The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (15 page)

Gudmundur Olafsson believes that’s where many of the Icelanders’ house timbers came from, that emigrants—whether Vikings fleeing the king or those of their descendants who moved to Greenland—literally pulled up stakes and brought the posts and beams and paneling with them.

Gudmundur is the chief archaeologist at Iceland’s National Museum in Reykjavik. Although he has been excavating Viking houses since 1972, he is disinclined to speculate; he often answers a question with
We don't exactly know yet.

For six summers he worked in Greenland, excavating a Norse farm that had been discovered in 1991 when two reindeer hunters spotted a stick of wood protruding from the bank of a glacial river, close to the inland ice pack. Greenland is as treeless as Iceland; as one account of the discovery remarks, “the sight of large pieces of wood is not an everyday occurrence.” The hunters called the authorities.

The stick was part of a Viking woman’s loom. What now is a barren plain of sand had been, from Gudrid’s day to the fourteenth century, an attractive Viking farm site, with grassy pasture, wet meadows, and a meandering oxbow river. Its name is long forgotten. The archaeologists, digging through yards of sand to uncover eight layers of houses, called it the “Farm Beneath the Sand.” Each winter the river dumped a new load of sand onto their work site. All summer, while they dug, it threatened to wash their work away. In the seventh year it succeeded; the site no longer exists. But in those six years, archaeologists learned more about a Norse household than they ever had before.

“The permafrost makes all the difference,” Gudmundur told me. “When you come down to the floor layer, you can smell the cows and sheep.” The stumps of the roof-bearing posts, preserved in postholes, were a bit under six inches across, about the size of sturdy fence-posts. They had been reused again and again as the house changed shape over the centuries. Just as in Iceland, the great hall favored by the first settlers had given way to a warren of small, interconnected rooms, presumably to save on firewood. But the earliest house on the site gave Gudmundur a queasy feeling of déjà vu.

“It was almost the same size as Eiriksstadir,” Gudmundur said, “a little wider, but the same length. We have no idea who lived at the Farm Beneath the Sand. It was not by the sea, but far inland. It was probably not anyone important. But it has led me to conclude that the people who went to Greenland with Eirik the Red were the same sort of farmer: middle-class farmers who wanted to get bigger, who wanted this opportunity to get rich. I think they lived quite similar a lifestyle as they had in Iceland.”

And they lived in quite similar—even exactly similar—houses.

“If you’re moving to Greenland or a new place, and you want to be a more important man, why wouldn’t you build a bigger house than you had at home, if you had the means?” Gudmundur said. “I think the reason they are building the same size of house is that they took all the timber with them on the boat.”

Gudmundur knows just how to do that. He helped design a Viking longhouse that was built in Iceland and then taken apart and shipped to Greenland. It was set up near Eirik the Red’s farm at Brattahlid to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the Norse settlement in Greenland. He showed me a photograph of a standard 20-foot shipping crate about half full of lumber—a precut Viking house kit. “This is all the wood for one house. It took a couple of months for the carpenters to make it, but only a couple of days to take it down and pack it. And it took up so little space on the boat.”

It was the second Viking house kit with which Gudmundur had been involved. In 1997 the Icelandic National Museum was approached by a committee of citizens from western Iceland who wanted to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of Vinland by reconstructing the house where he was born in the Dales. There was no question here of discovering the house, as John Steinberg had discovered Gudrid’s house at Glaumbaer. “It has never been lost,” said Gudmundur. “According to the local traditions, this was the site where Eirik the Red lived. The sagas are very much alive with the local farmers. They know their saga heroes.”

Eiriksstadir was first excavated in 1895 by Thorsteinn Erlingsson, an Icelandic poet. Archaeologists of his day had no feeling for turf. As Sirri had told me, “It was just turf and they threw it away. They dug down until they reached the foundation stones.” As a result, Eiriksstadir was well and truly ransacked. Most of the information a modern specialist would read in the turf—such as when the turf was cut and whether it was long-lasting
klömbra or
the lazy man’s
snidda
—was lost. In Thorsteinn’s drawings and descriptions, Eiriksstadir is square. The house is divided longitudinally into two parallel rooms, with an offset door connecting them.

