The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

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

  The site and dating of the church found at Brattahlid match the story, and in spite of being professionally wary of the sagas, archaeologists refer to it as “Thjodhild's Church.” In the churchyard were 155 graves: men to the south, women to the north, children and babies to the east. Twelve men and a boy were buried in a common grave, their bones “in wild disorder” except for the skulls, which were lined up facing east. More than one commentator has remarked that these must be the bones of Gudrid’s husband, Thorstein Eiriksson, and the men who died with him during that terrible winter at Sandnes. As the saga says, “The bodies were carried to the church in Eiriksfjord, and priests performed the proper Christian rites.”

  It is likely that the bones of Thjodhild, Eirik the Red, and Leif Eiriksson, too, are among the skeletons that now reside in a climate-controlled room at the museum in Copenhagen. It was definitely a family cemetery—a dentist can see the family resemblance in the skeletons’ teeth—and in use for only a short time in the first half of the eleventh century. Studies of the bones show that Eirik’s people were healthy and tall, the men averaging five-foot-ten, and the women five-foot-five. Their teeth are especially good, with no cavities and little tooth loss—overall, better than either the Norwegians or Icelanders of the time. Icelanders, in particular, lost three times as many teeth before death.

  Their teeth did show some wear by abrasion, probably due to grit in their food. Because of a dearth of large iron pots in which to boil their pork and goat (as the gods would do), the Greenlanders generally roasted meat outdoors in pits, laying it on the embers and packing earth over it. Chewing air-dried meat was also hard on the teeth; air drying, in dry-stone sheds, was a common way to preserve meat for the winter.

  To learn how the Vikings’ diets might have changed between Eirik the Red’s Land-Taking in 985 and the last word from Norse Greenland in 1408, Jette Arneborg and her colleagues drilled tiny samples of bone from twenty-seven skeletons, some from Thjodhild’s cemetery and some from five other graveyards. These bone bits were then analyzed for their concentration of three forms of carbon: the radioactive carbon 14 and the two stable isotopes, carbon 12 and carbon 13. For comparison purposes, the scientists also analyzed bits of cloth found in the graves and an ox bone that had slipped into the mass grave at Brattahlid by mistake.

  Carbon 14, or radiocarbon, has been used by archaeologists for half a century to date wood, bone, and anything else that contains carbon. Being radioactive, carbon 14 decays over time; its proportion in a bone tells you when that bone stopped taking in carbon—that is, when it died. By measuring the carbon 14 in the annual rings of ancient trees like the very-long-lived bristlecone pine, scientists have been able to create a carbon-14 calibration curve that extends back over 10,000 years. By matching your bone sample against the tree-ring curve, you can date it to within about thirty years. The problem with applying this technique to human bones is that it is affected by what the human was eating for the ten years before he or she died. If the food came from the sea, the tree-ring curve will give dates several hundred years too old. For example, when analyzed this way, one young woman in Jette’s sample was 420 years older than her clothes.

  The dates are skewed by what scientists call the marinereservoir effect. While the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 to carbon 14 in the air is more or less constant, seawater holds very little carbon 13. The amount of carbon 14 depends on the water’s depth, with more carbon 14 at the surface and less in the deeps.

  Carbon is drawn out of the air or water by green plants during photosynthesis, and gets into human bones through the food chain. A person who eats primarily milk, mutton, and venison will show in her bones the carbon taken out of the air by the grass, twigs, and lichens eaten by the cow, sheep, or deer. A person who eats primarily fish or seal will show in her bones the carbon taken out of the water by plankton, one-celled aquatic plants that feed the fish fry and larvae on which ocean predators ultimately dine. The ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 for these two skeletons will not be the same.

  Carbon-14 dates can be corrected for the marine-reservoir effect—so that a skeleton matches her burial clothes—if you know how much seafood the person ate. In reverse, skeletons dated by other means from cultures whose eating habits are known can tell us what ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 to look for to learn whether the Vikings buried at Brattahlid ate more mutton or seal meat.

  The differences are very small. The tests are painstaking and tedious. But the bones from Brattahlid seem to show that Gudrid’s diet while she lived there would have been between 22 and 50 percent seafood, including whale and seal. The later Greenland Norse, close to the collapse in the 1400s, ate up to 81 percent seafood.

