The day’s milk was filtered through a mesh strainer, knotted up from the coarse hairs of cows’ tails. Then it was left in a shallow, square wooden trough for thirty-six hours, until the cream collected on top. By laying an arm on one lip of the trough, and tilting the trough, Gudrid could quickly skim off the cream—in Icelandic, skim milk is still called undanrenna, what “runs under” the arm. The cream was churned into butter, kneaded into a block, squeezed to get every last bit of buttermilk out of it, and stored in a box. Unsalted, it would sour, but keep for decades. Later landowners filled their treasuries with butter; in the 1500s, an Icelandic bishop amassed twenty-five tons of it. In Ireland a common archaeological find is a barrel of butter dug up from a bog; the Norse also stored butter this way. Bog-butter grows hard, gray, and cheeselike, but stays edible: The specimens in the Irish National Museum, dated to the seventeenth century, are still “quite free from putrefaction.”
From the skim milk, Gudrid would have made cheese and skyr. To make skyr, she heated the milk until a skin formed, then cooled it to body temperature and added a bacterial culture from the previous day’s skyr, along with rennet, an enzyme from the dried, crumbled stomach of a calf a few days old. If the skyr tub was kept warm, the skyr would curdle by morning. Then it was sieved through cheesecloth, the curds (the skyr) and the liquid whey kept in separate wooden barrels to ferment. Once the whey was sour enough, it could be used to pickle blood sausages and other delicacies like rams’ testicles; mixed with water, it made a healthy drink, especially when the whey was made from sheep’s milk, which has three times the vitamin C of cows’ milk. A diet of fish and sheep’s whey will keep a worker healthy “for a long period of time,” an Icelandic writer in the 1800s noted, whereas people drinking water with their fish soon lost their strength.
Making cheese instead of skyr called for more rennet and none of the bacterial culture. Once hard, cheeses were stored in a cool, damp larder and washed frequently to keep down the mold. Or they could be carried up to a convenient snowbank and put on ice.
The essential tool for dairying, as important as an iron sickle blade to haymaking, is a watertight bucket. In the National Museum of Greenland—a series of handsome wooden warehouses clustered by the old harbor in Nuuk—Georg Nyegaard took me to the conservator’s workshop to see the plethora of wooden artifacts that had been retrieved from the Farm Beneath the Sand. Most were splintered bits of what he called “coopered vessels”—buckets and barrels, no doubt including milking pails, skyr tubs, whey barrels (large enough for a man to hide in), cheese forms, and butter boxes.
Wearing white cotton gloves, Georg opened a plastic bag and gently removed two wooden plates, one round, one oval, each hardly longer than my palm. “These are bottom disks,” he said. “They put staves all around here and tied them together with baleen.”
Opening another bag, he drew out a thin board about ten inches long. “Here is a very fine piece of a stave, with a groove at the bottom for the disk.” There was a matching groove near the top, but Georg couldn’t explain its purpose. “There are so many objects like this one that we don’t know the function of. So many strange shapes.”
The wood, he explained, was driftwood: It bore the telltale signs of shipworm. Driftwood comes to Greenland with the drift ice, “whole trees, roots and all,” as the missionary Otho Fabricius wrote in 1807. The trees are knocked from the wooded banks of great rivers in Siberia when the ice breaks up in spring, and float north to the pack ice of the Polar Sea, in which they travel, soaked and ground, stripped of bark and branches, for five to twenty years, following the current down the east coast of Greenland and around the tip north as far as Nuuk. Wood is tossed ashore in West Greenland at a rate of eighty to 120 cords a year, and most of it, according to Fabricius, is “crooked, twisted, or full of cracks and wormholes, or rotten.” Another author describes it as “intractable” and requiring “much ingenuity” to carve: “The wood has lost most of its original flexibility. It feels ‘dead.’” Very rarely is there a workable log, but it was all the Vikings had besides head-high birches and spindly willows and juniper.
Upstairs in the magazine, the main storage room, Georg opened box after box. An iron knife, whetted to a sliver. A polar bear tooth. A horn spoon. A partial basket made of willow roots, twined in a spiral. Beads of soapstone and walrus tusk. A small soapstone pot. A large soapstone basin for watering cows. A wooden ladle, broken centuries ago and stitched together with roots. A whalebone butter paddle.
We peered at scraps of a dark, woven cloth through the clear lid of a plastic box. “I remember this weaving room we excavated,” Georg said. “There were so many kinds of textiles. There were spindle whorls in different shapes made of soapstone—it’s a very common find. You see a lot of implements committed to this industry. You get an impression they spent a lot of time at it.”
He put the box back and opened one next to it. “Here’s one of the most beautiful objects to find,” Georg said, “because you get so close to history. It’s a last for a shoe.” He took out of the box a smooth, dark foot carved of wood and cradled it in both hands. “When you take such a piece from the soil, you feel so close to the person. It’s made for one person’s feet.
“These people were very busy,” he said as we left the magazine. “During the summer they had a lot of activities going on. The economy was quite complex. They recognized themselves as farmers, but when you look at the bones, a major part of the bones were seal and reindeer bones, so they were hunters, too.”
