The ruins of the barns in which the Greenland Norse kept their cows for nine months per year are still visible. They consisted of long narrow buildings with stone and turf walls several yards thick to keep the barn warm inside during the winter, because cows could not stand cold as could the Greenland breeds of sheep and goats. Each cow was kept in its own rectangular stall, marked off from adjacent stalls by stone dividing slabs that are still standing in many of the ruined barns. From the size of the stalls, from the height of the doors through which cows were led in and out of the barn, and of course from excavated skeletons of the cows themselves, one can calculate that Greenland cows were the smallest known in the modern world, not more than four feet high at the shoulder. During the winter they remained all the time in their stalls, where the dung that they dropped accumulated as a rising tide around them until the spring, when the sea of dung was shoveled outside. During the winter the cows were fed on harvested hay, but if its quantities weren’t sufficient, it had to be supplemented with seaweed brought inland. The cows evidently didn’t like the seaweed, so that farm laborers had to live in the barn with the cows and their rising sea of dung during the winter, and perhaps to force-feed the cows, which gradually became smaller and weaker. Around May, when the snow started to melt and new grass came up, the cows could at last be brought out of doors to start grazing themselves, but by then they were so weak that they could no longer walk and had to be carried outside. In extreme winters, when hay and seaweed stores ran out before the new growth of summer grass, farmers collected the first willow and birch twigs of the spring as a starvation diet to feed their animals.
Greenland cows, sheep, and goats were used mainly for milking rather than for meat. After the animals gave birth in May or June, they yielded milk just during the few summer months. The Norse then turned the milk into cheese, butter, and the yogurt-like product called skyr, which they stored in huge barrels kept cold by being placed either in mountain streams or in turf houses, and they ate those dairy products throughout the winter. The goats were also kept for their hair, and the sheep for their wool, which was of exceptionally high quality because sheep in those cold climates produce fatty wool that is naturally waterproof. Meat was available from the livestock just at times of culling, especially in the autumn, when farmers calculated how many animals they would be able to feed through the winter on the hay that they had brought in that fall. They slaughtered any remaining animals for which they estimated that they would not have enough winter fodder. Because meat of barnyard animals was thus in short supply, almost all bones of slaughtered animals in Greenland were split and broken to extract the last bits of marrow, far more so than in other Viking countries. At archaeological sites of Greenland Inuit, who were skilled hunters bringing in more wild meat than the Norse, the preserved larvae of flies that feed on rotting marrow and fat are abundant, but those flies found slim pickings at Norse sites.
It took several tons of hay to maintain a cow, much less to maintain a sheep, throughout an average Greenland winter. Hence the main occupation of most Greenland Norse during the late summer had to be cutting, drying, and storing hay. The hay quantities accumulated then were critical because they determined how many animals could be fed throughout the following winter, but that depended on the duration of that winter, which could not be predicted exactly in advance. Hence each September the Norse had to make the agonizing decision how many of their precious livestock to cull, basing that decision on the amount of fodder available and on their guess as to the length of the coming winter. If they killed too many animals in September, they would end up in May with uneaten hay and just a small herd, and they might kick themselves for not having gambled on being able to feed more animals. But if they killed too few animals in September, they might find themselves running out of hay before May and risk the whole herd starving.
Hay was produced in three types of fields. Most productive would be so-called infields near the main house, fenced to keep livestock out, manured to increase grass growth, and used just for hay production. At the cathedral farm of Gardar and a few other Norse farm ruins, one can see the remains of irrigation systems of dams and channels that spread mountain stream water over the infields to further increase productivity. The second zone of hay production was the so-called outfields, somewhat farther from the main house and outside the fenced-off area. Finally, the Greenland Norse carried over from Norway and Iceland a system called shielings or saeters, consisting of buildings in more remote upland areas suitable for producing hay and grazing animals during the summer but too cold for keeping livestock during the winter. The most complex shielings were virtually miniature farms, complete with houses where laborers lived during the summer to tend animals and make hay but returned to live on the main farm during the winter. Each year the snow melted off and the grass began to grow first at low altitude and then at increasingly higher altitudes, but new grass is especially high in nutrients and low in less-digestible fiber. Shielings were thus a sophisticated method to help Norse farmers solve the problem of Greenland’s patchy and limited resources, by exploiting even temporarily useful patches in the mountains, and by moving livestock gradually uphill to take advantage of the new grass appearing at progressively higher altitudes as the summer went on.
As I mentioned earlier, Christian Keller had told me before we visited Greenland together that “life in Greenland was about finding the best patches.” What Christian meant was that, even in those two fjord systems that were the sole areas of Greenland with good potential for pastures, the best areas along those fjords were few and scattered. As I cruised or walked up and down Greenland’s fjords, even as a naïve city-dweller I felt myself gradually learning to recognize the criteria by which the Norse would have recognized patches good for being turned into farms. While Greenland’s actual settlers from Iceland and Norway had a huge advantage over me as experienced farmers, I had the advantage of hindsight: I knew, and they couldn’t know, at which patches Norse farms were actually tried or proved poor or became abandoned. It would have taken years or even generations for the Norse themselves to have weeded out deceptively good-looking patches that eventually proved unsuitable. Jared Diamond’s city-dweller criteria for a good medieval Norse farm site are as follows:
1. The site should have a large area of flat or gently sloping lowlands (at elevations below 700 feet above sea level) to develop as a productive infield, because lowlands have the warmest climate and longest snow-free growing season, and because grass growth is poorer on steeper slopes. Among Greenland Norse farms, the cathedral farm of Gardar was preeminent in its expanse of flat lowlands, followed by some of the Vatnahverfi farms.
