Did Viking Greenland Collapse?

In 982 Eirik the Red discovered Greenland, according to the Icelandic sagas. The Viking colony there lasted 400 years, until 1408, when a wedding was held between an Icelander and a Greenlander—and that’s the last we hear of the Greenland Norse. Why, after surviving over 400 years, did these people disappear from history without a trace?

The puzzle of Viking Greenland captivates people, and I've written about it in three of my books, as nonfiction in Ivory Vikings and The Far Traveler, and as fiction in my young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, as well as on this blog. (You can read the section on Greenland from Ivory Vikings on Tor.com, here: http://www.tor.com/2015/09/02/excerpts-ivory-vikings-nancy-marie-brown/.)

One idea is that climate change worked in the Vikings' favor. Research in Europe had found signs of warmer temperatures between 950 and 1250, the so-called "Medieval Warm Period," which preceded "the Little Ice Age." But a new study of the Greenland ice cores (reported here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/04/vikings-greenland-warm-weather-history) shows that the "Medieval Warm Period" (if it even existed) never reached Greenland. There was no change in the extent of Greenland's ice. Ruling out other factors, the researchers concluded that there was no warming in Greenland during the Viking centuries.

Thjodhild's church at Brattahlid. Photo by NMB.

Jared Diamond presents another theory in his popular 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He argues that the livestock the settlers brought with them, based on the Norwegian “ideal farm,” didn’t suit Greenland’s colder, drier conditions. 

Diamond writes: “Although Vikings prized pork above all other meats, pigs proved terribly destructive and unprofitable in lightly wooded Greenland, where they rooted up the fragile vegetation and soil. Within a short time they were reduced to low numbers.” For similar environmental reasons, he says, the Vikings were forced to limit the number of “honored cows” they kept and increase their herds of “despised goats.” A main cause of the “collapse,” in his view, is that the Norse refused to give up their unsuitable livestock and become dedicated seal hunters like the Inuit, who began moving south into Viking territory in the 1200s. He also thinks they turned up their noses at fish.

Eirik's Fjord, Greenland. Photo by NMB.

Despite the attractive environmental message in Diamond’s Collapse, I have problems accepting this model of the Viking diet. How do we know that Vikings prized pork and despised goat meat? 

Our main source for Viking culinary practices are the myths in Snorri Sturluson’s Edda. Snorri, writing in the early 1200s, gives the cow pride of place: Her copious milk fed the giant Ymir, from whose body the chief god Odin created the world. Pork is the meat eaten in Valhalla, the great hall in the Otherworld to which Odin welcomes warriors slain in battle; the same old boar is boiled each night in a huge cauldron, and in the morning he comes back to life. Odin himself is said to never eat, living on wine alone; yet in another tale, he and two lesser gods butcher an ox and roast it on a spit over a wood fire. A goat, meanwhile, produces mead instead of milk for the dead heroes in Valhalla to drink. Goat is also the favorite food of the war god Thor; the two goats that pull his chariot allow him to butcher and boil them every night. Provided that he saves every bone and wraps them up in the skins, unbroken, the goats will come back to life in the morning. Given the number of children named after Thor—one quarter of the names in the Icelandic Book of Settlements  are Thor combinations—his totemic animal seems unlikely to have been “despised.” Finally, three gods, Thor, Loki, and Njord, are all associated with fishing. In particular, Loki, the trickster god, is said to have turned himself into a salmon and invented a net.

Sandnes, Greenland. Photo by NMB.

When I interviewed her in 2006, Jette Arneborg, an archaeologist at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, pointed out to me a second problem with Diamond’s model of the Viking diet. It assumes that the Vikings were tidy, that they carefully cleared the table and carried all their dinner scraps out to the garbage midden. But there were no tables in treeless Greenland. And bones were valuable. Housewives collected them back into the pot and boiled them to make soup, then pickled them in whey to make “bone-jelly porridge.” Toys, dice, flutes, and game pieces were carved out of them, and needles and needle cases. They were crushed and dried and fed to cows as a calcium supplement or spread on the fields as fertilizer. Bones were tossed to the dogs or simply left on the floor.

Archaeologists have long bemoaned the squalid conditions of the Greenland Vikings’ floors. Layers of twigs, hay, and moss served an insulating function—they kept the permafrost from thawing and the floor from turning to muck. Sifting through samples of such carpeting, scientists have identified flies that feed on carrion and feces, as well as human lice, sheep lice, and the beetles that live in rotting hay. Shards of bone are scattered throughout, “a few clearly having passed through the gut of the farm’s dog,” one excavator writes. On the floor of the Farm Beneath the Sand, archaeologists even found fish bones.

Eirik's Fjord, Greenland. Photo by NMB.

In her office at the museum, a converted Renaissance palace in downtown Copenhagen, Arneborg seemed worlds away from her job as codirector of the dig at the Farm Beneath the Sand. She described her days to me: going in by helicopter, using sandbags to hold the river back, excavating three to four inches of soil, then waiting for the sun to melt the next layer of permafrost. Wrapping every bone, every chip of wood, in wet paper and bagging it in plastic, the glacial river roaring past inches away. An open box on her desk held two animal bones from Greenland; they had been sent to the diet-analysis group, where someone saw a cross had been cut into each one and returned them to her, reclassified as artifacts.

“Of course they ate fish,” she said. “We do have one fishhook. We have sinkers. We have pieces of what I think were nets. We have fish bones from inside the house. If we sieve very carefully, we find them.” Of the 24,643 bone fragments found inside the house, 8,250 could be identified: 166 bones were fish bones. Only one was from a pig.

