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ОглавлениеTHE MOST COMPLETE ACCOUNTS of early Norse voyages to America are “The Greenlanders’ Saga” and “Eirik’s Saga.” Both were written long after the events they describe and both are copies or variations of earlier accounts that have been lost.
“The Greenlanders’ Saga” is part of a large vellum codex known as the Flateyjarbók, which was commissioned sometime between 1382 and 1395 by a wealthy Icelandic farmer named Jon Hakonarson who lived—as the title indicates—on a flat island. The book was carefully preserved by his descendants until one of them gave it to an Icelandic bishop, who gave it to the king of Denmark. It is now in the Royal Library.
There are two versions of Eirik’s saga. One occurs in Hauksbók, which dates from about 1334 and was written by a certain Hauk Erlendsson “the Lawman” with the help of two secretaries. Erlendsson was descended from one of the first Norsemen to visit America; he was quite proud of this fact, and scholars believe he revised history somewhat in order to make his family seem still more illustrious. The other version appears in Skálholtsbók, probably written during the second half of the fifteenth century, and because it is later than Erlendsson’s version it was at first assumed to be less accurate. But apparently the opposite is true; the Skálholtsbók copyist, no doubt descended from a long line of impoverished and lusterless clerks, did not care about history. He only wanted to produce a satisfactory duplicate so that he could get paid. At any rate, if you read medieval Norse and wish to compare them, both are in Copenhagen’s Arnamagnaean Library.
“The Greenlanders’ Saga” and “Eirik’s Saga” recount many of the same events, though not all, and occasionally they contradict each other, which makes historical detective work just that much more difficult. Considering this, as well as the sparse evidence from other sources, and the obscurities, and the centuries that have elapsed since Leif and his half sister Freydis and Thorfinn and the others went adventuring, and the fact that both sagas are either variants or perhaps inaccurate copies of lost manuscripts—considering these handicaps, only an arrogant and simpleminded historian would claim to have deduced the truth absolutely.
Even so, the sagas are not fiction.
It is well known that scholars fight like spiders in a bottle over the interpretation of artifacts and crumbling parchment, and medieval Norse explorations have particularly excited their testiness, making it almost impossible for an ignorant reader to know which gray eminence to believe. All the same, this seems to be more or less what happened:
In A.D. 985 or 986 a young Icelandic trader named Bjarni Herjolfsson returned from Norway to spend the winter with his father, as he customarily did every second year. But when he got to the farm it was deserted, and neighbors told him that his father had accompanied Eirik Raude, Eirik the Red, to Greenland. Bjarni, according to one translation, was “taken heavily aback” by this news, and instead of unloading his cargo he decided to sail on to Greenland. Having never been there, he asked where it was to be found and what it looked like; and after being told that it lay somewhere to the west Bjarni asked his crewmen if they were prepared to go there with him, because Greenland was where he meant to spend this winter.
They said they would go with him.
He told them that the trip might be considered foolhardy, since none of them had been to the Greenland Sea. But they told him they would go, if that was what he had in mind.
After taking aboard supplies they left Iceland, not in one of those classic dragonships with brightly painted shields overlapping the rail but in a broad-beamed wallowing merchant ship called a knarr. They sailed west “until the land sank into the sea.” Then, we are told, “the fair wind dropped, and there was a north wind and fog, and they did not know where they were going. Day after day passed like this. Then the sun came out again, and they were able to get their bearings from the sky.”
Presently they saw land. They asked each other if this could be Greenland. Bjarni did not think it was, but they sailed closer. The country was low, with many trees and small hills.
They turned away and sailed north.
Two days later they sighted another coast. The crew asked if this might be Greenland. Bjarni did not think it was, for there were said to be huge glaciers in that country while this was flat and heavily forested. The crew wanted to put ashore because they needed water, but he refused.
They continued sailing north.
After several more days they sighted land for a third time. They saw mountains and glaciers, but again Bjarni refused to stop, saying the country had an inhospitable look. So, once more: “they turned their prow from the land and held out to sea with the same following wind.”
The wind freshened. They sailed four days and nights until they saw yet another coast.
“From what I have been told,” said Bjarni, “this most resembles Greenland. Here we will go ashore.”
They put in that evening at a cape and found a boat nearby. Bjarni’s father, Herjolf Bardsson, was living on this cape, which has been known ever since as Herjolfsnes.
“The next thing that happened,” says the narrator of “The Greenlanders’ Saga,” “was that Bjarni Herjolfsson came from Green land to see Earl Eirik”—which refers not to Eirik the Red but to Earl Eirik Hakonarsson who ruled Norway from A.D. 1000 to 1014. During this visit Bjarni described the lands he had seen when he was blown off course fifteen years earlier and people at the court rebuked him for his lack of curiosity, telling him that he should have gone ashore.
The following summer he was back in Greenland. His embarrassment at court must have been the subject of considerable gossip; but more important, the sagas tell us that “there was now great talk of discovering new countries.” Eirik the Red’s son, Leif, then bought Bjarni’s ship and signed up a crew of thirty-five.
Old Eirik was asked to lead this voyage of exploration, just as he had led the colonists from Iceland to Greenland. He consented reluctantly, observing that he was not able to stand bad weather as he used to. But on the day they were to embark, while they were riding horseback to the ship, he was thrown and injured his foot.
“It is not fated that I shall discover more lands than Greenland, on which I live,” he said. “We can go no further together.”
Eirik Raude then returned to his farm, called Brattahlid, or Steep Slope, while Leif and the crew went aboard. Among the crew was a southerner, probably a German, named Tyrkir, who is identified in some accounts as Leif’s godfather.
