The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (19 page)

Erik had found a place where a man could
invent himself and be what he said he was, not the sum total of what other people
thought. He named the land ‘Greenland’ because, as he said, ‘men would
be keen to go there since the land had a good name’. And he thrived. He had room,
he had land and he had life on his own terms.
⁴⁰
He was no outlaw any more;
‘He was held in the highest esteem and everyone deferred to his authority,’
the
Saga of the Greenlanders
says.
⁴¹

Nothing forced the Greenlanders to look
further west; they did so by accident. The sagas start to disagree at this point about
who first went further. It might have been a trader called Bjarni who got lost in north
winds and thick fog until he didn’t know where he was but thought he was probably
not off Greenland any more. It may have been Leif, son of Erik the Red, who makes a
weightier story. He was commissioned, one saga says, to bring Christianity to Greenland.
He had low expectations; he did not expect his message to be welcome. The Norse were
turning Christian almost everywhere, but in Greenland, in the hard winters when hunters
didn’t always return from the hunt and those who came back caught very little, it
was still quite usual to invite a ‘little prophetess’ to tell the future and
try magic to improve it. She’d come in black, jewels down her front, with white
gloves of catskin. She sat on a high chair stuffed with chicken feathers, she fed on a
diet of hearts and she listened to the magic songs which even good Christians knew from
their childhood. She took
her time until she
could hear, she said, the spirits summoned by the songs.

On his voyage out from Norway to Greenland,
Leif was blown off course, tossed about at sea for many days. When navigation depended
on a clear view of the sun and stars it was easy to be entirely lost, terrifyingly alone
on the blank ocean. Leif found himself running along the shoreline of a land that should
not have been there, territory beyond the waters at the edge of the world: a land with
forest, with something like self-sown wheat, probably wild rye, and grapevines. When he
eventually made it to Greenland, he was eager to return to this unknown place. His
father, Erik the Red, meant to go with him as the official leader of the band, but he
fell off his horse on the way to the boat, hurt his shoulder and broke his ribs. He was
lucky. Leif’s ships went wildly off course again, saw Ireland, saw Iceland and
tacked back and forth all summer. They barely made it back home before winter began.

On the next voyage three ships set out, with
140 men, the saga says, and most of them from Greenland. This time, the Greenlanders
landed on the unknown coast. They found a land of ice, flat like a stone, which did not
seem hopeful, so they sailed south, where a forest rose gently up from white beaches.
After a few more days at sea there was an island, which sheltered an inlet. There were
shallows, there were salmon larger than they had ever seen, the winters were so mild
that cattle could feed outside on the grass, which was never frosted and never withered,
and there were butternuts, a kind of walnut the Norsemen could not have known before.
The crews dug trenches in the sand and, in the morning, found them full of flounders.
There were so many deer that the hill where they slept looked like a dunghill. There was
more. The German slave Tyrkir, who had been like a foster-father to Leif, went missing
one evening, and Leif was concerned; he took twelve men and went out to look for him.
They met Tyrkir coming back and looking distinctly pleased. Leif asked why he was so
late; Tyrkir said he’d gone only a little further than the others, but he had
found something: grapevines and grapes. Leif asked if he could be sure, and Tyrkir said
he was certain; ‘where I was born there was no lack of grapevines and
grapes’.

The sagas sometimes tell the same story with different
characters, or tell the same story twice, or contradict each other: if listeners and
readers want a history, they have to put it together for themselves. In another version,
a matched pair of Scottish slaves, a man called Haki and a woman called Hekja, faster
than any deer, were sent to run south down the shore and come back within three days;
which they did, with the grapes they had found and a kind of wheat. The wheat was
important, since Greenlanders had to bring grain from Norway, but the great constant in
this story is the wild vines that climbed through the trees. Grapes meant wine, and wine
was a treasure that was harder to find than gold. Wine didn’t last well, was not
yet a refined and crafted drink, but it was the drink of chieftains; the Viking chief of
Frisia, you remember, was resentful at being left in charge of a land without wine. If
Leif Eriksson had wine, he could build prestige and even power in Greenland by sharing
it. Naturally, he called the new land after the vines: Vinland. He was in America.