“In 1938 Eiriksstadir was revisited by the state antiquarian, Matthias Thordarson,” said Gudmundur. “He discovered there was no room in the back. It was a landslide that had formed the depression. So that’s what we knew in 1997.”

Gudmundur told the committee he would have to reexcavate the ruins before he could help with the replica. In his experience, the Vikings in Iceland before the year 1000 built two kinds of houses: longhouses and pit houses. A longhouse, or
skáli,
was a single rectangular room with a longfire, a narrow hearth running longways down the center. Earthen sleeping benches flanked the fire. The walls were slightly bowed out in the middle. The door was off-center, on a long wall close to one end. Longhouses are generally about 65 feet long and 20 feet wide.

Most longhouses had a pit house nearby. The much smaller pit houses—about 13 by 10 feet, roughly square, and sunk 18 inches into the ground—had benches along three walls, a fireplace in one corner, and no apparent doorway. People may have come down by ladder through the roof, which was not high: The rafter tips rested on the ground.

Early archaeologists thought the pit houses were saunas. Today some think they were housing for slaves—as at Sveigakot in the north—or temporary quarters for traders: Two to four people could live in them. “These houses are found all over Northern Europe,” Gudmundur explained. “They were probably quite easy to build. They don’t need much material. These were the first buildings you put up when you came to a new country.” Gudmundur believes the pit house became the women’s weaving room once the longhouse was built. “We find loom weights, small knives, and other artifacts connected with women in them.”

At Eiriksstadir, Gudmundur found both a longhouse and a pit house. Charcoal pieces from the longfire were dated, using the carbon-14 method, to between the years 900 and 1000; Eirik had presumably lived there around 980, so it could be his fire. But Gudmundur also found a second fireplace. It was hard to tell which was older because the floor layer had been dug away by the earlier excavations. He found three possible doors: two offset, front and back, and one in the center. He could not be sure where the western gable was; the end wall was indistinct, and the foundation stones may have been scavenged when a telephone pole was erected close by.

“There had been an earlier building destroyed by a landslide,” Gudmundur told me. “Then it was put up again. It’s quite small, but not the smallest longhouse we have found. Probably Eirik had no choice. He was living there on the mercy of his mother-in-law. He had no land. This house site was just on the border of the next farm. He was probably always in conflict with the neighbor because his sheep were grazing on the neighbor’s land.”

The basic floor plan Gudmundur arrived at shows one room, a great hall 41 feet long and 13 feet wide in the middle, narrowing at both ends. There is a central longfire and both a front and a back door—a good idea since Eirik the Red had so many enemies. What Gudmundur calls “a hypothetical reconstruction” of Eirik’s house was built on the site in 1999. He explained, “If we did it again, it wouldn’t look exactly the same because our knowledge improves with every reconstruction. We discussed what we knew about every little detail in the house—and what was possible. How big the posts should be. How high the roof should be. Sometimes we had to compromise, because the archaeologists didn’t always agree with the architects.”

The beds, for instance, are too short. The earthen benches along the walls on both sides of the longfire were boxed with wood and covered with furs and blankets to make comfortable seats by day and double (or triple) beds by night. Each bed was separated from the next by a footboard joined to the posts that hold up the roof. The length of the beds at Eiriksstadir, said Gudmundur, “was a compromise after long discussion. We had to speculate about the posts because the early excavations had destroyed the evidence. But they had drawn a map of where they had found stones that had supported the roof posts, so our house is based a little on that. We archaeologists wanted narrower posts. To get them we had to shorten the beds. The engineers wanted to be sure the roof wouldn’t fall in. It’s calculated to hold the maximum weight of snow. I don’t think that was a problem for Eirik.”

He paused. “All things considered, I think this is probably the best reconstruction of a Viking Age house that I’ve seen.”