  Jared Diamond interprets this change to mean that the later Norse were having trouble making hay. They couldn’t keep enough cows to feed their growing population and were forced to turn to seal or starve. Maybe. The paper she published in Radiocarbon in 1999, Jette told me, was only “a small project” to test the method. She is unwilling to build an edifice, as Diamond did, on twenty-seven bones. In the last six years, she and her colleagues have tested many more bones, including those dug up by Gudny Zoega at Keldudalur in Iceland. As Jette sees it, she has “just started trying to make some human conclusions.”

  Georg Nyegaard, who dug side by side with Jette at the Farm Beneath the Sand, thinks her 1999 results showed not a chronological difference, but a geographical one. “Jette’s article had a very little number of individuals,” he told me, “and the later individuals are all from graveyards on the coast. You always have more seal bones at sites on the outer coast.” He expects her results will change now that she has a larger sample size.

  Georg’s own research shows no change in diet during three hundred years of Norse settlement in Greenland. When not organizing exhibits for the museum in Nuuk, Georg has been analyzing animal bones from a bog in the valley north of Brattahlid, beside a farm a mile and a half from the sea. Settled in the second wave—about the time Gudrid and her father arrived—it has a midden with a difference: In the bog water, bones were very well preserved. And no one had disturbed it before Georg came, which means that the chronology of his samples, calculated from their depth in the bog, is better than for any previous collection of bones.

  Judging from the 50,000 mammal bones he has dated, Georg said, “It was a small farm, but there seems to have been very little change through time. We can compare whatever layer we want to any other and we’ll see the same overall picture, the same ratio of cows to sheep. We have goat bones and pig bones as well. Quite seldom do you find pig bones, but at this bog site, we found them in all the different layers. There seems to have been a few pigs all the time—which is not what the theories say. They had a few horses, and they ate them, too. We see the cracked marrow bones. Then there’s the dog bones in several sizes, big and small. And for the first time we found cat bones in Greenland. But at this site we see no change toward more marine adaptation. The marine part of the diet was a major part right from the start of the farm. We have many seal bones.

  “They left the farm around 1300. In the final phase, we find the same percentage of cattle bones as at the beginning. If you have problems with the vegetation, with feeding the domestic stock, the first thing that would happen is a decrease in the number of cows. The cow is very expensive to feed in the winter. It’s much cheaper to feed goats, and goats provide a lot of milk. But they go on with the same number of cows, maybe six or seven if you look at the cowshed, for three hundred years.”

  It’s frustrating when a handsome theory like Jared Diamond’s collapses, but the science simply doesn’t support the idea that the Vikings ate themselves out of house and home and then starved, rather than lowering themselves to eating Inuit food. Georg Nyegaard’s study argues instead that overgrazing in Greenland was not severe. The Vikings had no need to give up their honored cows. Nor did they hesitate to eat seafood.

  Rather than dying out, they are more likely to have packed up and lef
t, slowly, over a hundred years or more, the younger folk finding berths (or husbands) aboard the trade ships that still sailed fairly regularly from Iceland and Norway in the 1300s; by the early 1400s, the British were also plying Greenland waters in search of cod. The ships would have brought news of the Black Death, which killed half the population of Iceland between 1402 and 1404—or some 20,000 to 35,000 people, ten times the total Norse population of Greenland—and left hundreds of valuable farms unoccupied. Doubtless Sigrid Bjornsdottir, whose marriage to an Icelandic ship’s captain in the church at Hvalsey in 1408 is the last historical record of the Greenland Norse, was not the only heiress. The plague gave this young Greenlandic woman ownership of Stora-Akrar (Big Grain Fields), a wealthy farm in Skagafjord, Iceland, where, six hundred years later Sigridur Sigurdardottir, the curator of the museum at Glaumbaer, would grow up.

  The sailors would also have told the Greenlanders that their caches of walrus ivory—Greenland’s chief export—were now worthless. Elephant ivory became easy to get in the 1300s and, with the market flooded, all ivory had become cheap and unfashionable by the end of the century.

  Chapter 7: Land of Wine or Walrus

  A ship came to Greenland from Norway that summer. Its captain was a man named Thorfinn Karlsefni. He was the son of Thord Horse-Head, a son of Snorri Thordarson from Hofdi. Thorfinn Karlsefni was very rich. He spent the winter at Brattahlid with Leif Eiriksson and soon fell in love with Gudrid.

