264. Viking Greenland: Mysteries of the Lost Norse Settlers (Ep 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrumpur. And we have with us the wonderful Eleanor Baraclough, the author of Beyond the Northlands, Viking Voyages and the Old North Sagas. And boy, did we have some sagas for you last time. You mustn't forget Embers of the Hand. Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Listen, all round an excellent person, but also filthy, it turns out. Filthy. Have you heard the last episode? So, I got rather excited the last episode. Yes, you did. Because we had horny zombies, which is new to this podcast. We had horny zombies, which William cannot let go of at all.

1:09But I want to pursue this. You do. Of course you do. Why wouldn't you? Not the horny zombies. We've exhausted that. But that world. So we have a very clear image of these guys hunting walruses, seals, eating fish and seabirds and so on. But it's their mental world that's going on in these long dark nights, in these long houses, by the fire, the stories they're telling, the sagas they're recording. And although these are written down in Iceland, they quite often deal with the people in Greenland. So we have a real and unexpectedly rich window into the supernatural and the mythological and the religious world that's somewhere between pagan and Christian.

1:55And in your book, there's all these fantastic things. We've done the horny zombies, but we haven't done the nymphomaniac Snow Queen. I should say, this is nearly 10 years ago. Nor have we done trolls, spirit worship, and we haven't done uncanny tales of murdered men who sing in their burial mounds, witches who bring about death by carving bloody runes into driftwood, curses made by dead men who return to plague the living, and ill-fated weapons that cast long shadows over several generations. Eleanor Baraclough, go for it. Eleanor Baraclough, who is a serious academic in Viking history. Okay, let's start with Nymphomaniac Snow Queens.

2:37Yeah, go on. Right, okay. I feel quite honestly ambushed here. I thought this was going to be a serious podcast. That's what I thought too. You and me both, baby. Sorry to disappoint you both. Oh, God. All right, well, we're nowhere near Greenland for this. So you want nymphomaniacs, no queens. We're heading over to essentially what is sort of Russia, Ukraine. Let's just do it there for a very brief nymphomaniac, so queen. Right. Queen Eaglebeak, skinless nymphomaniac, right? Former lover, apparently, of both Thor and Odin. That is quite a superhero double to that. I know, right? I mean, at the same time, we will never know.

3:15But she's an unconventional queen of Jotunheimr, sort of the world of giants, the giant lands. and she's in this really crazy saga it's called ale saga in hender on ausmundur it's like the saga of ale the one-handed and ausmundur who's the killer of berserkers and these two heroes they're on the hunt they're going to rescue a princess and then they're taken in by queen eagle beak and she lives in a cave and she rules over this giant land she cooks them porridge for dinner she tells them stories of berserkers and zombies don't ask me if they're horny i have no idea if these zombies are horny and then essentially she says she's one of i think it's eight giant daughters they all sleep with the pagan god thor and she says ever since i've done that i've now been plagued by such lustfulness that i can't live without a man so all those all those sort of viking netflix series it's all it's all based on i mean it's like that's the once you go thor you just want more i mean i'm just doing the strap lines for this They just write themselves, to be honest And this is going on in Greenland too Queen Eaglebeak and her nymphomaniac ways are more towards Norway But this whole sort of mental world travels first to Iceland and then on to Greenland So it's a world of magic, it's a world of folklore It's a world where the veil between the spiritual and the corporeal are very blended, shall we say Yeah, exactly.

4:49But it depends on what sort of sagas we're talking about. So those sagas very much legendary fairy tale sagas. When we're looking at the two main sources for Norse Greenland in terms of textual material, these sagas, and as we said, sort of we've talked about a bit sagas in the last episode, they're transmitted orally down the generations, then they're written down. So we're not talking about history as we think of history, but we're talking exactly as you said, sort of worldview. And that in a way makes it more interesting because you see all the different layers of what that worldview looks like.

5:21Now, we're going to move on to one of the more historical sagas, the Vinland Saga, by far the most famous because it talks about the Norse discovery of North America. But in actual fact, it's quite a small passage, isn't it? In the whole width of the Atlantic Saga, it's almost a footnote. We know it now because it's America. But just before we go there, I want a little bit more of an idea of this sort of half-pagan, half-Christian world of the settlements in Greenland. They have a bishop, they've got cathedrals, but a lot of them are still absorbed in their old pagan ways. They expose children they don't want.

