2009
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008
Special Volume 2:30–51
Journal of the North Atlantic
The Place of Greenland in Medieval Icelandic Saga Narrative
Jonathan Grove*
Abstract - This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past the Vínland
sagas to examine ways in which Greenlandic settings are employed in the “post-classical” saga-tradition and other texts.
The style and content of these tales varied over time, but the recurrence of certain conventional patterns indicates that stories
set in Greenland retained important thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences. From as early as the 12th century,
Icelandic writers identified Greenland as a peripheral space in the Norse world, connected with Iceland, but markedly distinct and remote. This marginalization is evident in the Vínland sagas and developed further in the post-classical tradition,
which made Greenland a place of exile in which Icelandic heroes were tested by extreme adversity in the settlements and
wilderness. Embodying the preoccupations of Icelandic writers and audiences, these writings tell us little about historical
realities in Norse Greenland; but they do show how details of geographical and historical lore were subsumed and transformed in the Icelandic narrative tradition.
Introduction
Greenland at the Edge in the Icelandic Tradition
The Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders) and
the related shorter narratives, or þættir, composed in
medieval Iceland contain a number of tales and episodes set in Greenland in the late Viking Age. These
stories incorporate a range of observations and truisms regarding life in Norse Greenland, including
allusions to the special environmental and economic
circumstances of the colony, the disposition of the
settlements and central sites, and the importance of
foreign trade and connections with Norway. The texts
were mostly composed in the 13th and 14th centuries,
and although they build partly on oral traditions that
may in some cases have originated as early as the
10th and 11th centuries, they do not constitute primary
sources for the history of early Greenland; nor yet do
they compensate for the lack of equivalent textual
remains from Greenlandic contexts.1 The outlook of
these stories is resolutely Icelandic, and from a modern perspective much of their content is ahistorical at
best. The Íslendingasögur fulfilled and extended literary conventions that formalized the experience and
identity of the Icelanders as a distinct people. Geographical settings developed within them are not unproblematic representations of physical and historical
realities, but ideological constructions that assimilated hierarchical perceptions of locality and spatial
relations in a set of conventional narrative arrangements. Pseudo-historical and grotesque accounts of
activities in Greenland during the formative period
of the Icelandic Commonwealth mark the boundaries of the stylized conceptual world of Iceland and
Icelandic identity in saga literature (cf. Ólason
1998:82–3). By examining the treatment of Greenlandic settings in medieval narrative texts produced
in Iceland, we may identify how the imaginative writings of this historically marginal society embodied
its preoccupation with its own perceived place at the
heart of the medieval North Atlantic world.
Íslendingabók, composed by Ari Þorgilsson for
an Icelandic audience in the third or fourth decades
of the 12th century, famously commemorates the
naming of Greenland by its late 10th-century Norse
pioneer, Eiríkr rauði. According to Ari, Eiríkr “kvað
menn þat myndu fýsa þangat farar, at landit ætti nafn
gótt” (ÍF 1:13) (said that it would encourage people
to go there that the land had a good name [Grønlie
2006:7]). Ari’s story was propagated with the flowering of the Icelandic literary tradition in the 13th
century, reappearing in Landnámabók, Eiríks saga,
and a passage in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta.2
Yet if Greenland was named by its first Norse settlers
in terms calculated to advertise the attractions of its
south-western fjord-country as a sort of North Atlantic locus amoenus, a fortunate and prosperous place
well-suited for human habitation, the label outlasted
the message. Fifty years or so before Ari wrote Íslendingabók, the Saxon ecclesiastical historian Adam of
Bremen supplied an entirely different explanation of
the name. For Adam, the land had acquired its designation from its people, who had lived there long
enough to have acquired a greenish tinge from the
sea-water beside which they dwelt, and whose style
of life was still rooted in bad old northern habits:
“Homines … similem Islanis vitam agunt, excepto
quod crudeliores sunt raptuque pyratico remigantibus infesti” (Schmeidler 1917:274) (the people live
in the same manner as the Icelanders except that they
are fiercer and trouble seafarers by their piratical
attacks [Tschan and Reuter 2002:218]). Ari Þorgilsson evidently had access to better information, but
his Greenlandic aside is subordinated to the task of
portraying his own homeland as the providential
terra nova. Before the arrival of the first Norsemen,
in Ari’s construction, Iceland had effectively been
marked for Christ by the papar, who purportedly left
behind them books, bells, and croziers as relics of
*
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road Cambridge, CB3 9DP, UK; jpg15@
cam.ac.uk.
their presence (Íslendingabók ch. 1; cf. Clunies Ross
1997:21–2). Ari’s corresponding reference to the
discovery by the first Icelandic pioneers in Greenland of strange boats and tools left by the skrælingar
(ch. 6) may reflect knowledge of historical encounters with Paleo-Eskimo material culture, but the
contrast also serves to place Greenland firmly at
the edge of the map, well beyond the more civilized
cultural domains within which Iceland was incorporated (Lewis-Simpson 2006, Lindow 1997:459–60).