  —The Saga of the Greenlanders

  WALRUS IVORY BROUGHT KARLSEFNI TO GREENLAND. In the Viking Age, walrus ivory was as valuable as gold, and the only place to get it was in the north, where the seas are iced over nine months of the year, and mussels, the walrus’s favorite food, seed the shallow bottoms of the bays. Five hundred miles north of Sandnes, the walrus congregated on the beaches each August. Eirik the Red’s men would sail to Sandnes, replenish their supplies, and set out in hunting parties for Nordsetur—the Northern Camp. Then came the slaughter.

  The Norse had no harpoons, so they trapped the huge beasts on land, where they were clumsy. They came at the animals with lances and spears, like Sir James Lamont did in 1858 in Spitsbergen, in northern Norway. “In all my sporting life I never saw anything to equal the wild excitement of these hunts,” he writes. Sixteen men stole along the sea’s edge, then rushed at the thousands of walrus lounging on the rocks, stabbing those nearest the water.

  The passage to the sea soon got blocked up with dead and dying walrus. When drenched with blood and exhausted, and their lances from repeated use became blunt and useless, [the men] returned to their vessel, had their dinner, ground their lances, and then returned, killing nine hundred walrus.

  Even today, writes Robert McGhee in The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, the beaches of Spitsbergen are “carpeted with thick and heavy bones, the massive skulls with missing tusks.”

  The Vikings also left most of the bones on the beach. They took the skins to make a strong rope highly prized as sail rigging and anchor cables. Each skin could rig two or three ships. They cut off the penis. Walrus have a thick bone stiffening the male member; it made a good club. They knocked off the front of the skull, taking it home to do the careful work of extracting the valuable ivory tusks at leisure. And they took a joint or two for food.

  Ivory was the perfect trade good. It was light, it kept indefinitely, and until elephant ivory nudged it out of the marketplace in the 1300s, it was essential to aristocratic Christian life. The finest reliquary boxes for holding the remains of saints were made of ivory. Crosses and crucifixes and bishops’ croziers were intricately carved of ivory, as were the palm-sized religious plaques fastened to the covers of holy books. Nonecclesiastical uses included sword hilts, belt buckles, dice, and chess pieces—like the twelfth-century set found on the Isle of Lewis.

  The Greenlanders kept very little ivory for themselves. The bishop’s crozier—a staff of office in the shape of a shepherd’s crook—was retrieved from the bishops grave when the church at Gardar in South Greenland was excavated; the designs on its curved ivory head date it to the late 1100s. The churchyard also contained thirty walrus skulls with tusks intact, some in a row along the church’s east gable, others buried in the chancel itself. As Jette Arneborg deadpans, these totemic animal burials were “not quite according to normal Christian practice.” Otherwise, archaeologists have found only a few ivory buttons and some tiny amulets. Two icons unearthed at one Norse farm were polar bears; a third might be a walrus. (It wasn’t finished before it was lost.) A human figure thought to be a chess queen was found in an Inuit camp.

  It may have been over a chess game played with ivory pieces that Gudrid first spoke to Karlsefni about Vinland. According to The Saga of Eirik the Red, Karlsefni was a sensible merchant esteemed for his seamanship—not an adventurer. He is described as wealthy and well connected, from a large and noble family, with kings in his lineage. His grandfather was one of nineteen children, so Karlsefni was related to most of the families in the prosperous valley of Skagafjord in northern Iceland. He was five or ten years older than Gudrid, having had time to establish himself in his profession, and he was an only son, owner of a substantial estate being looked after by his widowed mother.

  As a good merchant, he would have been brave but also “discreet,” according to The King’s Mirror, a thirteenth-century handbook that gives this advice to businessmen: “On the sea ... be alert and fearless. When you are in a market town, or wherever you are, be polite and agreeable; then you will secure the friendship of all good men.” The writer, a priest who served three kings of Norway as chancellor and military adviser, asserts: “I regard no man perfect in knowledge unless he has thoroughly-learned and mastered the customs of the place where he is sojourning,” chief among those customs being the language. He also admonishes any would-be trader to learn arithmetic, navigation or “how to mark the movements of the ocean,” and the proper care of a ship. Finally, to be a good trader, you must “keep your temper calm” and “be not in a hurry to take revenge.”