5:59They're getting up to all sorts of magic. The Sami, the northern hunts people up in the north who they're bumping into, they fear their magic because they think their magic is even darker and richer. It's various layers we can sort of unpick there. So when we're talking about the Sami, we're talking particularly about the semi-nomadic peoples of Scandinavia and going over that whole area. And definitely there, so kind of Arctic Norway, Arctic Sweden coming further south as well, They are very much associated both in the sagas and more generally throughout sort of the centuries with magic. Absolutely.

6:37When we're looking at Greenland, what we have is it's really interesting. So Greenland gets settled around, yeah, 985. This is when Christianity is making its way into Norse culture in a more sort of muscular form in a way. So the traditional... These are muscular missionaries. convert or die. Yes, and they definitely do that in Iceland. And Iceland gets officially converted around the year 1000. And you have sort of a series of missionaries going in, creating all sorts of difficulties, killing a few people. The Icelanders make up some scurrilous verses about one of them, and it all gets a bit nasty.

7:17And eventually the Icelanders say, look, we're just going to convert. We've all got to be on the same page here. So it's around that time that we see the settlement of Greenland. What's interesting is in these two sagas, so they're actually two separate sagas, the saga of Erik the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders, but together they're called the Vinland sagas, exactly as you say, because they also look further west to Vinland, which we'll talk about. But what we see in these sagas is Greenland, and we've got to think they're written from an Icelandic point of view, Greenland is very much this world just on the cusp of conversion.

7:53And so there's a couple of really interesting examples of that. One of which is, as is so often the case, women seem to convert earlier. And one example of that is Erik the Red's wife. She converts Christadine and refused to sleep with him again. Exactly. She puts him on a sex ban and he's very cross about it, according to the sagas. Yeah, but it's because he won't convert. She's the one laughing a dirty pagan in my bed. Thank you very much. So this is the same, just to clarify, Eric the Red is the key figure, the psycho killer.

8:26How does the song go? Psycho killer. K 'est-ce que c 'est? It's what my friend is trying to say. For those younger than us, this is talking heads circa 1977. Anyway, so Eric the Red is the serial killer who is expelled from Norway, goes to Iceland, kills more people, gets to Greenland, that his wife converts to Christianity and won't sleep with him anymore. There may have been more behind this than just the fact that he converted to Christianity. Can I just say, while they were sleeping together, Leif Erikson is born, and Leif Erikson is going to be pivotal. And when you say America, William, I mean, I think we should say Canada now, because it is actually sort of the Canadian coast that Leif Erikson is meant to have landed.

9:08But the North American continent. Right. But, you know, it's sort of Newfoundland and places like that where the whole sort of entry into what is now Canada, what is North America, by Leif Erikson takes place. Eric's son. But, but, but the Vinland sagas are about vin, which is wine, which comes from grapes. Presumably you can't grow grapes in Canada, can you? So I've done a deep dive on this because, as you know, I've been doing a Canada series which is coming up. Coming up? It is not Eleanor Grapes, is it? It is something called the butternut, which sent me down a rabbit hole I definitely didn't need in my life.

9:41Is this true, Eleanor? It is not butternut squash. These are berries, aren't they, butternuts? You're both right. How can we both be right? I can be right. How is this possible? You're always right. Go on, Eleanor. You're both right in that. Eric has several children, all of whom seem to be involved in these expeditions to the edge of the North American continent, which is indeed sort of they end up, they go first up to what's now Baffin Island. They call Hedluland, Stone Slab Island. This is around the year 1000. So again, when Christianity is sort of taking root, Leif Erikson, traditionally very much a sort of Christian conversion figure as well.

10:19So important to say that. Then they come down the coast. They pass what they call Markland, which means forest land. It's probably Labrador. And then they end up sort of around Newfoundland. And there we have the only archaeological evidence of essentially Norse buildings that they didn't sort of live in. We're going to go there in some detail in a bit. Lads or meadow? Exactly. So we have sort of our points that we know they hit. According to these two sagas, it's when they get to this area that, yeah, they call Vinland, which is an area. It's not a specific location that they find self-sowing wheat and wild grapes, as they call them, and wild vines and sort of salmon.

11:00And more importantly, it's not the Norwegians that discover the grapes. It's two Scotsmen. This is an important national pride point for my proud people. And hardly surprising at all. You're going to have to include the Germans in there as well, because according to one of the sagas. Possibly a German in a different account, but two Scotsmen by name. So there's Haki and there's Hekia, so a woman and a man. But there are two enslaved people who are on the journey with them and they're sent inland and they come back with all this bounty. According to the other of those sagas. They come back with grapes.

