Greenland-msg - 12/24/18

Greenland history. Period points of interest.

NOTE: See also the files: Norse-msg, Iceland-msg, boat-building-msg, books-Norse-msg, fd-Iceland-msg, fish-msg, seafood-msg, stockfish-msg.

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This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday.

This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org

I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter.

The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors.

Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the originator(s).

Thank you,
    Mark S. Harris                  AKA:  THLord Stefan li Rous
                                          Stefan at florilegium.org
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To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 12:31:30 -0400
From: Elizabeth A Heckert <spynnere at juno.com>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #2332 - 15 msgs

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 10:18:00 -0500 sca-cooks-request at ansteorra.org
writes:
> From: "Mark S. Harris" <stefan at texas.net>
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Rhachitis

> Yes, the smaller population on Greenland would
> have increased the problems compared to Iceland as well as problems
> with the land suitable for agriculture being much less.

     It was as much a short growing season as it was the fact that the
Norsemen tried to raise cattle, especially,  but also, pigs sheep and
goats in a land unsuited to those animals' eating habits.

> I'm surprised with that short of a settlement such remains as this
> dress were there to be found. But then the Norse settlement on
> North America was also short lived and even smaller.

    Herjolfsnes was settled by Icelanders in the 980s.  The settlement
died out between the first and second quarter of the fifteenth century.
Herjolfsnes cemetery yielded c. 31 coffins,  40+ garments,  and about 25
skeletons; for a total of about 70-75 burials.  These burials (dated by
the clothes) come from the last century to century-and-a-quarter.

> > The genetic pool on Iceland was influenced by mainland Scandinavia
> > (at least if we are to trust the sagas, and I do) and some by northern
> > Scotland.

     In the Middle Ages there was (illegal) trading between Greenland and
Scotland.  The style of the clothing recovered from the cemetery reflects
an awareness of what was worn in Europe during the fourteenth century,
but these garments are not what the nobility wore.

> Or was this something that
> perhaps dropped off with time as the climate worsened or political
> changes occurred?

     There are many theories why Greenland failed.  The longest standing
theory suggests that the weather turned bad.  The truth is more complex.
Hansen, the archeologist who studied the bones in the initial dig, had
certain supremist or maybe racist views.  He believed there was a
degeneration in the 'Viking stock', as it were.  A scientist in the
forties (during WWII, no less!) disproved Hansen's results.  The main
Greenland exports, skins, hides, skin rope (sealskin, I think) walrus
ivory and falcons became less important to Europe in the later Middle
Ages.  The Church required isolation from the Inuit, so the Norsemen
could not learn survival tactics--because the Inuit relied on seals and
other food from the sea, and their way of life was not upset by colder
temps, they flourished, so that  when the Norweigian missionary Hans
Egede traveled to Greenland in the early eighteenth century to visit (he
thought) co-religionists, he discovered he had evangelization of the
Inuit to do.

   Elizabeth


From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?= <nannar at isholf.is>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Rhachitis
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 22:04:01 -0000

>How many generations before they called it quits- two? three? Maybe four?

More like fifteen or so. Greenland was settled from Iceland around AD 985;
contact was last made with the settlements there in the early 15th century,
IIRC. A century later, they had probably disappeared completely. And they
didn't call it quits, they stayed to the end, probably because they had
nowhere to go and no means to go anywhere.

> Yes, the smaller population on Greenland would
> have increased the problems compared to Iceland as well as problems
> with the land suitable for agriculture being much less.

Yes and no. The summers in Southern Greenland are actually warmer than the
Icelandic summers but the winters are colder. And there were more animals to
hunt.

> > The genetic pool on Iceland was influenced by mainland Scandanavia (at
> > least if we are to trust the sagas, and I do) and some by northern
> > Scotland.
>
> Do you mean after the initial settlement? Nanna, how much interaction
> was there between Iceland and Scandanavia? Or was this something that
> perhaps dropped off with time as the climate worsened or political
> changes occurred?

With the genetic pool, it is probably best to trust genetic research. Which
has recently revealed that the sagas are more or less correct. The great
majority of the male settlers did come from Scandinavia, probably mostly
from Norway. Well over half of the women came from the British Isles, which
is rather more than people had thought earlier.

There was some interaction, of course, but I doubt it had much effect on the
genetic pool after the initial settlement period. Keep in mind that Iceland
was considered fully settled in around 930 so there would have been little
room for newcomers (there were no towns or villages for them to settle in
either); that the journey to Iceland was difficult and could take months or
years - medieval sources often mention that in a particular year, no ship
could make the journey to Iceland so there were no imported goods to be had.

> > But Greenland is another story entirely, given the length and
> > difficulty of the journey.

