The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Nothing forced the Greenlanders to look further west; they did so by accident. The sagas start to disagree at this point about who first went further. It might have been a trader called Bjarni who got lost in north winds and thick fog until he didn’t know where he was but thought he was probably not off Greenland any more. It may have been Leif, son of Erik the Red, who makes a weightier story. He was commissioned, one saga says, to bring Christianity to Greenland. He had low expectations; he did not expect his message to be welcome. The Norse were turning Christian almost everywhere, but in Greenland, in the hard winters when hunters didn’t always return from the hunt and those who came back caught very little, it was still quite usual to invite a ‘little prophetess’ to tell the future and try magic to improve it. She’d come in black, jewels down her front, with white gloves of catskin. She sat on a high chair stuffed with chicken feathers, she fed on a diet of hearts and she listened to the magic songs which even good Christians knew from their childhood. She took her time until she could hear, she said, the spirits summoned by the songs.

  On his voyage out from Norway to Greenland, Leif was blown off course, tossed about at sea for many days. When navigation depended on a clear view of the sun and stars it was easy to be entirely lost, terrifyingly alone on the blank ocean. Leif found himself running along the shoreline of a land that should not have been there, territory beyond the waters at the edge of the world: a land with forest, with something like self-sown wheat, probably wild rye, and grapevines. When he eventually made it to Greenland, he was eager to return to this unknown place. His father, Erik the Red, meant to go with him as the official leader of the band, but he fell off his horse on the way to the boat, hurt his shoulder and broke his ribs. He was lucky. Leif’s ships went wildly off course again, saw Ireland, saw Iceland and tacked back and forth all summer. They barely made it back home before winter began.

  On the next voyage three ships set out, with 140 men, the saga says, and most of them from Greenland. This time, the Greenlanders landed on the unknown coast. They found a land of ice, flat like a stone, which did not seem hopeful, so they sailed south, where a forest rose gently up from white beaches. After a few more days at sea there was an island, which sheltered an inlet. There were shallows, there were salmon larger than they had ever seen, the winters were so mild that cattle could feed outside on the grass, which was never frosted and never withered, and there were butternuts, a kind of walnut the Norsemen could not have known before. The crews dug trenches in the sand and, in the morning, found them full of flounders. There were so many deer that the hill where they slept looked like a dunghill. There was more. The German slave Tyrkir, who had been like a foster-father to Leif, went missing one evening, and Leif was concerned; he took twelve men and went out to look for him. They met Tyrkir coming back and looking distinctly pleased. Leif asked why he was so late; Tyrkir said he’d gone only a little further than the others, but he had found something: grapevines and grapes. Leif asked if he could be sure, and Tyrkir said he was certain; ‘where I was born there was no lack of grapevines and grapes’.

  The sagas sometimes tell the same story with different characters, or tell the same story twice, or contradict each other: if listeners and readers want a history, they have to put it together for themselves. In another version, a matched pair of Scottish slaves, a man called Haki and a woman called Hekja, faster than any deer, were sent to run south down the shore and come back within three days; which they did, with the grapes they had found and a kind of wheat. The wheat was important, since Greenlanders had to bring grain from Norway, but the great constant in this story is the wild vines that climbed through the trees. Grapes meant wine, and wine was a treasure that was harder to find than gold. Wine didn’t last well, was not yet a refined and crafted drink, but it was the drink of chieftains; the Viking chief of Frisia, you remember, was resentful at being left in charge of a land without wine. If Leif Eriksson had wine, he could build prestige and even power in Greenland by sharing it. Naturally, he called the new land after the vines: Vinland. He was in America.