They followed Bjarni’s route backward, coming first to the inhospitable country. “They made for land, lowered the boat and rowed ashore; but they saw no grass there. The uplands were covered with glaciers, and from the glaciers to the shore it was like one great slab of rock.” Leif called this barren plateau Helluland. The leading candidates for Helluland seem to be Baffin Island and Newfoundland.
Next they came to the forest land, which they named Markland. It sounds agreeable, “with white sandy beaches shelving gently toward the sea,” yet according to the sagas Leif and his men stayed only a short time before hurrying back to their ship as fast as they could. The sagas do not explain why they were anxious to leave. Nor do we know exactly where they were, though it must have been either Labrador or Nova Scotia.
Two days later they reached an island and went ashore. The weather was fine. They saw dew on the grass, which they tasted, “and they thought that never had they tasted anything as sweet.” After this they returned to the ship and entered the sound which lay between the island and a cape projecting northward from the mainland.
They sailed westward past this cape. The water was very shallow. At low tide the ship touched bottom, “and it was a long way from the ship to the sea. But they were so impatient to get to land that they did not want to wait for the tide to rise under their ship but ran ashore at a place where a river flowed out of a lake.”
As soon as the tide refloated their ship they brought it up into the lake. Here they anchored, unloaded some sacks of hide, and built stone-and-turf huts. Later, after deciding to winter at this place, they built houses. The lake and river were full of huge salmon and they thought cattle would be able to survive without fodder. There was no frost and the grass scarcely withered.
When the house-building had been completed Leif divided his men. Each day one group went out to explore the countryside, with orders that they should not become separated and that they return by dusk. At first things went well, but one evening Tyrkir was missing. Leif was very much disturbed because Tyrkir had been one of his father’s companions for a long time.
“Leif spoke harsh words. . . .”
Twelve men set out to find Tyrkir. They had not gone far when he showed up. He was obviously in a good mood, rolling his eyes and laughing and talking in German so that nobody understood what he was saying. “The Greenlanders’ Saga” describes him as being small, dark, and seedy in appearance, with a sloping forehead and an unsteady eye, but good at all kinds of odd jobs.
“Why are you so late, foster-father?” asked Leif. “And why did you leave your comrades?”
Tyrkir continued laughing, grimacing, and talking in German. Finally be spoke in Norse. “I have some news for you,” he said. “I have found vines with grapes.”
“Is that true, foster-father?” Leif asked.
“Of course it’s true,” said Tyrkir, “because where I was born there are plenty of vines and grapes.”
Next morning Leif instructed his men to pick grapes and cut vines and to begin felling trees so that when they returned to Greenland they would have a good cargo. And when they embarked in the spring their ship carried a load of grapes, vines, and timber. Leif named the place Vinland.
All right, where was this lush country?
The sagas give many clues, several quite pointed, others too general to be of much help. That sweet-tasting dew, for instance, has been identified by some investigators as the sweet excreta of certain plant lice and flies—yet this could be found any number of places. Others who have studied the problem say it might have been only the dew which normally collects overnight, and the men had been aboard ship so long that they were eager for a taste of fresh water. Then there’s a third possibility: the incident might be a fabrication which should be disregarded.
As for grapes, about thirty varieties grow wild in the northeastern United States and Nova Scotia. Along the coast at the present time they grow no farther north than Massachusetts, which would seem to establish Vinland’s northern limit. However, in Leif’s day the climate might have been different, which would extend that boundary. In the 1530s, for example, Jacques Cartier saw grapevines on both banks of the Saint Lawrence where none grow today. And botanists who examined pollen found in the ruins of Greenland Viking settlements have concluded that eleventh-century weather was not bad, certainly no worse than it is now, perhaps a little warmer.
The big argument about grapes, though, is not how far north they might have been growing during the Middle Ages but whether Leif’s men actually found any. The quarrel hangs like a sword over the syllable vin or vín. In the original manuscript—long lost—did that syllable, or did it not, have a diacritical mark? Was Leif talking about Vinland or Vínland? Because the minuscule notation makes quite a difference. Without the mark it means meadow, grassy land, pastureland; with the mark it means wine country, grapevine country. In other words, how far north or south the Vikings camped might depend on whether Leif spoke of grass or of grapes. The sagas clearly suggest that Tyrkir was uncommonly exhilarated, and nobody ever has been known to get drunk on crushed grass, which argues that he was loitering amidst the vín, not the vin. But things aren’t that simple. Perhaps Tyrkir stumbled upon wild berries, not grapes, and the Vikings sailed home to Greenland with a boatload of berries.
Now about the salmon, a cold-water fish. Today it swims no farther south than New York, which ought to establish a southern boundary for Vinland, thus eliminating Virginia and North Carolina where some students of the problem have placed it. And a warmer ocean 1,000 years ago would have kept the salmon in still higher latitudes, which would eliminate New York.
On the other hand, because of a remark in the sagas concerning the winter solstice, a German scholar located the settlement between 27° and 31°—in Florida. A Norwegian, interpreting this same remark differently, concluded that Vinland must have been on Chesapeake Bay.
A Yankee partisan proved that Leif wintered at Plymouth. He determined not only the exact route from Greenland but the time of year Leif arrived, even the time of day. His argument covers many pages and could hardly be more persuasive. That is, until you listen to somebody else.
A Harvard professor fixed the site in his own neighborhood, less than a mile from campus.
So the squabble persists, point and counterpoint.
In any event, Leif had not been home very long when one of his brothers, Thorvald, volunteered to inspect Vinland more closely.
“Well, brother,” said Leif to Thorvald, “use my ship, if you like.”
Thorvald picked thirty men and reached the encampment with no trouble. They spent that winter comfortably and the following summer they explored the western coast. They saw no animals or humans, but they did come across a small wooden structure—perhaps the frame of a tepee.