Eirik's house at Brattahlid, Greenland. Photo by NMB.

In 2012, Arneborg and her colleagues published a series of articles summing up many years of work puzzling out the Greenlanders’ diet. Their conclusion? “Greenland’s Viking settlers gorged on seals.” A press release, linking to the scientific publications, is available here: http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2012/2012.11/greenland_norse_gorged_on_seals/

Rather than looking at the bones in the Greenlanders’ garbage middens, for this study the researchers analyzed the settlers’ own bones: 80 Norse skeletons preserved in the National Museum of Denmark. They used a technique called isotope analysis that compares the ratio between carbon-13 and carbon-15 in the bones to determine how much of the person’s diet came from land-based food and how much from marine-based food. It can even distinguish between seals and fish.

“Our analysis shows that the Norse in Greenland ate lots of food from the sea, especially seals,” Jan Heinemeier from the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University told a University of Copenhagen reporter.

So the Greenland Norse did not starve. Why their colony disappeared is still a mystery.

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker (November 2): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/briefly-noted-the-blue-guitar (scroll down)

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29): http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21662487-bones-contention

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29): http://www.startribune.com/review-ivory-vikings-by-nancy-marie-brown-the-mystery-of-the-lewis-chessmen/323230441/

What Drew the Vikings to Iceland and Greenland? Was it Walrus?

In the first chapter of Ivory Vikings, "The Berserks," I argue that walrus tusks--or "fish teeth," as the Vikings called them--made the perfect cargo for a Viking ship: They were light, long-lasting, and highly prized.

Viking raids were bankrolled with fish teeth. Viking trade routes were built on them. Viking explorers sailed west out of sight of land in search of shiny, white walrus tusks. From the 8th to the 14th century--well after the end of the Viking Age--walrus ivory was the most sought after commodity of the North. It was Arctic gold.

You can read part of that chapter, an excerpt on the Vikings in Greenland and North America, on the Tor.com website, here.

Before coming to my conclusions, I had tried to find every book or paper written about the medieval ivory trade, many of them by Thomas McGovern of CUNY and his colleagues. I had interviewed Jette Arneborg at the University of Copenhagen and Orri Vesteinsson at the Archaeological Institute of Iceland (whom I knew from my research for a previous book, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman), as well as historian Helgi Thorlaksson of the University of Iceland; all three are experts on archaeological finds of walrus bones and teeth in Greenland and Iceland and on the Icelandic place names that refer to walrus.  

If I'd waited a year, someone else would have done all that research for me. Because someone else was on the trail of the Viking walrus hunters at the same time as I was. And they've reached some of the same conclusions.

Illustration by Jón Baldur Hliðberg

A few weeks ago a longtime reader of this blog sent me a paper published in April in World Archaeology titled, "Was It Walrus?" Two of the authors were Arneborg and McGovern.

The paper contains a beautiful review of all the available data on walrus hunting in Iceland and Greenland, from archaeology, place names, and the Icelandic sagas, and outlines the arguments for and against the idea that walrus triggered the Vikings' westward expansion.

The authors conclude, as I did, that "The new excavations and zooarchaeological work appear to support the notion of an initial settlement of at least parts of Iceland driven and 'financed' by walrus hunting and connections to Viking Age exchange networks." Soon, however, the Icelandic walrus herds were hunted to extinction. "In contrast, in Greenland current evidence suggests that walrus hunting may have always played a central role in economy and society."

See Karin M. Frei, Ashley N. Coutu, Konrad Smiarowski, Ramona Harrison, Christian K. Madsen, Jette Arneborg, Robert Frei, Gardar Guðmundsson, Søren M. Sindbæk (corresponding author at farksms@hum.au.dk), James Woollett, Steven Hartman, Megan Hicks, and Thomas H. McGovern. “Was it for walrus? Viking Age settlement and medieval walrus ivory trade in Iceland and Greenland.” World Archaeology, published online 20 April 2015 at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2015.1025912

Read more about Ivory Vikings on my website, http://nancymariebrown.com, or check out these reviews:

"Bones of Contention," The Economist (August 29).

"Review: Ivory Vikings," Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 29).

Vikings in the Canadian North?

The Icelandic sagas tell of several Viking voyages to Vinland, or North America, a thousand years ago. Scholars have long agreed, though, that the sagas don't tell of every voyage--and they've long disagreed on where the Vikings went.

When I was researching my nonfiction book The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman in 2006, the scholarly consensus was that L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northwestern tip of Newfoundland, was the only authenticated Viking settlement in the New World. Birgitta Wallace, the lead archaeologist on the project, speculated that the Vikings traveled from there at least as far as south as the Miramichi River. (For her argument, see my post "The Case of the Butternuts.")

When I wrote my young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (just published by Namelos), I followed Birgitta's suggestion and placed Gudrid and Karlsefni's house on the banks of the Miramichi.

If I'd listened to a different archaeologist, though, I might have sent Gudrid north. For there is now a second authenticated Viking settlement in the New World: on Baffin Island.

Ian Robertson, a reader of this blog, has been helpfully keeping me up-to-date with the work of Canadian archaeologist Patricia Sutherland, now affiliated with the University of Aberdeen. In 2009, Sutherland published an exciting paper reanalyzing some older finds from the Arctic North. She and her colleagues have now followed that up with a paper in Geoarchaeology that--at least for me--puts all other arguments to rest: There were Viking explorers on Baffin Island a thousand years ago.

