The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Scholars argue about the year when this record was scratched on stone, but agree it would have been after 1135 and before 1333. So sometime between these dates Norsemen must have wintered near Upernavik, a thousand miles to the northward of Cape Farewell. The former valuta grounds of the departed Albans had come under new management.

  This was not the only aspect of Greenland to change management around this time. In 1152 jurisdiction of the Greenland bishopric was transferred from the See of Hamburg to the See of Nidaros (Trondheim) in Norway.

  The Church had exerted powerful influence over the Greenland Norse since shortly after Leif Erikson brought the first priest to them c. 988. Around 1075, Adam of Bremen wrote that “bishops ruled Iceland and Greenland as if they were kings.” In succeeding centuries the Church lost power in Iceland, but the Norse settlements in Greenland continued to live in a theocracy made almost absolute by the archbishops of Nidaros, for whom the remote island was an invaluable source of wealth.

  By the middle of the thirteenth century Greenland’s southern settlement (officially the Eastern Settlement) had become a Church-run state. The bishopric, based at Gardar, owned more than a third of all useable land outright—and this by far the best and most productive third. Many of the nominal owners of what was left were indebted to the Church and seem to have been little better off than serfs. Although the population of the Eastern Settlement amounted to not much more than two thousand, it had to support a cathedral, eleven other churches, an Augustine monastery, a Benedictine nunnery, and a bishop’s “palace” with an associated farm that could stable 120 cows.2 At least four of the churches were massively built of cut stone. Considering the resources available, their construction must have represented a per-capita expenditure of time, energy, and wealth comparable to that consumed in rearing some of the great medieval European cathedrals.

  Although by c. 1200 the Church was exercising almost total control over south Greenlanders, this was not so in the north. During the two centuries following upon the founding of the two settlements, each had evolved along different lines.

  The northerners (the so-called Western Settlement) had become Greenland’s valuta folk. Although pastoralism remained an ingredient in their lives, it was not paramount. By the turn of the thirteenth century they were spending much of their time, and getting most of their income from, hunting, fishing, and trapping. They were a free-ranging people and, like all such, resistant to absolute authority in whatever guise.

  What follows is my assessment of them and of their history.

  The northerners built only four churches, and it appears that, by the thirteenth century, just one of these was still functioning—if it was functioning as anything more than a forlorn ecclesiastical outpost in a settlement that was becoming, or had already become, apostate.

  The northerners not only rejected theocratic rule very early in their history, they did the same for the rule of kings. In 1261 the southern settlers abandoned their independence and swore allegiance to the king of Norway. Thereafter they paid tribute to, and accepted the strictures imposed upon them from, Norway. It appears that the people of the northern settlement did neither.

  A development in the latter part of the thirteenth century widened the split and increased antagonisms between the two groups.

  By as early as 1250 Thule people had drifted south as far as Upernavik. Although only faint echoes of the first meetings between Norse and Thule remain, they suggest that the Greenland Norse initially treated Thule Skraelings in the same manner Karlsefni’s people had treated Tunit and Indians in Newfoundland and Labrador.

  Historia Norwegiae, written in the thirteenth century, tells us:

  To the north of where the Greenlanders dwell, hunters have found some pygmy people called Skraelings. They are such that when they are struck with weapons, but not mortally, their wounds whiten without bleeding; but when they are wounded to death their blood will scarcely cease to flow.

  The information in the Historia Norwegiae probably came from southern settlers. If it also reflected the attitudes of the northerners then, as we shall shortly see, they changed their tune.

  The arrival of these “trolls” (as Thule people were regarded by Norse Christians) seems to have evoked the same sort of reaction in south Greenland evidenced by cattle ranchers of our times if wolves approach the neighbourhood. When Thule reached Disko Bight, it was time to bring on the exterminators.

