond this, there is really nothing more, and the Vinland voyages slowly fade out here.