11:34They come back with wheat. So, right, where the butternuts come in. Yes, please. Where's Leeta's butternuts? Could he stop shouting grapes at you in that intimidating manner? It is all about the butternut, not squash. It's hard to feel a bit faint here. Push through, Eleanor. Tell us about the butternut. So the butternuts, this comes back to what we just slid in there as a little teaser, which is this archaeological site, Lansomedos, where we have evidence that the Norse were around the year 1000. In fact, up to around 1000, and it's either 22 or 23, some exciting new stuff has happened with endocrinology.

12:09But around the turn of the millennium, we know they're there. And one of the things that archaeologists found in those layers, those archaeological layers, were butternuts. Butternuts. Now, butternuts do not grow on Newfoundland. You have to go further south. You have to go to around the St. Lawrence River. And so that tells us that in all likelihood, the Norse went further south than Newfoundland. They're not just there. And they bring these back. Being a persistent co-presenter here, I do want to just press this point. The Vinland saga, the Vin is vine. Is it vines? Is he right? I mean, you can side with him.

12:46I just won't speak to you again. So there is a slight argument here, if it helps, which is if it's a long I, so an I with an accent, that would be wine, grapes. And if it's a short I, then it could be something like fields or meadows. It's probably a long I, but if that helps, it's bloody bad enough. I think we should collaborate. We should write an academic paper on this and set the academic world on fire. On fire. Okay. All right. But look, they're settling in Finland. so what does happen after Lee Ferguson who is a very Christian fellow comes does he come land and leave does he come land stay what is it what is it what are his plans for this so so someone sees it and I think actually this is the one where they don't land and they get into trouble for I can't remember which one it is but the people say oh again we are talking about the sagas here so we can't be absolutely certain however it is interesting that when in the 60s archaeologists first found this site.

13:44L 'Also Medor. Yeah, exactly. They partly found that because the sagas essentially told them where to go. And then the people living locally said, well, there's some interesting humps over there you can go and look at. That could well be it. So it's not that the sagas are, it comes back to what we were saying in the beginning. They're not fiction, but they're not fact historically as we would think of it. And they tell us slightly different versions, these two sagas that together we call the Vinland sagas. The reason for that seems to be because they're both based on this oral pool of knowledge, not because they're copying from each other.

14:14So that makes it sort of a little bit tricky. In one of them, I think there's three voyages. In the other, there's six voyages. Different people are doing different things. So we can't say for sure that we know the historical truth behind that. But Leif is definitely set up as sort of the first one to go over there with his crew. And he goes on this adventure and names all the lands. And he ends up in this place, Vinland, where he builds what are called Leif's Boudir, so his huts, essentially. There's a good chance that those are what were found archaeologically, or at least that's where he first built them and maybe built a few more after that.

14:49There's another theory, though, isn't there, that what was discovered at L 'Anse aux Médaux is, in fact, a sort of staging post on the way to something else, that it's not the settlement. No, there is no settlement. As far as we know, there is no settlement. There's no graves, for example. Exactly. There's no middens full of rubbish. People are not living here. When I was a student archaeologist, all I ever seemed to be digging was graves and middens. And neither of these were there. No, well, this is exactly it. And so, again, if we look at the sagas, that sort of confirms that. What we have is a series of trips, first maybe by Leif and then by...

15:26So you've got to think, going back to the horny zombies. I don't want to bring up the horny zombies and get you started again. But the horny zombie, potentially, the Dreuger, who is not in the Høger. So you've got to remember Thorsten complains because she's trying to get in bed with him. He then dies. So Gudrider, his wife, then marries again. She marries Thorsten Kallsefni. And he's again one of these. So Gudrider and Thorsten go over to Vinland. And actually it's related to the horny zombie story. Tangentially related. But it is. But that Gudhrithar, who was with the farmer's wife, the lugubrious farmer's wife, she then, according to the sagas, goes on one of these voyages to the edge of the North American continent.

16:07And there she gives birth. She gives birth to a child called Snorri. And so and actually quite a lot of the saga of Erik the Red, one of these Vinland sagas, is actually about her. She's a much more interesting in some ways character. character there's a there's a story about her helping a little a seeress called thorvjök how to do sort of magic spells to try and ward away a famine in the winter so she's really cool but this is somebody who can has can read the runes and can tell the future and can tell you what you know befalls you at the time of your death that's what we're talking about so that's sort of that we don't know exactly what they did the idea is that they may have practiced a type of magic that they called Seyðr, which is also sort of, it's a very, it is really tricky because it's like, how do we actually know what that looks like?