The next summer while exploring the east coast they saw three unusual humps or mounds on the beach, which turned out to be hide-covered boats with three “skraelings” asleep under each boat. “Skraeling” cannot be precisely translated, but it refers to the native inhabitants of Greenland and North America and is contemptuous, meaning barbarian or screamer or wretch. Whether these skraelings were Eskimos or Indians is not known. Some anthropologists believe they were the now extinct Beothuk or Micmac Indians. The hide-covered boats, however, might have been Eskimo umiaks which are larger than kayaks. Whatever they were, Thorvald’s men crept up to these boats and killed eight skraelings. One escaped.
Then, we are told, after returning to the headland from which they had looked down on these boats, the Vikings became drowsy. This seems curious, but the saga does not explain. Next “they were aroused by a voice shouting: ‘Awake, Thorvald! Awake with all your men! Hurry to the ship and leave quickly if you would save your lives!’ Then came a great fleet of skin-boats to attack them.”
During this fight Thorvald was hit by a freak shot: an arrow struck him in the armpit. “I think it will be the death of me,” he said.
He asked to be carried to a place not far away where he had planned to build a house. There he was buried, with a cross at his head and another at his feet, so the place was named Krossanes.
Thorvald’s men remained at Leif’s camp that winter, loading their ship with vines and grapes. In the spring they sailed back to Greenland.
Another of Leif’s brothers, Thorstein, offered to bring home Thorvald’s body. He outfitted the same ship and took along his wife, Gudrid. The voyage was a disaster. They got lost, either because of storms or fog, and ended up not in Vinland but at a small Viking settlement on the upper coast of Greenland. They were obliged to spend the winter there, and Thorstein died of plague.
Shortly after his death, while Gudrid was seated near the bench on which his body was lying, Thorstein sat up and began to speak. Translations vary in detail, but essentially this is what Thorstein said:
“I wish to tell Gudrid her fate, that she may endure my death more easily, for I am comfortable in this place. Gudrid, listen. You are to be married to an Icelander and will live with him a long time. Many descendants will you have—stalwart, fair, sweet, and good. From Green-land you will go to Norway, thence to Iceland where you will make your home. In Iceland you will live many years with your husband, but you shall outlive him. After his death you will travel south but then return to Iceland where a church will be erected. In this church you will take the vows of a nun and this is where you will die.”
Thorstein then lay down again on the bench. Later his body was dressed and carried to the ship. Another crew was formed because many of his men also had died of plague, and with Gudrid aboard they returned to the main settlement.
That summer the Icelander arrived. He was a merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni of noble lineage: we read on his family register such aristocratic names as Thorvald Backbone, Thord Horsehead, and Ragnar Shaggypants. As prophesied, he fell in love with Gudrid and asked permission to marry her. Eirik consented. Or perhaps old Eirik was now dead and his son Leif gave permission. In either case, we know there was great joy at Brattahlid, with gaming, the telling of sagas, and other diversions.
“There was also much talk of Vinland voyages. . . .”
Karlsefni, urged by Gudrid, organized a large expedition consisting of sixty men, five women including Gudrid herself, and various kinds of livestock. It appears that they hoped to establish a permanent colony.
They settled in Leif’s houses and the skraelings began to come around, peacefully. But one of the skraelings tried to steal a knife or an ax, he was killed by a Viking, and another battle took place.
At this point “The Greenlanders’ Saga” and “Eirik’s Saga” do not agree. The first says nothing about Leif’s terrible half sister Freydis being a member of the Karlsefni expedition; yet according to “Eirik’s Saga” she was present, and during this fight with the skraelings she did something so odd that it could hardly have been invented.
First, though, the ballistic missiles must be mentioned. The skraelings hurled some objects at the Vikings. These could have been Eskimo harpoons tied to bladders which served as floats, or they may have been stones sewn up in leather cases and launched from the poles—which would suggest Indians. Centuries ago the Algonquins are said to have flung leather-bound stones at their enemies, with a hideous face painted on each bundle. Yet there is no reference to Indian arrows. Whatever they were, these blue-black flying objects terrified the Vikings, who turned and ran.
Freydis then appeared. As the skraelings rushed toward her she picked up the sword of a dead Viking, pulled out her breasts, and whetted the blade on them. Some translators say she slapped the sword against her breasts, or made as if to cut them off. Anyway, this spectacle frightened the savages worse than the ballista had frightened the Vikings: “They were aghast and fled to the boats. . . .”
Karlsefni’s party spent one more winter in the New World. They liked it and wanted to remain but anticipated further trouble with the natives; so when spring came they returned to Greenland bringing a load of timber, grapes, and furs. With them was a new passenger—Gudrid’s baby son, Snorre, born in America almost six centuries before Virginia Dare.
It is said that Karlsefni, his wife Gudrid, and their son, Snorre, eventually went to Iceland where Karlsefni bought a farm at Glaumby. After his death Gudrid and her son managed the farm until Snorre got married. Then Gudrid made a pilgrimage to Rome, became a nun, and lived the rest of her life in accordance with the prophecy.
Next we hear of Helgi and Finnbogi, two Icelandic brothers who may or may not have been planning a trip to Vinland when they were approached by Freydis. She proposed a joint expedition in two ships, sharing equally whatever profit they might make. Each group would consist of thirty men and a few women. The Icelanders agreed to this, so Freydis went to Leif and asked for the houses he had built on Vinland. Leif said he would not give them to her, although she might have the use of them.
The ships sailed together. Helgi and Finnbogi arrived first. Assuming the expedition was to be fully cooperative, they and their men settled in Leif’s houses; but when Freydis arrived she ordered them to leave. And now the brothers learned something else about their business partner: she had brought along five extra men.