  This is where the saga story turns stranger. There are no dragons, but there is a one-legged monster with a fat belly. A woman, dark like the local people, appears suddenly to a Norse woman called Gudrid and says her name is the same: Gudrid. There is trouble, and she vanishes just like a spirit. There is even a proper, murderous villainess: schemer, cheat and axe murderer, and we shall come to her. Stranger than all this, though, is a sense that the Norse somehow tipped forward in time. They lived through the same threats and tensions that would wreck the first English colony in Virginia six hundred years later, or make life hard for the Dutch in New Amsterdam. They had to manage the edgy, sometimes bloody connections with the peoples living where the Europeans might want to live; the calculations of what they would risk in order to stay; and the internal rivalries that broke up expeditions which seemed to have such clear purpose at the start. There was also, as usual, sex.

  These stories need a grounding in reality, if we are to understand them, and there is one. At L’Anse aux Meadows on the north edge of Newfoundland there are the physical remains of a camp that could hold a hundred people: a gateway42 to Vinland and a careful foothold on the land. It lies close to the ocean, which is where the Norse always felt most easy, and it guards a broad inlet that leads south to the wheat and the grapes on the St Lawrence River. The building required long and hard work: eighty-six trees cut and shaped for the three halls alone, and fifteen hundred cubic metres of sod for the walls. The style of those halls dates the camp to the turn of the eleventh century, just as the sagas do, and the style is exactly what you would expect from Icelanders, exactly what they built at first in Greenland, with no stone foundations, with sod walls inside the stone walls, fireplaces and sunken huts. The buildings had proper roofs, so they were meant to go through winter; and in fact the sailing season from Greenland to the coast of America was so short that trying to get there and back in a single summer would leave hardly enough time for a serious look at the land. The stores are unusually large, as though the Norse expected to bring everything they needed or else ship out rich quantities of goods. The fact that there are three halls suggests the camp may have been organized for the crews of three ships, just as the saga says; and whoever lived there must have made serious journeys south because we know they ate butternuts, which are unknown in Newfoundland but grow where the wild grapes grow further south. So Greenlanders did come in large numbers to Vinland to test out the ground, and they had a long habit of going west. Given the numbers of human beings on Greenland at the time – no more than five hundred – a camp with room to sleep a hundred women and men was a work that implies a big decision: a plan to open a new world.

  And yet the Greenlanders were scouting, not settling, because they had no byres or pens to protect their animals as breeding stock for the future; they brought only what they needed for milk and meat. They would expect to spend years exploring before settling; their fathers had examined Iceland for years before making homes there, and Erik the Red spent three winters exploring Greenland before he settled. The sagas tell the story of the Norsemen in Vinland over three years, too, and the physical remains confirm that they stayed no more than ten years. They had with them what they needed to maintain ships, catch fish and keep warm in winter. They had a simple iron smelter, and supplies of iron ore nearby, to make nails to mend their ships; they worked wood, and the remains are still in the ground; they kept fist-sized stones to sink fishing nets; their halls had fireplaces. When they left, it was an orderly planned retreat; they left behind mostly broken things.

  So why did this America prove to be too far? Probably the first explorers always meant to return to Greenland from this voyage, but the whole point of their expedition was to think about settling later in Vinland, which did not happen. L’Anse aux Meadows itself was a site exposed to the brute Atlantic in winter, a site much like Greenland or even Iceland, with fish and forests full of softwood and not much
else; but the pull of the place was the Vinland of stories, with grapes and wheat and the forests full of useful hardwoods. The trouble was that to get those good things meant going south and confronting two enemies: the local people and themselves.

  The locals came visiting, short men, dark with tangled hair and broad cheeks and features that the Norse found threatening, huge eyes to scan the newcomers; and when they’d looked they went away in their hide-covered canoes. The next time, they came in such numbers that the water looked as though it was scattered with coals. They wanted to trade skins and furs for red cloth and swords and spears, but the Norse had no weapons to spare; and the locals’ bargaining style was unexpected. When the red cloth was running out, they just accepted less and less for each skin, as though the point was to make an exchange not insist on a value. They took milk as well.

