by Tony Horwitz
Eventually, Gudrid remarries, to a wealthy captain named Thorfinn Karlsefni, and they sail off to Vinland with sixty men, six women, and “all sorts of livestock with them, for they intended to settle in the country if they could.” Arriving at Leif’s old camp, they lived well from the land’s “natural bounty” of grapes, fish, game, and whale.
Then in summer, Skraelings appeared again. At first, natives were frightened off by the bellowing and snorting of a bull, a creature they’d never seen. But they returned bearing “fur pelts and sables and all kinds of skins,” which they offered in exchange for weapons. This prefigured hundreds of encounters between natives and newcomers in centuries to come. Though wary at first, and unable to understand each other, the two parties quickly found a common tongue in trade. And it rarely took long for natives to recognize the strangers’ most valuable commodity: their edged steel swords and, later, their guns.
Karlsefni forbade his men from trading swords, instead “having the women bring out milk and milk products.” So began another trend in relations between Europeans and natives: the lopsided deal, at least in the eyes of the newcomers. “The Skraelings carried their purchases away in their bellies, and left their packs and furs.”
Karlsefni returned the next spring to Greenland, his ships laden with grapevines and skins. His visit left one other legacy. While in Vinland, Karlsefni’s wife, Gudrid, gave birth. Almost six centuries would pass before the birth of the first English child in North America: Virginia Dare, a babe lavishly commemorated in marble, poetry, novels, and plays. Gudrid’s infant, like so many Norse, remains unheralded outside the sagas. His name, for the record, was Snorri.
AFTER BEDDING DOWN at the Vinland Motel, I went to see the small national park enclosing the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. Stopping first at the visitors center, I watched a film interview with the site’s discoverer, Helge Ingstad, who had recently died at the age of 101. The lean, handsome Norwegian spoke of his deep admiration for Vikings, whose “lust of adventure” drove them across the ocean in open boats to “find a new country.”
This romantic image stood in contrast to the humble Norse artifacts found at L’Anse and now on display at the visitors center: a rusted nail, a wooden skewer “used to hold sod in place on roofs,” a ringed bronze pin for fastening cloaks, and a spindle whorl used by Norse women when spinning thread. Small, round, and cut from soapstone, the whorl looked like a flattened doughnut.
An adjoining exhibit, about Norse life on both sides of the Atlantic, also punctured my stereotype of Vikings as marauding berserkers. Technically, the term “Viking” refers only to Norsemen who went on raids. Most Norse stayed home, farming peacefully in Scandinavia. Nor did the Greenland and Vinland settlers travel in sleek, sharp-prowed “dragon ships” like those used by warriors in northern European raids. Instead, they sailed a broad-beamed workhorse known as a knarr, designed for toting passengers, cargo, and farm animals across open ocean.
A longship of the Viking Age, from the Bayeux Tapestry, eleventh century
Finally, lest I imagine pagan orgies in honor of the sex goddess Freya, the exhibit reported that most of the Vinland settlers were recent converts to Christianity. The overall impression was of a homey and pious bunch of pioneers who spun wool, cut timber, and caught fish: an early, somewhat chillier version of Pilgrim Plymouth.
Outside the visitors center, a boardwalk led down a gentle slope, between a peat bog and a moss bog, to the archaeological site. I stopped first at a furnace and smithy, where Norsemen used local bog iron to smelt low-grade metal, the first industrial enterprise in America. All that remained was a faint disturbance of the earth, no more conspicuous than a gopher hole.
A short way on, I came to a plateau dotted with grassy craters: the heart of the Viking settlement. The depressions outlined seven halls and huts. Slight breaks in the shin-high walls revealed where doorways had been; tiny holes denoted fire pits. Circumnavigating the plateau several times, I tried to conjure Leif and his men arriving in America. The site occupied a headland beside a shallow bay, with a brook running into it, just as the sagas described. And here were the “large houses” the Norse wintered in. It all fit, except for the weather: forty-one degrees with blowing rain, not quite the temperate, vine-rich paradise of the sagas.
I glanced at my watch. It had taken me ten minutes to tour the remains of Norse America. The story here was bigger than the place.
