The Vikings
Page 13
Leif next put his ship’s boat ashore at the place where Bjarni had refused to stop, despite the persistence of his crew. “This country,” relates a saga, “was level and wooded with broad white beaches wherever they went and a gently sloping shoreline.” The Norsemen, accustomed both in Scandinavia and in the western settlements to cramped and rocky shores, called these beaches Wonder Strands. Behind the beaches was another marvel: vast stands of gigantic trees tall and sturdy enough to make a timber-poor Greenlander’s heart soar. The physical description given in the sagas corresponds to a thirty-mile stretch of fine beaches backed by spruce woodlands along the Labrador coast in the vicinity of Cape Porcupine. Leif named it Markland, or Land of Forests.
Enticing though Markland must have been, Leif was determined to explore further. Relates a saga: “After sailing two doegr, they sighted another shore and landed on an island to the north of the mainland.” In this case, a doegr, a measure of both time and distance, probably meant a two-day journey of about 165 miles. The island on which they landed was doubtless Belle Isle, about fifteen miles north of Newfoundland and northeast of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. There, Leif and his men found the grass heavy with dew, which they collected and drank - “and thought they had never known anything so sweet as that was.”
“Then,” the saga continues, “they returned to the ship and sailed through the channel between the island and a cape jutting out to the north of the mainland” - almost certainly Cape Bauld, Newfoundland. “They steered a westerly course past the cape and found great shallows at ebb tide so that their ship was beached some distance from the sea.” When the tide rose, the adventures towed their knarr off the sandbar, and they “took their leather sleeping bags ashore and built themselves shelters. They decided to stay there during the winter and set up large houses. There was no lack of salmon either in the river or in the lake, and these salmon were bigger than any others the men had ever seen. Nature was so generous here that it seemed to them that cattle would need no winter fodder but could graze outdoors. There was no frost in the winter, and the grass hardly withered. The days and nights were more nearly equal than in Greenland or Iceland. On the shortest day of the winter, the sun remained up between breakfast time and late afternoon.”
The saga was almost surely exaggerating the benignity of the Newfoundland climate. Nevertheless, it may well have seemed like Elysium compared to what the men had experienced on Greenland in the dark months. In fact, all through the winter, Leif sent out parties of exploration to investigate the surrounding countryside. One evening, the man Leif called his “foster father failed to return from a scouting expedition. He was a Germany crony of Eirik the Red’s named Tyrkir, and his role, as was customary among well-positioned Vikings was to serve Leif as a sort of stand-in father on the voyage, seeking to protect him from harm, offering him counsel and tutoring him in various ways. Naturally, Leif mounted an anxious search, and finally Tyrkir was found in a condition of utter excitement. “I have some real news for you,” he cried. “I have found grapevines and grapes!”
“Is this possible, Foster Father?” asked Leif.
“Certainly,” replied Tyrkir, “for I was born where there is no lack of either vines or grapes.”
So saying, he led Leif to the place where he had made his astonishing find - and there they were, laden with fruit. “And,” the saga relates, “it is said that they loaded up the afterboat with grapes, and the ship itself with a cargo of timber. When spring came, they made the ship ready and sailed away. Leif gave the country a name to suits its product. He called it Vinland” - Wineland.
Tyrkir’s grapes would confound future generations. Were it not for them, there would likely be little dispute about the location of Leif’s Vinland as being at L’Anse aux Meadows in the Sacred Bay area at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Geographically and in physical details, the place fits the sagas: It is an inlet of Sacred Bay, is shallow, with rocks that would hang up a Viking knarr at low tide; the natural meadow is among the largest in northern Newfoundland. Nearby, curving to the sea, is the Block Duck Brook, up which salmon run to spawn in the spring. South of the meadow stands an extensive spruce forest. Finally, and seeming to clench the case, the remains of what were almost certainly Norse buildings have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows and nowhere else in America.