16:53Can I read at this point a description that you have in one of your books of Thorberg, the pagan seeress? Here she is. And there's own translation of the saga. And this is what, this is this woman, the seeress. She wore about herself a blue black mantle, which was covered in precious stones all the way down the hem. Around her neck she wore glass beads and on her head a black lambskin lined inside with white cat skin. In her hands she carried a staff with a knob on the top coated in brass and set with precious stones. She wore a belt around her waist with a large purse attached in which she kept the charms that she needed for her prophecies.

17:44On her feet, she wore furry calfskin boots tied with long laces that had big pewter knobs on the end. On her hands, she wore catskin gloves, which were white and furry. I love that. So powerful women figured in their own right in these stories. Oh, very much, yeah. So Eleanor, there's a landing of the Vikings. They've gone from Greenland, they've gone past the Labrador coast where they're getting wood. They've gone to Lancelot Meadow or to the staging post in the north. Is it on Labrador? Where is it? The staging post is Lansomeaders. It's on the tip of Newfoundland. Newfoundland. And then they're heading further south to an area where both Anita's squash, whatever it is.

18:35Butternuts, not squash. Anita's butternuts and my lovely wine and the grapes all grow. But in the middle of all this, they begin to run into the people they again call the scrawlings, the scrawny people who are the Native Americans. We're talking about the indigenous people of those lands. And again, just to remind people, if they didn't listen to the last episode, that scrawling word is a pejorative. I mean, it's as close to having a racist term as you can get in those days, which just means weak, small, half man. It's just, it's a horrible, insulting word. Yeah, exactly. And actually what happens there is very similar to what happens in later encounters as well.

19:17It reads like Captain Cook. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's crazy. They start off by trading and they trade furs and skins for milk products. The native people there want weapons, but they won't give it to them. Again, like Captain Cook. Yeah, it really is uncannily similar in some ways. And then it breaks down and then we start to see people being killed. and it doesn't end well. And initially, and again, we're talking very much about the sagas here. The sagas tell us that they wanted to settle, the Norse wanted to settle there. And by the end, it's very much, we found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to use them.

19:57And off they go with everything that they can fit in the ships. And there's a kind of fighting retreat. In the end, a large army, a large indigenous army turn up shooting arrows. Yeah, depending on... Which of the two sources. Exactly. Exactly. But also, I mean, it becomes quite magically inflected at that point. You know, people are disappearing and appearing and there's strange artifacts and some bellowing. It's very much this sense of you suspect that neither side knew exactly how to interpret the other. What I find really striking is that there is this terminology that creeps in of civilizing the natives or civilizing these people.

20:36You'll pick them up, you'll take them away, you'll teach them the ways of civilisation and they will be better for it. I mean, that's colonialism 101, isn't it, really? Yeah, so there are a couple of examples, certainly in Greenland as well, where they take indigenous people on their boats. Like Joseph Banks taking the guy from Tahiti and bringing him back to London. Yeah, it's really interesting because the Norse diaspora is so culturally broad and varied and there's so much cultural assimilation in other parts. But here, it's very weird, the sort of echoes of what comes later. I wonder if that is a brown skin thing, actually, because these are sort of the first kind of brown skin people they will have come across.

21:15The other places that they've gone to and sort of settled in, in Europe, I suppose, are mostly and certainly the Anglo-Saxon forays they've made are people who have the same color skin as them. That's a good point. I haven't considered that. Looking in the broader scale, in the global scale of human history, this is an extraordinary moment because you have 10 ,000 years of migration going through Asia, up through the Bering Straits, into Alaska, through the North American continent. Then you have another whole volume of human history of the people going into Europe and the gradual westward drift of humanity.

21:53And then these final moments, and it's the Norse who closed that circle. The Norse take the European end of humanity and with the meetings of the Skreeling in Vinland recorded in your sagas at this moment in the year 1000, those two halves of the human race meet together for the first time. Yeah, that's an extraordinary moment. It is. And we have the textual sources that suggest that and we have the archaeological evidence that suggests that, which is incredible. Let's take a break here and then we're going to return to Greenland and the end of the Greenland North story in the second half.

