The Greenlanders

by Jane Smiley

  “Few goods and bad news,” said Asgeir, “but I am content. That is enough for me, if there is nothing else.” The other men nodded and ate up the sourmilk and went off.

  The next day, all the Greenlanders flocked to Gardar to catch sight of the Norwegians and to trade the goods they had been hoarding for many years. The captain of the traders, a Bergen man named Thorleif, seemed to laugh all the time. He roared with laughter at the sight of the Greenlanders’ tradegoods: sealskins and walrus tusks and lengths of homespun fabric, piles of sheepskins and reindeer skins and long twisted narwhal tusks. He came near to folk and peered at them, then laughed. The sailors seemed too sober by comparison, and hardly had a word to say. They stared at the Greenlanders, in fact, and stood like dolts around the Gardar field, as if they had never seen a cathedral, or a byre, or a hall such as the great Gardar hall, or sheep and goats and cattle grazing about the hillsides, or horses in their pens, or the landing spot, or the fjord itself, or the high dark mountains that rose all about. When Ivar Bardarson brought out cheese and sourmilk and boiled reindeer meat and dried sealmeat—a feast, in the view of most of the Greenlanders—they gazed at that for a long time before they began to eat it.

  Asgeir said to Thorleif, “Are your men such farmboys that they’ve never seen wealth like this before?” and Gunnar thought Thorleif would choke from laughing at this joke.

  “Nay, Greenlander,” he finally replied. “It is only what they have heard about this place. Some folk say that all Greenlanders are a little bluish, which is why you are called Greenlanders. And other folk say that you live on a diet of ice and salt water, and such a diet sustains you through your being accustomed to it.”

  Now Asgeir grinned a wide grin, and said, “These things may be true of Herjolfsnes men, for they live far to the south and keep to themselves. You will have to see for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I will. Our voyage was not so short that I can return this summer, as I had hoped.” Thorleif looked about and laughed again. Asgeir said, “Most folk do not laugh at the prospect of a Greenland winter.”

  “But they may laugh at the prospect of telling tales upon it for the rest of their lives.”

  The trading went quickly, and there was little fighting. Farmers from as far away as Siglufjord and Alptafjord appeared with their goods, and Thorleif seemed always to have more to offer. The Gunnars Stead folk had much to trade, because Asgeir had raised and sheared many sheep and Hauk had been three times to the Northsetur. The large boat they brought to Gardar was full of walrus hide rope, vats of blubber, feathers, down, and hides. When Thorleif returned a second time to negotiate about the tusks, Asgeir made him sit down and brought out a round of cheese. “Now, shipmaster,” he said, “you must try this, if you think the Greenlanders live upon salt water and ice, and then you must tell me some news. We Greenlanders have been pushing these goods out of our way for ten years now. It is you who have the real wealth, and that is news of other places.”

  “That is such a coin as you might be sorry to receive, when you have heard what I have to tell.”

  “Nevertheless, you must tell it.”

  “Has a great pestilence not come to you here in Greenland?”

  “No more than usual, though not so many years ago bad conditions drove folk out of the western settlement, and they have settled among us here.”

  “The hand of God has not fallen heavily upon you?”

  “Shipmaster, the hand of God rests heavily upon the Greenlanders, and that is a fact.”

  Now the two were interrupted by an acquaintance of Asgeir’s, named Lavrans Kollgrimsson, of Hvalsey Fjord. Folk considered Lavrans rather foolish, but good-hearted, and Asgeir shared in this estimate. He offered Lavrans a bit of cheese.

  “Nay,” said Lavrans. “I am here about this bearskin business, and will stand before this Norwegian until he gives me what I desire.”

  Thorleif replied, “Old man, you are a fool. Folk tell me you had considerable trouble for this bearhide, and yet all you want for it is a length of red silk, no wheel hubs nor pitch nor iron goods.”