But how to explain the grapes? In plain fact, grapes could not have grown in the vicinity of L’Anse aux Meadows or anywhere else so far north. Because of this discrepancy, frequent and serious efforts have been made to place Vinland along the east coast of America from Nova Scotia as far south as Florida. Other attempts, often ingenious and occasionally persuasive, have sought a semantic solution. Thus, for example, if a scribe had been confused between the Norse words vin (long i), for “wine,” and vin (short i), for “pasture,” that might account for the conflict - were it not that the sagas specifically mention clusters of grapes (vinber) from which wine could be made.
It is possible that the sagas used the word grape in only the loosest of senses - to mean a roundish fruit. In that case, Tyrkir’s “grapes” may have been squashberries, gooseberries, cranberries, or currants, all of which could be made into wine and all of which grew in the north. There is no Old Norse name for any of these fruits. But vinber translates literally as “wineberry,” and thus it could have applied to a number of plants in addition to grapes.
Strangely, throughout decades of debate, the simplest explanation of the grapes has been largely ignored. Leif was, after all, the son of Eirik the Red - the man who had attracted settlers to one of the bleakest places on earth by touting it as a lush Greenland. With that remarkably successful example in mind, Leif could hardly have been above gilding his American discovery by calling it Vinland and saying that he returned with a cargo of grapes.
That he intended eventually to establish a permanent settlement in Vinland is beyond doubt. But Leif himself would not be one of the settlers: Shortly after his return to Greenland, Eirik the Red died and Leif assumed the duties and responsibilities of running the farm at Brattahlid. His seafaring days were done. However, his brother Thorvald, arguing that more exploration was needed before any attempt at colonization, outfitted his own ship and took on a crew. He followed Leif’s route and wintered at Leif’s temporary huts in Vinland, living mostly on fish.
In spring and summer, he scouted up and down the coast in the ship’s tender, finding little of note and spending a second winter in the old camp. Next summer, he probed the coastline again, this time in the ship itself. A storm drove it ashore on a promontory - it could have been any one of several between Cape Bauld and Cape Porcupine - breaking the keel. Thorvald effected repairs with local timber and set the broken keel erect in the sand to serve as a landmark.
Despite this mishap, the expedition had so far been rather well managed. But now, at another cape, came one of those senseless outbursts of savagery that so flawed the Viking character. After spotting three skin boats, overturned on the beach with three men sleeping beneath each, the Norsemen killed all but one, who escaped. In this murderous fashion, the Vikings introduced themselves to the Skraelings - an obscure term that may have meant “wretches” or “weaklings” or “screechers” or any one of several other epithets of low regard. They may have been either Eskimos or Algonquin Indians - both lived in the area. Whoever they were, they soon appeared in raging, overwhelming force at the scene of the killings.
Fleeing to their ship, the Norsemen took their customary defensive position behind a gunwale hung with shields. The Skraelings loosened a hail of arrows, a number of which penetrated the barricade and one of which struck Thorvald in an armpit. It is not recorded whether the arrow was dipped in poison or some other septic substance. In any case, the wound festered and proved mortal. The survivors buried their slain leader between two crosses at the site of the keel-landmark, wintered again at Leif’s stopping place and finally returned to Greenland, as a saga laconically put it, with “plenty of news to tell Leif.”
At last, in 1009, a determined attempt was made to establish a settlement in Vinland. Curiously, it was led not by a Greenlander but by an Icelander: Thorfinn the Valiant, as he came to be known. He was a young merchant who, in plying his trade between Norway and Greenland, got to know Eirik’s sons and married Gudrid, the attractive widow of Thorstein, Leif’s brother, who had since died of a fever. Through them, he became fascinated with Vinland. Thorfinn organized a full-fledged expedition, with three ships carrying 250 people, including some wives, relates a saga, “all kind of livestock, for it was their intention to colonize the country if they could.”
Taking the route established by Leif, Thorfinn and his followers found Vinland and took residence in - and doubtless built additions to - Leif’s houses, where Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European child born in America.
