The History of Greenland.
By Fabricius Flavius
Part II
WESTERN SETTLEMENT
INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY
FIRST BISHOP OF GREENLAND
The introduction of Christianity among the Greenland vikings in the year A.D. 1000 was the
work of Leif, son of Eric the Red. For in 999 he went on an expedition to Norway and there
joined the court of that great proselytizing king, Olaf Tryggvason, where he was, of
course, speedily converted to the new faith. When, in the following year, he proposed to
return to Greenland, he was invited by the king to preach Christianity to the people of
this far-off colony, and this, though not without some misgivings, Leif said he would do;
so he was given a priest to take with him. Soon after his arrival in Greenland he set about
his task and it was not long before his mother, Thjodhild, consented to be baptized; she
had a church built in the neighbourhood of their Brattahlid homestead, but old Red Eric
himself was stubborn and preferred that his wife should live away from him rather than that
he should betray the gods beloved of his fathers. Nevertheless Leif and the priest sent by
King Olaf made many converts.
No doubt here, as in Iceland, Christianity soon received the formal sanction of the Althing
as the official religion of the republic, for by the middle of the eleventh century the
colony, together with Scandinavia and Iceland, was recognized as a part of the great
archbishopric of Bremen, and as early as the time of Archbishop Adalbert ( 1043-1073) came
messengers from Greenland to the prelate at Bremen begging him to send them clergy. In 1103
the Greenland Church was transferred to the ecclesiastical province of Lund, but in the
'20S of the twelfth century the pious and neglected colonists, dismayed at the lack of
priests in their remote country, subscribed together for the endowment of a bishop's see
and obtained the permission of the Norwegian king that Greenland should have its own
resident prelate. In he saga of Eric the Red it is related that the custom in Greenland was
to bury men on the farms where they died, in unconsecrated ground, and to set a stake
rising up from the corpse's breast; then, later on, when the priest came, the stake would
be drawn up and holy water poured down the cavity and a funeral service sung over them.
Sometimes this happened a very long time after the burial of the body. In 1124 the
Norwegian Arnald was consecrated to the new see by the archbishop of Lund and in 1126,
after two years of travel and delay, the first bishop of Greenland landed in his far-off
diocese. He dwelt at Gardar and there was built the cathedral, a little cruciform church
between 70 and 80 feet in length, that was dedicated to St. Nicholas. Arnald proved himself
to be an able and influential man; indeed, when he departed from his diocese in 1150 he had
created for his successors in the see an authority that established the bishop of Greenland
henceforth as the chief personage in the colony, its temporal, and not merely its spiritual
head. Ten years after his leaving the already close bond between Greenland and Norway was
strengthened by the transference from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Lund to that of
the archbishop of Nidaros.
THE COLONY ABANDONED TO ITS FATE
It was just over a hundred years later, in 1261, that the free state of Greenland, after
more than 250 years existence as an independent republic, became a crown colony of Norway.
This was an inevitable sequel to the now almost complete economic dependence of Greenland
upon Norway, and the promise of the payment of taxes to the Norwegian king was little more
than a desperate measure to secure by purchase that frequent coming and going between
Europe and Greenland necessary for the supply to this distant land of such vital
commodities as corn and timber. But it was a political move with disastrous and
disappointing results, for shortly afterwards there came about a decline in Norse trading-
enterprise, largely the result of the rapidly increasing power of the Hanseatic League, and
the isolation of Greenland was now made more terrible inasmuch as the Scandinavian kings,
jealous of their rights, forbade private commerce with the Greenlanders. Only the royal
knerrir (merchant-ships), sailing from Bergen, were allowed to trade with the colony, and
in the fifteenth century, upon the further decline of Norway as a sea-power, even this
kingly monopoly was neglected and rare indeed became the visit of a knörr. At last,
forgotten of the civilized world, these poor dwellers in the distant north knew themselves
faced with ruin and extinction; then slowly and inexorably this worst tragedy of all
viking history played itself out; alone and unwatched of men, without hope of help, the
Greenland vikings died.