  In 1266 theocrats at Gardar, the bishop’s seat, sent an expedition north to see what could be done about halting this invasion by creatures the Church regarded as the devil’s spawn. More than one ship was involved and, presumably, a considerable force of well-armed men. The record is vague as to where they went and what was accomplished, but they reached Melville Bay where

  they beheld some Skraeling dwellings, but could not land because of the bears. . . . Upon going ashore on certain islands south of Snaefells [the Upernavik region] they found Skraeling dwelling places . . . then they returned home to Gardar.

  While we are not told of any actual encounters with Skraelings, it is hard to believe that—bears or no bears—none occurred. If they did, we can confidently conclude they involved the use of swords and battleaxes wielded in a manner which would confirm the Historia Norwegiae report that mortally wounded Skraelings bled profusely.

  Devout Christians of the southern settlement reacted to the Skraelings with hatred and loathing, but apparently people in the northern settlement did not. Although there is no written confirmation from the period of early contact, everything indicates that the Norse of the Godthaab district accommodated themselves to a Thule presence.3 Although there may have been initial conflict, relationships evolved into a mutually advantageous arrangement. As Albans and Tunit had earlier discovered, it was the sensible way to go.4

  Renowned northern traveller Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who knew as much as anyone about relationships between Eskimos and Europeans, concluded that:

  The less numerous Norsemen in the more northerly colony, less in touch with Europe, less successful with their cattle and sheep, and more dependent on hunting would for these reasons, and because they met the Eskimos more frequently, come much more readily to a feeling of tolerance and later of equality. . . . Hunters would have increasing reason to adopt Eskimo views and ways, until in great probability, a majority had Eskimo wives, just as the majority of northerly Canadian and Alaskan white trappers have Eskimo wives. . . . Eskimoization of the ways of life progressed, in all likelihood peaceably, to a stage where the Western Settlement was no longer an outpost either of European culture or the Christian religion.5

  The currency most commonly used by Greenlanders in their dealings with the outer world was walrus ivory and hides. These were mostly produced by the Western Settlement. Both materials remained in good supply until around the middle of the thirteenth century when a scarcity developed.

  By 1260 this “currency shortfall” had become so serious that the Gardar theocrats found themselves unable to pay the tithes demanded by Nidaros. The cause of the shortage is no mystery. The northerners had stopped paying tithes to Gardar; and the inhabitants of the Eastern Settlement could by no means make up the deficit through their own efforts.

  The bishop at Gardar was not the only one upset by this. Around 1275 the archbishop of Nidaros found himself having to apologize to Pope John XXI for his failure to meet the Vatican’s levy. The archbishop pleaded that Greenland tithes were no longer flowing into his coffers. The Pope replied with a lecture on the duties of subordinates and imposed a ban of excommunication upon the Greenlanders until they paid up.

  In 1279 the somewhat more lenient Pope Nicholas III lifted the ban, but Greenland valuta remained in short supply. In 1282 the tithe was paid mostly in cattle hides and seal skins, produce of the Eastern Settlement that, alas, was of comparatively little worth in European markets.

  According to Stefansson, the power of the Greenland theocracy peaked prior to 1300 and went downhill from then on. I bel
ieve this to have been a direct result of a schism between the two settlements. The annals for 1342 kept by Bishop Oddson in Iceland get to the crux of the matter.

  The inhabitants of Greenland voluntarily abandoned the true faith and the Christian religion, and amalgamated themselves with the people of America [ad Americae populos se converterunt].

  As Stefansson has pointed out, the use of “people of America,” instead of Skraelings, must be a latter-day attempt at clarification by the Icelandic Latinist who, about 1637, made the existing transcript of the bishop’s annals. There is another failure in transcription. The original entry must surely have read, “The inhabitants of northern or western Greenland.” Why so? Well, because we know with absolute certainty that Christianity maintained itself in the Eastern Settlement for another century. Bishop Oddson could not have failed to be aware that southern Greenland was still Christian in his time.