2. Complementary to this requirement for a large lowland infield is a large area of outfield at mid-elevations (up to 1,300 feet above sea level) for producing additional hay. Calculations show that the area of lowlands alone at most Norse farms would not have yielded enough hay to feed the farm’s number of livestock, estimated by counting stalls or measuring areas of ruined barns. Erik the Red’s farm at Brattahlid was preeminent in its large area of usable upland.
3. In the northern hemisphere, south-facing slopes receive the most sunlight. That’s important so that the winter’s snow will melt off earlier in the spring, the growing season for hay production will last more months, and the daily hours of sunlight will be longer. All of the best Norse Greenland farms—Gardar, Brattahlid, Hvalsey, and Sandnes—had south-facing exposures.
4. A good supply of streams is important for watering pastures by natural stream flow or by irrigation systems, to increase hay production.
5. It’s a recipe for poverty to place your farm in, near, or facing a glacial valley off of which come cold strong winds that decrease grass growth and increase soil erosion on heavily grazed pastures. Glacial winds were a curse that ensured the poverty of farms at Narssaq and in Sermilik Fjord, and that eventually forced the abandonment of farms at the head of Qoroq Valley and at higher elevations in the Vatnahverfi distric
t.
6. If possible, place your farm directly on a fjord with a good harbor for transporting supplies in and out by boat.
Dairy products alone were not enough to feed the 5,000 Norse inhabitants of Greenland. Gardening was of little use in making up that resulting deficit, because growing crops was so marginal in Greenland’s cold climate and short growing season. Contemporary Norwegian documents mentioned that most Greenland Norse never saw wheat, a piece of bread, or beer (brewed from barley) during their entire lives. Today, when Greenland’s climate is similar to what it was at the time that the Norse arrived, I saw at the former best Norse farm site of Gardar two small gardens in which modern Greenlanders were growing a few cold-resistant crops: cabbage, beets, rhubarb, and lettuce, which grew in medieval Norway, plus potatoes, which arrived in Europe only after the demise of the Norse Greenland colony. Presumably the Norse, too, could have grown those same crops (other than potatoes) in a few gardens, plus perhaps a little barley in especially mild years. At Gardar and two other Eastern Settlement farms I saw small fields at sites that might have served as Norse gardens, at the base of cliffs that would have retained the sun’s heat, and with walls to keep sheep and winds out. But our only direct evidence for gardening by the Greenland Norse is some pollen and seeds of flax, a medieval European crop plant that was not native to Greenland, hence that must have been introduced by the Norse, and that was useful for making linen textiles and linseed oil. If the Norse did grow any other crops, they would have made only an extremely minor contribution to the diet, probably just as an occasional luxury food for a few chiefs and clergy.
Instead, the main other component of the Greenland Norse diet was meat of wild animals, especially caribou and seals, consumed to a far greater extent than in Norway or Iceland. Caribou live in large herds that spend the summer in the mountains and descend to lower elevations during the winter. Caribou teeth found in Norse garbage middens show that the animals were hunted in the fall, probably by bow and arrow in communal drives with dogs (the middens also had bones of big elkhounds). The three main seal species hunted were the common seal (alias harbor seal), which is resident all year round in Greenland and comes out on beaches in inner fjords to bear its pups in the spring, at which time it would have been easy to net from boats or to kill by clubbing; and the migratory harp seal and hooded seal, both of which breed in Newfoundland but arrive in Greenland around May in large herds along the seacoast, rather than in the inner fjords where most Norse farms were located. To hunt those migratory seals, the Norse established seasonal bases on the outer fjords, dozens of miles from any farm.
The May arrival of harp and hooded seals was critical to Norse survival, because at that time of year the stocks of stored dairy products from the previous summer and of caribou meat hunted in the previous fall would be running out, but the snow had not yet disappeared from the Norse farms so that livestock could not yet be put out to pasture, and consequently the livestock had not yet given birth and were not yet producing milk. As we shall see, that made the Norse vulnerable to starvation from a failure of the seal migration, or from any obstacle (such as ice in the fjords and along the coast, or else hostile Inuit) that impeded their access to the migratory seals. Such ice conditions may have been especially likely in cold years when the Norse were already vulnerable because of cold summers and hence low hay production.