Looking at the bones dug up before the Farm Beneath the Sand was found, archaeologists created a story of this economy, a story whose ulterior goal was to explain the puzzle that captivates most people about Viking Greenland: Why, after surviving over four hundred years, did its people disappear without a trace? Jared Diamond draws on this work in his popular book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, arguing that the livestock the settlers brought with them, based on the Norwegian “ideal farm,” didn’t suit Greenland’s colder, drier conditions. Diamond writes: “Although pigs found abundant nuts to eat in Norway’s forests, and although Vikings prized pork above all other meats, pigs proved terribly destructive and unprofitable in lightly wooded Greenland, where they rooted up the fragile vegetation and soil. Within a short time they were reduced to low numbers or virtually eliminated.” For similar environmental reasons, he says, the Vikings were forced to limit the number of “honored cows” they kept and increase their herds of “despised goats.” A main cause of the “collapse,” in his view, is that the Norse refused to give up their unsuitable livestock altogether and become dedicated seal hunters like the Inuit, who began moving south into Viking territory in the 1200s. He also thinks they turned up their noses at fish.
Seal bones are found in significant numbers in late-Norse middens in Greenland, but most are from harp seals. A migratory carnivore, the harp seal followed the capelin into the fjords for a few weeks in the spring, and the sand eels in the fall. The spring run was particularly timely, coming when the stored milk products were running out.
Diamond argues that only people at “small poor farms” ate seal meat—that it was famine food. In one garbage heap from the last days of occupation at a small farm on the Lysufjord, 70 percent of the bones were seal. People at the large, upper-class Sandnes, next door, preferred venison, if they couldn’t get pork or beef. But as the climate worsened and the fragile vegetation was destroyed by overgrazing, they failed to see that seal or fish were their only options. Rather than change their eating habits—and adapt to their environment, the way the Inuit did—the Vikings starved. Diamond doesn’t blame them. He had forced himself to taste seal meat while he was in Greenland, and had not “gotten beyond the second bite.”
Despite the attractive environmental message in Diamond’s Collapse, I have problems accepting this model of the Viking economy. How do we know that Vikings prized pork and despised goat meat? Our main source for Viking culinary practices, other than scattered ref
erences to food in the sagas, is the volume of Old Norse mythology written in the early 1200s by the chieftain Snorri Sturluson. In Snorri’s Edda, the cow is given pride of place: Her copious milk fed the giant Ymir, from whose body the chief god Odin created the world. Pork is the meat eaten in Valhalla, the great hall in the Otherworld to which Odin welcomes warriors slain in battle; the same old boar is boiled each night in a huge cauldron, and in the morning he comes back to life. The other pig mentioned in the myths is not eaten, but ridden—by the fertility god Frey. Odin himself is said to never eat, living on wine alone; yet in another tale, he and two lesser gods butcher an ox and roast it on a spit over a wood fire. A goat, meanwhile, produces mead instead of milk for the dead heroes in Valhalla to drink. Goat is also the favorite food of the war god Thor; the two goats that pull his chariot allow him to butcher and boil them every night. Provided that he saves every bone and wraps them up in the skins, unbroken, the goats will come back to life in the morning. Given the number of children named after Thor—one-quarter of the names in the Icelandic Book of Settlements are Thor combinations—his totemic animal seems unlikely to have been “despised.” Finally, three gods, Thor, Loki, and Njord, are all associated with fishing. In particular, Loki, the trickster god, is said to have turned himself into a salmon and invented a net. Noticeably missing from the gods’ meals are sheep.
Jette Arneborg, an archaeologist at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, pointed out to me the second problem with Diamond’s model of the Viking diet. It assumes that the Vikings were tidy, that they carefully cleared the table and carried all their dinner scraps out to the garbage midden. But there were no tables in treeless Greenland. And bones were valuable. Housewives collected them back into the pot and boiled them to make soup, then pickled them in whey to make “bone-jelly porridge.” Toys, dice, flutes, and game pieces were carved out of them, and needles and needle cases. They were crushed and dried and fed to cows as a calcium supplement. Or spread on the fields as fertilizer—still a common practice in northern Norway in the nineteenth century. Bones were often burned, although they gave off a bitter, foul-smelling smoke. In profligate households, they were tossed to the dogs or simply left on the floor.
Archaeologists have long bemoaned the “fetid,” “squalid” conditions of the Greenland Vikings’ floors. Layers of twigs, hay, and moss served an insulating function—they kept the permafrost from thawing and the floor from turning to muck. Sifting through samples of such carpeting, scientists have identified flies that feed on carrion and feces, as well as human lice, sheep lice, and the beetles that live in rotting hay. Shards of bone are scattered throughout, “a few clearly having passed through the gut of the farm’s dog,” as one excavator writes, others the detritus of whittling. On the floor of the Farm Beneath the Sand, archaeologists even found fish bones.
Archaeologists have been agonizing over Greenland’s missing fish bones for over thirty years. Whereas piles of fish bones are found on Viking sites in Iceland, they are “extremely rare,” “nearly absent” from the bone collections in Greenland.