Sutherland identifies four sites at which Norse objects--or, as she more carefully says, "objects associated with a variety of European technologies"--have been found.

Yarn spun from animal hair.

Bar-shaped whetstones.

Notched wooden sticks that look like Viking tally-sticks.

And now, a crucible used for making bronze.

This small, broken stone vessel was found at a site called Nanook. It was near "a large structure with long straight walls of boulders and turf and a stone-edged drainage channel." The indigenous Dorset people, a Paleo-Eskimo culture, did not build houses like this. The Vikings did, throughout the North Atlantic, including in Greenland.

Under two inches high, the crucible was carved from a gray metamorphic rock not found near Nanook. Among the possible sources are the west coast of Greenland.

When Sutherland and her colleagues examined the crucible under a scanning electron microscope equipped with an Oxford Energy Dispersive Spectra (EDS) system for chemical analysis, they found "abundant traces of copper-tin alloy (bronze) as well as glass spherules similar to those associated with high-temperature processes. These results indicate that it had been used as a crucible" in which copper and tin were melted, "probably for the casting of small bronze objects."

The Dorset Eskimos, who lived in this area throughout the Viking Age and until being pushed out by the Inuit in the 13th or 14th century, did not make bronze. In fact, no one in North America north of Mexico knew how to make bronze.

But the Vikings did.

To learn more, read "Evidence of Early Metalworking in Canada" by Patricia D. Sutherland, Peter H. Thompson, and Patricia A. Hunt in Geoarchaeology 30 (2015): 74-78.

Gudrid's Voyage to Sandnes

As I wrote last week, I did much of the research for my new novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, several years ago when I was writing my nonfiction book about Gudrid, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman.

One research trip that became a crucial scene in the novel was an actual voyage. I went by boat down the Lysufjord from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, to Sandnes, the farm Gudrid and her husband Thorstein Eiriksson returned to after their failed voyage to Vinland--and the farm where Thorstein subsequently died, so spookily.

The boat was owned by my friend Kristjana Motzfeldt and piloted by her friend Tobias, since Kristjana was on her way to Denmark.

"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.

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.

Of course I lost track of the time, wandering about Gudrid's farm, musing on her life--suddenly I saw Rusina frantically waving. I ran for the beach.

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.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler was published in Spring 2015 by namelos. See www.namelos.com or order from your favorite bookseller. You'll find the fictional version of this voyage in Chapter Seven.

Eirik the Red’s Greenland

Last week I celebrated the publication of my first young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. If you read this blog regularly, you knew Gudrid already. Search on her name  or "Far Traveler" and you'll find a dozen posts.

That's because in 2007 I published a nonfiction book about Gudrid called The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. ("Far Traveler" or "Far-Traveler"? That pesky hyphen! It's missing from the first book because the designer thought it looked ugly.)

In one way, writing the nonfiction book was a prerequisite to writing the novel. I couldn't have written The Saga of Gudrid without first having written Voyages of a Viking Woman--or at least without having experienced the actual voyaging the earlier book required.

For instance, much of The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler takes place in Greenland. When I traveled to Greenland in 2006, I learned things my exhaustive library research had missed.

Writing in the early 1100s Iceland's first historian, Ari the Learned, described the discovery of Greenland, in about 982, this way:

"The land called Greenland was discovered and settled by Icelanders. Eirik the Red was the name of a man from the Breidafjord. He sailed from there to Greenland and claimed the land around what is now called Eiriksfjord. He gave the land its name and called it 'Greenland' because he said people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name."

It was academe's considered opinion, when I first read Ari's Book of the Icelanders 30 years ago, that in naming Greenland Eirik the Red had perpetrated a hoax. Ari practically came out and said it: Eirik's "nice name" was salesmanship, simple bait-and-switch.

Elsewhere, the Icelandic sagas have very little nice to say about Eirik's colony. A verse addressing a traveler headed to Greenland says:

I see death
in a dread place,
yours and mine,
northwest in the waves,
with frost and cold,
and countless wonders …

Trolls and evil spirits descended on Greenland 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.

Greenland is indeed "more gray than green," as a visitor approaching by sea in 1835 described it. Flying over from Denmark I found it, in fact, more white than gray.

Yet Eirik may not have actually lied. Greenland still has little pockets of green that are as lush as Iceland must have been around the year 1000.

In 2006, I spent two weeks in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, on the seaward edge of a handful of long, twisting fjords that probe eastward 60 miles to the inland ice. It was here that the Danish missionary Hans Egede came in the 1700s, 300 years after the Viking settlements 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 sun was hot and the air held 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. I took off my boots and dabbled my toes. It was refreshing.

You can read more about my trip to Greenland here:
"A Visit to Greenland" (March 13, 2012)
"Lambing Time" (March 28, 2012)

Leif Eiriksson Day

Today, October 9, is officially Leif Eiriksson Day, named for the Viking explorer who discovered North America 500 years before Columbus (whose day we celebrate a symbolic three days later). 

Last year, I suggested that today should better be named "Gudrid the Far-Traveler Day." Leif happened upon the land he named Vinland by chance in about 999, when he was blown off course traveling between Norway and Greenland. He never went back.

Gudrid, Leif's sister-in-law, packed up and set sail for Vinland twice--with two different husbands. Though the Vinland Sagas, the two medieval Icelandic sagas that tell her story, disagree on the particulars, Gudrid's hand in the preparations each time is clear. As is the fact that she stayed longer than Leif. With her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid explored the New World for three winters, giving birth there to her son Snorri. 

