The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

by The Far Traveler- Voyages of a Viking Woman (epub)

  “At last we came to the harbor, and it was a surprisingly good one,” wrote another Icelandic traveler, on a much bigger ship, in 1835, “though the land here is far from what you’d call beautiful. Sheer ice-gray mountains ringed the harbortown—not a few of them, either, and all bare-naked.” Greenland, he summed up, “is more gray than green.”

  It was academe’s considered opinion, when I first read The Book of the Icelanders thirty years ago, that in naming Greenland, Eirik the Red had perpetrated a hoax. The sagas have very little nice to say about Eirik’s colony.

  I see death

  in a dread place,

  yours and mine,

  northwest in the waves,

  with frost and cold,

  and countless wonders...

  So goes a verse addressing a traveler headed to Greenland. Trolls and evil spirits descended on Eirik’s Fjord in the winter, the sagas say, breaking men’s bones and destroying their ships. One poignant scene describes a girl who came to Greenland accidentally, adrift on an ice floe; she stands on the shore on a summer’s day and stares out to sea, dreaming of seeing the beautiful fields of Iceland again.

  Writing The Book of the Icelanders in the early 1100s, Ari the Learned, Iceland’s first historian, practically came out and said it: Eirik’s “nice name” was salesmanship, simple bait-and-switch. Lately, though, scholars have reconsidered. The name Greenland “might have been bestowed honestly,” one condescends to write. “Eirik had not lied,” others say more forcefully: “This name is not inappropriate”; it “reflected accurately” the land he had found.

  Greenland is indeed “more gray than green” (as well as more white than gray, at least from the air). Yet the little pockets of green are as lush as Iceland must have been when the first settlers claimed their plots. Doubtless, Eirik saw the other similarity: Like Iceland once, Greenland was empty of inhabitants. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it, “For the first time in his life Eirik was free of constrictive neighbors.”

  Today the largest town is the capital, Nuuk, on the seaward edge of a handful of long, twisting fjords that probe eastward sixty miles to the inland ice. It was here that the Danish missionary Hans Egede came in the 1700s, three hundred years after the Viking settlement had disappeared, looking for lost Christian souls. Finding the culture totally Inuit, he reintroduced Christianity, wool clothing, wood-framed houses, and, so I was told, “good Danish food.” I visited Nuuk in mid-May, a week after “spring arrived,” according to my hostess, Kristjana Motzfeldt, an Icelander married to a Greenlandic statesman. Built on a rocky spit three miles from end to end, the city of 15,000—more than one-quarter of the country’s entire population—sported no trees, no flowers. Old snow-piles, gray with gravel, hid behind the bright-painted houses bolted to the bare rock. The reservoir was still iced over. The mountains that overlooked the town were sheer and ice gray, streaked with snow. Yet the air did hold a springlike mildness as I climbed the steep wooden staircases that linked the winding streets, most of which dead-ended in water. The children certainly thought it was spring: They waded barefoot in the bay.

  Kristjana had offered to take me to Sandnes (“Sandy Point”), a farm deep in the Lysufjord south of Nuuk. According to archaeologists’ best guesses, Sandnes is the farm Gudrid owned with her first husband, Thorstein Eiriksson, or at least where they ended up after their failed attempt to get to Vinland, and where Thorstein so spookily died. But circumstances intervened, and Kristjana turned me and the Motzfeldts’ boat over to Tobias, whom her husband had introduced as his chauffeur.

  “You have a map, you know where you want to go, good, good,” she said, brushing away my doubts. “Tobias will get you there”—despite the fact that he spoke no English (or Icelandic) and I spoke no Greenlandic (or Danish). His wife, Rusina, would be going, too, I learned as we reached the boat at 8:00 Saturday morning. “Beautiful!” she said, with an expansive wave of one hand, as we passed the dramatic mountains that marked the harbor mouth. It was her favorite (and almost her only) English word.