“We are no match for you in wickedness, we brothers,” said Helgi. The Icelanders then moved out and built a shed for themselves some distance away.
During the winter there was more trouble. The two parties began avoiding each other.
Early one morning Freydis got up, put on her husband’s cloak, and walked to the shed where the Icelanders lived. The door was half open. She stood by the door and Finnbogi, who was awake, saw her. He asked what she wanted.
“I want you to come outside,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
Finnbogi came out of the shed and they sat down together on a log.
“How do you like things here?” she asked.
“I like this country,” he said, “but I don’t like the quarrel that has come between us. I see no reason for it.”
“What you say is true,” she answered. “I feel the same. But the reason I came to see you is that I would like to exchange ships. Your ship is larger than mine and I would like to get away from here.”
“All right,” he said, “if that will make you happy.”
Freydis then walked home. She had not worn shoes or stockings and when she climbed into bed her cold feet awakened her husband. He asked where she had been. She had gone to visit the brothers, she told him, and offered to buy their ship, which made them so angry that they had beaten her. “But you,” she said, “you wretched coward, you won’t avenge our shame! Now I know just how far from Greenland I am!”
Her husband called his men and ordered them to get their weapons. They walked to the shed where the Icelanders lay asleep and tied them up. As each man was brought outside Freydis had him killed. At last there were only five women left alive and nobody wanted to kill them.
“Give me an ax,” she said.
One of the men lent her an ax and Freydis slew the Icelandic women.
“After this wicked deed,” the saga tells us, the Greenlanders went back to their houses, and it was clear that Freydis felt she had handled the matter very well. This is what she said to her companions: “If we get to Greenland I shall be the death of any man who reveals what took place. Our story will be that they stayed here after we left.”
Early in the spring they loaded the brothers’ ship with as much as it could carry and sailed to Greenland. There, after bribing everybody to ensure silence, Freydis returned to her farm. But Leif heard rumors. He seized three of her men and tortured them until they confessed. When he learned the truth he said, “I do not have the heart to punish my sister Freydis as she deserves. But I prophesy that no good will come to her descendants.”
And after that, we are told, “no one thought anything but ill of her and her family.”
How many other Norse adventurers and colonists reached the American continent, either on purpose or by accident, is unknown. There must have been quite a few. Among the first was a certain Bjorn Asbrandsson who vanished after leaving Iceland in the year 1000. The chronicles are not clear as to whether he was on his way to Greenland; but about twenty-five years later, according to the “Eyrbyggja Saga,” a merchant named Gudleif who set out from Dublin was blown far to the west by a gale and finally anchored in a cove of some unfamiliar land. There he and his crew were captured by a group of dark-featured natives. They were released after an old white man spoke on their behalf. This man identified himself to Gudleif as Bjorn Asbrandsson. He said he had been living with the natives for a long time and had no wish to go back to Iceland.
In 1059 a Celtic or Saxon priest named Jon is said to have undertaken a missionary voyage to Vinland where he was murdered.
In 1120 or 1121 the bishop of Greenland, Eirik Gnupsson—or Upsi—“sailed in search of Vinland.” Or he sailed “to visit” that country, depending on how leitadi is translated. Nothing more is heard of him, and presumably he did not return because three years later King Sigurd Jorsalfare—Jorsalfare meaning a traveler to Jerusalem—King Sigurd gave the bishopric to a cleric named Arnald.
In 1226 the leaders of Greenland’s eastern settlement, Eystribyggd, which Eirik the Red had founded, became greatly disturbed by the arrival of Eskimos. They sent an expedition into Davis Strait, which separates Greenland from Canada, with instructions to find out where the Eskimos were coming from and to learn, if possible, what their intentions might be. Cairns and shelters discovered in that region prove that these men traveled through the extreme north at least to Devon Island—about as far west as Chicago.
Farther south, in the Vinland area, Norsemen were active as late as 1347, probably in the lumber trade. Says the Flateyjarbók: “Came a ship from Greenland that had been to Markland, eighteen men on board.” With a bit more detail this same ship is reported in the Skálholt annals: “Also there came a ship from Greenland, smaller than the small Icelandic boats, which put in at the outer Straumfjord and had no anchor. There were seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland but were afterwards storm-driven here.”
Chests found by archaeologists at Herjolfsnes are made of pine, deal, and larch. Some of this wood might have come from Norway, but the larch did not. It may have been driftwood, though this seems unlikely, not with Canada’s tremendous forests just below the horizon.
Indeed, there is a possibility that the entire western settlement, or what was left of it—perhaps several hundred people—emigrated to America, because in 1350, plus or minus a year or two or three, a cleric named Ivar Bárdarsson was chosen “to goe with Ships to the Westland, to drive away their Enemies the Skerlengers. But hee comming there, found no people neither Christian nor Heathen, but found there many Sheepe running being wilde, of which Sheepe they took with them as many as they could carrie, and with them returned to their Houses.”
Bárdarsson saw no indication of a struggle with Eskimos, which means the people must have left voluntarily. Eskimos may or may not have plundered the empty houses; his report suggests that they did. Yet the presence of livestock—not only Sheepe but goats, horses, and cattle—implies that Eskimos had not been near the place because they would have slaughtered the animals for food. If the Vikings did emigrate they must have crossed the strait to Canada.
A dozen theories have been offered to explain the disappearance of these people; each answers certain questions but fails to answer others.
The revolving centuries fought against them, says Gwyn Jones. The climate grew colder, glaciers crept down. And ahead of the ice came the skraelings. Events in Europe also weakened the colony: an increasing preference for English and Dutch cloth rather than Greenland woolens. African elephant ivory instead of walrus ivory. Commerce with Russia. In short, business. It became less profitable for Europeans to trade with those distant colonists. The immediate causes, though, beyond doubt, were skraeling attacks and the encroaching ice.