Loftur Sćmundsson continues the story.
Biography of Loftur Sćmundsson.
Loftur Sćmundsson (died 1133) was the son of Sćmundur fróđi. Loftur was the father of Jón Loftsson who adopted Snorri Sturluson. Loftur was a priest and a chieftain at Oddi in the county of Rangá in the south part of Iceland. He was married to Ţóra Magnúsdóttir, daughter of Magnus III of Norway.
EXCAVATIONS AT HERJOLFSNESS AND GARDAR
The last record of a foreign vessel having reached Greenland, an Icelandic boat driven out
of her course by storm, and the last recorded sailing of a knörr from Bergen, date from the
first decade of the fifteenth century, but before this date shadows of the doom impending
had darkened over the far-off colony. In 1345 the Greenlanders, because of their extreme
poverty, were excused by the pope the payment of a tithe, and ten years later it was
reported to the king of Norway that some of the colonists were forsaking Christianity and
Christian behaviour for the faith and habits of the Eskimo; so a knörr was hastily equipped
and sent off to them, the first for nine years. From 1349 to 1368 there was no resident
bishop of Greenland, and in 1377 died Alf, the last prelate who lived in the country. In
1492 a papal letter of Alexander VI declared that the inhabitants of Greenland lived on
dried fish and milk, that there was no knowledge of a ship having visited them during the
previous eighty years, and that most of them had abandoned their Christian faith, having
nothing else to remind them thereof save an altar-cloth (corporale) which was exhibited
once a year and whereon the body of Christ had been consecrated at the last mass said in
the country a hundred years ago. But though the history of the decline of the colony is
incomplete, and the story of its final extinction lost, yet the archaeologist has something
to tell about the life of these poor colonists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
this thanks to those pathetic and wonderful discoveries that fill several wall-cases of the
National Museum at Copenhagen, the result of the extraordinary excavations of Dr. Poul
Nörlund of this museum at Herjolfsness in 1921 and at Gardar in 1926. The first site was
the cemetery of Herjolfsness (now Nassarmiut) near Fredericksdal, and here, indeed, though
poverty and sickness were fast undermining the little settlement, the unhappy remnant of
the people was still faithful and devout Christians. In the hundred odd graves that were
explored it was found that the burial-customs of the Church were most scrupulously
observed, and no less than fifty-eight of the bodies had wooden crosses laid upon their
breasts, most of them ornamental and carefully made, some even bearing inscriptions in
runes. 'God the Almighty guard Gudleif well' ran the prayer of one, and 'Thorleif made this
cross in praise and worship of God the Almighty' said another.
The dead were laid to rest, some in wooden coffins and the remainder directly in the earth,
shrouded in the miserable clothes, often threadbare and patched, that they had worn in
life. These garments ( Pl. XII ) were woven of sheep's wool, and, for both men and women,
were long skirted gowns with full sleeves, following the European fashions of a somewhat
earlier date; the common head-dress was a hood and cape combined, having a tail at the
back, but there were five capes of simpler cut, and one of conical shape that cannot have
been in vogue in Greenland long before the end of the fifteenth century. The skeletons of
twenty-five individuals survived for examination, and it was found that the folk
represented were of short stature (5 foot was tall for a man, while all the women were
under 4 foot 9 inches) and of feeble build. Only five seem to have been of ordinary health,
and of the twenty folk over eighteen years of age a half had died before their thirtieth
year. Plainly did these miserable bones of a dying race betray the hard life and chronic
under-nourishment that had ruined the sturdy physique of the old Norse settlers.
DETERIORATION OF THE CLIMATE AND SOUTHWARD MOVEMENT OF THE ESKIMO
And at this time the end was near, for already nearly all intercourse with Europe had
ceased. But there remains one tragic picture of the passing of these lonely colonists.