I took Gudmundur’s advice and went to the Dales to visit Eiriksstadir. It was the weekend of the yearly Viking festival, Leif’s Holiday, very much a family event. There was ring dancing and folksinging. A man worked a furnace and made trinkets out of nails. A woman sold bone flutes. Another played
hneftafl
or “tables,” the Viking board game, beating all comers. A Greenlander sold walrus-ivory amulets. Other merchants hawked felt hats, cured skins, and soap. A man turned four sheep carcasses on spits over a fire. Wearing special straps around their waists and legs for their opponents to grip, boys and girls competed at
glíma,
or Viking wrestling. A group of young toughs tried to lift huge stones. (The smallest of three was marked 75 kilograms, or 165 pounds.) Young and old in Viking garb competed in a sort of tug-of-war: A long rope was tied in a loop and laid behind the necks of two contestants; the goal was to pull each other forward past a bone marker.

A Viking tent with carved wooden tent-poles was filled with reproductions of Queen Asa’s housewares from the Oseberg ship: A Viking reenactor was living inside. The seven-footlong bed was full of rumpled furs and blankets.

Up the hill, Eirik the Red’s house looked tiny from the outside, an earthen hovel. Inside, it was snug.

The architects had put in two wooden dividers, turning the single open room of Gudmundur’s excavation into three: a small entry room, with storage space for tack and farm equipment; the main living room; and a small pantry, with a grindstone and a food chest, at the back door. The two anterooms were rough, the turf walls exposed, and each had a loft. The great hall was completely paneled and very pretty in a blond Scandinavian way. Furs and skins hung on the walls and were draped over the wide wooden benches along the walls. Tools and weapons hung from pegs or on crossbars that ran from the posts. At the base of each post, a carved footboard divided the benches into sleeping berths—for children or midgets, but not six-foot-tall men. Gudmundur was right: The posts were too close together.

The longfire was small, just one stick of wood burning on a bed of coals, and the room was rather dark and smoky, though warm. Over the fire, on an iron chain, hung a big black pot full of soup, simmering slowly. As I sat on a bench by the fire, imagining Gudrid minding the soup, there was just enough room for the tourists to walk past my knees.

The ceiling was higher than I had expected. It made the lofts over the anterooms into usable space, but it seemed odd to send the fire’s heat away from the people.

“According to the sagas,” the docent told me, “houses were as tall as they were wide.”

Presumably that was an architect’s reading of the sagas. According to Gudmundur, the height of a Viking house was one of those things we don’t exactly know yet.

I told the docent, who was dressed in a pinafore gown with tortoise brooches, that I was working with an archaeological crew digging up Gudrid’s house in the north, at Glaumbaer.

“Then can you explain why the beds in this house are so short?” she asked.

A man listening in on our conversation replied, “Because Vikings slept sitting up.”

“That’s nonsense,” she said.

I had heard that theory, too, but I wasn’t sold. The sagas include numerous episodes in which husbands and wives were clearly stretched out full length.

But the docent didn’t call on the sagas this time; she stuck to the archaeological record. “Have you seen the bed in the tent down there? The one from the Oseberg ship? No way would they sleep in those big beds while they were traveling and then come home to a short bed.”

I repeated what Gudmundur had told me about the post placement and the snow-load problem, and she was reassured to learn that we don’t exactly know the size of a Viking bed.

But because of this theoretical reconstruction of Eirik the Red’s house, Gudmundur did know a few other things. For instance, it took the carpenters weeks to build the wall panels. Based on the wall panels found in Greenland, they were over an inch thick, planed as smooth as a ship’s strake, and then decoratively carved.

The crucial scene in
The Saga of Eirik the Red,
when Eirik’s temper snaps and he kills his neighbor’s sons in a rage—the murders for which he is outlawed from Iceland, forcing him to sail west in search of the land believed to be beyond—is due to a couple of these boards.

The land called Greenland was discovered and settled by Icelanders. Eirik the Red was the name of a man from the Breidafjord. He sailed from there to Greenland and claimed the land around what is now called Eiriksfjord. He gave the land its name and called it “Greenland” because he said people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name.

—Ari the Learned,
The Book of the Icelanders

G
UDRID AND HER FATHER SAILED TO GREENLAND IN
the year 1000. They carried along the posts and beams and wall panels and bench boards of their house at Hellisvellir, and most likely the timber frame from Arnarstapi, too, since Orm and his wife emigrated with them. The two households—around thirty people altogether—had their clothes chests and milk buckets and cooking pots and seal-oil lamps, their looms and tools and tack and weapons, their fishing boats and the best of their livestock. They carried food and fresh water for a voyage expected to last less than a week.