  “It would have been a great thing to send a live bear back to the king of Norway, as Greenlanders did in former days, but the animal died in my cowbyre, though not before it maimed a servant of mine. Nevertheless, I have my heart set on this bit of shining red, for no one in all of Greenland has such a possession. My wife is with child again, and it is no secret that she has lost the other three. Perhaps it will be good luck to have this banner from afar waving over her bedcloset when she comes to her time. I cannot be dissuaded.” And so Thorleif agreed to trade the silk, which he had brought for the see of Gardar, to Lavrans Kollgrimsson, a poor farmer from a poor district. Folk said Lavrans had gotten little for the trouble he had taken with the bear, but Lavrans, as always, paid no attention to the opinions of his neighbors. Now Osmund Thordarson, of Brattahlid, who also had a bearskin, and furthermore, a big one he had taken from the bear in the wilds, got two sacks of oatseed, one iron ax head, a vat of pitch, and a knife with a steel blade. But Osmund was known as a lucky man, who stepped forward and spoke up in all things. His mother’s brother, Gizur Gizursson, was the lawspeaker, but it was well known that Osmund knew the laws better than any man in Brattahlid district.

  What with the trading and bargaining, it was well toward nightfall before Thorleif had the breath to tell his news, and then it was wondrous news indeed. For the wrath of God had indeed descended upon the Norwegians, and not only upon them, but upon all others in the world as well, man and woman and child, rich and poor, country folk and town folk. It was such an ill that no one had ever seen the like of it: there were families, said Thorleif, who were healthy at dinner and died before daybreak, all together; there were whole districts, where every soul in every parish, excepting only one child or one old man, died within days. The streets of Bergen were less crowded during the sailing season, he said to Asgeir, who had been there, than they had once been in the dead of winter. Every sailor had lost parents or children or wife or brother; every sailor had seen the trains of penitents going from town to town, raising a great roar of prayers and alms-begging. Thorleif had seen the death ship itself, a little ship that floated into Bergen harbor from England—all of the sailors had the mark of death upon them, and then all were dead, and then folk in the town began to die off, and others fled, but the pestilence followed them into every valley and up every fjord. And there was more: poisoned wells and folk burned at the stake, priests found dead upon their altars and corpuses lying in the streets with no one to gather them into their graves, or to say a last prayer over them. Had none of this touched the Greenlanders? It had not. The sailors marveled at this, but in their turn, the Greenlanders were struck speechless and went off to their homes and considered these tidings for many days.

  Ivar Bardarson, who was a great friend of Asgeir, found Thorleif an entertaining companion, and brought him to Vatna Hverfi to visit with Asgeir rather often, and Asgeir answered Thorleif’s questions with glee. How was it the Greenlanders were so big and fat? (Plenty of sealmeat.) How did they do without bread? (Plenty of sealmeat.) Why did their houses have so many rooms and passageways? (The better to be warmed by seal oil lamps.) Why were the sheep and goats so big and the cows and horses so small? (Because they always had been so, since Erik the Red brought his shiploads of settlers from the west coast of Iceland.) What did the Greenlanders do for a bishop? (They waited, as they had been waiting for ten years, since the death of the last bishop, Arni.) Why did the Greenlanders have no ships? (The law of the king and a dearth of wood.) Nor did they have any cats, or chickens, or pigs, though some farmers had a fine breed of deerhound that Thorleif admired. The Greenlanders were so poor in weapons, how did they manage to hunt? (Even the best hunters, like Hauk Gunnarsson, used snares and traps more than spears or arrows.) Nor did they have any swords. Thorleif marveled. “There are other ways to settle disputes,” Asgeir told him, “and Greenlanders prefer the peaceable ones no more than anyone else.”
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  “And how,” Thorleif said more than once, “have you escaped this pestilence that haunts the rest of the world?” For this, Asgeir had no answer.

  Some sailors wintered in Vatna Hverfi district, and one of these, a boy named Skuli Gudmundsson, stayed at Gunnars Stead. He was very deft, and he always had a bit of wood in his hands, or some soapstone. He carved Margret a spindle whorl in the shape of a grinning face, which Ingrid said was sinful and idolatrous. For Asgeir he carved a set of chessmen. Even so, he had little to say of interest, for he had lived at his father’s farm near Bergen until the very day he went off with Thorleif on the ship to Greenland.