Gisle Oddsson, Bishop of Iceland at about the time of Ivar Bárdarsson’s voyage, thought the colonists had emigrated: “The settlers of Greenland lapsed of their own free will from the true faith and the Christian religion; having abandoned all good conduct and true virtues they turned to the people of America. Some people believe that Greenland lies very near to the westerly countries of the world.”
The mystery of this deserted Christian outpost seems to have troubled King Magnus Smek, who directed Poul Knudsson to take a look at that faraway place. Knudsson sailed in 1355: “in honor of God, for the deliverance of our souls, and for those ancestors of ours who brought Christianity to Greenland. . . .”
Nine years later several of Knudsson’s men returned to Norway. What news they brought—if any—concerning Vestribyggd, the western settlement, has not been preserved.
In 1379 the small “middle settlement” near Ivigtut was attacked by Eskimos who killed eighteen colonists and carried off two boys.
The last merchant ship to visit the colonies departed in 1383.
A ship bound from Norway to Iceland in 1406 was driven west by gales and made port in Eystribyggd, where it lay at anchor four years. During this time a crewman named Thorstein Olafson married a local girl, Sigrid Bjornsdatter. Their wedding was celebrated in Hvalsey church on September 16, 1408, “on the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Cross.” With the newlyweds aboard, this ship sailed to Iceland in 1410, the last European vessel known to have reached either settlement.
A letter dated 1448—which might possibly be spurious—from Pope Nicholas V to the two bishops of Iceland laments the misfortunes of Greenland colonists: “Thirty years ago, from the adjacent coasts of the heathen, the barbarians came with a fleet, attacked the inhabitants of Greenland most cruelly, and so devastated the mother-country and the holy buildings with fire and sword that there remained on that island no more than nine parish churches. . . .”
A few English ships, mostly from Bristol, might have visited Eystribyggd during this century. And perhaps a joint Portuguese-Danish expedition in 1473, because there is a letter dated March 3, 1551, from the burgomaster of Kiel, one Karsten Grip, addressed to Christian III. Burgomaster Grip reports that “two admirals of Your grandfather, His Royal Majesty Christian I, Pining and Pothurst, on the instructions of His Royal Majesty the King of Portugal, etc., were sent with several ships on a voyage to the new islands and the continents in the north. . . .” But we can only surmise the state of the colonies at that time.
A letter written by Pope Alexander VI in 1492 observes that there has been no priest resident in Greenland for eighty years and the people have nothing to remind them of Christianity except one altar cloth. Alexander fears that they have lost sight of the true faith, and he comments on a Benedictine monk named Mathias who is prepared to live and work as a missionary in Greenland.
About fifty years later a German merchant ship was blown by strong winds into a Greenland fjord. Buildings were visible, so the crew went ashore. They saw a dead European lying on the frozen ground. He was dressed in sealskin and frieze—which is a coarse woolen cloth with a shaggy nap. Beside his body lay a dagger, very thin from constant whetting. Evidently this was the corpse of the last Viking in the New World. There being no one left alive to bury him, he lay on the earth rather than in it.
A resident of Bergen, Absalon Pedersson, writes in 1567 that “many of the nobility hold the deeds of estates in Greenland yet of the country and properties they know nothing. . . .”
Martin Frobisher, who landed on Greenland’s west coast in 1578, observed that some of the Eskimos used iron spearheads and bronze buttons and were able to recognize gold, which meant they had dealt with Europeans.
In 1721 a Norwegian missionary, Hans Egede, saw the ruins of a church and the crumbling walls of houses. He asked about them, and described the Christian services, but the Eskimos indicated that they had never heard of such a religion, nor could they tell him anything about the people who built these houses. Despite this rather convincing testimony, as well as the ruins, Egede maintained that Eystribyggd still flourished: “I believe beyond a doubt that it survives and is inhabited by people of pure Norwegian Extraction, which by God’s help in due Time and when Occasion offers, may be discovered. . . .”
Hans Egede had a son named Niels who grew up in Greenland and recorded in his diary a curious legend. An Eskimo shaman who camped among the ruins of the lower settlement, “south by the hot baths,” told him that in the old days Eskimos and Norwegians had lived together until they were attacked by men who came from the southwest in ships. At first there had been three ships. Then more ships arrived, with much killing and plundering. When these ships came back again the Eskimos fled, taking several Norwegian women and children with them up the fjord. Months later the Eskimos returned, but saw that the houses had been burned and everything taken away. Then they left the settlement forever and the Norwegian women married into the tribe.
The identity of these marauders cannot be established, but German and English pirates often raided Iceland during the fifteenth century. Perhaps they curled westward looking for fresh victims and delivered the coup de grâce to a moribund culture.
In our century, following the Great War that would end all wars, the Danish government dispatched some archaeologists to Greenland. They located the remnants of buildings and of farms—the fields now smothered by weeds and horsehair oats—and many graves.
In the northeast chapel of Gardar cathedral, which was the episcopal seat of Eystribyggd, lay the skeleton of a sturdy middle-aged man who still wore his shoes, though not much else. For some inexplicable reason part of his right foot was gone. He held a crozier made of ash, with an iron ferrule, the upper part carved from a walrus tusk by his wife, Margret, and on the fourth finger of his right hand he wore a bishop’s gold ring. This was Jon Smyrill, or Sparrowhawk, who died in 1209.
The grave of a woman named Gudveig was empty, except for a rune rod which served as a proxy. She had died at sea and was buried like a sailor, sewn into sackcloth, a stone at her feet for ballast. A huge stone weighing more than a ton had been placed above the empty grave, either to guard her soul or to keep it from walking abroad.