By means of measurements of bone composition (so-called carbon isotope analyses), one can calculate the ratio of seafood to land-grown food that the human or animal owner of those bones had consumed over the course of a lifetime. As applied to Norse skeletons recovered from Greenland cemeteries, this method shows that the percentage of seafood (mostly seals) consumed in Eastern Settlement at the time of its founding was only 20% but rose to 80% during the later years of Norse survival: presumably because their ability to produce hay to feed wintering livestock had declined, and also because the increased human population needed more food than their livestock could provide. At any given time, seafood consumption was higher in Western Settlement than in Eastern Settlement, because hay production was lower at Western Settlement’s more northerly location. Seal consumption by the Norse population may have been even higher than these measurements indicate, since archaeologists would understandably rather excavate big rich farms than small poor farms, but available bone studies show that people at small poor farms with just a single cow ate more seal meat than did rich farmers. At one poor Western Settlement farm, an astonishing 70% of all animal bones in garbage middens were of seals.
Apart from that heavy reliance on seals and caribou, the Norse obtained minor amounts of wild meat from small mammals (especially hares), seabirds, ptarmigans, swans, eider ducks, beds of mussels, and whales. The latter probably just consisted of the occasional stranded animal; Norse sites contain no harpoons or other whale-hunting equipment. All meat not consumed immediately, whether from livestock or wild animals, would have been dried in storage buildings called skemmur, built of uncemented stones for the wind to whistle through and dry out the meat, and located on windy sites like tops of ridges.
Conspicuously nearly absent from Norse archaeological sites are fish, even though the Greenland Norse were descended from Norwegians and Icelanders who spent much time fishing and happily ate fish. Fish bones account for much less than 0.1% of animal bones recovered at Greenland Norse archaeological sites, compared to between 50 and 95% at most contemporary Iceland, northern Norway, and Shetland sites. For instance, the archaeologist Thomas McGovern found the grand total of three fish bones in Norse garbage from Vatnahverfi farms next to lakes teeming with fish, while Georg Nygaard recovered only two fish bones from a total of 35,000 animal bones in the garbage of the Norse farm Ö34. Even at the GUS site, which yielded the largest number of fish bones—166, representing a mere 0.7% of all animal bones recovered from the site—26 of those bones come from the tail of a single cod, and bones of all fish species are still outnumbered 3 to 1 by bones of one bird species (the ptarmigan) and outnumbered 144 to 1 by mammal bones.
This paucity of fish bones is incredible when one considers how abundant fish are in Greenland, and how saltwater fish (especially haddock and cod) are by far the largest export of modern Greenland. Trout and salmon-like char are so numerous in Greenland’s rivers and lakes that, on my first night in the youth hostel at Brattahlid, I shared the kitchen with a Danish tourist cooking two large char, each weighing two pounds and about 20 inches long, that she had caught with her bare hands in a small pool where they had become trapped. The Norse were surely as adept with their hands as that tourist, and they could also have caught fish in fjords with nets while they were netting seals. Even if the Norse didn’t want to eat those easily caught fish themselves, they could at least have fed them to their dogs, thereby reducing the amount of seal and other meat that their dogs required, and sparing more meat for themselves.
Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland refuses initially to believe the incredible claim that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish, and starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding. Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows? Could their dogs have run off with those fish carcasses, dropped the fish bones in fields chosen with foresight to be ones where future archaeologists would rarely bother to dig, and carefully avoided carrying the carcasses back to the house or midden lest archaeologists subsequently find them? Might the Norse have had so much meat that they didn’t need to eat fish?—but why, then, did they break bones to get out the last bit of marrow? Might all of those little fish bones have rotted away in the ground?—but preservation conditions in Greenland middens are good enough to preserve even sheep lice and sheep fecal pellets. The trouble with all those excuses for the lack of fish bones at Greenland Norse sites is that they would app
ly equally well to Greenland Inuit and Icelandic and Norwegian Norse sites, where fish bones prove instead to be abundant. Nor do these excuses explain why Greenland Norse sites contain almost no fishhooks, fish line sinkers, or net sinkers, which are common in Norse sites elsewhere.
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. Every society has its own arbitrary food taboos, as one of the many ways to distinguish itself from other societies: we virtuous clean people don’t eat those disgusting things that those other gross weirdoes seem to savor. By far the highest proportion of those taboos involves meat and fish. For instance, the French eat snails and frogs and horses, New Guineans eat rats and spiders and beetle larvae, Mexicans eat goat, and Polynesians eat marine annelid worms, all of which are nutritious and (if you let yourself taste them) delicious, but most Americans would recoil at the thought of eating any of those things.
As for the ultimate reasons why meat and fish so often get tabooed, they are much more likely than plant foods to develop bacteria or protozoa that give us food poisoning or parasites if we eat them. That’s especially likely to happen in Iceland and Scandinavia, whose people employ many fermentation methods for long-term preservation of smelly (non-Scandinavians would say “rotting”) fish, including methods using deadly botulism-causing bacteria. The most painful illness of my life, worse even than malaria, arose when I contracted food poisoning from eating shrimp that I had bought in a market in Cambridge, England, and that were evidently not fresh. I was confined to bed for several days with awful retching, intense muscle pain, headaches, and diarrhea. That suggests to me a scenario for the Greenland Norse: perhaps Erik 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.
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