  In the middle of the trading, the one bull the Norsemen owned came charging out of the woods, bellowing and snorting, and the locals took to their boats in panic and stayed away for three weeks. This time, they came back like an army: a steady stream of boats full of men who brandished poles and shrieked alarmingly. The Norsemen assumed they were at war and went out fighting until a large black object, the size of a sheep’s gut, landed noisily on the beach among them: a stone, most likely, from a catapult. If weapons were going to rain down, the Norse wanted to move upriver and fight in just one direction, with a cliff to protect their backs. They began a very quick retreat.

  A woman called Freydis came out of the camp and told the men they ought to be able to kill off the natives like sheep. She said she’d fight better than any of them if she only had a weapon, and she wanted to go upriver with them even though she was pregnant. She was moving so slowly that the natives caught up with her by the corpse of a Norseman called Thorbrand. Surrounded, Freydis took up the dead man’s sword, slapped her bare breast against it and the locals ran away in terror, or so the saga says; she must have seemed like a spirit, violent, pregnant and appalling. The Norsemen came back and congratulated her on, of all things, her luck.

  Something changed during this battle: an end to any sense of ease, the realization that ‘despite everything the land had to offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its inhabitants,’ the saga says. The locals moved in such curious ways, sometimes a whole flotilla of canoes going south or going north on puzzling migrations, sometimes bursting out of the dense forest. They didn’t make sense. They could kill, but they did not understand iron, it seemed, because when they picked up an axe they tested it on wood, and then on stone, and then threw it away because it broke on stone and must be useless. They were an unsettling presence for would-be settlers, especially women and men who had been used to moving into empty places for a century and a half. After the fighting, the saga says, the Norse ‘made ready to depart for their own country’.43

  Freydis in Erik the Red’s Saga is a kind of heroine. In the Saga of the Greenlanders she is someone quite different: a horror. She’s a bully of a woman, married to a no-account man and strictly for his money; but she was the bastard daughter of Erik the Red, which made her half-sister to Leif Eriksson. She planned her own voyage to this western land called Vinland, and she went to ask Erik for his old houses there; he wouldn’t give them to her but said that she could use them. She found two brothers with a ship and offered a deal: they would all sail out to Vinland and they’d divide whatever they made and whatever they found. From the very start she and her husband meant to cheat: they took extra fighting men. When she landed, just a little after the brothers, she found them already settled in the houses and she asked them what they were doing. They said they thought she’d meant to keep her word about sharing things. Freydis told them Erik had offered the houses to her, not them.

  Her partners went off and built themselves a new longhouse. When winter came, the two parties tried to waste their time with chess and other board games, with any kind of amusement to get through the dead days, but their mutual distrust and dislike stopped all that. One morning Freydis went down to the brothers’ hall and stood silent for a while in the doorway. The brothers asked what she was doing there. They said they liked the land well enough but they didn’t understand why there had to be such tension between them for no reason at all. She asked if they would exchange ships with her because she wanted to leave, and the brothers agreed, anything for a more quiet life. She then went back to her husband, climbed into bed and her wet, cold feet woke him up. She told him the brothers had refused her offer, had even struck and hurt her; it was his duty to protect his woman against the single men.44 She said he was a coward and she was far from home and if he didn’t avenge her, she would divorce him.

  The no-account husband called up his men and went down to the brothers’ longhouse while they were still asleep. His men bound the brothers and their crew and took them outside. Freydis gave the orders now: she ordered death. The brothers’ women stood among the bodies and none of her husband’s crew would kill them. ‘Hand me an axe,’ Freydis said. She told her own men that if they were lucky enough to get back to Greenland, they should say the brothers’ crew had all decided to stay behind. She said if they told a different story, she would make sure they were killed.45

  The stories can’t be mashed together to make history, but they may help explain what happened in Vinland. For a start, there must have been some talk of settlement – of ‘staying behind’ in Vinland – or else Freydis could never have made the men tell such a lie. The sagas produce a dramatic explanation for why it did not happen. The simple fact that the Norsemen were unnerved by the local people would not do because heroes are never unnerved; but they were certainly disturbed to meet peoples they didn’t understand and couldn’t predict, so different they didn’t know how to classify them. They rescued two local boys from a rock at one point, and thought they might be ‘trolls’. They taught them to talk, or so they thought, after which they never lacked for fish; so the locals might count as animals with no language. They also had very strong magic: after Freydis came back from scaring off the natives, the men came to think that the whole hostile army Freydis scattered was an illusion. They found it very difficult to live with magic and illusion, the sense of being out of their own world.

