Many monasteries and trading
centers were attacked repeatedly, even annually. In some cases the Vikings
extorted protection money, known as danegeld, as the price of peace.
The Vikings didn't just pillage and run; sometimes they came to stay. Dublin
became a Viking town; so did Lincoln and York, along with much of the
surrounding territory in northern and eastern England. In Scotland, Vikings
maintained their language and political links to their homeland well into the
15th century. Says Batey: "The northern regions of Scotland, especially, were
essentially a Scandinavian colony up until then." Vikings also created the duchy
of Normandy, in what later became France, as well as a dynasty that ruled Kiev,
in Ukraine.
Given their hugely profitable forays into Europe, it's not entirely clear why
the Vikings chose to strike out across the forbidding Atlantic. One reason might
have been a growing population; another might have been political turmoil. The
search for such exotic trade goods as furs and walrus ivory might have also been
a factor. The timing, in any event, was perfect: during the 9th century, when
the expansion began, the climate was unusually warm and stable. Pastures were
productive, and the pack ice that often clogged the western North Atlantic was
at a minimum.
So westward the Vikings went. Their first stop, in about 860, was the Faeroe
Islands, northwest of Scotland. Then, about a decade later, the Norse reached
Iceland. Experts believe as many as 12,000 Viking immigrants ultimately settled
there, taking their farm animals with them. (Inadvertently, they also brought
along mice, dung beetles, lice, human fleas and a host of animal parasites,
whose remains, trapped in soil, are helping archaeologists form a detailed
picture of early medieval climate and Viking life. Bugs, for example, show what
sort of livestock the Norse kept.)
Agriculture was tough in Iceland; it was too cold, for instance, to grow
barley for that all important beverage beer. "They tried to grow barley all over
Iceland, but it wasn't economical," says archaeologist Thomas McGovern of New
York City's Hunter College. Nevertheless, the colony held on, and in 930
Iceland's ruling families founded a general assembly, known as the Althing, at
which representatives of the entire population met annually to discuss matters
of importance and settle legal disputes. The institution is still in operation
today, more than a thousand years later.
In 982 the Althing considered the case of an ill-tempered immigrant named
Erik the Red. Erik, the saga says, had arrived in Iceland several years earlier
after being expelled from Norway for murder. He settled down on a farm, married
a Christian woman named Thjodhild (the Norse were by now starting to convert)
and had three sons, Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein, and one daughter, Freydis. It
wasn't long, though, before Erik began feuding with a neighbor--something about
a cow and some wallboards--and ended up killing again.
The Althing decided to exile him for three years, so Erik sailed west to
explore a land he had heard about from sailors who had been blown off course.
Making his way around a desolate coast, he came upon magnificent fjords flanked
by lush meadows and forests of dwarf willow and birch, with glacier-strewn
mountain ranges towering in the distance. This "green land," he decided (in what
might have been a clever bit of salesmanship), would be a perfect place to live.
In 985 Erik returned triumphantly to Iceland and enlisted a group of followers
to help him establish the first Norse outposts on Greenland. Claiming the best
plot of land for himself, Erik established his base at Brattahlid, a verdant
spot at the neck of a fjord on the island's southwestern tip, across from what
is now the modern airport at Narsarsuaq. He carved out a farm and built his wife
a tiny church, just 8 ft. wide by 12 ft. long. (According to one legend, she
refused to sleep with him until it was completed.)
The remains of this stone-and-turf building were found in 1961. The most
spectacular discovery from the Greenland colonies was made in 1990, however,
when two Inuit hunters searching for caribou about 55 miles east of Nuuk (the
modern capital) noticed several large pieces of wood sticking out of a bluff.
Because trees never grew in the area, they reported their discovery to the
national museum. The wood turned out to be part of an enormous Norse building,
perfectly sealed in permafrost covered by 5 ft. of sand: "definitely one of the
best-preserved Norse sites we have," says archaeologist Joel Berglund, vice
director of the Greenland National Museum and Archives in Nuuk.
According to Berglund, a leader of the dig at the "Farm Beneath the Sand"
from 1991 through 1996, the site was occupied for nearly 300 years, from the
mid-11th century to the end of the 13th century. "It went from small to big and
then from big to small again," he explains. "They started with a classic
longhouse, which later burned down." The place was abandoned for a while and
then rebuilt into what became a "centralized farm," a huge, multifunction
building with more than 30 rooms housing perhaps 15 or 20 people, plus sheep,
goats, cows and horses.