A comparable marginalizing strategy is detectable in the work of a much later Icelandic historian
writing in very different circumstances. In 1264–5,
the Icelandic magnate Sturla Þórðarson composed
Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, the posthumous biography of Hákon IV of Norway, for the king’s son
and heir Magnús. Chapter 271 of the saga describes
the return from Greenland in 1261 of royal ambassadors bearing word that the Greenlanders would
recognize themselves henceforth as a subject people,
rendering to the crown penalties imposed for the
homicide of Greenlanders and Norwegians alike
in the settlements and in the Norðrseta—the arctic
hunting grounds of the west coast—“ok allt norðr
undir stjörnuna” (Jónsson 1957:420–421) (and all
the way north under the Pole Star). Sturla was an established poet as well as a prose writer, however, and
he ornamented his sober prose account by quoting
the penultimate stanza of Hrynhenda, a court poem
composed by him in praise of Hákon to promote and
advertise his connections with the crown:3
Norðr líkar þér alt at auka
yðvart vald um heiminn kalda,
— gegnir munu því fyrðar fagna —
fjörnis álfr, und leiðarstjörnu.
Þengill hefr þar annarr engi,
allvaldr, en þú ríki haldit;
lengra reiða þjóðir þangat
þína dýrð, en röðull skíni.
(Þorvaldsdóttir 2009:697; cf. Jónsson 1957:421)
It pleases you to increase your power, elf of the
helmet [warrior, i.e., Hákon], around the cold
world, all the way north beneath the North Star;
reliable men will welcome that. No other prince
but you, mighty ruler, has held power there; people
will spread your glory in that direction further than
the sun shines.
The submission of Greenland was one part of the
political realignment that also brought Iceland to accept Norwegian sovereignty in 1262–1264, and immediately after his quotation of the stanza from Hrynhenda, Sturla supplies a summary of developments in
his homeland. Nowhere in the 21 surviving stanzas of
Hrynhenda, however, nor in Sturla’s other panegyrics
do we find any equivalent allusion to the subjection of
Iceland (Pálsson 1988:71–72). If any such references
once existed in his verse, Sturla excluded them from
Hákonar saga; it is upon Greenland that he focused
when he adorned his account of Hákon’s expansion
of power in the North Atlantic with a piece of his own
ornate and elevated court poetry, and it is the great
wilderness hinterland north of the Norse settlements
by which he characterizes that land, and by reference to which he measures the king’s unparalleled
achievement. There would have been nothing strange
to Norwegian ears in Sturla’s allusion to Greenland,
but his verse nevertheless expresses a peculiar and
well-established Icelandic investment in the idea of
Greenland as a place apart, the most far-flung outpost
of Norse culture in the North Atlantic.