Purists might complain, but having traveled this far, I was glad to find that Parks Canada had reconstructed several buildings as they would have appeared in A.D. 1000. Set away from the archaeological site, the buildings looked at a distance like low green mounds rising from the coastal plain. Up close, they resembled hobbit homes, with turf walls and sod roofs that drooped almost to the ground. Grass and wildflowers sprouted on top. Ducking through a low doorway, I felt as though I were plunging straight into the earth.
Darkness and warmth enveloped me as soon as I stepped inside. When my eyes adjusted, I saw dirt floor, timber framing, and wooden platforms draped in furs. A cauldron hung over a small fire. Beside the pot knelt a beautiful young woman with long blond hair, her rough brown cloak roped at the waist.
“Gothen dyen,” she said. “I did not see your knarr arrive.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said ‘Good day’ and asked after your vessel. Is it a large one?”
“Subcompact,” I replied. “And yours? When did it arrive?”
“Sir, I have been here a thousand years and all that time a slave.” She poked in the pot. “May I offer you some blubber?”
A gruff voice bellowed from the gloom at the other end of the longhouse. “Bera, you lazy thrall, bring me my mead!”
Bera sighed. “That is Bjorn, my master. A cruel and stupid man.” At this, a burly man appeared, with wild, shoulder-length locks and almost as much hair sprouting from his face. He wore a gray tunic over woolen trousers and goat-skin boots. “What’s this?” he growled, peering into the cauldron. “Swill, again?”
Bjorn turned and glared at me, gesturing at my pad and pen. “A true skald needs no such tools,” he said. Then he recited from a poem called the “Hávamál,” or “Sayings of the High One,” which offered homilies about proper behavior for Vikings. “Cattle die, kinsmen die, and you yourself must likewise die,” he boomed. “I know of only one thing that never dies: the reputation of each man dead.”
After fifteen minutes of this, he and Bera lapsed out of period character. Bjorn, in real life, was a former fisherman named Mike who had worked at the park for six years. At one time, becoming a Viking had seemed the coming thing in Newfoundland’s depressed north, where the closing of the exhausted cod fishery in the 1990s threw thousands out of work. The government sponsored a program to retrain some of the unemployed as Norse reenactors, in hopes the thousandth anniversary of Leif’s sail, in 2000, would spark a surge in tourism. But few travelers made it this far north and a number of laid-off fishermen now had the added distinction of being laid-off Vikings.
Bera was a former teacher, intrigued by Norse domestic life. She spent her days in the longhouse knitting, weaving, and cooking, though not the whale blubber she’d offered. The actual contents of her cauldron were beans, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and onion—cold-weather crops of the sort the Norse grew along the North Atlantic.
“We used to eat what we cooked,” Bjorn said. “But it’s gassy food, not the best thing when you’re shut in here all day.”
He showed me the rest of the longhouse, which was seventy-two feet long and nine feet wide, the exact dimensions of one of the building sites found outside. The interior details reproduced those of a Norse dwelling in Iceland that had been preserved under volcanic ash. Hanging on the wall was a pointed helmet with an iron nosepiece. This, too, was based on a historic model—and it was nothing like the horned helmets worn by cartoon Norse, or Minnesota Vikings’ fans. Like so much Viking lore, the horned helmet was a romantic fiction, created in the nineteenth
century by costume designers for Wagnerian operas.
While the longhouse’s props were museum grade, other aspects of Norse life had proved harder to re-create. “We imagine them as primitive compared to us,” Bjorn said, “except we can’t do basic things they did.” Venting the smoke from a fire, for instance. When the longhouse opened, Bjorn said, “Smoke was glued to the floor. We were coughing and couldn’t spend a large amount of time in here.”
The park installed roof hatches, but they caused sparks to rise, setting fire to the ceiling. Attempts at creating the right draft through doorways or the floor also failed. Finally, the park gave up on wood and installed propane jets and fake logs. However, once the real fire was gone, damp set in. The sheepskin sleeping sacks became soggy and bug-ridden and started to stink.
