CHAPTER 6

Eirik the Red’s Green Land

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.

—Ari the Learned, The Book of the Icelanders

 

Gudrid and her father sailed to Greenland in the year 1000. They carried along the posts and beams and wall panels and bench boards of their house at Hellisvellir, and most likely the timber frame from Arnarstapi, too, since Orm and his wife emigrated with them. The two households—around thirty people altogether—had their clothes chests and milk buckets and cooking pots and seal-oil lamps, their looms and tools and tack and weapons, their fishing boats and the best of their livestock. They carried food and fresh water for a voyage expected to last less than a week.

They were not so lucky. Following the gentler version of Gudrid’s story—the one that doesn’t end in shipwreck—they were blown about the North Atlantic all summer, hafvilla, “bewildered by the sea.” Half their people died, including Gudrid’s foster-parents, and the survivors suffered miserably from fear and exposure in the open boat before they reached the southernmost tip of Greenland, just before winter, and found shelter with Eirik the Red’s cousin.

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The day’s milk was filtered through a mesh strainer, knotted up from the coarse hairs of cows’ tails. Then it was left in a shallow, square wooden trough for thirty-six hours, until the cream collected on top. By laying an arm on one lip of the trough, and tilting the trough, Gudrid could quickly skim off the cream—in Icelandic, skim milk is still called undanrenna, what “runs under” the arm. The cream was churned into butter, kneaded into a block, squeezed to get every last bit of buttermilk out of it, and stored in a box. Unsalted, it would sour, but keep for decades. Later landowners filled their treasuries with butter; in the 1500s, an Icelandic bishop amassed twenty-five tons of it. In Ireland a common archaeological find is a barrel of butter dug up from a bog; the Norse also stored butter this way. Bog-butter grows hard, gray, and cheeselike, but stays edible: The specimens in the Irish National Museum, dated to the seventeenth century, are still “quite free from putrefaction.”

From the skim milk, Gudrid would have made cheese and skyr. To make skyr, she heated the milk until a skin formed, then cooled it to body temperature and added a bacterial culture from the previous day’s skyr, along with rennet, an enzyme from the dried, crumbled stomach of a calf a few days old. If the skyr tub was kept warm, the skyr would curdle by morning. Then it was sieved through cheesecloth, the curds (the skyr) and the liquid whey kept in separate wooden barrels to ferment. Once the whey was sour enough, it could be used to pickle blood sausages and other delicacies like rams’ testicles; mixed with water, it made a healthy drink, especially when the whey was made from sheep’s milk, which has three times the vitamin C of cows’ milk. A diet of fish and sheep’s whey will keep a worker healthy “for a long period of time,” an Icelandic writer in the 1800s noted, whereas people drinking water with their fish soon lost their strength.

Making cheese instead of skyr called for more rennet and none of the bacterial culture. Once hard, cheeses were stored in a cool, damp larder and washed frequently to keep down the mold. Or they could be carried up to a convenient snowbank and put on ice.

The essential tool for dairying, as important as an iron sickle blade to haymaking, is a watertight bucket. In the National Museum of Greenland—a series of handsome wooden warehouses clustered by the old harbor in Nuuk—Georg Nyegaard took me to the conservator’s workshop to see the plethora of wooden artifacts that had been retrieved from the Farm Beneath the Sand. Most were splintered bits of what he called “coopered vessels”—buckets and barrels, no doubt including milking pails, skyr tubs, whey barrels (large enough for a man to hide in), cheese forms, and butter boxes.

Wearing white cotton gloves, Georg opened a plastic bag and gently removed two wooden plates, one round, one oval, each hardly longer than my palm. “These are bottom disks,” he said. “They put staves all around here and tied them together with baleen.”

Opening another bag, he drew out a thin board about ten inches long. “Here is a very fine piece of a stave, with a groove at the bottom for the disk.” There was a matching groove near the top, but Georg couldn’t explain its purpose. “There are so many objects like this one that we don’t know the function of. So many strange shapes.”