Ozuur Asbjarnarson died on some island during winter and was buried in unhallowed ground with a wooden stake planted over his chest. Eventually a priest would arrive; then the stake could be withdrawn and consecrated water poured into the hole. That’s all we know about Ozuur Asbjarnarson. It seems hardly enough.
The graves of quite a few children were located. Most of them had been buried with their toys.
Herjolfsnes cemetery yielded what was left of fifty-eight adults arranged in neat rows with their heads to the west. When time came for them to sit up on Resurrection Day they would face the rising sun. Each skeleton held a cross with a runic inscription:
GOD THE ALMIGHTY PROTECT GUDLEIF.
THORLEIF MADE THIS CROSS IN PRAISE AND WORSHIP OF GOD ALMIGHTY.
And so forth.
These Herjolfsnes colonists were fashionably dressed in accordance with European styles of the late Middle Ages, although in homespun wool rather than dyed silk or Italian velvet. From this rough material they had cut handsome cloaks and those tall Burgundian caps pictured by Memling, Christus, and other Flemish artists. They had copied the hood with a long tail, called a liripipe—de rigueur for modish gentlemen—which we recognize from descriptions by Dante and Petrarch. And they had imitated the cotte hardie, a man’s tight short jacket which fully exposed his legs, except that the Greenland cotte hardie was less revealing. The garment as Europeans wore it must have seemed too bold.
One thing about these cloaked and hooded skeletons is unforgettable: their size. They look like children pretending to be adults. The tallest woman measured just four feet, nine inches. The men were not much bigger.
Half of these people died before the age of thirty, and all of them had been feeble, their bodies deformed. This was not true of the early Green-landers, Eirik’s colonists, nor of their first descendants whose bones indicated that they were healthy enough. But it appears that toward the end, about the time Eystribyggd was raided and plundered, the colonists were suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and rickets.
So it may be argued that the Viking impetus failed. Nothing was born of these people, nothing developed from them.
But that violent westward surge, foaming against the littoral of the New World, has not yet receded from the imagination because even today, a thousand years after Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course, we wonder just how far west the Vikings traveled.
This brings up the Kensington runestone, a memorial tablet approximately the size of a tombstone. Medieval Scandinavian characters on its face tell a grim story:
[WE ARE] 8 GOTHS AND 22 NORWEGIANS ON EXPLORATION JOURNEY FROM VINELAND THROUGHOUT THE WEST. WE HAD CAMP BESIDE 2 SKERRIES ONE DAY’S JOURNEY NORTH OF THIS STONE. WE WERE OUT FISHING ONE DAY. AFTER WE CAME HOME, FOUND 10 MEN RED WITH BLOOD AND DEAD. AV[E] M[ARIA] DELIVER [US] FROM EVIL!
HAVE 10 MEN BY THE SEA TO LOOK AFTER OUR SHIP, 14 DAYS’ JOURNEY FROM THIS ISLAND. YEAR 1362.
On July 20, 1909, a Minnesota farmer filed this deposition with the local notary public:
I, Olof Ohman, of the town of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, being duly sworn . . . In the month of August, 1898, while accompanied by my son, Edward, I was engaged in grubbing upon a timbered elevation, surrounded by marshes, in the southeast corner of my land, about 500 feet west of my neighbor’s, Nils Flaten’s, house, and in the full view thereof. Upon removing an asp, measuring about 10 inches in diameter at its base, I discovered a flat stone inscribed with characters, to me unintelligible. The stone lay just beneath the surface of the ground in a slightly slanting position, with one corner almost protruding. The two largest roots of the tree clasped the stone in such a manner that the stone must have been there at least as long as the tree. . . . I immediately called my neighbor’s, Nils Flaten’s, attention to the discovery, and he came over the same afternoon and inspected the stone and the stump under which it was found.
I kept the stone in my possession for a few days; and then left it in the Bank of Kensington. . . .
Nils Flaten, who accompanied Ohman to the office of the notary, swore to his part in the discovery. This much can be verified, along with a few unimportant details.
Is it a fake, or not?
The runestone’s leading advocate was Hjalmar Holand, a Norwegian-born Wisconsin cherry farmer who learned about it in 1907 while he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. He tried to buy it. He offered five dollars, but Ohman wanted ten. Holand could not afford ten. Ohman by this time had put up with a certain amount of ridicule because almost every geologist and philologist who examined the stone had concluded that the carving must be recent, and perhaps because of this he suddenly gave the stone to Holand.
For the next fifty-five years Holand tried to authenticate the grisly tale—which he himself had translated. He even took the stone to Scandinavia for examination. And there have been authorities in one field or another who agreed with him that it could not be a fraud. The American ethnographer Stirling called it one of the most significant finds ever made on American soil. A German geographer, Richard Hennig, said that the stone’s authenticity was certain “and consequently the presence of Scandinavians in America a good one hundred and thirty years before Columbus can no longer be doubted.” The Preliminary Report of the Museum Committee of the Historical Society of Minnesota pronounced it genuine. And so on. Most experts, however, look upon the Kensington stone with distaste, boredom, resignation, and contempt.
The Danish rune specialist Erik Moltke, for instance: “Even the non-specialist will observe that the text, when it is transcribed into Latin, is easy to read. That is not the language of the fourteenth century, but rather of the nineteenth. In the language of the late Middle Ages ‘we had’ should be written ‘wi hafd hum’ not ‘wi hade’; ‘we were’ as ‘wi varum’ not ‘wi var’. . . .” Moltke also pointed out that the carver had invented a runic j, and had included a modified ö which was not introduced into Swedish until the Reformation.
