Culture and Environment: Lost Norse Mystery.

Lost Norse Mystery.

Disappearance of Greenland settlements in Middle Ages

Around the year 1540 a Norwegian ship on the trade route between Iceland and Hamburg was blown far off course. The wayward vessel finally found refuge in a fjord near the southeast extremity of Greenland. A boat was sent ashore to a little island where there were moorings for boats and many drying sheds for fish.

The visitor saw one dead man. Dressed in woolens and skins, he was lying face down, his hat still on, a dull, bent iron knife clutched in his fist. Of the hundreds of European Norsemen who had tended their farms, hunted, fished and worshipped their Christian God in that whole area, as they had for 500 years, not another soul could be found.

This was the first eyewitness obituary of the old Norse "Eastern Settlement" deep in the fjord region between Julianehaab and Cape Farewell, at the green toe of the world's largest, iciest island.

Two centuries before — about the year 1350 — an official of the bishop's farmstead and episcopal see in the still thriving colony of Gardar, had sailed some 240 miles up Greenland's west coast to investigate the area which today is Godthaab.

The settlers were deeply troubled over the long silence from their sister "Western Settlement." Many more "skrellings" (a derogatory term meaning Eskimos or savages) were reported around the ninety farms and four churches there earlier, and the colonists of the south feared that something terrible had happened to their neighbors up north. It certainly looked that way, for according to the sagas, this landing party sighted animals but not so much as a single "Christian or heathen" in the Western Settlement.

The bishop's administrator, Ivar Baardson, was quoted later on, from Norway, "Now the skrellings have wiped out all the Western Settlement; though there are indeed horses, goats, cattle, sheep, all wild, and no people, Christian or heathen." The envoy went on to tell how "we helped ourselves until the ships could hold no more . . ."

Whatever happened, as some specialists interpret the still scanty evidence, it must have been quick and was probably catastrophic. Otherwise, how can one explain the sudden disappearance of a whole self-sufficient colony of mediaeval farmers and fishermen, that was two and a half times as old as the United States of America is today? Or .. .

Had the whole Western Settlement disappeared? Were there people on at least some of the neighboring farms? Was the family on the deserted farm off hunting or fishing or gathering eggs?

Had everyone — or at least some —departed for the greener shores of Helluland, Markland or Vinland across the sea in North America, or sailed back to Iceland?

No one knows. Those Norse simply were never heard from again. And about a century and a half later, their southern countrymen of the Eastern Settlement just faded away, leaving no written records behind. At least none have been found in Greenland, Iceland or Europe. The frozen remains of their mediaeval farm society might still yield something to solve the riddle. Danish archaeologists plan more digs around Godthaab, and they are optimistic.

In the best years of the 1100s there may have been from 5,000 to 6,000 people on more than 400 farms in the Greenland settlements. By the end of the 1200s there were still 190 farmsteads, 12 parish churches and 2 monasteries in the Eastern Settlement alone. These Scandinavians were the hardy progeny of the legendary Viking chief-turned-Christian farmer, Eric the Red, and his followers. The same Eric whose son, Leif the Lucky, discovered Vinland — probably northern Newfoundland — and whose people embarked on other expeditions along the American east coast, using Brattahlid farm in the Eastern Settlement as home base.

About A.D. 985 Eric had led 400 or so Icelanders to the verdant country in the southwest region of the great polar island. (He named it Greenland, some say to encourage potential settlers, others claim that is how he saw it.) There Eric founded Brattahlid. Some of his followers sailed farther northwest to settle in the Godthaab fjords — the Western Settlement. The bones of the Brattahlid founders, including, it is fairly well accepted, those of Eric and his wife Tjodhilde and their son Lief, now rest in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen.

The mystery of Greenland's lost colonies has captured many imaginations for several generations. In our own time, opinions have differed along national lines, Danish experts leaning toward the theory that the southward-migrating Thule Eskimos finally banded together to wipe out the already hard-pressed "westerners" — and a century and a half later probably also the unfortunate "easterners" — while Norwegians argue that those European Greenlanders who weathered bad times, finally melted into the Greenland Eskimo community.

Curator Jørgen Meldgaard of the Danish museum and consultant of the "Greenland Arctic Denmark" Exhibition recently seen during a three-year tour by more than three million museum visitors in North America, rejects the "integration" theory and advances another. According to Meldgaard, the way of survival was the way of the Eskimo. When in Greenland, do as the aboriginal Greenlanders do. Meldgaard maintains that the European Greenlanders, after 500 years, still failed to do this — and he thinks he understands why.

