The Vikings of Greenland
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Under the wild sky of the Arctic north, at the far northwestern edge of the heaving Atlantic sea, there lies the ruins of a church. Scattered amongst the grass, half-sunken stones now stand open to the heavens, but once they formed the centre of a small community named Hvalsey. In the year 1408 a few dozen guests made their way here across the black and icy water from their farms along the coast. They came for a celebration: the wedding of young couple Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Björnsdóttir. The church had likely seen many such weddings before, but it would see no more. This was to be the last recorded act of a dying civilisation.
Soon after the wedding Thorstein and Sigrid left Hvalsey for the former’s birthplace — Iceland. They never returned. Within three decades no man, woman, or child was left in Hvalsey. The homesteads were abandoned, the livestock and dogs butchered and eaten, their farms left to rot. As they sang, drank mead, and ate roasted seal that happy night, none among them could have known they were to be the last of the Greenland Vikings.
No one knows exactly what happened to them. No one knows where they went or how they died or whether any of them survived. After five hundred years living at the edge of the known world, the westernmost Norsemen seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
Five centuries earlier, around the year 950, a red-headed boy named Erik was born in southern Norway. When he was ten his father killed a man in a quarrel and the family had to flee. They took passage across the sea to an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, the land of fire and ice, Iceland.
For almost a century the Norse had been expanding out of their Scandinavian homeland, driven by a booming population and shortage of tillable land. The first Viking ship had reached Reykjavik in 874; by the time Erik’s family arrived the island was already well settled. They had to make do with a poor strip of country in the northwest. Thorvald worked the fields until he died and then his son took over. Erik inherited more than the farm, however. Like his father before him, he got into a quarrel with a neighbour; like his father before him, he killed a man. Norse law was clear: Erik was to be banished from his adopted home for three years. He rounded up a crew and left Iceland at the prow of a longship.
Another man might have headed back east, but such a path was difficult for Erik the Red. If he returned to Norway it was likely he’d find the family of the man his father murdered still waiting for vengeance. The Norse were no strangers to blood feuds; killings could oscillate back and forth between families for generations. He could not risk going back there. Instead, Erik decided on another path: one which looked to the west.
There was a rumour among the Norsemen who made regular passage from Norway to Iceland of a land even further to the west. Supposedly a sailor called Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had been blown far from shore during a storm and sighted strange islands among the mists. He had only caught a glimpse, not getting close enough to land, but upon his return to Iceland his story had intrigued many. Erik decided to see if the rumours were true.
The journey was a perilous one: 1500 miles of tempestuous seas riven with roving icebergs. The Vikings had perhaps the most sophisticated sailing ships in the world at the time — streamlined and hardy vessels with square sails. But they had only the sun and the stars by which to navigate, and they could do little to prevent the winds of a storm taking them wherever they wished. And yet, despite the daunting odds, Erik and his men made it to the coast of Greenland, the largest non-continental island in the world, unscathed.
The lone ship rounded the island’s southern cape and found a cove that sheltered them from the winds. Despite their northerly latitude, the valley they found was green with life: grassland, willow, and birch. It was no paradise, but it was habitable. A harsh living could be scratched from this patch of earth, for, by complete chance, Erik had discovered Greenland just as the world entered the Mediaeval Warm Period — when temperatures in the North Atlantic were somewhat warmer (perhaps by as little as 1°C) than the centuries that followed.
Erik spent his three years of exile exploring this new land. When he arrived back in Iceland at the end of his sentence he brought with him a cunning plan. He wanted to gather settlers to accompany him westwards to begin a new colony. But he knew it would be a hard sell. How could he convince people to risk the deadly crossing for a sliver of green on the edge of a frozen wasteland? The Icelandic Saga from which we draw most of Erik the Red’s story tells us what he did with more than a hint of irony:
In the summer Erik went to live in the land which he had discovered, and which he called Greenland, "Because," said he, “men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name.”
It was a simple trick, but it worked. When he came to leave the following summer, Erik the Red was accompanied by no fewer than twenty-five ships carrying men, women, children, cattle, chickens and rabbits. They brought with them too plenty of timber and iron and grain.
Of the twenty-five, only fourteen ships reached Greenland. The other eleven became the first of many Greenland-bound vessels to be lost to the seas over the following centuries. And for those that arrived, the trials had only just begun.