  The Motzfeldts’ boat was a seal-hunting boat, half enclosed. It had two seats, for pilot and copilot, a two-sleeper cabin in the bow, and an open rear deck large enough for landing a seal or two. It had two engines and a large gas tank. Cruising along at about eight knots, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastries, I realized that sailing to Sandnes in a Viking ship would have taken amazing skill. The narrow Lysufjord (named for a kind of cod) heads due east for most of its length, the ice-gray mountains falling straight into the sea, with no beaches, no harbors, no skerries, no bays, nowhere to find safety if the wind should turn contrary—or the ship should sink. The cliffs’ snow-streaks and striations puzzle the mind; the eye wants to find a meaning in the pattern. I began to see huge faces as the hours passed and the view refused to change. The sky was overcast, the silver sea glassy calm. A sense of distance eluded me until I saw a boat the size of ours looking like a speck, a seabird, between us and the gray cliff face. Ahead lay endless iterations of the same humped mountain, hill upon hill: I could see no passage in.

  Finally, after almost four hours, the fjord divided in two. A dome-shaped mountain lay straight ahead, a low rocky toe reached in from our left. As we turned the point into shadow, the boat began humping the waves, “swimming like a seal,” as Kristjana had warned me it might if the wind turned against us. No Viking ship would have made it to Sandnes that day.

  But the sides of the fjord soon softened. The snow had disappeared. Red-brown brush clung to gentler slopes, and here and there above a narrow beach were bright yellow-gold patches of grass that looked man-made: they were straight-edged, rectangular. You could spot Norse ruins from far away, I had read, if you looked for the lushest grass.

  The water grew greener, more shallow. Birds were feeding along the edge of a sandbar, seemingly in the middle of the fjord. We went slowly onward, rolling sideways and, I soon realized, hugging the wrong shore. Across to the north I could see another great swath of winter-gold grass and the landmark I’d read about: “a small round rocky hillock ... a fine vantage place for looking for scattered sheep in the valley.”

  Creeping along the edge of the sandbar, we had to retreat back down the fjord quite a ways before we could come close enough to shore to launch our rubber dinghy. Luckily the wind was calmer now, and by the time we scraped the white sand beach, the sun had come out.

  Tobias and Rusina, each carrying a bottle of soda and a handful of plastic bags, sauntered down the beach to gather mussels. I hurried off the opposite way, knowing we had very little time before the falling tide would strand our anchored boat. I soon found, though, that the clear Greenlandic air had again deceived me: It was much farther to the Viking site than it had seemed from the vantage of the boat. Climbing above the beach, I found a forest—head high, but dense and tangled, the tiny leaves just unfurling—between me and the winter-gold grass. I crouched and wriggled through it on reindeer trails, the broken birch branches in my wake leaving a pungent scent. Under my feet were juniper bushes thick with last year’s berries and the tiny pink flowers of saxifrage. Jumping a rushing stream, I broke from the tree cover, startling three reindeer that had been grazing in the old Viking pastures. As I watched them course off into the hills, dwindling to specks, I finally understood the size of Sandnes: It was easily a chieftain’s farm, to be measured in miles, not acres. That landmark hillock would take more time to climb than the tide would spare me, while beyond it, I knew from the map, was mile upon mile of grassy river valley leading north to the next fjord, the way marked by a series of linked lakes known for the finest salmon run in Greenland. To the south, across the silty end of the bay, were two long green valleys stretching ten miles to the inland ice. Along one of them was the Farm Beneath the Sand.

  Just as that farmstead was buried in sand by the river’s changing course, the church built at Sandnes soon after Gudrid’s time is now underwater. The Sandy Point has eroded significantly since her day. But the hip-high grass is still rumpled
into hummocks by the turf-and-stone walls of Norse buildings. These were lived in until at least 1300, and beneath the largest, according to drawings from the first excavation, in 1932, are two walls of an older longhouse: the house Gudrid may have lived in that long horrible winter when almost everyone she knew died. The archaeologist found a corner hearth and flagstones at the front door. Thirty feet away were two small buildings “almost obliterated” by a later midden. In one was found a finely carved ship’s tiller, its knob shaped like a dragon’s head and its shaft decorated with a row of cats’ faces. The name “Helgi” was written in runes on its side.

  It was not clear to me, standing on the old stone walls and gazing at the view, why Gudrid should have wanted to leave Sandnes—once spring arrived and the winter’s spooks had been put to rest—except to go in search of a more suitable husband than the old farmer who had tried his best to comfort her. It is a lovely green spot in an otherwise barren gray land. Other visitors have had the same reaction. The world traveler Arni Magnusson, the first Icelander to visit China, remarked on the richness of Sandnes in 1755. Tallying up its birch trees and grazing lands, beaches full of edible seaweed, reindeer, seals, salmon, seabirds, and birds’ eggs, he concluded, “I thought to myself that it would be good to build a farm there on either side of that river,” adding, “I have never eaten so many blueberries.”