Among Olof Ohman’s possessions when he died was a book with this resounding title: Carl Rosander, Den kunskapsrike Skolmästare eller hufvudegrunderna uti de för ett borgerligt samfundsliv nödigaste vetenskaper. It contains a chapter on the development of the Swedish language and gives, as one example, a fourteenth-century prayer ending with “fraelse [os] af illu,” which is to say, “Deliver [us] from evil.” In Ohman’s copy the page on which this prayer occurs had been well thumbed.
Birgitta Wallace of the Carnegie Museum speaks for a majority of professionals when she says that the stone was carved by a nineteenth-century immigrant: “. . . someone with an embryonic knowledge of runes, but who lacked familiarity with medieval Scandinavian languages. The carver could have been almost any one of the early Scandinavian settlers in Minnesota, all of whom knew something about runes but who generally had no philological education.” The language employed on the stone, she remarks, is a dialect which developed in the Kensington area and is still spoken by a few old-timers, though it is unknown elsewhere. Furthermore, the tool used in making the inscription was a chisel with a standard one-inch bit, a type sold in American hardware stores.
Quite a few bona fide runestones have been found in Scandinavia. They are big, blunt, ugly things that remind you of menhirs or of the weathered teeth of ancient monsters, and their crude messages are seldom dramatic, although real enough:
RAGNHILD, ULV’S SISTER, PLACED THIS STONE—AND THIS BOAT-SHAPED STONE CIRCLE—TO HER HUSBAND GUNULF, AN OUTSPOKEN MAN, SON OF NÆRVE. FEW ARE NOW BORN BETTER THAN HE.
. . . SER PLACED THIS STONE TO HIS BROTHER AS . . . AND [HE] MET HIS DEATH IN GOTLAND [?]. THOR SANCTIFY [THESE] RUNES.
SØLVE ERECTED . . . SPALKLØSE TO [HIS] FATHER SUSER [AND MADE] THIS BRIDGE [TO] HIS BROTHER TROELS. ETERNALLY SHALL THIS INSCRIPTION BE TRUE, WHICH SØLVE HAS MADE.
THORE ERECTED THIS STONE TO HIS FATHER GUNNER.
After you have contemplated the homeliness and innocence of such epitaphs you are even less apt to be persuaded by that wild Minnesota drama. Still, one wants to believe. THORE ERECTED THIS STONE TO HIS FATHER GUNNER. All right, but who cares? A fight between Vikings and Indians does more for the imagination.
Now, along with that Minnesota runestone, and no less celebrated, we have Rhode Island’s Newport tower—alleged to have been built by Knudsson’s party either before or after they visited the Midwest, or by some earlier Viking expedition. Or it was built by sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers. Or perhaps by the governor of Rhode Island, Benedict Arnold—not the Benedict Arnold—shortly before 1677, the date it first appears in historical records. Those who believe in the authenticity of the Kensington runestone almost without exception believe in the Viking origin of the tower. And, naturally, vice versa.
Here is what we know for certain: it is a cylindrical stone structure approximately twenty-five feet high, with eight arches supported by columns. The walls are about two feet thick with traces of stucco coating. Only the shell of the tower remains, the interior wooden components having disintegrated. It became a proper subject for argument in 1839 after a Danish antiquarian said he thought it was a Norse church or baptistery, and that it had been built by Vinlanders of the eleventh or twelfth century.
True believers point to architectural similarities between the tower and medieval Scandinavian structures: segmental arches, double-splayed casement windows, et cetera. They mention a unit of measurement known as the “Rhineland foot” which they say was used in the design of the tower, whereas all Colonial buildings used the English foot.
Skeptics reply that because of the tower’s condition the unit of measurement cannot be determined. Besides, the Rhineland foot was still in use as late as the nineteenth century. Then, too, carefully supervised digging around the foundation has brought up such items as a gunflint and a seventeenth-century clay pipe.
“This is fourteenth-century architecture,” said a European archaeologist. “There would be no question as to its age if this were in Europe.”
So the dispute continues.
Excluding various knickknacks from L’Anse aux Meadows, there is only one batch of indisputably Norse objects to have surfaced on the American continent. This is the Beardmore find, which consists of a broken sword, an axhead, a horse rattle, and three scraps of iron. In the judgment of almost every authority who has studied these relics, they date from the latter part of the Viking Age: the sword from the tenth century, the axhead and rattle from the eleventh. They were found, according to one report, while dynamiting on a mining claim near Beardmore, Ontario. But another report says they were retrieved from the basement of a home in Port Arthur and that they were brought to Canada about fifty years ago. Both reports are substantiated by witnesses and by circumstantial evidence. Once again, therefore, you have an option.
All in all there are perhaps 100 objects, a couple dozen inscriptions, and at least fifty sites which purport to show that Vikings reached America. By far the most engaging souvenirs are some rusty crescent-shaped little axes from the Great Lakes region, home of the embattled Kensington runestone. Because they are too light to be weapons they have been described as ceremonial halberds. But medieval halberds did not look exactly like that. Furthermore, these specimens apparently were manufactured by the American Tobacco Company in the late nineteenth century for use as plug tobacco cutters—the business end of the hatchet being attached to a cutting board by a hinge. They were given away during an advertising campaign to promote the sale of Battle-Axe Plug and quite a few midwestern housewives probably used them to chop cabbage.
Nevertheless, Hjalmar Holand submitted one tobacco cutter and two of the halberds that he thought were medieval Norse to the department of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Professor R. A. Ragatz, chairman of the department, examined all three and wrote to Holand: “The metal [of the tobacco cutter] is a rather poor quality of gray cast iron, showing the following micro-constituents: graphite plates, ferrite, pearlite, steadite. The structure is totally different from the frames of the two genuine halberds. . . . I can state positively that the two halberds sent me last fall were not of the same origin as the tobacco cutter recently submitted.”