But where in North America did Leif--or Gudrid--go? 

Georgia. Or between Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Or New York harbor. Boston, on the Charles River near Harvard University. Rhode Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Cape Cod or the coast of Maine. New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, the St. Lawrence Valley, or back in Greenland. 

All of these places have been suggested in a serious manner between 1757 and today. As the irrepressible BBC television host Magnus Magnusson said at a conference in Newfoundland in 2000, “Enthusiasts have twiddled the texts, selected from the texts, conflated the texts, and compromised the texts in endless attempts to create a coherent story that will ‘prove’ their particular hypothesis. But frankly, the sailing directions which dozens of eager researchers have tried to follow are not much more explicit than the old Icelandic adage for getting to North America: Sail south until the butter melts, and then turn right.” 

Though folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson believes the Vinland sagas hold a coherent “mental map” of Viking explorations along the coast of North America, he concedes that “perhaps the most striking feature of the attempts to locate Vinland is that each and every person to have made one has disagreed with everyone else.”

The sagas say that Vinland is southwest of Greenland. There's a prominent island thick with birds’ nests, a wide shallow bay, a sandy cape, an amazingly long beach somewhere to the north, a river with tidal flats, and a couple of lakes. 

The sagas sometimes tell how long it took to sail from one spot to another, but scholars argue viciously over how to translate “a day’s sail” into a distance. Is a “day” 24 hours? Twelve hours? The time when the sun is up? The Icelandic word (like the English one) is inexact.

A Viking ship can sail as fast as 11 to 13 knots per hour, we know from the voyages of replica ships. It can also lie becalmed and be storm-driven backward. Some scholars take the wind into account. Others note that a cautious captain in an unknown sea with no hope of rescue might care to take his time, while an explorer, by definition, should poke into every interesting cove and bay.

A note on the length of a winter day in The Saga of the Greenlanders has been similarly dissected. It has “proved” that Vinland lay at a latitude of 31 degrees North (as does Jekyll Island, Georgia)—and at 50 degrees North (nearer to L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, where Viking artifacts have been found). The saga says simply: “The length of day and night was more equal than in Greenland or Iceland,” adding that the sun could be seen “during the short days” at eyktarstaður and at dagmalastaður. No one knows if those two terms apply to the places on the horizon where the sun rises and sets, or to times of day.

With the sailing directions and the day length both inscrutable, we are left with the Vikings’ list of Vinland’s riches. The land is called “Wine Land” so often, not only in the sagas but in other sources, that there must have been some berry from which wine could be made; the question of whether wine requires grapes has bedeviled generations of scholars. Although the words usually translated as “wine wood” and “wine berries” refer to grapevines and grapes in modern Icelandic, we can’t be sure they did so in Gudrid’s day. 

A related question is whether the Vin of Vinland has a long or short “i”: vín (long “i”) means wine; vin (short “i”) means meadow. Although most scholars are convinced by linguistic arguments that Vinland is Wine Land not Meadow Land, and that the “Meadow” in the name L’Anse aux Meadows is a corruption of a French word for jellyfish, the other side of the debate still arises. 

The sagas do mention pastures “so rich that it seemed to them the sheep would need no hay all winter. There was no frost in the winter, and the grass hardly withered.” There was also some kind of wild grain that resembled wheat. Eider ducks nested on the offshore islands, whales washed up on the beaches, and fish, including large salmon, could be easily caught. There were bears and foxes and plentiful game. Finally there were mosurr trees “big enough for house timbers.” (Twenty feet would have been tall enough). 

The Viking ruins at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northwestern tip of Newfoundland, were discovered in the 1960s. Now, after 40 years of argument and analysis, the experts agree it was a base camp where the Vikings spent the winter after exploring further south. [I wrote about visiting L'Anse aux Meadows on this blog on July 25, 2012.]

Research published in 2013 by archaeologist Kevin Smith proves that the Vikings went from there at least as far as Notre Dame Bay, 143 miles south, where they picked up a piece of jaspar--and may have encountered the Beothuck Indians. As archaeological research has shown, Newfoundland's Notre Dame Bay was home to a dense settlement of Beothuck Indians a thousand years ago. [See my blog post of July 24, 2013.]

In my book The Far Traveler [and on this blog on May 23, 2012], I presented archaeologist Birgitta Wallace's theory--based on her discovery of butternuts in the Viking Age layers of the L'Anse aux Meadows did--that one of the places described in the Vinland Sagas was the mouth of the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. 

Recently I've heard from two new explorers trying to trace the Vikings' route through North America. 

First is the Fara Heim expedition [http://faraheim.com] organized by Icelandic-Canadians Johann Straumfjord Sigurdson and David Collette; their expedition's name comes from the Icelandic að fara heim, meaning "to go home." According to their website, Fara Heim will sail from Manitoba, Canada, across Hudson Bay, and through Arctic waters to Greenland and Iceland. Drawing from "historical data, verbal history, community knowledge, and analysis of modern data," they will visit "likely sites" and look for "signs of Norse presence." It's a bit like Helge Ingstad's protocol when he searched for--and found--the Viking ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows. I wish them well.

I've also heard from Donald Wiedman, who blogs at http://lavalhallalujah.wordpress.com. As he writes, "Though interested and intrigued by Denmark and Scandinavia, Donald was/is not on any particular mission to locate the lost Viking settlements in North America--but he’s positive he’s found them." Using Google Satellite and various old maps, he places Vinland in Laval, Quebec, which is in line with the speculations of many Old Norse scholars that any Vikings cruising the Gulf of St Lawrence would have sailed up the St Lawrence River toward what's now Quebec City. 