  Archaeological evidence shows that Thule people were at Godthaab by c. 1330 and that amalgamation between them and Norse settlers was apparently well under way by then.6

  Those northerners who wished to practise pastoralism were still doing so, but the bulk of the population of the Western Settlement was being sustained chiefly by hunting, a way of life at which the Skraelings were past masters.

  The Church undoubtedly did everything it could to halt what the clerics must have reviled as a descent into heresy and paganism, but without effect. A full-scale rupture between the two settlements had become inevitable.

  Such a rift would not have worked serious hardship on the northerners. They would have continued hunting valuta, and trading it to English, Flemish, and other merchant ships which bypassed the Eastern Settlement and came direct to the western one. This they did of necessity because Greenland was now officially closed to all foreign merchants by order of the king of Norway, who was determined to make the trade a royal monopoly. His problem was that the apostate northern settlers rejected the overlordship of Norway as resolutely as they did that of the Vatican.

  It was the Eastern Settlement that suffered. Not only was it starved of valuta produced by the northerners, its people were cut off from access to the northern grounds. In consequence they had little to offer traders. When a king’s knorr arrived in Greenland (and they sometimes failed to appear for years on end) the people had little to exchange for European goods other than cattle hides, seal skins, and rough woollen cloth, none of which was of sufficient value to much more than defray the freighting costs to Bergen. It was little wonder that visits of the king’s vessels became more and more infrequent.

  The resulting deprivations must have hurt the southern laity (already an impoverished lot), for they retained a considerable dependence on European supplies. The effect upon the theocrats would have been catastrophic. Not only was the Greenland church deprived of the largest part of its revenue, it also had to endure a severe loss of the prestige upon which its power depended. The situation was intolerable. The Western Settlement had to be brought to heel.

  The death of Bishop Arni in 1348 left the Gardar see vacant for twenty years. During most of that time a priest named Ivar Bardarson was in charge. Shortly before or after 1350 Bardarson went with an expedition to the Western Settlement. Although historians have assumed this was a rescue mission designed to save the northerners from the Skraeling threat, the truth appears otherwise.

  Around 1364 Bardarson returned to Norway where he dictated a report on his Greenland experiences.

  Up there in the Western Settlement stands a big church which is called Stensness church. . . . At present the Skraelings possess the entire Western Settlement. There are indeed horses, goats, cattle, and sheep, but all wild, and no people [natives were not considered “people”], either Christian or heathen.

  All this that is recorded above was told us by Ivar Bardarson, a Greenlander who for many years was steward of the bishop’s household at Gardar in Greenland; how he had seen all this, and was one of those who was chosen by the Laugmader [lawmaker] to go to the Western Settlement against the Skraelings, in order to expel them from the settlement. But when they arrived there they found nobody, either Christian or heathen, merely some wild cattle and sheep. They made use of these cattle and sheep for provisions, and killed as many as the ships could carry, and with this sailed back, and the aforesaid Ivar was one of their party.

  This affair smacks not of a rescue attempt but of a raid. Without human care horses, cattle, goats, and sheep could not have survived long enough in the Godthaab region to become “wild.” The animals found by the Bardarson party must have belonged to someone. Ivar would hardly have admitted that they belonged to people of Norse descent for then his actions would have been tantamount to robbing his own kind. However, if the inhabitants were stigmatized as sub-human (or non-human) Skraelings “who possess the entire Western Settlement,” he would be off the hook.

  I conclude that racial integration had by this time proceeded so far that the theocrats in the south were prepared to write off all the inhabitants of the Western Settlement as renegades who had gone native. Having mingled their proud Aesir blood with that of Skraelings, the northerners deserved no better treatment than was meted out to savages and should, in fact, be categorized as Skraelings themselves.

  The squadron of vessels from the south probably entered Lysefiord (southernmost of the Western Settlement fiords) and sailed up it as far as Sandness, site of the principal church and of estates owned by the church. Finding the country in the hands of “Skraelings,” the southerners filled their ships with loot, then fled back to the Eastern Settlement.