The wood, he explained, was driftwood: It bore the telltale signs of shipworm. Driftwood comes to Greenland with the drift ice, “whole trees, roots and all,” as the missionary Otho Fabricius wrote in 1807. The trees are knocked from the wooded banks of great rivers in Siberia when the ice breaks up in spring, and float north to the pack ice of the Polar Sea, in which they travel, soaked and ground, stripped of bark and branches, for five to twenty years, following the current down the east coast of Greenland and around the tip north as far as Nuuk. Wood is tossed ashore in West Greenland at a rate of eighty to 120 cords a year, and most of it, according to Fabricius, is “crooked, twisted, or full of cracks and wormholes, or rotten.” Another author describes it as “intractable” and requiring “much ingenuity” to carve: “The wood has lost most of its original flexibility. It feels ‘dead.’” Very rarely is there a workable log, but it was all the Vikings had besides head-high birches and spindly willows and juniper.

Upstairs in the magazine, the main storage room, Georg opened box after box. An iron knife, whetted to a sliver. A polar bear tooth. A horn spoon. A partial basket made of willow roots, twined in a spiral. Beads of soapstone and walrus tusk. A small soapstone pot. A large soapstone basin for watering cows. A wooden ladle, broken centuries ago and stitched together with roots. A whalebone butter paddle.

We peered at scraps of a dark, woven cloth through the clear lid of a plastic box. “I remember this weaving room we excavated,” Georg said. “There were so many kinds of textiles. There were spindle whorls in different shapes made of soapstone—it’s a very common find. You see a lot of implements committed to this industry. You get an impression they spent a lot of time at it.”

He put the box back and opened one next to it. “Here’s one of the most beautiful objects to find,” Georg said, “because you get so close to history. It’s a last for a shoe.” He took out of the box a smooth, dark foot carved of wood and cradled it in both hands. “When you take such a piece from the soil, you feel so close to the person. It’s made for one person’s feet.

“These people were very busy,” he said as we left the magazine. “During the summer they had a lot of activities going on. The economy was quite complex. They recognized themselves as farmers, but when you look at the bones, a major part of the bones were seal and reindeer bones, so they were hunters, too.”

 

Looking at the bones dug up before the Farm Beneath the Sand was found, archaeologists created a story of this economy, a story whose ulterior goal was to explain the puzzle that captivates most people about Viking Greenland: Why, after surviving over four hundred years, did its people disappear without a trace? Jared Diamond draws on this work in his popular book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, arguing 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 pigs found abundant nuts to eat in Norway’s forests, and 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 or virtually eliminated.” 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 altogether 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.

Seal bones are found in significant numbers in late-Norse middens in Greenland, but most are from harp seals. A migratory carnivore, the harp seal followed the capelin into the fjords for a few weeks in the spring, and the sand eels in the fall. The spring run was particularly timely, coming when the stored milk products were running out.

Diamond argues that only people at “small poor farms” ate seal meat—that it was famine food. In one garbage heap from the last days of occupation at a small farm on the Lysufjord, 70 percent of the bones were seal. People at the large, upper-class Sandnes, next door, preferred venison, if they couldn’t get pork or beef. But as the climate worsened and the fragile vegetation was destroyed by overgrazing, they failed to see that seal or fish were their only options. Rather than change their eating habits—and adapt to their environment, the way the Inuit did—the Vikings starved. Diamond doesn’t blame them. He had forced himself to taste seal meat while he was in Greenland, and had not “gotten beyond the second bite.”

Despite the attractive environmental message in Diamond’s Collapse, I have problems accepting this model of the Viking economy. How do we know that Vikings prized pork and despised goat meat? Our main source for Viking culinary practices, other than scattered references to food in the sagas, is the volume of Old Norse mythology written in the early 1200s by the chieftain Snorri Sturluson. In Snorri’s Edda, the cow is given 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. The other pig mentioned in the myths is not eaten, but ridden—by the fertility god Frey. 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. Noticeably missing from the gods’ meals are sheep.

Jette Arneborg, an archaeologist at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, pointed out to me the 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—still a common practice in northern Norway in the nineteenth century. Bones were often burned, although they gave off a bitter, foul-smelling smoke. In profligate households, they were tossed to the dogs or simply left on the floor.

Archaeologists have long bemoaned the “fetid,” “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,” as one excavator writes, others the detritus of whittling. On the floor of the Farm Beneath the Sand, archaeologists even found fish bones.

Archaeologists have been agonizing over Greenland’s missing fish bones for over thirty years. Whereas piles of fish bones are found on Viking sites in Iceland, they are “extremely rare,” “nearly absent” from the bone collections in Greenland.

Jared Diamond thinks they should stop worrying about it. He writes in Collapse, “I prefer instead to take the facts at face value: Even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.” His explanation draws on his own painful reaction to a batch of spoiled shrimp. “Perhaps Eirik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an equally awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is for you, and how we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desperate grubby ichthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.”