22:35Welcome back. So, yes, let's talk about the decline of the Vikings in Greenland. And it starts, I mean, it's climate change, isn't it? We talk about our demise as a human race and we talk about climate change. But this was a climate change where Greenland was going to get a lot, lot colder and that would make it uninhabitable. Yeah, this is it. It's really interesting. So there are probably a lot of factors coming into play, some internal to Greenland, some very much external. But what we start to see, so yeah, they're settling in Greenland around 985 and things are good for a while. For quite a long while, we've got to remember their settlements there lasted almost 500 years.

23:20That's important. This wasn't, they weren't on a hiding to nothing there. That's the distance between Henry VIII and us. Exactly. I mean, there's a lot of history. Exactly. And they were successful. And they, you know, that's important. We can't just see the end as the inevitability. I think that's really, really important. And it's not initially that fragile. There's an economy that works. They're finding valuable things there that they can sell in return. They're giving polar bears to kings. I mean, they're doing all right. They're doing okay. It's exactly true. And so what we see is that that bigger, more southerly settlement, the eastern settlement, that has its own bishopric that's kind of three times the size of the other one, that's still pretty good.

23:59But around the middle of the 1300s, there seems to be trouble further up the coastline in the western settlement, which is always more marginal. You know, it's further north, so it doesn't have so good farming land. It has longer, colder winters. There seems to be the possibility that essentially this is very new evidence that's coming out. They may have started to exhaust the walrus population. And so, again, that's not so good. There's that kind of level of extinction, like the buffalo in the plains. Exactly. So this is literally, these papers are sort of coming out now. I think kind of six months ago, the last one came out where they're saying, look, what we're starting to see is they're using females and sort of the younger ones.

24:38And you don't do that if you've got healthy males to take. And there's a really interesting text reported by someone called Eva Boudersen. And he lives at the Eastern Settlement for 20 years, and he's managing the bishop's estate there. And at some point, and this is sort of 13, well, he's sent to Greenland, I think, in 1341. But he's part of a party that go to the Western Settlement to check out what's going on, because it doesn't seem quite right. and his account says and it's a bit garbled but it seems to be there's no one there you know essentially he says and this is interesting but we don't have any other evidence for this now the Skreilingar so you know the natives coming from north have destroyed the western settlements and there are still horses there's still goats and cows and all the rest of it and they're running wild but we didn't find any people this is like this has uncanny echoes of the Sir Walter Raleigh in the first Elizabethan settlement when they come back and there's no one there.

25:42And there's the word of the local tribe, the Croton, written on a tree. And that's all there is. But this is it. And it is fascinating. Yes. A deserted settlement. Exactly. And it's like, but what's even weirder is, archaeologically, it doesn't quite fit with that. And, you know, perhaps it hadn't completely collapsed at that point. You know, it's quite a long area that it extends. It's all these fjords. So something's happening, but we can't quite tell from this what's going on. What we also start to see archaeologically is signs of famine. There's a really horrible site, and it is just one farmstead, but where they find the hunting dogs all butchered and the lambs and the calves.

26:22This is the farm beneath the sand. This one is just down the road. They'd have known each other. They were neighbours. But the farm beneath the sand is fascinating. Now, the reason it's called the farm beneath the sand is because essentially the glacier, that there was this lovely river and they lasted there for hundreds of years and they're probably one of the last big farms to leave but the river sort of starts to the silt starts to wash up all over their lands and then eventually it's just buried and it was two i think it was two caribou hunters in the 90s who found bits of wood sticking out and it turns out to be a norse greenlandic loom you know so it's but but we but they they seem fine i mean for the most part it looks like the Western settlement, it was an orderly retreat.

27:05And they probably ended up going down the coast into the Eastern settlement. And when you say an orderly retreat, I mean, does it sort of map with the drops in temperatures? Are we talking about over a period of years or months or, you know, how long is this retreat taking? Well, I mean, it's essentially Greenland being what it was, and particularly when you get further north towards the Arctic Circle, which the Western settlement was, you see, you know, you have a couple of bad years in a row. and things are really bad suddenly you know it's it's there's there's not a lot of margin for error and so they're always on the edge of what they can farm the habitable land as hunters as farmers with their sort of northern european early medieval or sort of mid-medieval way of life but you just get a few bad years in a row and things start to tip and this specific site where you see butchered bones and it's all it's all really nasty um well butchered dogs i mean that That tells you a huge story.