Herjolfsnes (Norse Greenland)

Herjolfsnes was a Norse settlement in Greenland, located approximately 50 km northwest of Cape Farewell. It was established by Herjolf Bardsson in the late 10th century and is believed to have lasted approximately 500 years. The fate of its Norse inhabitants, as with the Norse Greenland colony as a whole, is unknown. The site is known today for having yielded remarkably well-preserved medieval garments, excavated by Danish archaeologist Paul Norland in 1921. Its name roughly translates as Herjolf's Point or Peninsula.

Herjolfsnes/Ikigait

Herjolfsnes/Ikigait (Greenland)

Establishment

Prior to the arrival of the Norse, successive waves of Paleo-Eskimo cultures had inhabited Greenland, perhaps as far back as 2,500 BC. However, the island is believed to have been essentially uninhabited by the time of the Norse arrival, except perhaps for the extreme northwest region. The Little Climatic Optimum then underway would have made the southwest coast especially unsuited to arctic hunter-gatherers.

As noted in the Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), Herjolf Bardsson was one of the founding chieftains of the Norse colony in Greenland. He was part of an exodus from Iceland accompanying Erik the Red, who led an expedition of colonists in 25 ships circa 985 AD. Landing on Greenland's southwest coast, Erik and his other kinsmen almost invariably chose to settle further inland, away from the open Labrador Sea, in the heads of the fjords where the land was better suited to farming. By contrast, Herjolf's decision to establish himself at the end of a fjord on the open ocean near Greenland's southernmost tip suggests that his primary intention was not farming, but rather the establishment of the new colony's major port-of-call for incoming ships from Iceland and Europe.^[1]

Herjolf's homestead was situated on the west shore of a fjord that came to bear his name, Herjolfsfjord, and was the southern- and easternmost major homestead of the colony's Eastern Settlement.

The Greenlanders Saga tells of how the settlement was named. Herjolf's son Bjarni landed in Iceland after conducting business in Norway and found to his surprise that his father had emigrated to join the Greenland colony, but left instructions if Bjarni wished to join him in the new land. Bjarni set out to follow Herjolf, but was blown off course to the southwest, becoming the first known European to skirt, if not land on, the North American coast. Realizing he had overshot Greenland, Bjarni reversed course to the northeast and came to a land that matched the description he had been given. The saga states, "...they landed in the evening under a ness; and there was a boat by the ness, and just here lived Bjarni's father, and from him has the ness taken its name, and is since called Herjolfsness."^[2]

In Erik The Red's Saga (which covers essentially the same events as the Greenlanders Saga), the famous Icelander Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir is said to have landed at Herjolfsnes after a difficult journey and lived there for awhile. Curiously, this saga claims that the settlement was owned by a man named Thorkell. Anne Stine Ingstad believes this was an attempt by the saga's author to diminish Bjarni Herjolfsson's exploits to favour those of Lief Eriksson by writing the former out of the story.^[3]

Herjolfsnes established its own church after the colony's conversion to Christianity. Ruins show a rectangular foundation similar to that of the churches at Hvalsey and Battahlid further north in a style that was common in medieval northern Europe. The ruins visible today at all three locations were likely built in the 13th century, on the sites of older churches. The Herjolfsnes church was the 3rd largest in the Norse Greenland colony, behind Gardar and Brattahlid.^[4]

The church's graveyard hosted the remains of local inhabitants and also those who had died during ocean voyages to the colony. One account tells of 12th century Icelanders who were shipwrecked on the east coast and perished while trying to cross the inland glaciers in an attempt to reach Herjolfsnes, only to be buried there instead. For bodies lost or buried at sea, it appears to have been the custom to carve commemorative runes onto a stick which was then placed in the Herjolfsnes graveyard when the ship made landfall there. One such rune stick found at Herjolfsnes reads, "This woman, whose name was Gudveg, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea."^[5]

Some of the departed at Herjolfsnes had been laid to rest in wooden coffins, but, perhaps owing to the scarcity of wood, it increasingly became the practice to wrap the deceased in layers of wool clothing.^[6] This practice inadvertently created a treasure trove of medieval textile and fashion artifacts when the graves and well-preserved clothes were excavated in the early 20th century.