Still, longhouse life had its compensations. Whenever visitors entered, the cool and gloom drew them into a companionable circle around the fire. With no windows, and only the doorway giving a narrow glimpse of the harsh world outside, the longhouse seemed an earthen, fur-draped womb. Sprawled on a skin, listening to Bjorn tell tales from Norse mythology—dwarf craftsmen laboring underground; Valkyries scooping the souls of slain warriors from the battlefield; mighty Thor battling giants with his hammer—it seemed small wonder that the Norse created one of the world’s richest troves of spoken lore. What setting is more conducive to storytelling and fantastic imaginings than a long, dark winter spent gathered in a circle of firelit faces?
It also made sense that the Norse resisted Christianity longer than any other Europeans, clinging to paganism for a thousand years after Christ. Isolation was one reason for this. But in the cold, dark, watery, and violent world the Norse inhabited, trolls and thunder gods and feasts of boar and mead, served by maidens in the Hall of the Slain, must have been hard to exchange for a belief system bred of the Middle Eastern desert.
Bjorn, for one, hadn’t yet succumbed. “I got no time for Christians,” he growled to a family gathered by the fire. “They go to the next life and don’t take anything with them. Pagans, we go well prepared.”
He brought out a spear and a broad-bladed battle-ax. “If you get a good clean smack at a Christian with this,” he said, brandishing the ax at a wide-eyed boy, “he won’t suffer much. Not that we care, sir, when the killing time comes.” Then he showed how to thrust the spear, which Vikings twisted before pulling out. “There’s nothing like the smell of intestines flying in the air of a morning.”
When the visitors left, Bjorn and Bera settled into board games, another indoor pastime at which Norsemen excelled. Their favorite was hneftafl, a siegelike version of chess, in which one player places his king at the center and the other attacks. Bjorn was a master at this, but still a novice at another Norse pursuit. He’d spent weeks trying to carve a ship’s figurehead into a fierce dragon.
“It looks like a duck,” Bera said.
“No it doesn’t, it’s beastlike.” Bjorn slashed at the creature’s mouth. “See. A snarl.” Bera glanced up from her knitting again. “He’s going to be one ferocious duck.”
I loitered in the longhouse until the park closed. Bjorn stored the weapons and shoved his dragon-duck under a fur. “I’ll get the gas,” Bera said, reaching beneath a rock by the fire for the propane valve.
We emerged from the longhouse into the low light of a Newfoundland evening. Even so, the world seemed startlingly bright after hours in the sod enclosure. I felt pleasantly disoriented, the way one does after stepping out of a movie theater in the afternoon.
Bjorn smiled at me, familiar with the sensation. “Back to the future,” he said. “Not all it’s cracked up to be, eh?” Buttoning our coats, we walked through the peat bog, back to our knarrs in the parking lot.
THE SAGA OF the Greenlanders tells of a fourth and final voyage to Vinland. The earlier sails, by Leif, Thorvald, and Karlsefni, were evidently judged a success, as “the trip seemed to bring men both wealth and renown.” So Eirik the Red’s illegitimate daughter, the hot-tempered Freydis, decided to try her luck. She contracted with two brothers from Iceland to sail in convoy and share profits from the voyage. Each ship was to carry thirty “fighting men,” but “Freydis broke the agreement straight away,” stowing five extra warriors on her ship.
On reaching Leif’s camp, Freydis demanded that only her party occupy the existing homes. So the brothers built a separate longhouse. Their suggestion that the two groups join for winter “games and entertainment” only led to more ill will, “and each group kept to its own houses.”
Then, early one morning, Freydis went barefoot through the dew to ask one of the brothers to exchange ships with her, since his was larger and she wanted to go home. He agreeably assented. When she returned to bed, her cold feet woke her husband, Thorvard, who asked why she was wet. Freydis claimed she’d gone to ask about purchasing the brothers’ ship and been turned down, as well as assaulted. “But you’re such a coward that you will repay neither dishonor done to me nor to yourself,” she said. “Unless you avenge this, I will divorce you!”
Duly shamed, Thorvard roused his men and went to seize the brothers and their companions. When he led the bound captives outside, Freydis ordered them slain. But Thorvard’s men balked at killing the five women among them.