They were not so lucky. Following the gentler version of Gudrid’s story—the one that doesn’t end in shipwreck—they were blown about the North Atlantic all summer,
hafvilla,
“bewildered by the sea.” Half their people died, including Gudrid’s foster-parents, and the survivors suffered miserably from fear and exposure in the open boat before they reached the southernmost tip of Greenland, just before winter, and found shelter with Eirik the Red’s cousin.

“At last we came to the harbor, and it was a surprisingly good one,” wrote another Icelandic traveler, on a much bigger ship, in 1835, “though the land here is far from what you’d call beautiful. Sheer ice-gray mountains ringed the harbortown—not a few of them, either, and all bare-naked.” Greenland, he summed up, “is more gray than green.”

It was academe’s considered opinion, when I first read
The Book of the Icelanders
thirty years ago, that in naming Greenland, Eirik the Red had perpetrated a hoax. The sagas have very little nice to say about Eirik’s colony.

I see death
in a dread place,
yours and mine,
northwest in the waves,
with frost and cold,
and countless wonders...

So goes a verse addressing a traveler headed to Greenland. Trolls and evil spirits descended on Eirik’s Fjord in the winter, the sagas say, breaking men’s bones and destroying their ships. One poignant scene describes a girl who came to Greenland accidentally, adrift on an ice floe; she stands on the shore on a summer’s day and stares out to sea, dreaming of seeing the beautiful fields of Iceland again.

Writing
The Book of the Icelanders
in the early 1100s, Ari the Learned, Iceland’s first historian, practically came out and said it: Eirik’s “nice name” was salesmanship, simple bait-and-switch. Lately, though, scholars have reconsidered. The name Greenland “might have been bestowed honestly,” one condescends to write. “Eirik had not lied,” others say more forcefully: “This name is not inappropriate”; it “reflected accurately” the land he had found.

Greenland is indeed “more gray than green” (as well as more white than gray, at least from the air). Yet the little pockets of green are as lush as Iceland must have been when the first settlers claimed their plots. Doubtless, Eirik saw the other similarity: Like Iceland once, Greenland was empty of inhabitants. As historian Gwyn Jones puts it, “For the first time in his life Eirik was free of constrictive neighbors.”

Today the largest town is the capital, Nuuk, on the seaward edge of a handful of long, twisting fjords that probe eastward sixty miles to the inland ice. It was here that the Danish missionary Hans Egede came in the 1700s, three hundred years after the Viking settlement had disappeared, looking for lost Christian souls. Finding the culture totally Inuit, he reintroduced Christianity, wool clothing, wood-framed houses, and, so I was told, “good Danish food.” I visited Nuuk in mid-May, a week after “spring arrived,” according to my hostess, Kristjana Motzfeldt, an Icelander married to a Greenlandic statesman. Built on a rocky spit three miles from end to end, the city of 15,000—more than one-quarter of the country’s entire population—sported no trees, no flowers. Old snow-piles, gray with gravel, hid behind the bright-painted houses bolted to the bare rock. The reservoir was still iced over. The mountains that overlooked the town were sheer and ice gray, streaked with snow. Yet the air did hold a springlike mildness as I climbed the steep wooden staircases that linked the winding streets, most of which dead-ended in water. The children certainly thought it was spring: They waded barefoot in the bay.

Kristjana had offered to take me to Sandnes (“Sandy Point”), a farm deep in the Lysufjord south of Nuuk. According to archaeologists’ best guesses, Sandnes is the farm Gudrid owned with her first husband, Thorstein Eiriksson, or at least where they ended up after their failed attempt to get to Vinland, and where Thorstein so spookily died. But circumstances intervened, and Kristjana turned me and the Motzfeldts’ boat over to Tobias, whom her husband had introduced as his chauffeur.