"They were too withdrawn inside themselves, too tied to their northern European culture and unwilling to learn other ways," says the scientist who has been on, and led, field trips to the old settlements — especially in the Eskimo area — for ten summers since 1948. Jørgen Meldgaard wrote a history of the Viking settlement entitled Nordboerne i Grøndland — En vikingsbygds historie (Copenhagen: Munksgaards Forlag, 1965). The freckled Dane draws the orange flame of another match into his pipe bowl and in the hush of his museum surroundings, settles back to elaborate:

"Hunting seal like the Eskimos from kayaks, using the same tools, dressing and eating like them would have adapted them properly to their deteriorating environment. A good number then could have survived, I feel, but they didn't! And many Scandinavians today still have the same problem of isolation."

In his book In Northern Mists, written in 1911, Norway's celebrated arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen said he could not think so badly of his 12th to 15th century countrymen as to believe they were too stupid to learn that salvation lay in shedding the customs they had brought with them and adopting those of the new country. And Iceland's own leader of modern Arctic scientific expeditions, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, agreed a generation later that "The mediaeval Europeans in Greenland needed for survival only the good sense to realize that they ought to change the European for the Eskimo way of life."

Archaeologist Meldgaard in the last quarter century has found no evidence that they did. "We can show they didn't learn from each other primarily from archaeological material. In the Eskimo culture of 1400 to 1500 there are very few signs of contact, while on the Norsemen's side the artifacts, so far recovered, show virtually none."

From the time Eric arrived with the first colonists until the 1300s, the two cultures were separated by some of the world's roughest terrain. "In Greenland," according to Jens Rosing, a Greenlander artist and folklorist whose paternal great-grandmother was an Eskimo, "the Thule Eskimos migrated very slowly down from the north where they had been for hundreds of years." The skillfull hunters moved in small family groups, taking each step with great care, Rosing says, "because this was new territory for them. Not until these groups finally got together in large numbers were they in a position to attack."

In that sense and in many others, Rosing reflects, the Norse were luckier than the English settlers in the New World. Sir Walter Raleigh's "Lost Colony" of some 121 men, women and children left on Roanoke Island off North Carolina in 1587 had disappeared, like another 15 settlers before them, by the time their leader, John White, returned in 1590. All he found was the word "Croatoan" carved on a tree —perhaps the name of the Indians who, as it is reliably suggested, made short work of the intruders.

Two Eskimo arrowheads were dug up at the site of a burned-down farm in the Western Settlement, and the Greenlander says Eskimo folk legends and the Icelandic sagas support the contention that his great-grandmother's ancestors, around 1350, finished the work that a colder, drier climate, and an ill-adapted pastoral culture had begun. The more cautious scientist, Porgen Meldgaard claims the data are still lacking to make a hard case, but admits great partiality toward this viewpoint.

At any rate, Meldgaard and Rosing believe any exodus back east to Iceland or southeast to Europe or west across Davis Strait to North America unaided, was unlikely for either settlement because neither had vessels large enough and Greenland had no trees big enough to build them. In fact, the two Danes point out, the larger seaworthy Viking ships were no longer in use twenty years after Eric first settled there. (Old ships' planks, notes Rosing, served as benches in at least one eastern community sauna!) And centuries after the Viking era had passed, Rosing adds, farmers and fishermen who lived by the sea "don't suddenly decide to take off in inadequate little boats."

Such reasoning, of course, is an open invitation to rebuttal. However, even if some did manage to cross over to Baffin Island, Labrador Highland, Newfoundland or farther down the North American coast, one might guess they would have had as much trouble founding permanent settlements in Eskimo or Indian country as did their belligerent and unsuccessful Viking ancestors — or even as did Walter Raleigh's sad little band of foredoomed Englishmen. For the Eskimos were masters of the arrow, sling, hurling board and harpoon, highly effective repellents against the intrusion of the white man.

What (or who) else could have dis-patched the European Greenlanders?

Several things. Trade with Europe, from which the continental-conscious settlers obtained iron, sometimes timber, and luxury goods such as wine, resins, glassware, fell off when elephant ivory from Africa superseded the Greenland walrus tusk market. The settlements, a "free state" until 1261, came under the sovereignty of Norway's King Haakon IV, and paid taxes to the Crown in return for a guarantee of maritime connections.

Still, links with the Old World grew weaker. Rosing writes in his chapter on early Greenland history, Bogen om Grøndland (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 1970) that in 1348 King Magnus Smek forbade all foreign trade with his colonies.