About the year 1550 an Icelander, aboard a German merchant-ship, was blown far out of his
course and found himself off the coast of Greenland. The ship put into a fjord where there
were many islands, some inhabited by Eskimos, and these natives the European crew dared not
approach. But they landed on a seemingly uninhabited island upon which were some ruins,
boat-houses and walls such as were familiar objects in Iceland. And there they found a man
lying dead. He wore a well-made hood and clothing of coarse woollen material and sealskin;
by his side lay an iron knife, almost worn away by long use and much resharpening. Who he
was they knew not, but this stiffened and lonely corpse must have been the last Norseman of
the old colony who was seen by Europeans, and there he lay, dead and unburied, by his
deserted dwelling with the wasted knife at his side, a pitiful emblem of the civilization
to which he belonged, the civilization that had forgotten and deserted him. There were,
however, two contributory causes, in addition to European neglect, that had made life for
the Norse in Greenland too hard to be endured. One was a gradual and serious deterioration
of the climate during the centuries following the original settlement, and the other,
itself a consequence of the now increasing cold, was the southward movement of the Eskimo.
When the Norsemen first came to Greenland they found the ruined dwellingplaces and stone
implements of the Skraelings, as they called these nomad native folk, but discovered that
the Eskimo themselves were then living far away to the north. But by the thirteenth century
the southward movement had begun and finally, about 1325, the western settlement was
abandoned by the white men. In 1355 it was told in Norway that many of the Greenland Norse
had become tainted with Eskimo heathendom; but there was, nevertheless, a continued
hostility between the two races, and another attack by the Skraelings took place in 1379,
this time upon the eastern settlement, where a large number of the white men were killed.
Jón Loftsson finishes our tale of Greenland.
Biography of Jón Loftsson.
Jón Loftsson (died 1197) was chieftain at Oddi in the county of Rangá in the south part of Iceland, and of the Oddaverjar family clan. He was one of the most popular chieftains and politician of his age in the country. He participated in the so-called Stađarmál, in 1179, against the Roman-Catholic Church and was victorious. After Jón died the family at Oddi was still the most powerful family in Iceland but their power soon began to go downhill after his death. His parents were Loftur Sćmundsson and Ţóra Magnúsdóttir. At a young age the great scholar Snorri Sturluson was adopted by Jón Loftsson.
The poem Nóregs konungatal was composed in Jón's honour, tracing his ancestry to the Norwegian royal line.
What finally happened is unknown. The Eskimos never seem to have been a naturally
quarrelsome folk and there was perhaps some ordinary and peaceful intercourse with the
Skraelings, enough at any rate to lend some probability to the belief of Dr. Nansen that
the Norse, finding themselves deprived of the comforts of their own civilization, were
compelled by the hard necessity of imitating the Eskimo manner of life to abandon what had
survived of their own faith and customs, this ending at last in the complete absorption of
the remaining white men by the far more numerous Eskimos. Yet the excavations at
Herjolfsness revealed nothing that pointed to an intermingling of the two races, and it
seems more likely that the children of the vikings died surrounded by natives who regarded
unmoved and without sympathy the sufferings of the enfeebled and starving folk who clung so
desperately to this inhospitable country where now only the hardy Skraelings dared hope to
live.
REDISCOVERY OF GREENLAND BY FROBISHER
And so it was almost as an unknown country that Greenland was rediscovered in 1576 by
Martin Frobisher. He landed on the west-coast in 1578, and finding that the Eskimos had a
few pieces of iron, some spearheads of this metal, a bronze button or two, and knew gold
when they saw it, he concluded that they must have had intercourse at some time with
Europeans. But of these he knew and heard nothing. Yet the memory of the Norse settlers had
not wholly passed away, for in 1721 the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede landed in Greenland
to discover, if he could, their fate and to preach to them the Christianity that Leif
Ericsson had first taught in the country over seven hundred years before. But Hans Egede
found only the Skraelings in the land where once his countrymen had lived.
Credits:
Book Title: A History of the Vikings. Contributors: T. D. Kendrick - author. Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1930.
2007 NetGlimse.com.
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