Life of the Icelandic Colony
To hark back to Adam of Bremen, the charges of special cruelty and predatory attacks on seafarers in the middle of the eleventh century awaken some surprise. The life of the people seems simple and innocent enough, as disclosed by their relics and remnants, which have been unearthed with great care. As seal bones predominate in their refuse piles, this offshore supply must have been their greatest reliance for animal food; but they had also sheep, goats, and a small breed of cattle. They spun wool and wove it; they carved vessels of soapstone, sometimes with decoration; they milked cows and made butter; they exported sealskins, ropes of walrus hide, and walrus tusks; they paid tithes to the Pope in such commodities; they boiled seal fat and made seal tar; they gathered tree trunks as driftwood far up the coast and probably brought back cargoes of timber from Markland; they built substantial houses and churches, using huge stones in some cases. But they had to import grain, iron, and many other articles from Europe; and the infrequent visits of ships from Iceland, Norway, and elsewhere must have made a break in the monotony of their lives which they could ill afford to forego. One would expect them to be especially kind to such visitors.
Fig. 18—Sigurdr Stefánsson’s map of Greenland, 1590, showing the severance of Greenland from Europe and its union with the western land mass which includes Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. Cf. with [Fig. 14]. (From Torfaeus’ “Gronlandia antiqua,” Copenhagen, 1706, in the library of the American Geographical Society.)
On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the bloody feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these transplanted Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there were thralls among them and the irritations growing out of thralldom. Also, while much of their daily routine was quiet enough, they were subject to savage weather and perils of navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up the coast, where many of them maintained stations for that purpose at Krogfiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric was able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed with him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred ample experiences of storm and danger. These wild elements of life would tend to enhance a certain recklessness; and the law must have been impotent to maintain order in remote fiords and headlands, even if it had sought to do so.
In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the very first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young wife on the eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore together. In another of the Greenland tales there is a bloody contention, freely involving homicide, over the claims of the church upon the contents of two ships which had come to grief. No doubt such instances might be multiplied; but in the main we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders went orderly enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a grievance, narrated at second or third hand.
If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in a remote region and could not present many salient features. The colony possessed at least one monastery and the beginning of a literature, including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a curious interest in the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part of a distant colonist hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside the glaciers. In art, as distinguished from literature, they seem to have made few advances, if any, beyond mere ornamental carving or designing on a plane hardly surpassing that of the Eskimos.