Religious ties were disrupted. For nearly two decades, from 1349-1368, according to Rosing, there was no bishop in Greenland. In 1383 a ship arrived in Norway with news that Bishop Alf had died six years before. Other bishops were appointed, but apparently none reached Gardar, the farmstead-see in the Eastern Settlement.

Norway came under the Danish Crown in 1389. Pestilence and north German privateers laid waste to Bergen, and "Under Eric of Pommerania — in 1425 —the prohibition against private navigation in Greenland became more stringent," Rosing reports, adding that merchant contacts then were restricted to the king's personal ship.

"The last reliable written mention of the Norsemen in Greenland," writes Copenhagen archaeologist Knud J. Krogh, who has led the Danish National Museum excavations on their settlement sites, "concerns a wedding ceremony that was per-formed at Hvalsø church (Eastern Settlement) on the 16th of September 1408." Two priests confirm, in a letter the following year, that they had read the vows on three consecutive Sundays. "The same letter," Krogh adds, "provides another interesting piece of information: a great number of people were in the church. All seemed to be well, then, at the settlement."

Krogh's colleague, Jørgen Meldgaard, says that in 1410 a group of Icelanders are on record as having returned from Greenland. From all indications, he adds, ships visited and traded with the Eastern Settlement during the 1400s.

Bubonic plague (the "black death") or some other contagious or congenital disease cannot be excluded. Jens Rosing says the sagas tell of a pestilence which claimed many lives. However, according to Meldgaard, no mass graves or skeletal evidence have come to light to support this. Attacks by Scottish and other privateers, especially during the 15th century, represent another unconfirmed possibility.

The archaeologist also calls attention to a "thick layer of nun moths covering the last deposits from the Norse period" in the Western Settlement. The larvae, he notes, "will eat every blade of grass and every leaf." This happened about a decade ago when the moths attacked again in somewhat lesser force.

Whatever occurred, Meldgaard and Rosing refute the old argument that the colonists were starved out. The westerners' stables were intact to the end. "They had sheep and cows and a few goats as well," Rosing states. In their pantries, large tubular containers 1.60 meters in diameter and partly sunk into the ground, were found filled with large amounts of a junket-like milk product. Over 200 drowned mice were recovered from one such tub. "If the owner was there when they fell in," Meldgaard asks, "wouldn't he have plucked them out?"

Moreover, recent studies by Dr. J. Balslev Jcbrgensen, a Danish physician and physical anthropologist, reveal that the skeletons at Herjolfsnes farm down in the Eastern Settlement show no signs of degeneration. These disprove the thesis, advanced in 1926 by archaeologist Poul N6rlund, that malnutrition was at least partly responsible for the Norsemen's disappearance from Greenland. Even when the weather closed in, Meldgaard and Rosing maintain, the colonists still could meet their basic needs for food, shelter, warmth and clothing . . . though less and less efficiently.

But the fact that they clung to European culture patterns and were strongly in-fluenced by Middle Age fashions, reveals a psychological need that life, in an ever more isolated arctic habitat, may have been unable to satisfy. Indeed, the won-drous recovery from a Herjolfsnes (Eastern Settlement farmstead) churchyard of the only large collection of everyday mediaeval clothing ever found — some thirty well-preserved woolen garments including the latest continental fashions from 1400-1500, the long high Burgunder hood — was proof enough for Poul NOT¬lund and still is for Jens Rosing, among others, that there were some Norse in the Eastern Settlement in 1492 when Christopher Columbus's three little vessels were heading westward far to the south, and possibly some were still around up to about 1520. "Possibly," Meldgaard grants, "but not positively."

Only one basic factor is beyond dispute, so far as the arctic archaeologist is concerned, and that is the climate. Reports of drift ice in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland began to appear in the sagas circa 1200; a century later this apparently was extensive enough to seriously impede ocean traffic to Scandinavia's westernmost outpost.

One geographer writes that the settlements were "on the verge of the possible" — prompting another observer's rejoinder: "The climatic deterioration of late mediaeval times thrust them over the verge." In any event, by the 1300s the climate was both drier and colder, as confirmed on the southern site by the decreasing depths of graves, and by isotope studies, conducted in Copenhagen, of a 4,700-foot ice core taken straight through the polar ice cap by United States Army Engineers. These show evidence of regular swings between warm and cold 100,000 years back in time, and the findings are confirmed by other ice borings from different points on the Greenland cap.

There was less rainfall, Meldgaard amplifies, and this meant drier summers and a shorter grazing season. Toward the end, he conjectures, the "southerners" may not have been able to keep their herds out at all.

As average temperatures dipped, water cooled just enough, in all probability (the same thing has happened since), to send a lot of cod fish away from their coastal Greenland breeding grounds. And fishing, the scientist underscores, "was very important for the Norsemen."