The Norwegian perspective on Greenland is
supplied in a pair of learned writings that reflect the
growing interest in the colony as it was drawn into
the orbit of Norwegian secular and ecclesiastical
dominance in the 12th and 13th centuries, with its
assimilation into the new archdiocese of Niðarós
(Trondheim), established in 1152/53, and its political submission in 1261.4 The anonymous Historia Norwegiae, a synoptic history of Norway most
likely composed in Niðarós itself in about 1150,
incorporates material on Greenland in an opening
description of the northern world which fuses the
real and the imagined onto the inherited template of
ancient and late-antique geographical arrangements
(Ekrem and Mortensen 2003:54–7, 158–162). Konungs skuggsjá, a didactic text composed in Norway
in about 1250, ostensibly to educate the future king
Magnús Hákonarson in politics, strategy and courtly
behaviour, contains a lengthy account of the physical
features of Greenland and the Greenlanders’ way of
life in an extended section describing the marvels of
Norway and the lands of the North Atlantic (Jónsson
1920–21:64–85, Larson 1917:135–153). Greenland
is identified in both texts as part of a great northerly
landmass, reaching across the arctic from the White
Sea—a tradition also known in medieval Iceland.5
Historia Norwegiae populates the wild spaces lying
north of human abodes in Greenland with giants,
maidens who become pregnant by sipping water, and
“quidam homunciones … quos Screlinga appellant”
(the dwarfs whom they call Skrælings)—apparently
Eskimos of the Late Dorset culture encountered in
the Norðrseta, who are said to use walrus ivory in
place of iron, but, in keeping with their identification with non-human domains, do not bleed when
wounded (Ekrem and Mortensen 2003:54, 55). Both
Historia Norwegiae and Konungs skuggsjá also refer to Greenland as a destination for merchant ships
that risk adverse gales, sea-ice, and huge sea-beasts
in the pursuit of trade, and alongside its descriptions of fabulous sea-creatures, Konungs skuggsjá
famously specifies the motivations of those prepared
to make the long voyage west: hunger for fame,
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Journal of the North Atlantic
natural curiosity, and the desire for wealth (Jónsson
1920–1921:71–72, Larson 1917:142). In Norway as
in Iceland, Greenland marked the western limit of
the known world. But these texts, representing the
view from the center at separate stages in the emergence of Norwegian hegemony in the North Atlantic,
offer a rather different outlook from the medieval
Icelandic literary tradition. It is only in the Icelandic
sagas that we find Greenlandic settings deployed in
narrative contexts. These tales embody a series of
literary responses to a centuries-long acquaintance
with Greenland which was conditioned by the correlations and contrasts perceived by Icelanders in
the interconnected histories and separate identities
of the two colonies. For the writers of these tales, far
removed from the political and ecclesiastical centers
of Scandinavia and Christendom, it was convenient
to reflect with Ari Þorgilsson and Sturla Þórðarson
that their Greenlandic cousins occupied a still more
marginal place in the Norse world.
The role of Greenland in Icelandic narratives as
a frontier space, employed to define the horizons of
Icelandic self-identification, is apparent already in
the passing reference to a voyage west in the moralizing tale Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (CSI 1:369–374,
ÍF 6:359–368). Of the various Íslendingasögur and
þættir referring to Greenland, the tale of Auðunn of
the Westfjords may still be dated relatively confidently to the early 13th century.6 The þáttr tells how
Auðunn leaves home to seek his fortune, and like
many other medieval Icelandic tales of the 13th and
14th centuries, it exemplifies the independence of
mind shown by Icelanders in negotiating relations
with Norwegian royalty. Crossing to Greenland,
Auðunn sells all his possessions in order to buy a
tame polar bear, and then takes passage with it for
Scandinavia. He stops off first at the Norwegian
court of King Haraldr harðráði, where he refuses to
part company with the beast, having already decided
to take it to Denmark to present it as a gift to King
Sveinn Úlfsson. Notwithstanding Auðunn’s defiance
of Haraldr, the Greenlandic bear becomes a source
of enormous economic and symbolic capital for the
Icelander. On one level, it may serve as a literary
reflex of the “Pearl of Great Price” from the parable
in the Gospel of Matthew, physically embodying the
spiritual treasure that becomes available to Auðunn
when he departs Sveinn’s court on a pilgrimage
to Rome.7 However, the impoverished traveller’s
single-minded pursuit of his secular and religious
goals also brings him substantial earthly rewards,
for his conduct impresses Haraldr as well as Sveinn,
and he eventually returns home a wealthy man.