Other disputed evidence of Viking tourists includes “mooring holes,” found on Cape Cod and quite plentifully around the Minnesota lakes. These holes, about an inch in diameter and six or seven inches deep, have been drilled into boulders on the shores of past or present waterways. They are said to have been used for mooring a boat temporarily, a line from the boat being tied to an iron pin inserted in the hole. A sequence of such holes should indicate the route traveled; and it so happens that they often appear beside northern rivers and lakes that feed the Mississippi. Now, what this suggests is that Vikings may have traveled up the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes, or south from Hudson Bay via the Nelson River into the Wisconsin-Minnesota area. From there they could have gone south with almost no trouble, as far as they cared to float, drifting at last into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. And what a dramatic voyage that would be.
Regrettably we must deal with Birgitta Wallace, archenemy of romantics: “. . . the method is unknown in Norse seamanship, medieval or modern.” Ms. Wallace goes on to say that other stones with identical drillings in the vicinity of these so-called mooring holes provide a clue as to what they really are: they are blasting holes drilled by early settlers. It seems that during the latter half of the nineteenth century these settlers obtained foundation stones for their houses by blowing boulders apart. Occasionally the dynamite didn’t go off, or the prospective home builder changed his mind, or for some other reason all that endured was the hole, somewhat like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
If Birgitta Wallace & Co. are correct we find ourselves restricted to L’Anse aux Meadows, which is either a grave disappointment or an exciting discovery, depending on your outlook. The name could mean the cove or bay with grass around it, or possibly Meadows is a corruption of Medusa—for the shoals of jellyfish found there during summer. Old sailing charts call it Méduse Bay, Jellyfish Bay. It is on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, about the latitude of London, within sight of the Canadian mainland, and near this bay are the ruins of a Norse settlement. Carbon 14 tests give a date of approximately A.D. 1000.
Not much is left. There is the ground plan of a big turf-walled house—fifty by seventy feet, with five or six rooms—and the outlines of various smaller structures including a smithy, a bathhouse, five boat sheds, a kiln, and two cooking pits.
Very little handiwork has survived, partly because there is so much acid in the soil. Almost everything made of bone or wood has disintegrated, whatever was not carried off by Eskimos, Indians, and early Newfoundland settlers. There are rusty traces that once were nails, a piece of copper with cross stripings that might have come from a belt, a whetstone, a bone needle, a bit of jasper, a stone lamp of the old Icelandic type, a steatite spindle whorl—meaning there were women in the house—and a bronze ring-headed pin. Pins of this type were used by Vikings to fasten their capes. And in the smithy was a large cracked flat-topped stone—the anvil—together with scraps of bog iron, clumps of slag, and patches of soot.
The great house burned, says Dr. Helge Ingstad, who supervised the excavation, although it is impossible to say whether this happened by accident or design.
L’Anse aux Meadows must have been an agreeable place to live. There were fields of berries and flowers, salmon in the lake, herds of caribou—many more animals and birds than there are now. The sea was alive with cod, seals, and whales, and the weather probably was mild.
Then why was Paradise abandoned? And why is there no sign of other settlements?
The answer seems to be that these people arrived too soon. Europe was not ready to support them, and with only spears, axes, knives, and swords these few colonists could not hold out against the skraelings. Whether they were killed in one overwhelming raid, whether they intermarried with the natives, or perhaps moved farther south, or at last gave up and retreated to Greenland—neither the ruins nor the old vellum manuscripts reveal.
It is certain, though, that they got this far on several occasions, and it would be exceedingly strange if they traveled no farther. Even the most conservative archaeologists admit the possibility of Viking sites on the mainland.
A lump of coal uncovered in a Greenland house strongly implies a voyage to Rhode Island. This house, which stood at the head of Ameralik fjord in the western settlement, may have belonged at one time to Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife, Gudrid. The coal was found deep in the ruins by Danish archaeologists, and there are two curious things about it. First, there was just one lump, with nothing but woodash in the fireplace. Second, it is meta-anthracite, which does not occur in Greenland, nor anyplace along the east coast of North America except in Rhode Island.
And there is an eleventh-century Norse penny, probably struck between the years 1065 and 1080, during the reign of Olaf III, which turned up at an Indian site near Bar Harbor, Maine. It’s possible, of course, that the penny was lost by a Colonial American coin collector. Or it might have been brought from Newfoundland by an acquisitive Indian. However, the obvious deduction seems best: eleventh-century Vikings either lived or traded in Maine.
What all of this means is that you are at liberty to follow the mooring holes of imagination as far as you care to. Through the Saint Lawrence waterway, for example, to the Great Lakes and beyond. After all, nobody can prove that a party of Norse adventurers did not reach the Mississippi and follow it to the Gulf, and from there sail west, following the downward coast.
The Mexican Indian legend of Quetzalcoatl says that a bearded white man appeared out of the east on a raft of snakes and later departed in the direction from which he had come, promising to return in 500 years. So you may imagine a Viking ship with a carved serpent head on the prow, with a fair-haired bearded Norwegian in command. And when five centuries had passed a bearded foreigner did arrive, not exactly commanding a raft of snakes, although many people swear he had a complement of snakes aboard. He was, of course, much darker than a Norwegian; and his name, Hernando Cortés, is not unfamiliar.
You will get a chilly reception from anthropologists if you attempt to relate Quetzalcoatl to a Viking, or any other such fabulous theory. But the alternative is to join the conservatives, in which case you will have to be satisfied with a spindle whorl, a bone needle, and some furnace slag.