After a cruel winter, during which they were forced to fight and kill ravenous forest bears, the settlers sailed southward until they came to a sheltered place with abundant pasturage that they named Hóp, an old Norse word for a small, land-locked bay. There they met and entered into trade with another tribe of Skraelings, filthy creatures with, says a saga, “ugly hair on their heads, big eyes, and broad cheeks.” To their immense gratification, the Vikings discovered that these Skraelings were willing to trade valuable furs for cow’s milk or a span of red cloth to wrap around their heads. As if that were not enough, the Vikings, says a saga, delightedly compounded the swindle: “When a cloth began to run short, they cut it up so that it was no broader than a fingerbreadth, but the Skraelings gave just as much or more.”
The Skraelings were not as simple as they seemed. They perceived the Vikings’ metal swords were far superior to their own stone weapons, and they were vastly annoyed when Thorfinn forbade his men to trade any of their swords. Inevitably, a Skraeling tried to seal a sword. Just as surely, he was killed. A screaming mob of Skraelings attacked in overwhelming force and with a weird weapon of psychological warfare. It was described in a saga as “a pole with a huge knob on the end, black in color, and about the size of a sheep’s belly, which flew over the heads of the men and made a frightening noise when it fell.” This strange object panicked the Vikings; the knob was probably nothing more than an inflated moose bladder. Thorfinn and his men in short order were driven to a last stand with their backs against a cliff. There they certainly would have been massacred had it not been for Freydis, a bastard daughter of Eirik’s and as bloodthirsty a character as can be found in the sagas. She ripped open her bodice, pulled out a breast, and slapped it with the flat of a sword as if infusing it with some magical power. The primitive Skraelings, astounded by this display and thinking her some sort of female warrior-god, turned and fled in terror.
Although the would-be settlers lingered in America for two more years, they lost heart in the face of the Skraelings’ continuing harassment and finally departed. “It now seemed plain,” explains a saga, “that though the quality of the land was admirable, there would always be fear and strife dogging them there on account of those that inhabited the land.” Thorfinn’s was the last significant Norse effort to settle America, although as late as 1341 there was a report of a Greenland ship making a trip to Labrador, probably on a timber-cutting expedition.
By then, Greenland itself was in the throes of terrible troubles. After 1200, the entire North Atlantic area entered the so-called Little Ice Age. Glaciers began growing bigger, and sea temperatures dropped drastically. For the Greenland settlements, the result was disastrous: There was a vast increase in the ice drifting south with the East Greenland Current and, as a result, the island’s sea approaches, always difficult, were rendered perilous in the extreme. In the middle of the thirteenth century, a chronicler reported: “As soon as one has passed over the deepest part of the ocean, he will encounter such masses of ice in the sea that I know no equal of it anywhere else on earth. Sometimes these ice fields are about four or five ells thick” - that is, eight feet - “and extend so far out from the land that it may mean a journey of four days or more to travel across them. There is more ice to the northeast and north of the land than to the south, southwest, and west. It has frequently happened that men have sought to make the land too soon and, as a result, have been caught in the ice floes. Some of those who have been caught have perished.”
The Greenlanders’ trading economy, precarious at best, could withstand little such disruption, and, in 1261, the desperate islanders sought succor, surrendering their precious independence to Norway in return for various trade concessions - which the Norwegian kings, whether by neglect or malice, never lived up to. A year later, Iceland, under the same pressures of declining trade and increasingly bitter cold, also sought help from Norway - with much the same result, though the Icelanders survived in the end while the Greenlanders did not.
Besides ice, the cold brought a new menace to Greenland in the person of Skraelings - this time Eskimos of the Thule culture, who in an epochal migration had moved from Alaska across northern Canada to Ellesmere Island and thence, in their pursuit of the cold-loving seal, to the northernmost reaches of Greenland.