Auðunn’s travels start and end in Iceland, and his
itinerary triangulates the position of Iceland spatially and culturally between Greenland at the far
edge of the Scandinavian North Atlantic settlements,
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the political and cultural centers of the Scandinavian
heartlands, and Rome, the focal point of western
Christendom. Greenland itself does not acquire any
significant dimensionality as a setting in this short
tale. The focus lies on the Icelander, but Greenland
provides the liminal context within which he first
displays the strength of purpose that will find its
reward in more prestigious settings, and fi nally
transform his status at home.8
The best-known Icelandic texts referring to
Greenland in greater detail are of course the Vínland
sagas, Eiríks saga and Grœnlendinga saga.9 Neither,
it should be noted, depicts the Greenlandic colony in
an alluring light. It is a marginal place, marked by
dearth, disease, uncouth habits, and strange goings
on. In Eiríks saga, when famine strikes, Christian
visitors at Herjólfsnes are obliged to participate in
outlandish pagan ceremonies (ch. 4). At Brattahlíð,
Eiríkr rauði, the most powerful chieftain in the land,
refuses to accept the new religion (ch. 5), and priests
and churches are so few in conversion-era Greenland
that the dead are buried in unconsecrated ground
(ch. 6). At Lýsufjƒrðr, in the sticks of the Western
Settlement (the only other concrete Greenlandic
setting in the Vínland sagas apart from Brattahlíð
and Herjólfsnes), plague spreads from a visiting
ship and infects the farm, which then experiences
a spate of paranormal activity (Eiríks saga ch. 6,
Grœnlendinga saga ch. 6). The supernatural has a
more insistent presence in the Greenlandic settings
deployed in these texts than in most other contexts
in saga narrative; Þorbjƒrg lítilvƒlva, the most elaborately imagined seeress in saga-literature, tells the
future at Herjólfsnes. During the outbreak of plague
at Lýsufjƒrðr, the dead walk and utter prophecies,
and Grœnlendinga saga describes how every timber
in the house creaks as the corpse of the farmer’s wife
walks the premises, and her husband struggles to
drag out her coffin for burial. Such tales dramatize
the hardship and claustrophobia of life at the edge
of Norse cultural life, as seen from Iceland. They
articulate a medieval Icelandic discourse on marginality and isolation, transferred to distant shores
reassuringly far from Iceland itself.
The intention of the present paper is to explore
the wider framework within which early Greenlandic
settings are deployed in the Íslendingasögur, outside
the all-too familiar Vínland sagas.10 By focussing on
episodes in Fóstbrœðra saga, the more far-fetched
Flóamanna saga and Króka-Refs saga, and the still
more overblown Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Gunnars
saga Keldugnúpsfífls, and Jökuls þáttr Búasonar, we
can draw out some common elements in narratives
connected with Greenland in the söguöld and so contextualize readings of Eiríks saga and Grœnlendinga
saga. Exact datings are impossible to establish
(Thórsson 1990), but the composition of this corpus
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J. Grove
probably spans the 13th to 15th centuries, when reported communications with Greenland peaked and
declined (Table 1). Apart from Fóstbrœðra saga, all
of these texts are usually qualified as post-classical
sagas—fantastical works, customarily thought to
have been composed from the end of the 13th century
onwards, which display an increasingly strong predilection for the manifestly implausible designs of the
medieval romance and folklore traditions, describing the extraordinary adventures of larger-than-life
heroes in supernatural settings and far-off lands.11 Yet
shared features suggest that as time passed and different tastes and literary conventions asserted themselves, stories set in Greenland retained important
thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences.
Aside from this core group of Íslendingasögur
and þættir, comparable material referring to Greenland in the later 10th and 11th centuries occurs in a
number of other Icelandic writings including Landnámabók and the konungasögur (Sagas of Kings).
There are some additional Greenlandic passages in
the so-called samtíðarsögur (Contemporary Sagas)
connected with the doings of Icelanders in the 12th
and 13th centuries, represented chiefly in the tales in
the great Sturlunga saga compendium and the various biskupa sögur (Sagas of Bishops). Alongside
these texts, we may also place Grœnlendinga þáttr,
also known as Einars þáttr Sokkasonar.12 This shorter work describes the circumstances leading to the
establishment of the bishopric of Garðar in 1123–6,
and a violent altercation over salvage rights between
Greenlanders and a party of Norwegian merchants
in 1135–6. It is an exceptional case in the whole
body of medieval Icelandic narrative texts relating
to Greenland. With its elaborately constructed and
comparatively realistic 12th-century setting, and its
adoption of a uniquely Greenland-centred narrative,
the tale stands apart, in style, content and orientation.13 Yet as will be seen, even Grœnlendinga þáttr
shares elements with the other texts under discussion
here, reminding us all the more forcibly that these
works reflect the persistence of a long-standing and
highly conventionalizing Icelandic literary discourse
on Greenland.
33
Fóstbrœðra Saga, Flóamanna Saga,
and Króka-Refs Saga
Like the other Íslendingasögur and þættir, the
texts in our main set of tales referring to Greenland
in the 10th and 11th centuries are atavistic works
that exploit their audiences’ interest in the real or
imagined accomplishments of their forebears, and
the performance of an anachronistic and often dangerous ideology of honour that could safely be realized and contained in the past and, in these cases,
overseas. This can be illustrated in the work with
the most realistic Greenlandic setting in this group,
the 13th-century Fóstbrœðra saga (CSI 2:329–402,
ÍF 6:119–276).14 The saga tracks the fortunes of
Þorgeirr Hávarsson and Þormóðr Bersason, a pair
of predatory and competitive trouble-makers who
plague northwestern Iceland in the early 11th century.