Jared Diamond thinks they should stop worrying about it. He writes in Collapse, “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.” His explanation draws on his own painful reaction to a batch of spoiled shrimp. “Perhaps Eirik 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.”
“That’s not how it was!” laughed Jette Arneborg, when I relayed Diamond’s theory to her. In her cluttered office at the Danish National Museum, a converted Renaissance palace in downtown Copenhagen, Jette seemed worlds away from her job as codirector of the dig at the Farm Beneath the Sand. She had already described her days there: going in by helicopter, using sandbags to hold the river back, excavating three to four inches of soil, then waiting for the sun to melt the next layer of permafrost. Wrapping every bone, every chip of wood, in wet paper and bagging it in plastic, the glacial river roaring past inches away: It was very fast, very deep, she had told me. If you fell into it, you wouldn’t survive. An open box on her desk held two animal bones from Greenland; they had been sent to the diet-analysis group, where someone saw a cross had been cut into each one and returned them to her, reclassified as artifacts.
“Of course they ate fish,” she said. “We do have one fishhook. We have sinkers. We have pieces of what I think were nets. We have fish bones from inside the house. If we sieve very carefully, we find them.” The Farm Beneath the Sand is the only house from Gudrid’s time in Greenland that has ever been fully excavated. “For the rest of the farms,” Jette said, “we have excavated only the top part,” the part from the 1300s. She explained, “These farms are ancient monuments. The walls are still standing. They are huge and marvelous. You can’t spoil them by digging under them. But here we could, because the river was taking it all away.”
And when they did, they found 24,643 bone fragments inside the house. Inge Bodker Enghoff of the University of Copenhagen’s Zoological Museum could identify 8,250 of them, representing four hundred years of occupation. Of these, 166 bones were fish bones—the largest collection of fish bones found at any Greenland Norse farm. (By comparison, Enghoff identified only one pig bone.) Because of the permafrost and slightly acidic soil, most bones were very well preserved, she writes, “with the exception of the fish bones.” Why only the fish bones decayed she did not know, but their poor state of preservation led her to conclude that “fishing may have played a larger role than the sheer number of fish bones indicates.”
The Norse name for the fjord close to the Farm Beneath the Sand is, after all, Cod Fjord. And the best salmon river in Greenland is a few hours away by horseback. Said Jette, “They fished. We have written sources talking about the good fishing spots. They knew where to catch halibut. There’s salmon and a lot of trout. They lived so close to the water, the trout jumped out of the lake at them.” Exactly that happened to C. L. Vebaek in 1949, as he excavated a Norse farm by a lake in South Greenland. “One day,” he writes, “one of these awful nigeqs [southeasterly gales] arose (lasting three days), and it blew so much of the water from the lake situated to the east that the water level suddenly fell considerably. As a result, nearly all the water in the river disappeared, and a large number of salmon (as far as I remember more than a hundred) were stranded in small pools—you could just walk out and collect the fish with your hands!”
Counting animal bones can’t tell us that Vikings in Iceland ate fish and their cousins in Greenland didn’t. We can’t “take the facts at face value,” as Diamond argues; archaeology is not so precise a science. But it is clear that the Greenlanders didn’t catch fish on the same scale. Icelanders bartered with it: A farmer with too much skyr could strap two bull’s-hide bags of it onto a horse, travel down to the coast, and purchase a horseload of dried fish. Clear signs of eleventh-century fish-processing sites on the seashore, as well as quantities of headless fish found high in inland farms, prove that some sort of fish business was going on in Iceland in Viking times. Still today, the way to dry fish is to gut it, behead it, split it open, and hang it on a rack by the sea, where the salt air permeates it. Light and long lasting, dried, headless fish travel well and make an excellent commodity. In Greenland, the similar farm-to-farm trade was between reindeer and seal. Bones of cheap, plentiful seal are found far from the sea, while the best cuts of reindeer seem to have traveled down from the highlands, where they were hunted, to the chieftains’ farms.
Jared Diamond cites another line of reasoning to prove that the Vikings’ dependence on livestock caused their culture to collapse: Jette Arneborg’s own study of human bones, published
in the journal Radiocarbon in 1999.
In 1961 workers digging the foundation for a school dormitory near Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid discovered a tiny church surrounded by a circular graveyard. The Saga of Eirik the Red speaks of such a church. In the year 999 Leif Eiriksson abandoned pregnant Thorgunna in the Hebrides and sailed to Norway to meet the king, Olaf Tryggvason. King Olaf was at the time strenuously urging Iceland to become Christian—so strenuously that he impounded all the Icelandic ships and imprisoned all the Icelandic men who had visited Norway that year, including Kjartan and Bolli, the lovers of Gudrun the Fair. King Olaf’s arm-twisting led the Icelandic chieftains to declare Christianity the official state religion the next summer. Through Leif Eiriksson, Greenland followed suit: Leif returned home from his visit to the king with a priest, timber to build a church, and a vow to do the king’s saintly will. His mother, Thjodhild, converted instantly and had the chapel built, over her husband’s objections: “As a Christian, Thjodhild refused to sleep with Eirik the Red. This annoyed him greatly.”
The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Page 15