Relations between the two peoples soon turned violent. Few records of the fighting survive, but there is little doubt that it was bloody - and uneven. The Eskimos were in their natural element, all but oblivious to the cold and wise to every way of the north. The Viking hunters, no matter how skilled with their weapons, were alien to this brutal land. They suffered from the cold, from lack of proper food at times, from Eskimo ambushes. The Norsemen slowly withdrew before the Eskimo advance until they finally abandoned the Western Settlement and moved to the Eastern Settlement, where they prepared for a last stand. The sagas do not say whether the Western Settlement was abandoned in haste under attack. But it may have been: Many years later a Norwegian investigator sent out to examine conditions in Greenland reported that the Eskimos in control of the settlement had “many horses, goats, cattle, and sheep.”
For some reason, perhaps because the seal herds led the way, the Eskimos’ advance took them to the southeast, all the way to Cape Farewell, bypassing the Eastern Settlement, which clung grimly to life until about 1500 - when complete silence fell upon the community founded by Eirik the Red. Whether the Norsemen were wiped out by returning Eskimos, by pirates then roaming the North Atlantic, or by some natural disaster is unknown. History records only that, in 1586, the English explorer John Davis, seeking the Northwest Passage, put into a Greenland fjord along whose banks a Viking settlement had once burst with energy and throbbed with hope. He may have found some ruins, but no living person - “nor anything, save only gripes, ravens, and small birds, such as larks and linnets.”
The last traces of life in the Eastern Settlement have been found on a farm located on the next fjord over from Eirik’s Brattahlid. There was a barrel with the bones of a hundred mice that had climbed in when it still contained milk and had starved to death when there was no more. Nearby in the farmyard were the bones of a Norseman. He may have been the last descendant of Eirik the Red. Since there was no one left but him, his bones remained where he lay down to die.
The disappearance of the Greenland settlements was only part of a long and sweeping evolution that finally closed out the age of the Vikings. At least in part, the Vikings fell victim to their own extraordinary success.
In the great explosion of their energy, they had crossed the seas to conquer. In the enjoyment of their gains, they had settled down to rule. And in their rule, they erected defensive barriers against further expansion from the Norse homelands.
In the east, the Viking princes and grand dukes had mingled and intermarried so thoroughly with their Slavic subjects that they turned Slav themselves. When Svyatoslav of Kiev -
among the first of the Viking dynasty to bear a non-Scandinavian name - conquered Bulgar on the Volga in about 970, he all but severed the major trade routes through Russia to the Norselands and turned his attention east to Byzantium, whose Orthodox Christian faith his people would soon wholeheartedly adopt. In the West, another Viking descendant, William of Normandy, organized and led the conquest of England in 1066. The sons and grandsons of the Vikings were assimilated into that society. Viking blood flowed in the veins of King Harold of England; many of his warriors remembered their Viking ways, despite conversion to Christianity, and stood shoulder to shoulder, swinging their great battle-axes - until they were finally overwhelmed by the Norman host.
In Norway, the boil of Viking blood seemed to cool with succeeding generations. Harald Hardrada, who had died a Viking hero’s death in England fighting the English in 1066 shortly before the Norman invasion, was followed by his son Olaf, who was contemptuously called the Quiet because, unlike his ancestors and successor, Magnus, known as Bareleg because he liked to wear Celtic kilts, entertained dreams of glory and mounted a number of expeditions to the Hebrides and to Ireland. But he was a failure as a warrior and was cut down in battle with the Irish before he accomplished much of anything. And Magnus’ sons, Sigurd and Eystein, who divided up his kingdom in Norway, summed up in their characters and careers all the difference between the old sanguinary Viking days and the new, less violent, more Europeanized Scandinavia that was coming to birth.
King Sigurd was a throwback. Off at seventeen on a crusade to the Holy Land in 1106, he performed deeds of high valor in Spain and in Syria, rode in state through Jerusalem and Constantinople, and after three years came back to Norway bearing a fragment of the True Cross. There was, of course, a feast featuring a traditional boasting match in which each man tried to outdo his neighbor in accounts of his fearsome exploits.