  Sigurdur Breidfjord, who had found Greenland “more gray than green,” changed his mind abruptly when he saw Sandnes in 1835. “It would have been good to live here,” he wrote, “for the grassland is beautiful and lush, likewise there is a good forest and salmon fishing both winter and summer in the lakes and brook.” (The churchyard had not yet been entirely swept away, for he writes with macabre detail of the yellowed human bones that fell apart in his fingers as he tried to pry them from the eroding beachfront.)

  To Aage Roussell, the young architect-turned-archaeologist who excavated the spot for the Danish National Museum in the 1930s, the setting was more remarkable than the resources. “The farm is surrounded by much natural beauty and the view over the fjord is magnificent,” he wrote. “Here, as at most Norse farms, the impression one forms is that the view has been one of the chief considerations when the landnáms man chose his site.”

  What apparently was not a chief consideration for that first settler was easy access. If we had been in a Viking ship, sailing or rowing, we would not have made it back to Nuuk that night—one reason no one lives at Sandnes now. We had hardly shipped our anchor when the wind turned against us again. The boat began to buck and thump; Tobias gritted his teeth and concentrated on steering her straight. Four bone-jarring hours later, we came to the mouth of the fjord, into a suddenly calm and sunny evening, an iceberg floating like a big pale-blue swan in the distance. At the foot of the beautiful! mountain, Rusina finally got a chance to throw out a fishing line.

  Gudrid lived at Sandnes, at most, for a year, leaving it for good after her husband died. Her main home in Greenland, a good six-days’ row to the south, is not such a lush and secret wilderness. Instead, boatloads of tourists cross Eiriksfjord from the international airport at Narsarsuaq to visit the Viking ruins at Eirik the Red’s setdement of Brattahlid (“Steep Slope”).

  As at Sandnes, what is visible through the grass are the stone foundations of the houses, barns, and church that were here in the 1300s—over three hundred years after Gudrid left. Unlike at Sandnes, these ruins are carefully marked, with clear pathways for the tourists to keep to and a striking metal sculpture bolted to an overlooking rock. A metal plaque gives the archaeological interpretation of each rank of stones; another shows the probable layout of Brattahlid in Eirik the Red’s time. The main longhouse, it says, was up the hill west of the modern church, in a spot that now contains a very well-groomed and flattened hayfield on a steep south-facing slope, as well as a large sheep barn.

  Brattahlid is the center of Greenland’s sheep industry. The settlement is about the size of the island Eirik the Red had been trying to build a house on in Iceland, when Thorgest the Old refused to return his bench boards; you can stroll end to end in about twenty minutes. Doing so, I counted twenty-two horses, loose along the road; several dogs, all of a border-collie type; a church, school, shop, and warehouses by the dock; a café and youth hostel (closed until summer); the cluster of Viking ruins; reconstructions of a Viking longhouse (made from Gudmundur Olafsson’s Viking house kit) and a tiny Viking church; about thirty houses (many of them apparently summerhouses like the one I had rented); and six sheep barns, each large enough for 600 ewes and the 1,200 lambs they were expected to give birth to in the next week or so.

  Climbing the pink-gravel road out of Brattahlid proper, I hiked for two hours until the sheep pastures gave way to a fjord filled with icebergs. There were no head-high thickets to wriggle through, and no thick stands of winter-gold grass; just scattered sheep and sturdy woven-wire fences standing four feet tall with a strand of barbed wire on the top. The rare birch I passed had been browsed back; nothing was budding here, though spring comes sooner at Brattahlid than Sandnes. I saw no flowers. The hills were smooth and groomed almost bare by the sheep.

  Green valleys, full of modern sheep fences alongside Viking stonework, finger out all along the thirty-mile length of Eiriksfjord, with sixty farming families now providing 30,000 lambs a year to the abattoir in the market town of Narsaq, a three-hour boat trip south. The farmers in Brattahlid are descendants of Otto Frederiksen, who established a sheep farm there in 1924. As a guidebook published by the Danish National Museum notes: “The fact that the Eskimos who wanted to be farmers chose Brattahlid is due to the simple fact that they, like Eirik the Red, could see that the richest grazing areas in the whole country were to be found there.” Between the time each spring when the lambs go up to the mountain pastures to graze and when they come down again in October, the farmers make hay. That I saw ranks of round bales wrapped in white plastic behind the barns in mid-May, after spring had arrived and the sheep were being turned out on grass, testified that there was more than enough hay to go around.