This is where the saga story turns stranger.
There are no dragons, but there is a one-legged monster with a fat belly. A woman, dark
like the local people, appears suddenly to a Norse woman called Gudrid and says her name
is the same: Gudrid. There is trouble, and she vanishes just like a spirit. There is
even a proper, murderous villainess: schemer, cheat and axe murderer, and we shall come
to her. Stranger than all this, though, is a sense that the Norse somehow tipped forward
in time. They lived through the same threats and tensions that would wreck the first
English colony in Virginia six hundred years later, or make life hard for the Dutch in
New Amsterdam. They had to manage the edgy, sometimes bloody connections with the
peoples living where the Europeans might want to live; the calculations of what they
would risk in order to stay; and the internal rivalries that broke up expeditions which
seemed to have such clear purpose at the start. There was also, as usual, sex.

These stories need a grounding in reality,
if we are to understand them, and there is one. At L’Anse aux Meadows on the north
edge of Newfoundland there are the physical remains of a camp that could hold a hundred
people: a gateway
⁴²
to Vinland and a careful foothold on the land. It lies close to
the ocean, which is where the Norse always
felt most easy, and it guards a broad inlet that leads south
to the wheat and the grapes on the St Lawrence River. The building required long and
hard work: eighty-six trees cut and shaped for the three halls alone, and fifteen
hundred cubic metres of sod for the walls. The style of those halls dates the camp to
the turn of the eleventh century, just as the sagas do, and the style is exactly what
you would expect from Icelanders, exactly what they built at first in Greenland, with no
stone foundations, with sod walls inside the stone walls, fireplaces and sunken huts.
The buildings had proper roofs, so they were meant to go through winter; and in fact the
sailing season from Greenland to the coast of America was so short that trying to get
there and back in a single summer would leave hardly enough time for a serious look at
the land. The stores are unusually large, as though the Norse expected to bring
everything they needed or else ship out rich quantities of goods. The fact that there
are three halls suggests the camp may have been organized for the crews of three ships,
just as the saga says; and whoever lived there must have made serious journeys south
because we know they ate butternuts, which are unknown in Newfoundland but grow where
the wild grapes grow further south. So Greenlanders did come in large numbers to Vinland
to test out the ground, and they had a long habit of going west. Given the numbers of
human beings on Greenland at the time – no more than five hundred – a camp with room to
sleep a hundred women and men was a work that implies a big decision: a plan to open a
new world.

And yet the Greenlanders were scouting, not
settling, because they had no byres or pens to protect their animals as breeding stock
for the future; they brought only what they needed for milk and meat. They would expect
to spend years exploring before settling; their fathers had examined Iceland for years
before making homes there, and Erik the Red spent three winters exploring Greenland
before he settled. The sagas tell the story of the Norsemen in Vinland over three years,
too, and the physical remains confirm that they stayed no more than ten years. They had
with them what they needed to maintain ships, catch fish and keep warm in winter. They
had a simple iron smelter, and supplies of iron ore nearby, to make nails to
mend their ships; they worked wood, and the
remains are still in the ground; they kept fist-sized stones to sink fishing nets; their
halls had fireplaces. When they left, it was an orderly planned retreat; they left
behind mostly broken things.

So why did this America prove to be too far?
Probably the first explorers always meant to return to Greenland from this voyage, but
the whole point of their expedition was to think about settling later in Vinland, which
did not happen. L’Anse aux Meadows itself was a site exposed to the brute Atlantic
in winter, a site much like Greenland or even Iceland, with fish and forests full of
softwood and not much else; but the pull of the place was the Vinland of stories, with
grapes and wheat and the forests full of useful hardwoods. The trouble was that to get
those good things meant going south and confronting two enemies: the local people and
themselves.