“Hand me an ax,” Freydis coolly demanded. She then dispatched the five women, and threatened to kill any of her party who told what she had done.
Freydis proved quite the Valkyrie in combat, too. During an exploratory foray, the Norse came under attack by a large force of Skraelings in canoes, wielding a strange weapon. From tall poles, they catapulted “a large round object, about the size of a sheep’s gut and black in color,” which “made a threatening noise when it landed.” These missiles so terrified the Norse that “their only thought was to flee.”
Seeing her kinsmen retreat, Freydis declared, “Had I a weapon I’m sure I could fight better than any of you.” Though heavily pregnant, she joined the battle, snatching up the sword of a slain Viking. “When the Skraelings came rushing toward her she pulled one of her breasts out of her bodice and slapped it with her sword. The Skraelings were terrified at the sight of this and fled back to their boats and hastened away.”
Though Freydis had warded off defeat, the settlers realized they couldn’t remain in Vinland. “Despite everything the land had to offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its prior inhabitants. They made ready to depart for their own country.”
The Norse, who had subdued so many European foes—Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Celts, Slavs—were driven off by Skraelings in skin canoes. Stray documents from as late as the mid-1300s mention expeditions to cut timber in Markland, which was probably today’s Labrador. But never again would Norsemen return to explore and settle Leif’s Land of Wine.
I SPENT FIVE days in L’Anse aux Meadows, trying to get to know its present-day inhabitants. Most descended from fishermen who had claimed small plots by the water in the nineteenth century. “I was born on the same spot I’m living,” Clayton Colbourne said, when I met him in his yard, painting the bottom of a boat. “My mom’s next door and my brother next to her.”
The Colbournes occupied Beak Point, beside the shallow inlet into which the Vikings sailed. The coast of Labrador was dimly visible, thirty miles away. Clayton, a lean, ruggedly handsome man of fifty-five, with a graying reddish beard, was one of eleven children, and all had helped their father fish from an early age. In the early 1960s, when the Ingstads arrived, there was no road into L’Anse, just a footpath to the next hamlet and a half-day boat ride to the nearest town, a trip only possible during the few warm months of the year.
“You can imagine what it was like when these strangers arrived from across the sea, like Vikings, and started digging around,” Clayton said. “We thought they were crazy fools.” He nonetheless joined the excavation team, and later became a guide at the park, where he’d worked for several decades. “Vikings are a big part of me now, a passion,” he said. “I like their
courage and tenacity, to be bold enough to think they could go in an open boat across the ocean and back.”
These qualities resonated in a seafaring community at the fringe of the continent. So did the Vikings’ resourcefulness. “They used whatever was at hand, like us,” Clayton said. “I cut my own lumber to make boats, do everything myself. You have to be tough and self-reliant.” He pointed to his woodpile: one hundred loads, dragged from the woods on a sled hitched to a snowmobile. “No one lives here for the climate,” he added dryly. The previous winter, the temperature had dipped to thirty below and a white-out trapped people indoors for three days.
Clayton walked me to the edge of the bay, which was only six feet deep, perfect for pulling up shallow-draft vessels like those used by Vikings and, later, by cod fishermen. The shore had ample grass for livestock; until recently, local families had grazed sheep, goats, and cows where the Vikings had a thousand years before. When Clayton was a boy, fish ran so thick in the brook by the Viking site that he could catch them with his hands.
“Everything the Vikings knew and needed was right here,” he said. “My dad liked to say, ‘Give a dog what he’s used to.’ Leif and them, they would have been out of place farther south somewhere.”
Still, this was by any standard an inhospitable place. When the Ingstads arrived, L’Anse had about a hundred inhabitants—just a bit more than the Norse population in A.D. 1000. “I guess that’s about all the environment here could sustain,” Clayton said.
Today, it sustained even less. With the Ingstads’ discovery, L’Anse had gained a paved road and a small tourist industry. But easier access to the outside world, and exposure to it through TV, hastened an exodus of young people. Only thirty-one villagers remained, many of them elderly. The saga of L’Anse aux Meadows was drawing to an end. “In another twenty years, what our families built here will fade away, like the Vikings’ settlement,” Clayton predicted.