But, like the Fara Heim sailors, unless Wiedman finds an archeological site with demonstrably Viking artifacts (as at L'Anse aux Meadows), the debate about where the Vikings sailed will go on and on.

Which is why it excites me. Icelandic storytellers kept the knowledge of Vinland alive for 200 years before it was written down in the two Vinland Sagas, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red. These sagas were copied and recopied and come down to us in three manuscripts. The Saga of the Greenlanders takes up two pages in Flateyjarbók, the Book of Flatey, a beautiful manuscript written between 1387 and 1394. The Saga of Eirik the Red appears in two very different versions in Hauksbók, the Book of Haukur (1299-1334), and Skálholtsbók, the Book of Skalholt (written around 1420). 

Six hundred years later, these Icelandic stories are still inspiring explorers and archaeologists. Their authors and editors and copyists should be proud. Today is their day too.

Join me again next week at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

A Viking Ship Named Snorri

The Icelandic name Snorri, which I admit I cannot properly pronounce, seems to follow me about. I first went to Iceland in 1986 thinking of writing a novel about Snorri, the chieftain of Helgafell in Eyrbyggja Saga. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, heroine of my 2007 nonfiction book The Far Traveler, had a son named Snorri, born while Gudrid and her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni explored North America just after the year 1000. My latest book, Song of the Vikings, is the biography of a third Snorri, the 13th-century poet and politician Snorri Sturluson, who gave us Norse mythology as we know it.

Now a fourth Snorri comes into my life. While on tour for Song of the Vikings last November, I gave a lecture at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. There to meet me was Rob Stevens, famous for building a Viking ship replica named, yes, Snorri. Granted the ship was named after Gudrid the Far-Traveler’s son, but still, another Snorri.

Rob was a bit of a Santa: big white beard, big round belly, round blue eyes with the requisite sparkle. He had two silver rings in his left ear, one in the right. A curly ponytail. His hands were strong and notably banged up, the hands of a woodworker.

I knew all about him from Hodding Carter’s 2000 book, A Viking Voyage, which has one of those subtitles that need no further explanation: In which an unlikely crew of adventurers attempts an epic journey to the New World. In spite of reading like a farce, Carter’s book supplied me with wonderful background material for Gudrid the Far-Traveler’s experiences sailing in a Viking ship across the North Atlantic eight times.

Rob, in the book, did not come across as a hero. Carter wrote of “Rob’s moodiness and tendency toward being a loose cannon,” while acknowledging that “even if half of what he spewed was bullshit, he still probably knew more about traditional boatbuilding than anyone alive.”

“What’s it like to be written about—especially in a funny book?” I asked him.

He shrugged. At first he had been annoyed. Then he’d compared notes with the others on the crew, and none of them had liked what Carter had written about themselves either. So it was probably all true.

Now Rob shared with me a new book: Paul T. Cunningham’s Building a Viking Ship in Maine (Just Write Books 2012), a photo essay that chronicles the building of Snorri out of oak, pine, locust, tamarack, willow, and iron. The ship was a copy of a knarr, or Viking merchant ship, found in the harbor at Roskilde, Denmark some years ago. It is 54 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 6 feet deep. Rather tubby compared to the long, sleek dragonships we’re used to thinking of as Viking ships.

It also seems a little small for an ocean-crossing knarr. On pages 110-111 of Cunningham’s book, Snorri is in the water, surrounded by rowboats and canoes; a phalanx of motorboats waits further offshore. The blacksmith who made the rivets, a husky guy in a plastic horned helmet, poses at an oar, two other  fake “oarsmen” (is one a woman? hard to tell) pose behind him, while the rest of the crew and their families look like the tourists they are, sitting on the gunwales, lounging hands-in-pockets amidships. It’s quite a crowd: Packed in, with little room to move are at least 41 people (a couple more children might be tucked in, invisible). In Eirik the Red’s Saga, Thorfinn Karlsefni is said to come to Greenland on a knarr, or merchant ship, with 40 men aboard; his partner, another Snorri, had a second ship with 40 men. Traveling to Vinland, Karlsefni is said to have taken three ships and a total of 160 people. Looking at this photo of Snorri, the saga account doesn’t seem possible, unless Snorri is an unusually small knarr.

But other than its carrying capacity, Snorri proved it was fully up to the task of discovering America in about the year 1000—with a little remodeling. Unlike other replica ships like Gaia, on which I took a pleasure cruise in Newport Harbor in 1991, Snorri  had no back-up diesel engine, no enclosed cabin, no chase boat. The crew were totally exposed to the elements—the way the Vikings were—and totally reliant on the ship’s sail and oars. Not being totally insane, however, Carter did allow modern communications technology aboard. Otherwise, there might have been no story to tell.

On their first attempt to cross the Davis Strait, Carter wrote, “Our huge rudder had loosened a supporting crossbeam, a thigh-thick piece of wooden framing, by constantly pulling forward on it, instantly creating four holes in the bottom of the boat. Water gushed in…” They radioed for help. The coast guard towed Snorri back to Greenland and Rob flew to Denmark to consult with the experts at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde on rudder design.

The Danes weren’t a lot of help. Recalling his trip to me last November, Rob shrugged. “There’s a series of books called Culture Shock. I wish I’d read the one about the Danes before I went there. I’m just a boatbuilder. I thought they’d say, ‘Boy, oh, boy, another Viking ship!’” They didn’t. In fact, Rob thought they were giving him the shove-off. “After I read the book, I realized that they were being really helpful. They’d say, ‘This is all we will do for you’ and I now I realize they meant, ‘This is all we can do for you.’ It’s a huge difference in English.”