Thus Eskimo living habits became ever more valuable while European pastoral (and fishing and hunting) patterns grew less functional. This tends to support Meldgaard's thesis — that if the Norse had "gone Eskimo," mingled, built kayaks and hunted seal from them, a fair number at least could have lived to tell the story. He finds it intriguing that north European (including English) colonizers tended to "stick to their own kind" while the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians and "sometimes the French" intermingled and often intermarried with native peoples in the areas they occupied.

Four centuries later, America's Admiral Robert E. Peary and Denmark's humanist-explorer Knud Rasmussen, among others, did adopt north Greenlander garb, the dog sledge, the igloo, and other local ways on their expeditions to and along the top of the globe. Rasmussen, at least, mingled closely with the Eskimos. After Denmark recolonized Greenland in 1721, the two races intermixed and it was the Eskimos who were absorbed. But skeletal remains from the old settlement days thus far show no signs of previous racial inter-breeding. "That closed-in tendency persists today in Scandinavia," Meldgaard muses, sucking more flame into his pipe bowl. "We are far less outgoing than our image!"

The Danish museum's Knud Krogh thinks the Eastern Settlement may have slowly emptied over a couple of generations, the young people perhaps leaving on eastbound ships when possible. Another idea worth considering, especially for the 14th century years of delcine, Meldgaard comments. But was this a major factor? The lack of any written records by the Norsemen makes him doubt it. Iceland's President Christian Eldjarn, himself an archaeologist, agrees with Meldgaard for the same reason. "In what was the entrance to an Eastern Settlement farm," the Dane says half in fun, "we found the remains of the 'last Norseman' — which means that not all migrated to more hospitable lands, if any did at all!"

More than 400 farms are known to have existed in the 12th century settlements, but barely fifteen have been excavated with great care. The most recent big find, in 1971, was another church in the Eastern Settlement. Last summer, the rejuvenated Greenland provincial Museum under newly-appointed chief curator Jens Rosing, and the Danish National Museum represented by curator J5rgen Meldgaard, initiated the "Inuit-Nordbo Unders6gelse, 1976" (Eskimo-Norse Investigation, 1976) in Ameralik Fjord near Godthaab, site of the Western Settlement.

Meldgaard calls the site unique because this settlement was out on open fjord-side terrain and everything is well preserved in the frozen earth. "There on the surface, perfectly visible, you have the ruins of buildings, fields, fences." Three previously untouched farms were sampled and the two-meter deep stratigraphy of old Norse refuse heaps was studied with the help of the expedition zoologists. The dwellings proper were not unearthed, but ‘’thousands and thousands" of animal bones recovered from the kitchen middens will permit an exact reconstruction of the Norsemen's diet, and changes in menu and habits, over many centuries.

While there were no surprises, the scientist said, certain factors were underscored by the new finds. A fair abundance of supplies "eliminates for certain the possibility that the Western Settlement was starved out." (Western and Eastern settlements faced two different situations.) Moreover, the investigators found "some signs of contact, but no signs of conflict" with the Eskimos. The two societies apparently saw little need to borrow from one another, although the Norse, it now seems, may have tried to imitate certain things Eskimo. "We found a few technical appliances, for example a small whalebone 'shoe' to be attached underneath a sledge runner to lessen friction over the ice. This was a traditional Eskimo way of doing it, although they used ivory or hard bone."

On the whole, however, there were remarkably few signs of Norse-Eskimo contact. What struck the archaeologist's eye, in the summer of 1976, was "a catastrophe pattern" of some sort. Even though no mass graves were located — and the Catholics of 500 years ago would have done everything possible to bury their dead — the black plague remains, in Meldgaard's mind, "a good possibility."

In seasons to come, the Godthaab-based Greenland Museum will assume more responsibility for the "Inuit-Nordbo" excavations, since native Greenlanders of part-Eskimo origin and Scandinavians together may bore in better and faster to the heart of the mystery. No international scientific meeting ever has been held to review the accumulating evidence — for instance, on whether the black death struck the Greenland colonies. Such a meeting, or series of meetings, coupled with more intensive field work, could explain one of the greatest disappearing acts of modern times.

Fradley Garner, a cultural anthropologist and free-lance writer residing in Denmark since 1960, is the international editor of the American monthly Environment.

Jens Rosing, chief curator of the Greenland Provincial Museum, has published a book of his watercolor reconstructions of the European Greenland settlements based on Norse sagas and eskimo legends.

Five eskimos keep Sandiness farm in the the Western Settlement under close surveillance (from a watercolor.)