“That’s not how it was!” laughed Jette Arneborg, when I relayed Diamond’s theory to her. In her cluttered office at the Danish National Museum, a converted Renaissance palace in downtown Copenhagen, Jette seemed worlds away from her job as codirector of the dig at the Farm Beneath the Sand. She had already described her days there: 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: It was very fast, very deep, she had told me. If you fell into it, you wouldn’t survive. 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.” The Farm Beneath the Sand is the only house from Gudrid’s time in Greenland that has ever been fully excavated. “For the rest of the farms,” Jette said, “we have excavated only the top part,” the part from the 1300s. She explained, “These farms are ancient monuments. The walls are still standing. They are huge and marvelous. You can’t spoil them by digging under them. But here we could, because the river was taking it all away.”

And when they did, they found 24,643 bone fragments inside the house. Inge Bodker Enghoff of the University of Copenhagen’s Zoological Museum could identify 8,250 of them, representing four hundred years of occupation. Of these, 166 bones were fish bones—the largest collection of fish bones found at any Greenland Norse farm. (By comparison, Enghoff identified only one pig bone.) Because of the permafrost and slightly acidic soil, most bones were very well preserved, she writes, “with the exception of the fish bones.” Why only the fish bones decayed she did not know, but their poor state of preservation led her to conclude that “fishing may have played a larger role than the sheer number of fish bones indicates.”

The Norse name for the fjord close to the Farm Beneath the Sand is, after all, Cod Fjord. And the best salmon river in Greenland is a few hours away by horseback. Said Jette, “They fished. We have written sources talking about the good fishing spots. They knew where to catch halibut. There’s salmon and a lot of trout. They lived so close to the water, the trout jumped out of the lake at them.” Exactly that happened to C. L. Vebaek in 1949, as he excavated a Norse farm by a lake in South Greenland. “One day,” he writes, “one of these awful nigeqs [southeasterly gales] arose (lasting three days), and it blew so much of the water from the lake situated to the east that the water level suddenly fell considerably. As a result, nearly all the water in the river disappeared, and a large number of salmon (as far as I remember more than a hundred) were stranded in small pools—you could just walk out and collect the fish with your hands!”

Counting animal bones can’t tell us that Vikings in Iceland ate fish and their cousins in Greenland didn’t. We can’t “take the facts at face value,” as Diamond argues; archaeology is not so precise a science. But it is clear that the Greenlanders didn’t catch fish on the same scale. Icelanders bartered with it: A farmer with too much skyr could strap two bull’s-hide bags of it onto a horse, travel down to the coast, and purchase a horseload of dried fish. Clear signs of eleventh-century fish-processing sites on the seashore, as well as quantities of headless fish found high in inland farms, prove that some sort of fish business was going on in Iceland in Viking times. Still today, the way to dry fish is to gut it, behead it, split it open, and hang it on a rack by the sea, where the salt air permeates it. Light and long lasting, dried, headless fish travel well and make an excellent commodity. In Greenland, the similar farm-to-farm trade was between reindeer and seal. Bones of cheap, plentiful seal are found far from the sea, while the best cuts of reindeer seem to have traveled down from the highlands, where they were hunted, to the chieftains’ farms.

 

Jared Diamond cites another line of reasoning to prove that the Vikings’ dependence on livestock caused their culture to collapse: Jette Arneborg’s own study of human bones, published in the journal Radiocarbon in 1999.

In 1961 workers digging the foundation for a school dormitory near Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid discovered a tiny church surrounded by a circular graveyard. The Saga of Eirik the Red speaks of such a church. In the year 999 Leif Eiriksson abandoned pregnant Thorgunna in the Hebrides and sailed to Norway to meet the king, Olaf Tryggvason. King Olaf was at the time strenuously urging Iceland to become Christian—so strenuously that he impounded all the Icelandic ships and imprisoned all the Icelandic men who had visited Norway that year, including Kjartan and Bolli, the lovers of Gudrun the Fair. King Olaf’s arm-twisting led the Icelandic chieftains to declare Christianity the official state religion the next summer. Through Leif Eiriksson, Greenland followed suit: Leif returned home from his visit to the king with a priest, timber to build a church, and a vow to do the king’s saintly will. His mother, Thjodhild, converted instantly and had the chapel built, over her husband’s objections: “As a Christian, Thjodhild refused to sleep with Eirik the Red. This annoyed him greatly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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