  It happened that the autumn of this year was an especially prosperous one for Asgeir. The grass stood high in the fields, there were many lambs to be slaughtered, Hauk brought back so much sealmeat and blubber from the autumn seal hunt that the drying racks bowed beneath it, and so Asgeir declared his intention to give a Yule feast for the priest Ivar Bardarson, Thorleif, and his cousin, Thorkel Gellison, who had just come into possession of his steading in the southern part of Vatna Hverfi district. And it was the case that Asgeir had given no feast at Gunnars Stead since his homecoming feast to celebrate his marriage to Helga Ingvadottir.

  One night, when Hauk and Ingrid and the other members of the household were sitting about, Asgeir went to the storeroom and came back with a vat of honey, which he had gotten from Thorleif in exchange for two walrus tusks. The others sat forward where they were dozing or occupying themselves with game counters, and Hauk said, “It seems to me that we are not about to dish this onto our sourmilk.”

  “Nay, indeed,” said Asgeir, and he mixed all of this honey, which was a great quantity, with some fresh water and with some measures full of rotten bilberries, and then he put it away.

  Ingrid looked at him, and said, “This mead-making will have ill results.”

  “It will be a good surprise for Ivar Bardarson,” replied Asgeir.

  “You think to impress the shipmaster with the acquirements of the Greenlanders. Greenlanders always run after folk from other lands as if they were saints in heaven.”

  “We know what is suitable to a feast, as others do, and if we may supply it, then it is pleasant to do so.”

  “At least we will see,” said Ingrid, “who has the head for drink and who does not.”

  Now Hauk spoke up and said, “Will the Ketils Stead folk be invited to the feast?”

  “If they are not,” replied Asgeir, “then Ketil will stand upon his fence and count our guests as they come into the steading, and in his opinion, he will be counting the heads of his enemies. It is better to have him inside the steading, where we can look upon him.” It was a fact that though Ketils Stead lay hard by Gunnars Stead, Asgeir and Ketil were ill-assorted neighbors, and always found much to disagree about.

  Hauk smiled, and Asgeir looked at him briefly, then said, “My brother, it seems to me that you are looking for a reason to absent yourself from the gathering, and seek the wastelands, even in the dead of winter.”

  “It is certain that there are not a few pursuits I prefer to sitting about the steading with a lot of folk, stifling from the lamps and the talk.”

  “Even so, you will not find a wife in the wastelands, unless she is a ghost or a snow demon.”

  Hauk made no reply, and Ingrid spoke up and said, “A wife would be ashamed to go with a man who wears feathered birdskins next to his flesh, as skraelings do.”

  “And an old woman should be ashamed,” said Asgeir, “to notice a young man’s undergarments,” and he laughed merrily, for he was much pleased at the prospect of his feast, and it seemed to him that he had repaid Ingrid handily for her prediction concerning the mead.

  Now the day of the feast came around, and many folk came from Gardar and other farmsteads to Gunnars Stead, and it was Margret’s task to help with the serving, but also, of course, to keep her eye on Gunnar. She sat him at a bench with Skuli and Jona Vigmundsdottir, the wife of Thorkel. Margret was a little shy of Jona, though Jona was but a few years older, in part because Jona was married, but largely because Jona had been born in the western settlement. Those folk had come in many small boats, hugging their sheep and goats to their breasts and sitting on what remained of their wealth, carrying tales of year after year of bad weather—rain and ice all winter, wind and wind-blown sand all summer, fights at the Northsetur hunting grounds between Norsemen with their axes and skraelings with their bows and arrows. They had arrived thin and remained thin, most of them, moving to vacated farms in the southern parts of the eastern settlement, or taking service in Brattahlid or at Gardar. Once, Asgeir said, it was the western settlement where the wealthy Greenlanders lived, but now not even the attractions of the Northsetur, where men went to hunt narwhal, polar bear, and walrus, could compensate for the dwindling of stock in the homefield. Men must eat mutton and cheese and drink milk. A diet of wild food makes them demons. Now only a few of the hardiest souls, like Hauk, went to the Northsetur, and most folk sought the eastern wastelands, though the game there was not as plentiful.