From Building a Viking Ship in Maine

Essentially, no one really knows how to build a Viking ship—or how to fit one with the correct rudder. All the Viking ship replicas built are examples of experimental archaeology, a fancy term for trial and error.

“The hardest thing about building Snorri,” Rob told me, “was organizing people. The vast majority of it was done the same way we built boats a hundred years ago. The only difference is if you’re using electricity or not. And electricity makes us lousy woodworkers.” The Vikings, he believes, could build a ship much more quickly than we can now. “Take the laziest person in the world,” said Rob, meaning in the Viking world: “Their tools were sharp. They knew how to measure and then cut to the line. Now you cut and grind it down to the line and it takes forever.”

In one of Cunningham’s photos, Rob uses an adze to shape the stern. Reads the caption, "Sometimes in wooden boat building, the older tools are the right ones to use." Elsewhere, another craftsman uses a modern router to shape a floor timber. If the Viking’s had one, they would have used it. It was a common refrain, Cunningham noted. The builders of Snorri weren’t purists.

But they were brave. Reading about Rob’s experiences sailing Snorri from Greenland to Newfoundland convinced me I would never (as I had once threatened) talk my way onto a replica Viking voyage. Remembering that time the “water gushed in,” Carter wrote: “We were more than 130 miles from Greenland, adrift. All that bashing and groaning I had so cherished had taken its toll. Some of the crew were falling apart. Rob was retching wherever he stood. Others were nearly as sick.”

And again: “Walls of crashing water would tumble over you and then the wind finished you off. I stayed just warm enough in my wool clothes—just shy of hypothermia, really—but I was soaked to the bone. Dean took a hit that even Mike Tyson could not equal. He reeled around gasping for air. Rob became incapacitated and puked mightily…”

I would rather fall off a horse (and I have, repeatedly) than be seasick. When I asked about it last November, Rob laughed it off. “Great way to lose 40 or 50 pounds.” Then he added, “I want to convince the guys at Cape Cod to build another one and sail it back to Greenland.” Spoken like a true Viking. Let a little bit of discomfort get in the way of an adventure? Never.

The adventures of the ship Snorri are chronicled in three books. I recommend them all:

Hodding Carter’s A Viking Voyage (Ballantine 2000)
Carter’s An Illustrated Viking Voyage: Retracing Leif Eriksson’s Journey in an Authentic Viking Knarr, with photos by Russell Kaye (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
Paul Cunningham’s Building a Viking Ship in Maine (Just Write Books 2012).

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Names for the Sea

British writer Sarah Moss and I are kindred spirits. Shortly after I visited Greenland to see Viking Age archaeological sites in 2006, I read her novel Cold Earth, in which strange things happen during an archaeological investigation in Greenland. The novel remains one of my favorites, recommended to many friends, so it's no surprise I bought her memoir about a year in Iceland, Names for the Sea, as soon as it was available in the U.S. I have always wanted to spend a year in Iceland.

Instead, I visit frequently and I read a lot about Iceland--though most of what I read disappoints me. American journalists always seem to have landed on some other island that bears no relationship to the Iceland I've known and loved since 1986. For one thing, I've spent very little time in the city of Reykjavik, particularly the city these journalists seem to find, with its "diverse milieu of funky cafes, cutting-edge restaurants and Icelandic-chic bars, all catering to a cozy chat society that hummed late into the infinite night" (NY Times, January 18, 2013), and where "half the country appears to take it as a professional obligation to drink themselves into oblivion and wander the streets until what should be sunrise" (Vanity Fair, April 2009).

Never seen it. Granted, I'm never out wandering the city streets in the wee hours looking for it. Reykjavik to me is a city of libraries, museums, and bookstores--especially bookstores, some of which I'll grant are funky (like the one inside the weekly flea-market at Kolaportid), and which I wish were open until what should be sunrise.

Sarah Moss, in Names of the Sea, doesn't dwell on the drunken nightlife. She's in Iceland to teach English literature at the university, with a husband and two young children in tow. But her Iceland is still not my Iceland. In a year she seems to have rarely left the city. And she never discovered the joys of the bookstores. She does not read Icelandic, she confesses. I'll forgive her that. Icelandic is a very difficult language to learn.

But Moss also doesn't seem to have read much Icelandic literature in translation. Particularly, in a whole year of living in the country, Moss doesn't seem to have read a single Icelandic saga.

That is harder for me to understand. Iceland without its sagas is just not Iceland. Iceland's medieval manuscripts, in which the sagas are preserved, "are at one and the same time the repository of medieval Icelandic culture and its visible symbol," according to the 2004 book The Manuscripts of Iceland. They are Iceland’s "main source of pride."

Only someone who had never read an Icelandic saga could write, as Moss does: 

"The sagas are long narrative poems about the settlement years, which were first written down in the 12th and 13th centuries, several hundred years after the events they describe. In the 20th century, Icelandic historians questioned the status of the sagas as historical truth, and the poems are now widely seen as literary artefacts, but there is still something of the sacred text about them. Many Icelanders can quote the sagas in the way that 17th-century Puritans quoted the Bible. Every so often, a discussion in a faculty meeting will end with someone saying something in Icelandic alliterative verse. … everyone else will be nodding and agreeing, the issue somehow resolved, and I'll know the sagas have spoken again. They combine the functions of the Bible and the Domesday Book…"

Poems? Narrative poems?? At first I thought it was a typo, and Moss meant to say "the sagas are long narratives." But no, she repeats the word poems and even believes her fellow academics were quoting the sagas when they said something in alliterative verse. They were not.