“You have a map, you know where you want to go, good, good,” she said, brushing away my doubts. “Tobias will get you there”—despite the fact that he spoke no English (or Icelandic) and I spoke no Greenlandic (or Danish). His wife, Rusina, would be going, too, I learned as we reached the boat at 8:00 Saturday morning. “Beautiful!” she said, with an expansive wave of one hand, as we passed the dramatic mountains that marked the harbor mouth. It was her favorite (and almost her only) English word.

The Motzfeldts’ boat was a seal-hunting boat, half enclosed. It had two seats, for pilot and copilot, a two-sleeper cabin in the bow, and an open rear deck large enough for landing a seal or two. It had two engines and a large gas tank. Cruising along at about eight knots, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastries, I realized that sailing to Sandnes in a Viking ship would have taken amazing skill. The narrow Lysufjord (named for a kind of cod) heads due east for most of its length, the ice-gray mountains falling straight into the sea, with no beaches, no harbors, no skerries, no bays, nowhere to find safety if the wind should turn contrary—or the ship should sink. The cliffs’ snow-streaks and striations puzzle the mind; the eye wants to find a meaning in the pattern. I began to see huge faces as the hours passed and the view refused to change. The sky was overcast, the silver sea glassy calm. A sense of distance eluded me until I saw a boat the size of ours looking like a speck, a seabird, between us and the gray cliff face. Ahead lay endless iterations of the same humped mountain, hill upon hill: I could see no passage in.

Finally, after almost four hours, the fjord divided in two. A dome-shaped mountain lay straight ahead, a low rocky toe reached in from our left. As we turned the point into shadow, the boat began humping the waves, “swimming like a seal,” as Kristjana had warned me it might if the wind turned against us. No Viking ship would have made it to Sandnes that day.

But the sides of the fjord soon softened. The snow had disappeared. Red-brown brush clung to gentler slopes, and here and there above a narrow beach were bright yellow-gold patches of grass that looked man-made: they were straight-edged, rectangular. You could spot Norse ruins from far away, I had read, if you looked for the lushest grass.

The water grew greener, more shallow. Birds were feeding along the edge of a sandbar, seemingly in the middle of the fjord. We went slowly onward, rolling sideways and, I soon realized, hugging the wrong shore. Across to the north I could see another great swath of winter-gold grass and the landmark I’d read about: “a small round rocky hillock ... a fine vantage place for looking for scattered sheep in the valley.”

Creeping along the edge of the sandbar, we had to retreat back down the fjord quite a ways before we could come close enough to shore to launch our rubber dinghy. Luckily the wind was calmer now, and by the time we scraped the white sand beach, the sun had come out.

Tobias and Rusina, each carrying a bottle of soda and a handful of plastic bags, sauntered down the beach to gather mussels. I hurried off the opposite way, knowing we had very little time before the falling tide would strand our anchored boat. I soon found, though, that the clear Greenlandic air had again deceived me: It was much farther to the Viking site than it had seemed from the vantage of the boat. Climbing above the beach, I found a forest—head high, but dense and tangled, the tiny leaves just unfurling—between me and the winter-gold grass. I crouched and wriggled through it on reindeer trails, the broken birch branches in my wake leaving a pungent scent. Under my feet were juniper bushes thick with last year’s berries and the tiny pink flowers of saxifrage. Jumping a rushing stream, I broke from the tree cover, startling three reindeer that had been grazing in the old Viking pastures. As I watched them course off into the hills, dwindling to specks, I finally understood the size of Sandnes: It was easily a chieftain’s farm, to be measured in miles, not acres. That landmark hillock would take more time to climb than the tide would spare me, while beyond it, I knew from the map, was mile upon mile of grassy river valley leading north to the next fjord, the way marked by a series of linked lakes known for the finest salmon run in Greenland. To the south, across the silty end of the bay, were two long green valleys stretching ten miles to the inland ice. Along one of them was the Farm Beneath the Sand.

Just as that farmstead was buried in sand by the river’s changing course, the church built at Sandnes soon after Gudrid’s time is now underwater. The Sandy Point has eroded significantly since her day. But the hip-high grass is still rumpled into hummocks by the turf-and-stone walls of Norse buildings. These were lived in until at least 1300, and beneath the largest, according to drawings from the first excavation, in 1932, are two walls of an older longhouse: the house Gudrid may have lived in that long horrible winter when almost everyone she knew died. The archaeologist found a corner hearth and flagstones at the front door. Thirty feet away were two small buildings “almost obliterated” by a later midden. In one was found a finely carved ship’s tiller, its knob shaped like a dragon’s head and its shaft decorated with a row of cats’ faces. The name “Helgi” was written in runes on its side.

