These two voyages to the west and east symbolize the character of this wonderful race. Love of change made their conversion to Christianity easy; love of adventure made all enterprises of discovery seem trifling hazards, and gave them the world to roam in. To their achievements in the Western hemisphere the influence of the Christian religion was, no doubt, very powerful. It weaned them from Europe and its perpetual wars, and while it did not destroy, it turned their enterprise into a new channel, and one more consistent with the new faith.
The introduction of Christianity into Greenland was accomplished by Lief, son of Red Eric; and it was the same man who discovered America—two grand achievements which rank Lief Ericson as one of the heroes of history. With respect to the former event, an old Icelandic saga thus briefly records the fact:
“When fourteen winters were passed from the time that Eric the Red set forth to Greenland, his son Lief sailed from thence to Norway, and came thither in the autumn that King Olaf Tryggvason arrived in the North from Helgaland. Lief brought up his ship at Nidaros [Drontheim], and went straightway to the king. Olaf declared unto him the true faith, as was his custom unto all heathens who came before him; and it was not hard for the king to persuade Lief thereto, and he was baptized, and with him all his crew.”
Nor was it hard for King Olaf to “persuade” his subjects generally “thereto.” His Christianity was very new and rather muscular, and under the persuasive influence of the sword this royal missionary made more proselytes than ever were made before in the same space of time by all the monks and missionaries put together.
When Lief came back to Greenland with a new religion and a priest to boot, his father Eric was much incensed, and declared the act pregnant with mischief; but after a while he was prevailed upon to acknowledge the new religion, and at the same time to give his wife Thjodhilda, who had proved a more ready subject for conversion, leave to build a church. Thus runs the saga:
“Lief straightway began to declare the universal faith throughout the land; and he laid before the people the message of King Olaf, and detailed unto them how much grandeur and great nobleness there was attached to the new belief. Eric was slow to determine to leave his ancient faith, but Thjodhilda, his wife, was quickly persuaded thereto, and she built a kirk, which was called ‘Thjodhilda’s Kirk.’ And from the time she received the faith she separated from her husband, which did sorely grieve him.”
And this appears to have been the last, and (as the sequel shows) was the most potent argument for his conversion. To get his wife back, he turned Christian, and ordered the pagan rites to be discontinued, and the pagan images of Thor, and Odin, and the rest of them, to be broken up and burned.
Whether this first Greenland church of Thjodhilda’s was built at Brattahlid, or Gardar, or Krakortok, can not now be positively said; but we might, perhaps, find some reason to conclude it was the latter, from the fact that an old man named Grima, as the saga states, who lived then at Brattahlid, made complaint, “I get but seldom to the church to hear the words of learned clerks, for it is a long journey thereto.”
This much, however, we do know, that the church—wherever it was situated—was begun in the year 1002, and was known far and wide by the name of its pious lady-founder. Several churches and three monasteries were built afterwards. One of these latter was near a boiling spring, the waters from which, being carried through the building in pipes, gave a pleasant warmth to the good monks who occupied it, and they needed no other heat the year round.
The Christian population of Greenland became, in course of time, so numerous that it was necessary for the Bishop of Iceland to come over there frequently to administer the duties of that part of his see; for the diocese of Gardar, as it was called, was from the first attached to the See of Iceland.