Moss has missed the whole point of the sagas' literary-historical importance. The Icelandic sagas are not poems. If someone was quoting alliterative verse, they were probably quoting the Poetic Edda, or maybe just a proverb.

The Icelandic sagas are "the envy of most world literatures," according to scholar William Ian Miller, because they are not poems: The sagas are written in prose. About 40 tales, some as quick as a short story, others stretching to several volumes in today’s paperback translations, make up the corpus. They tell of Iceland’s Golden Age, the Saga Age, 400 years of a free republic before the island succumbed to Norwegian rule in 1262. And they tell it beautifully: "This is not only the stuff of art," said Miller, "it is the stuff of a confident art that needs no instruction in sophistication."

In the 13th century, when verse was the norm in Europe, Icelanders were writing a vernacular prose that "achieved a height of excellence which can only be paralleled in modern times," declared E. V. Gordon, author of the standard Old Icelandic grammar book. 

Peter Hallberg, who wrote a college text on the sagas, compared their style to Hemingway’s, with its simple, lucid sentence structure and finely calculated artistic effects. And there is none of that “metaphysical brooding,” in Hallberg’s words, that make medieval works like Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, so tedious.

The sagas are Iceland’s claim to literary fame. Literary scholars have called them "muscled, powerful narratives" that are surprising in their "seductiveness." They have inspired countless authors, from Kipling and Longfellow to Milan Kundera and Günter Grass. 

J. R. R. Tolkien found much of his Middle Earth in Icelandic literature; he and C. S. Lewis started a saga-reading club at Oxford University and translated the texts from Old Norse, the Viking language. 

Another saga translator was the Victorian writer and designer William Morris. Asked once if he was going on a trip to Iceland, Morris replied, "No, I am going on a pilgrimage to Iceland." 

Quoting Morris, the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges said, "This is also my answer. Any specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature is sooner or later drawn to Icelandic literature. It is like admiring a sunset or falling in love." 

The American novelist Jane Smiley ranks the sagas beside the works of "Homer, Shakespeare, Socrates, and those few others who live at the very heart of human literary endeavor."

I enjoyed Names for the Sea. It was fun to see Iceland through the eyes of a sensitive observer to whom everything was new--the light on the mountainsides, the cruel shapes in the lava, the misty rain, the ever-present sea. I envied her her ability to knit. But Moss's Iceland--without sagas!--is not my Iceland. 

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland and the medieval world.

The Case of the Butternuts

Where Was the Viking’s Vinland?

The climax of my book The Far Traveler is the story of the Viking expedition to North America led by 19-year-old Gudrid the Far-Traveler and her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni.

Leif Eiriksson discovered the land he named Vinland, or “Wine Land,” in about 999, when he was blown off course on his way home to Greenland after visiting the king of Norway. But Leif never returned to explore this fabulous new land.

His sister-in-law did. Gudrid the Far-Traveler and her first husband, Leif’s younger brother Thorstein, tried to sail to Vinland soon after Leif came home. They ran into storms and were forced back to Greenland. Thorsteinn died, and Gudrid gave up her dream for a while.

Then Thorfinn Karlsefni came to Greenland. Karlsefni was a merchant from Iceland. He wanted to trade for walrus tusks, white falcons, and polar bear skins. Instead, he met Gudrid and fell in love. Gudrid convinced him to go to Vinland. She owned one ship; she hired a crew of Greenlanders. The other two ships were manned by Icelanders, led by Karlsefni.

A Viking Colony

They crossed the North Atlantic. They sailed south along shore, past mountains and marvelous beaches. They spent the first winter beside a fjord with fierce currents.

Next summer, they sailed south to a wide tidal lagoon. They named it Hóp (pronounced “Hope”), which means “Lagoon.” There Gudrun gave birth to her son Snorri. Hóp had tall trees and a river full of fish. Wild grapes grew abundantly there. It was a richer land than Greenland or Iceland—a good place for a Viking colony.

But soon strangers came to the Vikings’ camp. They were delighted by the taste of milk. They traded furs for strips of red wool cloth. They had never seen an axe—and they wanted one. A fight broke out. The strangers fought with stone-tipped arrows. The Vikings had axes and swords, but they were vastly outnumbered. They abandoned Hóp. 

Only one of their ships made it back to Greenland. Gudrid, Karlsefni, and little Snorri sailed on to Iceland, where they built a new home.

Where Was Vinland?

Their story was written down about 200 years later in the Icelandic sagas. One version was written by Gudrid’s great-great grandson. Another is linked to her seven-greats granddaughter. 

Two hundred years is a long time. Some of the story was exaggerated. Some was forgotten. But some of it is true. 

In the 1960s, archaeologists found three Viking longhouses on the tip of Newfoundland, at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. Each house is big enough for one ship’s crew. Fire-starters made of jasper rock show the Vikings came from both Iceland and Greenland. A spindle whorl proves a Viking woman was with them. Spinning wool into yarn was women’s work in Viking times. 

But grapes have never grown in Newfoundland. Why would Leif name this place Wine Land? And where was Hóp, the lagoon with tall trees, fish, grapes, and fierce natives? 

The Clue of the Butternuts

Three butternuts gave archaeologist Birgitta Wallace the answer.