Later History

Ivar Bardarson, a Norwegian priest who lived in the colony for nearly 20 years in the mid 14th century, stated that Herjolfsnes served as the major harbour for Greenland's inbound and outbound travellers and was well known to North Atlantic sailors, who referred to it as The Sand.^[7]

Herjolfsnes is the only Greenland settlement shown on the Skálholt Map from the late Middle Ages, which shows the North Atlantic's European and North American coastlines as understood by Norse explorers.

A copy of Sigurd Stefánsson's 1570 Skálholt Map, correctly showing Herjolfsnes near Cape Farewell.

Herjolfsnes is also noted in one of the Inuit Greenlanders' oral histories about the Norse. With the advent of the Little Ice Age, Greenland's cooling climate prompted the Thule people to increase their southern range, and brought them into greater contact with the Norse than had been the case with the Dorset culture who inhabited the island's extreme northwest during the initial period of Norse settlement centuries earlier. One legend tells of a Norse chieftain named Ungortoq and his enemy, an Inuit leader named K'aissape who was said to have burned the Hvalsey settlement and pursued Ungortoq from Hvalseyfjord all the way down past Herjolfsnes to Cape Farewell.

Disappearance

The reasons behind the disappearance of Norse Greenlanders from Herjolfsnes, and the entirety of Greenland, have never been conclusively proven. The Little Ice Age likely presented more challenges to the Greenlanders' pastoral way of life compared to their counterparts in Europe. DNA analysis of human remains from Herjolfsnes and other settlements shows that seafood protein became an increasingly large part of their diet, compared to Erik the Red's time. Ships from Europe arrived less frequently owing to the worsening sea conditions. Although there is no first-hand account of Norse Greenlanders living after 1410, it is believed that the inhabitants of Herjolfsnes continued to have some sort of contact with the outside world for at least a few more decades into the 15th century.

Early examination of human remains from the Herjolfsnes churchyard gave rise to a belief that its inhabitants had died out from inbreeding and overall degeneration from extreme cultural and geographic isolation. However, Helge Ingstad disputed this as a faulty assumption that was made after only a cursory analysis of a particularly bad sample of remains. Ingstad asserted that on balance, the Herjolfsnes graveyard shows the picture of a relatively healthy and prosperous people who generally reflected the social and religious mores of Northern European Christendom.^[8]

Although a growing volume of explorers and whalers were once again beginning to land in Greenland by the 16th century, it was not until the early 18th century that an official effort was made by the Danish-Norwegian crown to re-connect with the lost colony.^[9] One problem was that the Norse Greenlanders' Eastern, Middle and Western settlements, despite their names, were all located on Greenland's west coast, running south to north respectively. This caused considerable confusion when Hans Egede tried to locate the settlements in the hope of finding a remnant Norse population. He and his colleagues knew the names of the major homesteads and their associated fjords from the sagas, but not their locations, and assumed that the Eastern Settlement was to be found on Greenland's forbidding east coast. ^[10] Throughout the remainder of his life, Egede was convinced that the Eastern Settlement had yet to be discovered, not realizing he had already thoroughly explored its ruins. As a result, maps of Greenland from this period often perpetuated the misunderstanding by showing Herjolfsnes at various locations on the east coast, in contrast to the accurate placement shown on the Skálholt Map nearly two hundred years earlier.

A 1747 map of Greenland by English map engraver Emanuel Bowen, based on Hans Egede's descriptions, incorrectly placing Herjolfsnes halfway up on the east coast.