  Karlsefni owned his ship in partnership with another Icelander, Snorri Thorbrandsson of Swan Fjord. This Snorri may have been ten or fifteen years older than his friend, and had certainly never heard The King’s Mirrors advice. He and his brothers, along with Gudrid’s father, were Eirik the Red’s chief supporters in his feud with Thorgest the Old over those bench boards. After Eirik the Red left Iceland, the Swan Fjord brothers filled his role of district troublemaker. Besides being unruly and clannish, they were known for wearing tight, fashionable trousers. Snorri Thorbrandsson and one brother, Thorleif Kimbi, finally went to Greenland a year or two before Gudrid arrived, having forced their chieftain—the cunning and ambitious Snorri of Helgafell—to get them out of trouble once too often. One feud, for instance, started when Thorleif Kimbi grabbed a cooking pot away from another Viking, spilling the mans evening porridge, and was whacked with the hot ladle on his neck. In the last battle of this disagreement, two men died and the chieftain arrived just in time to save his foster-brothers’ lives: Thorleif Kimbi had lost a leg and Snorri Thorbrandsson had taken an arrow through the throat. As proof of his manliness, were told that he snapped off the shaft and didn’t mention the arrowhead at the base of his tongue until he was sitting down to dinner that evening and noticed it was hard to swallow. Karlsefni’s partner was tough and touchy, but he was a loyal friend—none of the feuds he fought in were his own. He had also lived in Greenland before setting up his trading route, and his friendship with Eirik the Red ensured Karlsefni’s welcome.

  The partners crossed the icy North Atlantic in convoy with a second trading ship crewed by Icelanders. They beached their boats in front of Brattahlid (a sonar survey of the fjord has found that the beach was 300 feet broader in those days) and unloaded their goods into Eirik’s capacious warehouses, signs of which archaeologists can still see in the turf. The Saga of Eirik the Red next details the courtly dance of give-and-take that passed for a business transact
ion in the Viking Age. The two ships’ captains invited Eirik to take anything he wanted from their cargoes. “Then Eirik showed them he was a great man, too,” as the saga says, by offering to feed and house both ships’ crews over the long Greenlandic winter. “They lacked nothing,” the saga says, and enjoyed themselves until Christmas, when Eirik started going about the house with a long face. After a bit of polite prying, Karlsefni learned that Eirik feared he would tell everyone back home in Iceland that he had never had a poorer Christmas feast than that one at Brattahlid. Eirik was out of beer. “That’s no problem,” said Karlsefni. “We still have malt and grain from the ship. Take it and brew up a feast greater than any before.” After a discreet pause, Karlsefni asked Eirik for Gudrid’s hand in marriage, and this drunken, happy Christmas feast was extended into a wedding.

  With Gudrid—at least, with the rich Gudrid of The Saga of Eirik the Red—Karlsefni gained half of Sandnes, her husband’s farm. He got her father’s farm, across the fjord from Brattahlid, and her father’s ship. It’s clear Karlsefni had no plans to put down roots in Greenland, given the value of his property back in Iceland. He would have sold Gudrid’s farms in the spring for their worth in walrus tusks and hides, other skins (ox and goat for leather, polar bear for luxury), and perhaps one or two white falcons, which were highly prized by the Arabs. He would also have taken in trade whatever foodstuffs he needed to restock his ship for the return journey.

  The haul might have been less than he had expected, divided up among his and the other ship’s sailors, and he may not have had much of value left to trade. He had already donated his malt and grain to Eirik for the feast. He had probably given Eirik the other foodstuffs in his cargo, too—how else could Eirik have fed so many unexpected mouths over the long winter? Eirik would have chosen the iron tools and ingots in the cargo first off, when the captains gave him his pick of the goods. That left some linen or other fine cloth, wood for housewares or boat repair, candle wax and wine for the church, tar for sealing ships’ timbers, and perhaps some bronze or silver jewelry and other finery. Fiddling with the arithmetic in his head, Karlsefni might have wondered if sailing through the ice and storms to Greenland had been worth the risk.