  Apostasy in the west now became a matter of royal concern. In 1355 King Magnus Eriksson ordered a functionary named Powel Knudsson to take a force to Greenland because, the king said,

  for the sake of Our soul and Our parents, who have also supported Christianity in Greenland as We have, We will not let Christianity be destroyed in Greenland in Our time.

  Since there was no threat to Christianity in the Eastern Settlement, the king could only have been referring to the Western one. Nothing in the existing record indicates that Knudsson ever went to Greenland. If he did, he failed to bring the Western Settlement back into the fold.

  In 1379, according to Icelandic chronicles, “The Skraelings attacked the Greenlanders, killed eighteen men and captured two youths and a slave woman.”

  Historians have generally assumed this was an Eskimo attack on the Eastern Settlement. Indeed, the incident could have been a retaliatory raid by “Skraelings,” but it could equally well describe the fate suffered by the crew of an Eastern Settlement vessel (the numbers and genders of the victims sound right) killed and captured during a raid on the northerners.

  Stories collected from native Greenlanders by the first modern Europeans to visit the country certainly speak of troubled times in earlier centuries. The majority of historians have concluded that these accounts are based on memories of raids by European pirates on southern Greenland. I submit that most probably originated in clashes between the two Norse settlements.

  Early in the fifteenth century there was a major escalation in the conflict. In 1448 Pope Nicholas V wrote to the bishops of Skalhölt and Hólar in Iceland, directing them to send priests to Greenland. The situation there, he told the bishops, had become desperate.

  Thirty years ago [that is, in 1418], the barbarians came from the nearby coast of the heathens and attacked the inhabitants of [southern] Greenland most cruelly, and so devastated the mother-country and the holy buildings with fire and sword that there remained on that island no more than nine parish churches. . . . The pitiable inhabitants of both sexes. . .they carried away as prisoners to their own country. But, as is added in the same complaint [from which the Pope was quoting] because the greater number have since returned from captivity to their own homes and have here and there repaired the ruins of their dwellings, they most earnestly desire to restore and extend divine service.

  Scholars have long been at odds about the interp
retation of this letter. Some think it refers to an attack on the Eastern Settlement by Greenland Eskimos. Some, to a raid by natives from Labrador. Some believe the villains were European pirates, Britons by preference. Some question the authenticity of the letter, on the grounds that what it says does not make sense.

  But it would make sense—and very good sense, too, if in 1418 “Skraelings” from the Western Settlement had mounted a devastating raid on the Eastern Settlement—an attack whose primary target was the theocracy and all its works.

  The systematic burning of holy places in “the mother country” suggests that this was the work of men who harboured a powerful hostility towards the Church. This animosity apparently did not extend to ordinary folk. Although people were taken prisoner and carried off (as hostages?), they were brought, or permitted to come, home again and resume their freedom. Credulity boggles at the idea of European slavers behaving in such a manner. One thing is established beyond question: the raiders came from a “nearby coast”—from relatively close by. I am persuaded that their home was no farther away than the Godthaab fiords.

  The Greenland theocracy never recovered from the raid of 1418, during which most of the clerics seem either to have been killed or to have fled the country. No priest is known to have again set foot in Greenland until 1721 when a Lutheran pastor named Hans Egede found his way there.

  During the intervening centuries Greenland was not only out of touch with the Church, but with Norway too. However, all contact with Europe was not lost. By early in the fifteenth century Basque whalers were working Greenland waters, and during the first half of that century increasing numbers of English and other European ships were fishing cod on Iceland’s banks, and trading with the Icelanders.

  Some of these venturers must have come into contact with Greenlanders. Excavations of an old cemetery at Herjólfsnes have produced clothing cut in fifteenth-century continental styles, though made of local materials.