Excavation and Discovery of Norse Garments

By the early 19th century, visitors and local Inuit had begun finding artifacts and bits of clothing embedded in the shoreline nearest the Herjolfsnes church ruins: the sea level had risen considerably since the Norse period and was quickly eroding the grounds around the old church. The formal re-discovery of the graveyard (by Europeans) was in the early 19th century when a missionary observed that a nearby Inuit house had a load-bearing doorway that was fashioned from an old tombstone bearing the name Hroar Kolgrimsson in runic. A trading clerk was also said to have found a Norse wool "sailor's jacket" near the church ruins. This prompted a formal excavation attempt in 1839 and the discovery of fair-haired human remains confirmed the site was a Norse cemetery.^[11] Subsequent digging in the following decades revealed more artifacts, human remains and garments.

The diggings also revealed other buildings besides the church, including the main house and adjoining banquet hall, a byre and some outbuildings. In the ruins of the church itself, archaeologists found a significant quantity of charcoal, suggesting a conflagration at some point. The local Inuit's name for the site, Ikigait ("the place destroyed by fire") is further evidence of this. ^[12]

The increasing number of wadmal fragments and garments being pulled from the ruins - and concern that the rising water line would soon submerge the site - prompted the Danish National Museum to launch an urgent formal excavation in 1921 led by Paul Norland. He estimated that the shoreline had advanced another 12 metres since the rediscovery less than a century before. Norland stated in his book, Buried Norsemen at Herjolfsnes, that he'd never worked on a project that attracted such keen interest from the local inhabitants. One woman informed him that she had become so accustomed to finding pieces of preserved Norse wool that she had fashioned children's garments from the centuries-old fabric, but the wool unsurprisingly was not strong enough to make the clothing practical. Working under difficult conditions during the short digging season, Norland and his crew were eventually successful in recovering full and partial costumes, hats, hoods and stockings. The recovery of these clothes is considered one of the most significant European archaeological finds of the 20th century. Prior to the Herjolfsnes diggings, these clothes had essentially only been seen in medieval paintings. Careful analysis and reconstruction of the garments revealed the skill of the Herjolfsnes inhabitants at spinning and weaving, as well as their desire to follow European fashions such as the coathardie, the liripipe hood and hats in the Burgunderhuen and Pillbox styles.

The garments had been stained a dark brown from being buried, but testing revealed the presence of iron on some of them that appeared to have been selectively and deliberately introduced during manufacture rather than through ground contamination. This suggests that the Herjolfsnes weavers created a non-vegetation-based red dye from a local source of mineral ferric oxide. Although iron was historically used as a mordant for dyes, the Herjolfsnes samples are believed to be the only known instance of medieval Europeans using the mineral to create the red dye itself, presumably in the absence of the madder plant that was commonly used to make red dye back in Europe.^[13]

In one sense, the quality, innovation and fashion awareness shown in the Herjolfsnes garments throw even more mystery on the disappearance of the settlement and the Norse colony. As Helge Ingstad observed, "Many of these garments were not worn by common people of Europe, but only by the well-to-do middle class. Altogether the finds testify to a cultivated and fairly prosperous community; certainly not to a people on the brink of extinction."^[14]

In addition to the work of Norland himself, the Herjolfsnes clothing has been exhaustively studied by Else Østergård in her books, Woven into the Earth and Medieval Garments Reconstructed.

Later Settlement

By the time of Norland's excavation in the 1920s, the former site of Herjolfsnes was known as the community of Ikigait by local Inuit Greenlanders. The community was abandoned afterward, with the inhabitants perhaps having moved to nearby Narsarmijit on the other side of the fjord. A few concrete and wooden foundations from the time can be seen in current photographs of the site. Herjolfsnes / Ikigait is now uninhabited.

Fictional Depiction

In The Greenlanders, a 1988 historical fiction novel by Jane Smiley, Herjolfsnes is depicted as being set apart from the other districts in the Eastern Settlement owing to its location and its wealthy inhabitants, who wore distinct clothing and took pride in their greater knowledge of the outside world.

References

External Links

• A tourist's scroll-able 360 panorama of the Herjolfsnes site. The church ruins are located behind the modern concrete structure on the left shoreline.
• Images of Herjolfsnes from the Vilhjalmur Stefansson Collection (Dartmouth College Library)
• The Greenlanders Saga (English)
• Erik the Red's Saga (English)
• The Book of Settlement (English)