Chapter 1: The Trial

“Dumb Norsemen go into the north outside the range of their economy, mess up the environment and then they all die when it gets cold.” Until recently this was believed in the consensus view as an archaeologist summarized, Thomas McGovern, of Hunter College of the City University of New York. In addition it was long preached to school children that Erik the Red engaged in false advertising by naming the new land Greenland. This settling of Greenland occurred during the Medieval warm period and the settlements survived not just for generations. They survived and flourished more than four centuries. How? Why? And why were the settlements abandoned after all those centuries? Mystery.

Ranked as the most powerful eruption of the last 7,000 years, a volcano on the Pacific island of Lombok erupted in 1257, and its ashy signatures are found in ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland.

“It had a global impact,” McGovern says. “Europeans had a long period of famine. The onset was somewhere just after 1300 and continued into the 1320s, 1340s”

The climate cooled dramatically and the Medieval warm period ended. Did the viking settlements and settlers die as a result?

Sigrid Bjornsdottir wed Thorstein Olafsson September 16, 1408 in the cathedral at the settlement named Gardar on the fjord Hvalsey, which means “Whale Island”. It’s located near the southwestern extremity of Greenland. The Inuit now call it Igaliku.

The Inuit arrived in northern Greenland a century or two after the Vikings settled in the south. The Inuit culture focused on hunting marine mammals and continues to thrive today without interruption. Today, the most prosperous Inuit farms in Greenland are found near ancient Viking sites because Inuit farmers know the Norse chose homesteads in the best locations. Today, abundant tall grass covers these old Norse settlements because of todays warmer climate. The same lush grasses grew in Erik the Red’s time, giving just cause to the name Greenland. How do we know it was green and grassy then? Because of the large herds of sheep, goats, and cattle the Viking inhabitants of old Greenland raised. They were grazing the grass, not snow.

What happened to the settlements? No evidence exists of black death in Greenland that killed half of Norway in this period. At least two people migrated back to Iceland. In 1424 Sigrid Bjornsdottir and Thorstein Olafsson had to provide letters and witnesses proving that they had been married in Greenland when they resettled in Iceland. What wasn’t mentioned though you would reasonably expect it to be, was any impending doom, depopulation, or hardships in all those letters from Greenland over four centuries. Was repatriation of Greenlanders to Iceland so gradual, so quietly done, no official record of mass exodus was made of it? Another mystery.

Our own mystery story is about a less than bold viking and begins more than four centuries earlier than the settlements demise.

When he finally arrives tardy at Gardar, the hated Bjarni is summoned before Erik the Red, the self proclaimed king of Greenland. Less than a year earlier, renegade Icelander Erik the Red arrived with 14 longships in the year 985, and with him was Bjarni’s father, whom Bjarni attempted to follow. A storm drove Bjarni’s ship off course and as result he encountered heavily timbered Canada.