  Even the fact that Jona had been married at such an early age betrayed her as a westerner, for these farmers from the west were anxious to get their daughters off their hands, and find them places at other folks’ tables. Gunnar sat across from her, and Margret set a big basin of sourmilk and a small one of honey between them. Jona had one child, Skeggi, some two winters old, who sat beside her. Gunnar passed the time making faces at the child, and Skeggi, who was a bold, defiant boy, only laughed at whatever Gunnar attempted. Soon some young men from Gardar took places at the bench, and when Margret brought them basins to eat from, they said their names were Olaf Finnbogason and Halldor Karlson. Halldor was another of the boys from the ship, and he and Skuli were much pleased to see one another.

  Margret knew of Olaf, though she had never seen him. He was a boy from Brattahlid, whose father had died on a seal hunt one year, and his mother had sent him to Gardar to be made a priest. He was a quiet boy, thick and short of stature, about Margret’s own age. His spoon, which he took out of his spooncase rather furtively, was of Greenlandic horn, and a bit of the bowl was broken off, too. The sailor boys had wooden spoons, and Skuli’s, especially beautiful, was of carved Norwegian ashwood, decorated with clusters of grapes. Margret had admired it before. She went off to serve some other folk, then sat down beside Gunnar to eat her own meat.

  Skuli and Halldor had dipped portions of honey onto their sourmilk, and Halldor was saying, in a loud voice, “Who are these Greenlanders that they have never tasted honey before?” To Olaf, he said, “Just because of the color, you think it is horse piss?”

  Olaf sat silent, red-faced, and Halldor and Skuli began to laugh. Gunnar joined them. Margret spooned some of the honey onto her sourmilk, and looked encouragingly across at Olaf, but he ignored her. Just then there was a commotion, and Ivar Bardarson could be seen taking something from the sack he had brought. There were three of them, large and roundish, like stones, and about the color of stone, too. The guests muttered and laughed. Ivar Bardarson had brought bread, something most Greenlanders had never seen, for Greenlanders have neither grain nor yeast, and make do with dried sealmeat for their butter. Asgeir stood up with a shout, and called for his servant to bring in the vat. It was a great success. Ivar and Asgeir had each surprised the other, and the guests were more than eager. The Norwegians had tasted no drink in half a year. Some of the Greenlanders had never tasted drink in their lives, as there are no beehives, nor grapes, nor barley in Greenland and men can refresh themselves only with water and milk.

  When Margret returned to her place, Olaf was silent, and Jona was talking with Skuli about the voyage.

  “How long was your journey?” she said.

  “Six weeks, by Thorleif’s stick calendar.”

  “Is that long for such a journey?”

  “We were hungry enough when we got here.” Skuli and Halldor grinned.

  “Were there storms?”

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p; Halldor replied, “Thorleif says that there must be as many storms in every crossing as the ship can bear.” Suddenly, Olaf Finnbogason grabbed the basin of honey and poured its entire contents over his meat.

  “Ho! Greenlander!” shouted Halldor, loudly enough to attract the attention of folk at other benches. “You have doused your meat in the horse piss and left none for the rest of us!” And he brought his fist down on Olaf’s spoon, which lay between the two of them. The handle of the spoon broke off at the bowl. First Gunnar, then Skeggi, then even Jona began to laugh at Olaf’s embarrassment, for his face truly flushed purple to his hairline. Other folk smiled and called out. Margret stood up, but really she didn’t know what to do, because all of the Gunnars Stead spoons were being used for serving, and anyway, it was customary for a man to carry his own spoon about with him. Just then, Skuli Gudmundsson exclaimed, “Halldor, it is always the case that you make more trouble than pleasure,” and he reached his foot under the eating board and kicked Halldor backwards off the bench. Then, amidst the gasping and laughter of the guests, he pushed his ashwood spoon across to Olaf and said, “Have this one, Olaf Finnbogason. It is carved of sturdy wood, and will fit in your spooncase, to boot.” Olaf muttered his thanks, and stared at the elaborate spoon, but did not pick it up.

  The steading was in a great uproar. It seemed to Margret that everyone was shouting, and she was not surprised when Gunnar climbed upon her lap and nestled fearfully there. All about, men were calling out to one another, smiling, scowling, and pouring down the mead, which Margret herself had tasted and found too sweet. Asgeir’s face was as florid and shiny as anyone’s, and Margret could see him, thumping the shipmaster repeatedly on the back. Margret had never seen her father behave in this way. Margret hugged Gunnar tightly.