The sculpture of the Sagas

The art and archaeology of exploration in the north is a fascinating subject to explore.  Here is a brief video from my trip last month to Iceland showing some of the sculptures of figures from the Vínland sagas.  They range from the heroic Leif Eiriksson (by Stirling Calder) and Thorfinn Karlsefni (by Einar Jónsson) in Reykjavik (note the cross Leif is holding, which along with the sword would have made him one of the first Christian soldiers, if you believe that he was indeed carrying Christianity to the Greenland and the New World), to the strong maternal explorer Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir as sculpted by Ásmundur Sveinsson, to the almost prancing version of Leif at Eiríksstaðir by Nína Sæmundsson. The two Leif statues were apparently in competition in 1930 to see which would be given to the people of Iceland from the people of the U.S. on the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the Icelandic Parliament, the Alþingi. It seems probable that Sæmundsson’s intepretation of Leif was a bit too effete for the Modern Age in which it was produced. Calder’s Christian soldier hero carried the day.

From Nanortalik to Herjolfsnæs

After a few days of decompression, I am starting to clear out my notebooks from the ICASS VII trip.  First, the video of the flight over southern Greenland.  This footage was shot on Sunday, 19 June, on the flight from Boston to Reykjavik.  It starts with a view of the daunting ice belt surrounding the fjords that day, and gives something of a sense of the difficulties that would have been faced by Norse mariners if they tried to approach this jagged coastline in anything other than perfect sailing conditions.

The clip shows the area around the southernmost of the Norse fjords in Greenland, in the area from Nanortalik down to Kap Farvel, with the site of the Norse ruins at Herjolfsnæs somewhere about halfway in between.  You can see the spectacular Prince Christian Sound that spans southern Greenland and which all but invites you to imagine Norse vessel navigating the sound a thousand years ago.  How I would love to have my small research vessel Odin and its side-scan sonar in that long and historic passage.

However, the timing of such research would have to be as closely calculated as that of the approach of Norse mariners a thousand years ago.  With today’s news that the “ice sheet in Greenland melted at its highest rate since at least 1958,” (see:  http://news.yahoo.com/greenland-ice-melts-most-half-century-us-204848118.html)  perhaps the Norse colony in Greenland did not meet its end when the climate cooled but when it grew warmer and belts of ice such as these made navigation in and out of the Greenland fjords impossible.  As the Icelandic reenactor at Eiríksstaðir said when speaking of Norse ships and their encounters with disastrous sailing conditions: “When it went bad, it went really bad.”

Eiríksstaðir

The presumed ruins of Eiríksstaðir in Haukadalur

Eiríksstaðir is a remarkable archaeological site halfway up the Haukadalur, a wide fjord in northwest Iceland.  A detailed replica of what Eirík the Red’s long house is supposed to have looked like was constructed in 2000, and according to the woman dressed in period costume and interpreting at the site, this was all due to the kindness of one William Jefferson Clinton, who made sure the money was available for the project to happen. 

Eirík, a violent immigrant from Norway, apparently hated the place.  He came into the property when he married a local woman, Thjodhild Jorundardottir.  Feeling cramped in what today would seem like half the universe to most of the inhabitants of planet earth, Eirík, after some of the same troubles in Iceland that gotten him banished from Norway, set out west.  Eventually, he found decent homestead land in southwest Greenland, bringing Thjodhild and four children with him.  One of those children, Leif, later went on to explore the New World.

It is yet another American link to this beautiful country, in addition to the innumerable sculptures recorded on this journey: including one of Eirík’s son Leif at the Eiríksstaðir site.  Taken as a leit motif, they can be seen as the public art that binds the literature of the Norse sagas with the archaeology of saga explorers like Helga and Anne Stine Instad.  This in turn tells the first truly American story: the voyages, discovery, exploration, contact and conflict between Europe and North America that had already begun even in medieval times.

Beware, if you are an aging chicken like me, that the area is reached through a heart-stopping drive over a mountain pass northwards on Route 60.  I did most of it in 2nd gear going north, and first on the return south.  The reward is some of the most stunning scenery of stark cliffs cut by cascades of glacial waters that I have ever seen.

Ten hours on the road today from Akureyri to Keflavik, over 517 km in all, with temperatures starting with about 4 celsius with light mist in Akureyri, to 8 celsius and bright sunshine at Eiríksstaðir in Haukadalur, to 13 and broken clouds at Keflavik.  Apparently Icelandair is also broken, as there is a partial strike on.  The Boston flight still looks as if it will go tomorrow, but if not my Icelandic sojourn will be extended by human, not natural, volcanoes.

Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir and the site at Glaumbær

Ásmundur Sveinsson's statue of Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir and her son Snorri

Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir is thought to be one of the most widely traveled women of the medieval Viking period.  Refused permission by her father to marry the son of  a slave, she married a sailor who was soon lost at sea.  She then married Þorstein, the son of Eirik the Red.  When Þorstein’s died after a voyage from Greenland to Vinland, Guðríðr married an Icelandic merchant named Þorfinnr Karlsefni.  Together they attempted to establish a colony in Vinland.  The expedition ended after three years, but not before Guðríðr gave birth to the first European child born in the New World, Snorri.  When Þorfinnr died after they returned to Greenland, Guðríðr and Snorri eventually returned to Iceland to the sprawling fertile Skagafjordur and a farm at Glaumbær. 

I reached Glaumbær this morning, after a drive of some 100 km from Akureyri, where the ICASS VII banquet was held last night.  The conference is over, but it was a terrific opportunity to see old colleagues and meet potential new ones.  The key now is to follow up the conference with a paper for Polar Journal, and proposals for funding for the ASAT Project.  But before all that, I am off now to try and see the farm of Eirik the Red himself, which is directly over the ridge I am looking  at now.  I can’t drive over the ridge without a four-wheel drive machine, so I will drive south on Route 1 until I can intersect with Route 60 north toward Haukadalur.

Hangin’ with the locals

Urban Wråkberg (The Barents Institute and University of Tromsø), Ron Doel (Florida State), and P.J. Capelotti (Penn State) hangin' with some of the Akureyri locals, 23 June 2011

Walking to the conference site yesterday, I glanced across the Glerá River (the River of Glass) and noticed about a dozen seemingly unattended prams in a field of dandelions. It almost looked like an art installation, since even in Scandinavia, where very young children have perhaps more freedom to explore and grow than anywhere else, leaving so many infants unattended would be shocking. As I got a bit closer, the scene became clearer. Lying deep in the tall field of flowers on a brilliant summer morning, were nine or ten young mothers, chatting, then doing stretching exercises in unison. Suddenly, and with military precision, they rose as one, lined up three prams aside on the wide walkway, and strolled off smartly towards the old river dam. Social, healthy, outdoors; as good a picture of Scandinavian motherhood as one could find. Of course, it was also the day I chose to leave my camera behind, thereby violating one of the basic Rules of Travel to Strange Places: Do not choose to leave your camera behind, ever. Having learned my lesson, I was able to pass my camera to Amanda Graham of Yukon College later that day, who was kind enough to take the picture above of some of our session participants hanging with a slightly older Scandinavian couple.

Claims on sites and knowledge in the North

Ubiquitous Icelandic lupins. Dennis Moore would go crazy here!

Just finished two days of sessions on our theme of “Claims on Sites and Knowledge in Cold Regions. Material and Immaterial Constructs of Nature, Nations and Industry.” The session was organized by Urban Wråkberg and Dag Avango, but unfortunately Dag and also Robert Marc Friedman were unable to attend, so two of our brightest cultural and intellectual historians were not there. Urban is pulling together many of the presentations for a special issue of the newly-launched Polar Journal, and it is a fascinating exercise trying to maintain a semblance of thematic cohesion with so many participants plowing so many different fields in so many different countries. On the other hand, after being largely absent myself from such conferences because of half a dozen military reserve mobilizations since 9/11, it was refreshing to see and hear many new scholars and perspectives, and see the quantum leap in data access that has been the direct result of more and larger web-based archives since 2000-2001. Of course, the flip side is that you give talks at conferences now while much of the audience is surfing the web or working on projects or answering e-mail as you speak. All of us as teachers tell our students not to do this, then when we get together with colleagues whose research we really want to hear we find ourselves doing it. Still, it is how things are now, and the trick as always is to turn this development into a pedagogical positive and that is part of what I proposed in my talk: “The Archaeological Site in Arctic Tourism”

And for more on Dennis Moore and lupins:

Opening Day

View down the fjord from University of Akureyri

ICASS VII began this morning with a keynote address by the great Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson. Among his many interesting points related to the historical anthropology of the construction of Icelandic identity, was perhaps the most interesting note that recent DNA mapping by Agnar Helgason and his student Sigrídur Ebenesersdóttir has located the presence of markers that suggest the introduction of the DNA of a native American woman around the year 1000. This would mean that Norse explorers of Vinland brought at least one native American woman back to Iceland and her DNA survives in the blood of 80 Icelanders alive today. If true, it would rewrite the story of the Norse exploration of North America as a two-way exchange of culture and biology.