The locals came visiting, short men, dark
with tangled hair and broad cheeks and features that the Norse found threatening, huge
eyes to scan the newcomers; and when they’d looked they went away in their
hide-covered canoes. The next time, they came in such numbers that the water looked as
though it was scattered with coals. They wanted to trade skins and furs for red cloth
and swords and spears, but the Norse had no weapons to spare; and the locals’
bargaining style was unexpected. When the red cloth was running out, they just accepted
less and less for each skin, as though the point was to make an exchange not insist on a
value. They took milk as well.

In the middle of the trading, the one bull
the Norsemen owned came charging out of the woods, bellowing and snorting, and the
locals took to their boats in panic and stayed away for three weeks. This time, they
came back like an army: a steady stream of boats full of men who brandished poles and
shrieked alarmingly. The Norsemen assumed they were at war and went out fighting until a
large black object, the size of a sheep’s gut, landed noisily on the beach among
them: a stone, most likely, from a catapult. If weapons were going to rain down, the
Norse wanted to move upriver and fight in just one direction, with a cliff to protect
their backs. They began a very quick retreat.

A woman called Freydis came out of the camp
and told the men
they ought to be able to
kill off the natives like sheep. She said she’d fight better than any of them if
she only had a weapon, and she wanted to go upriver with them even though she was
pregnant. She was moving so slowly that the natives caught up with her by the corpse of
a Norseman called Thorbrand. Surrounded, Freydis took up the dead man’s sword,
slapped her bare breast against it and the locals ran away in terror, or so the saga
says; she must have seemed like a spirit, violent, pregnant and appalling. The Norsemen
came back and congratulated her on, of all things, her luck.

Something changed during this battle: an end
to any sense of ease, the realization that ‘despite everything the land had to
offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its inhabitants,’
the saga says. The locals moved in such curious ways, sometimes a whole flotilla of
canoes going south or going north on puzzling migrations, sometimes bursting out of the
dense forest. They didn’t make sense. They could kill, but they did not understand
iron, it seemed, because when they picked up an axe they tested it on wood, and then on
stone, and then threw it away because it broke on stone and must be useless. They were
an unsettling presence for would-be settlers, especially women and men who had been used
to moving into empty places for a century and a half. After the fighting, the saga says,
the Norse ‘made ready to depart for their own country’.
⁴³

Freydis in
Erik the Red’s
Saga
is a kind of heroine. In the
Saga of the Greenlanders
she is
someone quite different: a horror. She’s a bully of a woman, married to a
no-account man and strictly for his money; but she was the bastard daughter of Erik the
Red, which made her half-sister to Leif Eriksson. She planned her own voyage to this
western land called Vinland, and she went to ask Erik for his old houses there; he
wouldn’t give them to her but said that she could use them. She found two brothers
with a ship and offered a deal: they would all sail out to Vinland and they’d
divide whatever they made and whatever they found. From the very start she and her
husband meant to cheat: they took extra fighting men. When she landed, just a little
after the brothers, she found them already settled in the houses and she asked them what
they were doing. They said they thought she’d
meant to keep her word about sharing things. Freydis told
them Erik had offered the houses to her, not them.

Her partners went off and built themselves a
new longhouse. When winter came, the two parties tried to waste their time with chess
and other board games, with any kind of amusement to get through the dead days, but
their mutual distrust and dislike stopped all that. One morning Freydis went down to the
brothers’ hall and stood silent for a while in the doorway. The brothers asked
what she was doing there. They said they liked the land well enough but they
didn’t understand why there had to be such tension between them for no reason at
all. She asked if they would exchange ships with her because she wanted to leave, and
the brothers agreed, anything for a more quiet life. She then went back to her husband,
climbed into bed and her wet, cold feet woke him up. She told him the brothers had
refused her offer, had even struck and hurt her; it was his duty to protect his woman
against the single men.
⁴⁴
She said he was a coward and she
was far from home and if he didn’t avenge her, she would divorce him.