Maybe not another story entirely - more like a particularily difficult
chapter of the same story. Ships did sail to Greenland from Scandinavia and
from mainland Europe. Up until the 13th century (I think, don't have a book
at hand to look up dates) the Greenland trade was very lucrative - furs,
walrus teeth, etc., and merchants went there on a regular basis. Then the
trade dropped off - I can't remember why at the moment - and merchants lost
their interest in Greenland. So did everybody else, except maybe Icelanders,
who did consider the Greenlanders as their cousins. But by then we had no
ships left to risk on such a dangerous journey and any contact with the
settlements in Greenland after the mid-14th century or so was mostly
accidental. For instance, a ship that sailed from Norway to Iceland in the
summer of 1406 was blown off course to Greenland and the travellers were
unable to return to Norway until 1410; then it took them two or three
additional years to get home to Iceland. You can sail from Norway to Iceland
in a few days in the best of contitions; it could also take you six or seven
years. (I can't remember for sure just now but I think these travellers may
have been the last known to have visited the Nordic settlements in
Greenland.)

Nanna


From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Nanna_R=F6gnvaldard=F3ttir?= <nannar at isholf.is>
To: <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Greenland/Iceland
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 20:38:46 -0000

Stefan wrote:
> Maps of the northern areas are often distorted, but I thought Greenland
> was north of Iceland. Or does this have more to do with the ocean currents
> than the absolute latitude?

Sail in any direction from Iceland, from straight north to south-west, and
you will hit Greenland. The southernmost part of Greenland, where most of
the settlements there were, stretches much farther south than Iceland. The
capitals, Reykjav=EDk and Nuuk, are at about the same latitude but Nuuk is
usually much colder because of the cold currents that come down the Baffin
Bay and Davis Strait. Iceland, on the other hand, benefits from the Gulf
Stream.

In the far north, Greenland's easternmost tip actually stretches further
east than Iceland's eastern shore, so you could say that Greenland is south
of Iceland, west of Iceland, north of Iceland and even (slightly) east of
Iceland.

> Oh! Interesting. Do we know whether these women came to Iceland voluntarily
> or not? Was Iceland a stopping off point from raids into the British Isles?
> Or perhaps these women came from the British Isles to Iceland by way of
> the Shetlands and Faroes? and the other islands between the two?
>
> Now, there is a storyline for all those SCAers that like complicated,
> unlikely persona stories. :-) Only this one might have some basis.

Here, we have to look to the Sagas. They frequently mention that
Scandinavian Vikings on their way to Iceland raided the shores of the
British Isles and took slaves, men and especially women. Or they went to
slave markets and bought Celtic slaves to take to their new home - maybe
they had no luck persuading the girls back home to undertake a perilous
journey to foreign shores.

On the other hand, the Sagas also often mention that some of the settlers
did not come straight from Scandinavia, but had lived in the British Isles,
the Orkneys, Shetland or other places for some time, maybe even a generation
or more. And many of the Norsemen who settled there for some time may have
married local women and brought them with them to Iceland. As I've said
earlier, I find it rather remarkable that all this does not seem to have had
much (lasting) effect on food and cooking in Iceland - but then again, the
resources were so few and the limitations so severe.

> Again, what happened to the ships? or at least the ship building
> skills? Was Iceland not doing much fishing at this time, such that
> seamanship and shipbuilding would be kept up? Or was it being done
> much more on a small-scale coastal only arrangement?

The trees that grew in Iceland were too small or unsuitable for
ship-building (not much good for building houses either), so wood to build
ships had to be imported from Norway - very expensive and not really viable
Icelanders used small boats for coastal fishing and they were built out of
driftwood. We didn't really own any ships again until the mid 19th century
or even later.

Nanna


Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 19:19:37 -0700
From: Ciorstan <ciorstan at attbi.com>
To: SCA-Cooks <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: Greenland/Iceland

Stefan writes:
> Again, what happened to the ships? or at least the ship building
> skills? Was Iceland not doing much fishing at this time, such that
> seamanship and shipbuilding would be kept up? Or was it being done
> much more on a small-scale coastal only arrangement?

Stefan, they stopped coming to Greenland most likely due to the severe
weather. Greenland and Iceland did not have the timber to build boats--
Iceland's native woods were not suitable and Greenland just didn't have
any wood at all.

> It sort of sounds like Greenland and Iceland were the typical colonial
> arrangements with the technological skills staying back in the
> homeland. But was there really enough contact for this to really be an
> appropriate model?