It was not clear to me, standing on the old stone walls and gazing at the view, why Gudrid should have wanted to leave Sandnes—once spring arrived and the winter’s spooks had been put to rest—except to go in search of a more suitable husband than the old farmer who had tried his best to comfort her. It is a lovely green spot in an otherwise barren gray land. Other visitors have had the same reaction. The world traveler Arni Magnusson, the first Icelander to visit China, remarked on the richness of Sandnes in 1755. Tallying up its birch trees and grazing lands, beaches full of edible seaweed, reindeer, seals, salmon, seabirds, and birds’ eggs, he concluded, “I thought to myself that it would be good to build a farm there on either side of that river,” adding, “I have never eaten so many blueberries.”

Sigurdur Breidfjord, who had found Greenland “more gray than green,” changed his mind abruptly when he saw Sandnes in 1835. “It would have been good to live here,” he wrote, “for the grassland is beautiful and lush, likewise there is a good forest and salmon fishing both winter and summer in the lakes and brook.” (The churchyard had not yet been entirely swept away, for he writes with macabre detail of the yellowed human bones that fell apart in his fingers as he tried to pry them from the eroding beachfront.)

To Aage Roussell, the young architect-turned-archaeologist who excavated the spot for the Danish National Museum in the 1930s, the setting was more remarkable than the resources. “The farm is surrounded by much natural beauty and the view over the fjord is magnificent,” he wrote. “Here, as at most Norse farms, the impression one forms is that the view has been one of the chief considerations when the
landnáms
man chose his site.”

What apparently was not a chief consideration for that first settler was easy access. If we had been in a Viking ship, sailing or rowing, we would not have made it back to Nuuk that night—one reason no one lives at Sandnes now. We had hardly shipped our anchor when the wind turned against us again. The boat began to buck and thump; Tobias gritted his teeth and concentrated on steering her straight. Four bone-jarring hours later, we came to the mouth of the fjord, into a suddenly calm and sunny evening, an iceberg floating like a big pale-blue swan in the distance. At the foot of the
beautiful!
mountain, Rusina finally got a chance to throw out a fishing line.

Gudrid lived at Sandnes, at most, for a year, leaving it for good after her husband died. Her main home in Greenland, a good six-days’ row to the south, is not such a lush and secret wilderness. Instead, boatloads of tourists cross Eiriksfjord from the international airport at Narsarsuaq to visit the Viking ruins at Eirik the Red’s setdement of Brattahlid (“Steep Slope”).

As at Sandnes, what is visible through the grass are the stone foundations of the houses, barns, and church that were here in the 1300s—over three hundred years after Gudrid left. Unlike at Sandnes, these ruins are carefully marked, with clear pathways for the tourists to keep to and a striking metal sculpture bolted to an overlooking rock. A metal plaque gives the archaeological interpretation of each rank of stones; another shows the probable layout of Brattahlid in Eirik the Red’s time. The main longhouse, it says, was up the hill west of the modern church, in a spot that now contains a very well-groomed and flattened hayfield on a steep south-facing slope, as well as a large sheep barn.

Brattahlid is the center of Greenland’s sheep industry. The settlement is about the size of the island Eirik the Red had been trying to build a house on in Iceland, when Thorgest the Old refused to return his bench boards; you can stroll end to end in about twenty minutes. Doing so, I counted twenty-two horses, loose along the road; several dogs, all of a border-collie type; a church, school, shop, and warehouses by the dock; a café and youth hostel (closed until summer); the cluster of Viking ruins; reconstructions of a Viking longhouse (made from Gudmundur Olafsson’s Viking house kit) and a tiny Viking church; about thirty houses (many of them apparently summerhouses like the one I had rented); and six sheep barns, each large enough for 600 ewes and the 1,200 lambs they were expected to give birth to in the next week or so.