The other district, the “Western Settlement” [Vesterbygden], lay farther north-west between 63° and 66½° (see map, [p. 266]), for the most part in the modern Godthaab District, and its population was densest in Ameralik-fjord and Godthaabsfjord. There are said to have been ninety homesteads in this settlement. Many ruins of Norsemen’s stone houses are still found in both districts, and they show with certainty where the settlements were and what was their extent.
On the east coast of Greenland, which is closed by drift-ice for the greater part of the year, the Norsemen had no permanent settlement, and it was only exceptionally that they were able to land there, or they were sometimes wrecked in the drift-ice off the coast and had to take refuge ashore. Several places are, however, mentioned along the southern part of the east coast, where people from the Eastern Settlement probably went hunting in the summer.
The plain by Igaliko (Garðar) with ruins. In the background the peaks
of Igdlerfigsalik, and in front of them Iganek (after N. P. Jörgensen)
Population
Bishops
The population of the two settlements in Greenland can scarcely have been large at any time; perhaps at its highest a couple of thousand altogether. If we take it that there were 280 homesteads, and on an average seven persons in each, which is a high estimate, then the total will not be more than 1960. But the long distances caused the building, after the introduction of Christianity, of a comparatively large number of churches, namely, twelve in the Eastern Settlement (where the ruins of only five have been found) and four in the Western Settlement, besides which a monastery and a nunnery are mentioned in the Eastern Settlement. About 1110 Greenland became an independent bishopric, although it is said in the “King’s Mirror” that
“if it lay nearer to other lands it would be reckoned for a third part of a bishopric. But now the people there have nevertheless a bishop of their own; for there is no other way, since the distance between them and other people is so great.”
The chief’s house Garðar in Einarsfjord (Igaliko) became the episcopal residence. There is a fairly complete record of the bishops of Greenland down to the end of the fourteenth century. During the succeeding century and even until 1530 a number of bishops of Greenland are also mentioned, who were appointed, but never went to Greenland.
Norse literature in Greenland
Even if the conditions of life in the Greenland settlements were not luxurious, they were nevertheless not so hard as to prevent the development of an independent art of poetry. Sophus Bugge points out in “Norrœn Fornkvædi” [Christiania, 1867, p. 433] that the “Atlamál en grœnlenzku” of the Edda is, as its title shows, from Greenland, and was most probably composed there. Finnur Jónsson [1894, i. pp. 66, 68 ff.; 1897, pp. 40 ff.] would even refer four or five other Edda-lays to Greenland, namely: “Oddrúnargrátr,” “Goðrúnarhvot,” “Sigurðarkviða en skamma,” “Helgakviða Hundingsbana,” perhaps also “Helreið Brynhildar.” As regards the two last-named, the assumption is certainly too doubtful, but in the case of the other three it is possible. The “Norðrsetu-drápa,” to be mentioned later ([p. 298]), was composed in Greenland; and the so-called “Hafgerðinga-drápa” may be derived thence; in the Landnámabók, where one or two fragments of it are reproduced, it is said to have been composed by a “Christian man (monk ?) from the Southern isles” (Hebrides), on the way thither. The fragments of lays on Furðustrandir and Wineland, which are given in the Saga of Eric the Red, may possibly also be from Greenland. The fact that the “Snorra-Edda” gives a particular kind of metre, called “Grönlenzkr háttr,”[250] agrees with the view that Greenland had an independent art of poetry.