Wallace was in charge of the dig at L’Anse aux Meadows from 1975 to 2000. Her workers dug a five-foot-deep trench 200 feet into the bog beside the Viking houses. She sent all the wood and seeds they found to a botanist. She said, “Look for what doesn’t belong here, what’s not here now.” 

The botanist told her, “It’s all what you’d imagine. Except what are those butternuts doing there?”

In three different spots the workers had turned up butternuts. The nuts were in the same layer of soil as rusty nails and chips of wood from a repaired Viking ship.

Butternuts have never grown in Newfoundland. The closest trees are 800 miles south. The nuts couldn’t have floated north. The shore currents in the Gulf of St. Lawrence run the other direction. The only way they could have reached the bog when they did is by Viking ship. The Vikings could have collected butternuts in New Brunswick, New England, or near Quebec. Wallace thinks the Miramichi River valley in New Brunswick has the best claim to being the place Gudrid and Karlsefni named Hóp.

The river’s mouth forms a great tidal lagoon. Its banks are lush with tall butternut trees. Where butternuts grow, grapes are also found. A thousand years ago, the Miramichi River had the richest salmon run in eastern North America. And, because of the fish, the valley was home to the largest population of Native Americans in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 

Could the Vikings have explored farther south? Yes. A replica Viking ship sailed all the way to the Amazon in the summer of 1991. But until we find another longhouse or lost spindle whorl—or clue like the butternuts—we can’t say exactly where Gudrid the Far-Traveler and her husband went when they came to America a thousand years ago.

Links & Photos:

The picture of the butternut and of archaeologists excavating the bog at L'Anse aux Meadows come from the website, Canadian Mysteries, 

http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/vinland/home/indexen.html

The other photos were taken by Charles Fergus in 2006 while I was researching The Far Traveler.

You can also learn more about the Viking archaeological site on the official Parks Canada L'Anse aux Meadows website, http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in the medieval world.

Lambing Time in Greenland

Our neighbors' lambs are being born here in Vermont now, and soon it will be lambing time in Iceland too. I remember one Icelandic friend of mine, sad that they were giving up sheep-farming, say, “But it won’t be spring without lambs bouncing around.”

I’ve never been in Iceland during lambing time, but when I went to Greenland to see Eirik the Red’s Viking settlement there in May 2006, the people who lived on Eirik’s old farm, Brattahlid, were in the middle of lambing season. They had learned their craft—and bought their sheep—in Iceland, and were trying to recreate (with government help) the Viking economy.

Jacky of Blue Ice Explorers warned me, when he rented a cottage for me on a Greenlandic farm, that I wouldn’t see much of the farmers, and I didn’t. They were hardly sleeping, two needing to be in the sheep house twenty-four hours a day. But one day I did get a tour of the barn. My hostess, Ellen, was small and patient and proud of her sheep. When she spoke—to me in English, to her kids in Greenlandic—her voice was soft and even, and she raised it only slightly in surprise when a young ram butted the housedoor with a bang. She slipped out and grabbed his horns before calling to me to follow.

The ram, nearly as big as she, was a yearling, bottlefed last May because he was born too small. “Now he won’t stay with the other sheep,” Ellen explained. “He likes to come in the house. Watch out he doesn’t hurt you.”

Holding tight to both of his impressively curled horns, she dragged him off the porch and through a muddy stream to the barn, then waved me inside before shooing him away.

The high, wide barn was divided lengthwise into five aisles, each about six feet wide and filled with sixty jostling, curious, pregnant ewes. We walked between two aisles on a raised boardwalk, which was also where the sheep’s noontime hay was piled (and the dogs were napping). It smelled very sweet. Ellen’s husband Carl and a helper were busy in the aisles, both slim, short, dark, sweaty, and tired. Carl had a wide, open face and a brightness to his expression, as if he’d like to speak to me but couldn’t, knowing no English. Instead he merely smiled, hopped nimbly up out of the pen in front of me and stretched up to the rafters to fetch down a wooden grate that he then slipped into grooves in the sides of the aisle to separate off a ewe and her two lambs. The far end of the aisle, I noticed, was already divided that way all along its length into little ewe-and-lamb-sized pens.

“There,” Ellen nudged me and pointed toward our feet.

A birth-slick white lamb lay sprawled on the aisle floor, glistening, two ewes competing to lick it dry. “Will the others step on it?” I asked.

“Only if they are scared,” she said, and I held very still until Carl reached it. The new lamb’s fleece by then was just starting to curl. Carl lifted it carefully by its head and carried it down the aisle to make it a pen, both ewes anxiously trotting behind him. He held the grate high for a moment until only one ewe was on the lamb’s side, then quickly slid it into place, leaving the second ewe trapped, baahing miserably, outside.

“How does he know which one is the mother?” I asked.

“Its rear end is bloody. And the other one is fatter.”

Off the back of the barn was a spacious shed carpeted with hay, to which the lambs graduated in groups of ten or so when they were strong enough. There, Ellen said, they “learned to find their mothers” before being taken up to the mountain pastures and let loose until October, when they are rounded up, sorted, and sent by boat to the slaughterhouse.

It’s a short, but sweet, life for mountain-raised lamb.

If you want to visit the Viking sites in Greenland, I recommend Blue Ice Explorer at http://www.blueice.gl/ in south Greenland. Greenland doesn’t export lamb, as far as I know, but you can often buy Icelandic mountain-raised lamb at Whole Foods; on their website, read “The Tender Story of Icelandic Lamb.” It’s the wild thyme and other herbs they graze on all summer that makes it so delicious.