  The same could not be said in Eirik the Red’s day. The biggest difference between raising sheep then and now is the haymaking technology: Today’s Greenlanders have tractors and balers and plastic wrapping. Eirik the Red had a short-handled sickle with an iron blade, and even those were scarce. Although a few Greenlandic bogs and brooks show the ruddy tint of iron ore, archaeologists have found no signs of ore smelting. All the iron in the Vikings’ tools, they learned by looking at bits of nails and knives under a scanning electron microscope, came from Norway in the form of “blooms”: ore that had been roasted, crushed, and cooked in a hot charcoal furnace until most of the impurities ran out. This lump of solid iron was squeezed and shaped into a ball, then split, while hot, into two or more “fingers” that were easily transported and sold. Eirik the Red (or his blacksmith) would heat a finger of iron over a charcoal fire in a soapstone hearth, purify it further, and then forge it into a tool. It was expensive, time-consuming, and essential to making hay. An iron sickle blade also had to be resharpened every day during haymaking, which required heating it in a bed of charcoal. If you were out of charcoal, you couldn’t make hay—which is why the modern Icelandic phrase úrkul vonar, literally “out-of-charcoal hopes,” means “hopeless.”

  The estimates of how many sheep a chieftain like Eirik the Red might have owned range from fifty to 3,000, depending on how wild the writer assumes those sheep were. If his sheep wintered in sheds and were fed hay during the worst weather, then fifty. If expected to “fend for themselves outside all year,” as the sagas say sheep did during the first years of Iceland’s settlement, browsing the ground cover entirely away, then 3,000, more like the numbers kept in Brattahlid today. But Eirik the Red not only kept sheep, he also raised cows, which modern Greenlanders have given up on, after a brief assay at dairying in the early twentieth century. At last count, there were sixteen cows in all of Greenland; the stores sell no fresh milk. Not col
d-hardy like sheep, cows cannot survive outside, as the old Icelandic saying puts it, “between the devil and the frost.” The Vikings built sturdy byres to protect their cows, with tall flat stones standing on edge to divide the stalls. Counting those partitions, archaeologists estimate that a chieftain like Eirik may have kept up to twenty cows. Since they had to stay in their stalls for 200 days of the year, they required 55 tons of hay, or 500 horse loads. Eirik needed some hay for his horses, too, though like the sheep they usually could fend for themselves. He also kept goats, which can digest brush and scrub even better than sheep.

  As in Iceland, the amount of hay Eirik the Red could make each summer depended on the labor at his call—how many men cutting the grass with sickles, how many women raking and drying the hay, how many horses carrying it to the turf-covered haystacks or the barns. But it also depended on the weather and on what the sagas call the “richness of the land.” Greenland has a more continental climate than Iceland, and the Viking sites were subject to summer droughts. Elaborate lidded stone channels have been found on many Viking farms, diverting rivers to irrigate the hayfields (and, in some cases, into the houses to provide running water). It is not known if the Vikings manured their fields systematically, but even if they did, the watered and fertilized fields were large enough to feed only five to seven cows through the long winter. The additional hay had to be cut and hauled from the natural lowland marshes—which meant herding the cows in summer, and the sheep much of the year, away from that grass and into the highlands, a job that called for both shepherds and dairymaids, for the sheep and goats, as well as the cows, were milked.

  When she first came to Brattahlid with her father, Gudrid, as an unmarried girl of fifteen, would have been sent into the hills with the other young people to work as a dairymaid for the summer. This again would have been her summer chore when she returned to Brattahlid, a widow at age seventeen. In the hills, she lived in a small house, close to wood and water, and spent her days making butter, cheese, skyr—a thick yogurtlike dish—and whey to feed the household over winter. Based on Icelandic practice in later centuries, we can guess that both cows and sheep were milked once a day, the cows in the field as they grazed, the ewes after being driven into a pen. Records from the 1400s say three women should be able to milk twelve cows and eighty ewes. While working, they should keep an eye out for butter imps, little demons that sucked the teats of other people’s cows. These imps not only stole milk to carry home for their master’s butter, “they had a habit of crawling between women’s legs and going about their business there, too,” as one folklorist puts it.