  The camp evidently broke into factions, ship by ship, crew by crew; this was not an expedition sure of what it wanted and what it ought to do. The fact that the sagas show the factions trying to work together means they started by feeling truly separate, little nations inside a small community; and in the end they failed to get together. The Norse, alarmed by an incomprehensible enemy outside, managed to find even more enemies inside.

  The oddity is that a woman takes the blame for all this. It is odd because it is taken for granted at first that Freydis has the right background to commission ships and plan an expedition and even organize the use of a camp already built in Vinland. Other women had done that sort of thing before; Erik the Red’s Saga mentions Aud the Deep-Minded, widow of a king of Dublin, who secretly built a ship in the forests of Caithness and sailed out by way of the Orkneys to Iceland with twenty free-born men and many bondsmen who had been taken prisoner by the Vikings. Aud owned the ship, organized the crew, and led her free men even into Christianity; she stands as mother and a godmother to Iceland. The saga writers respected what a woman could do.

  Freydis might be wicked, she might have magic to see off the natives’ magic, but more than anything she stands for the other great anxiety: the disruptive power of sex. Some women came to Vinland, as she did, with their husbands, but most men travelled without wives, and they were away three years. A woman like Freydis, men feared, could stir up her husband’s jealousy and get men killed, could play off the married faction against the single men; that alone gave her a disconcerting power. Even if she turned out to be an axe murderer, and she did, the situation would always make her desirable and essential; and even without a strong woman like Freydis, the facts of the situation were disruptive. The saga says flatly:
‘Many quarrels arose, as the men who had no wives sought to take those of the married men.’46

  Disagreements, ill-feeling, living together closely for three long years without a break and without the comfort of going home – all kept the camp edgy. There were times of hunger when a man might go almost mad, as Thorhall did: found on the edge of a cliff, mumbling and staring and scratching and pinching himself, trying to make sure he had found the right way to pray to a god who would send them something to eat. Men asked him what he was doing. He said it made no difference and that he’d got along without their advice for most of his life. The Norse were used to organized shipping in the Greenland summers, to sizeable stores, and above all to a settled pattern of loyalty and duty that kept a person fed, warmed and more or less safe. They had never before met weird peoples who talked like beasts but could kill, who blocked their way to what the Norse really wanted from Vinland.

  They began to think they might have gone too far.

  Being a Viking was a failing trade. In twelfth-century Orkney, Svein Asleifarson47 had family estates and eighty followers spending the winter in his huge hall; he was ‘the greatest man the western world has ever seen in ancient or modern times’, the Orkneyinga Saga says, ‘apart from those of higher rank than himself’. Such greatness cost a great deal to maintain; followers want meat, drink and money. So when he had carefully supervised the springtime sowing, he went off plundering in the Hebrides or in Ireland, which he called his ‘spring trip’. He came back just before mid-summer and stayed until the fields had been reaped and the grain was safely stored, and then he went off on his ‘autumn trip’ and stayed away as a marauder until the first month of winter was ended. He had his seasons as a farmer, his seasons as a Viking.

  He took five big ships on a good trip, ships fitted out for rowing to make them reliable and manoeuvrable. They tackled the Hebrides first, but the trouble with being a seasonal raider is that people know in which season they ought to bury everything valuable. The islanders did just that, and the Isle of Man was not much better. Svein evidently did not worry that he was raiding the settlements of men like him: from Norway, generations back.