When I originally laid my hands on NESAT V, which is the journal of the
North European Symposium on Archaeological Textiles, I was very
interested in the article outlining the discovery of the warp weighted
loom that was found in the western settlement of Greenland. In 1990, two
Inuit hunters had found a piece of wood floating in a river-- and
knowing that wood is not native to Greenland, they brought it to the
museum in Nuuk and turning it in to the museum sparked the search for
the find later named the Farm Under the Sand. The article discussed in
some length the assertion there is and has been no native wood in
Greenland. The piece of wood they found in the river was one of the
beams of a warp weighted loom, later excavated and found to have fallen,
abandoned, with cloth and weights still on it. The farm's middens have
been examined at length and evidence suggests that the last residents of
the farm ate every source of protein they could find as even the dog's
bones were split for marrow.

The saga talking about the expedition to Vinland says that the reasons
for exploration were economic. Iceland and Greenland needed timber, as
did Norway-- and Vinland was indeed a lucrative source of timber though
impractical due to sheer distance.

At any rate, the theory amongst these scientists is that the Greenland
settlements starved to death, forgotten and marooned in a cooling
climate they did not understand or adapt to due to cultural
restrictions.

I wrote this in response to a different issue, though related, to the
Rialto a while back (1998). You might find it of interest:

A near-complete warp-weighted loom was discovered in the ruins of a
farm on the western side of Greenland-- that farm is numbered 555 by the
Greenland National Museum in Nuuk. That seems to imply, to me, at least,
that there were likely far more people in the western settlement alone
that could have been waiting for a rescue expedition from Iceland that
never came. The warp weighted loom in the "Garden under Sandet" (Farm
under Sand) apparently fell with cloth and weights still dressed to the
loom-- and given the amount of sheer work invested in spinning and
weaving wool by hand, I don't believe a weaver in her right mind would
have walked away from that loom with 2/2 twill still on it.

Greenland never had any native wood. It still doesn't. Think about the
implications of that... In fact the very reason this particular farm was
found was due to two pieces of warp-weighted loom wood washing out to
sea down a small river found by a pair of caribou hunters. They knew the
scarcity of wood and brought the wood to the museum, who investigated
the find further the following two summers.

"Clustered around the complete loom beam were found the bulk of 81 loom
weights of soapstone that were gathered in the room.  Some of the
weights still fitted with the woolen threads by which they had been tied
to the warp. A small wooden stick (25 cm long) also found close to the
loom beam was tentatively identified as a pin beater (Mus.no.1950 x
283). 8 spindle whorls of soapstone scattered around show that besides
weaving also spinning took place in room 1. So far, the area here hasn't
been excavated methodically, for which reason it's too early to place
the find in room 1 or in room 3."

And from further on in the article:

"On the basis of the written accounts landam in the Norse Western
Settlement took place c. 1000 AD. When the Norwegian clergyman Iva
Bardsson visited the Western Settlement around 1360 AD he afterwards
reported that he didn't meet any people there, and in the history of the
Greenlandic Norsement the time of Bardsson's visit has been generally
accepted as the dating of the final depopulation of the Western
Settlement.

"However, radiocarbon datings from "Garden under Sandet" suggest that
maybe this date need a slight correction. A peat layer thought to have
been formed shortly after room 2 came out of use (Malmros 1982) is dated
1485 AD Cal. (1485 - 1625 AD Cal. +-1 stand.dev.)(K-5821; Calibrated
Suiver and Pearson, 1986). And local Saliz from room 1 is dated 1430 AD
Cal. 1410 - 1445 AD Cal. +-1 stand.dev.)(K-5907; Calibrated Suiver and
Pearson, 1986).

"Archaeologically dated artifacts and radiocarbon datings assign the use
of room 1 at "Garden under Sandet" to the period after c. 1200 - 1250 AD
(Adreasen & Arneborg 1992b).  On basis of the above mentioned the finds
from room 1 are therefore dated c. 1200-1250 AD to 1360-1400 AD.  The
finds from room 3 are very likely from the same period."

Jette Arneborg and Else Ostergard, "Notes on Archaeological finds of
textiles and textile equipment from the Norse Western Settlement in
Greenland (a preliminary report)", Achaeologische Textilfunde -
Archaological Textiles , proceedings from the Textilsymposium
Neumuenster 4. - 7.5.1993 (NESAT V).

The English of the quoted text is perhaps a little odd as the writers of
the article don't speak or write it as their first [language].

ciorstan


Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 07:09:33 -0500
From: Sam Wallace <guillaumedep at gmail.com>
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Greenland Article

Here is a link to a Smithsonian Magazine article concerning the fate of the
Norse settlements in Greenland. Interesting to this groups' focus are the
sections concerning diet.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/

Guillaume

<the end>
Edited by Mark S. Harris	Greenland-msg	Page 2 of 7