After they part company, Þorgeirr becomes a retainer
of Óláfr Haraldsson, the saint-king of Norway, but is
killed in a brawl in Iceland. The king sends Þormóðr
to take revenge, and chapters 20–24 of the saga tell
how, after a hard voyage to the Eastern Settlement,
he tracks down Þorgeirr’s surviving killer, Þorgrímr
trolli Einarsson, slaughtering him and four of his five
nephews, and evading capture as an outlaw. It is an
extreme performance even by the standards of the
old ethos. Although partly sanctioned by the royal
saint, Þormóðr’s comprehensive violence attracts
even the king’s incredulity. Safely back in Norway,
however, he subjects himself wholly to his Christian
patron, dying with him at the Battle of Stiklastaðir.
Fóstbrœðra saga and the other texts with which
we are concerned locate Greenland as a recognized
stepping-stone in the career path of the Icelandic
adventurer, a peripheral setting in which manhood is
challenged and vigorously asserted. In this context,
the Icelander performs the extraordinary exploits by
which his reputation will be cemented when he is
integrated back into the centers of culture in Iceland
or Scandinavia. Because Greenland, like Iceland,
was subject to Norwegian cultural and political
influence through much of its history, and eventually fell under the sway of the kings of Norway, it
offered Icelandic saga-writers a
particularly pertinent setting in
Table 1. Some Íslendingasögur and þættir, indicating dates of composition customarily accepted in modern scholarship, and dates of the earliest surviving manuscripts (cf. Thórsson
which to exercise their abiding
1990:35; for more complete information on the manuscript preservation of the works listed
interest in the negotiation of
here, see the index of Old Norse texts in Degnbol et al. 1989).
political relations between their
protagonists and Norwegian
Text
Conventional dating
Earliest manuscripts
rulers. More generally, howAuðunar þáttr vestfirzka
Early 13th century
ca. 1275
Grœnlendinga saga
Early 13th century
ca. 1387–95
ever, Greenland provides in the
Eiríks saga rauða
Early 13th century
ca. 1302–10
sagas a special transitory venue
Fóstbrœðra saga
Early or late 13th century
ca. 1302–10
in which Icelandic protagonists
th
th
Flóamanna saga
Late 13 /early 14 century
ca. 1390–1425
are free to act in an environment
Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss
Early or mid-14th century
ca. 1390–1425
Króka-Refs saga
14th century
ca. 1450–1500
that was in some ways more recGunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls
Late 14th or 15th century
17th century
ognizable than almost any other
Jökuls þáttr Búasonar
Late 14th or 15th century
17th century
outside Iceland itself, but also
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Journal of the North Atlantic
markedly far-off and foreign. As a geographically
and culturally liminal setting, it also provides fertile
ground for the uncanny and supernatural, as evident
in the Vínland sagas, and a context within which
Icelandic anxieties about marginality and isolation
could be sublimated.
While Fóstbræðra saga restricts Þormóðr’s
exploits to districts in the Eastern Settlement, the
more far-fetched adventures of Flóamanna saga and
Króka-Refs saga reflect the exploitation of Greenland’s glaciated coastal wildernesses as a setting for
extra-societal adventures, pushing the peripheral
quality of the location to its extreme.15 Króka-Refs
saga (CSI III:396–420, ÍF 14:117–60) follows the
adventures of Refr, a young Icelander who turns out
to be a wondrously ingenious craftsman and a lethal
defender of his own honour. The extent of Refr’s
capacities does not become evident until he moves
to Greenland, where his skills allow him to elude all
difficulties and defeat his enemies. He establishes
himself in the Eastern Settlement, but after he is
slandered by a neighbour, Þorgils Víkarskalli, Refr
mirrors the exploits of Þormóðr Bersason by killing
him and his four sons, while failing to dispatch a
fifth relative, a son-in-law of Þorgils named Gunnarr.16 Before taking up residence in the Eastern
Settlement, however, Refr had constructed a hidden
refuge for himself amid the glaciers in the wilderness
of the east coast of Greenland, where he first made
landfall, and it is there that he now takes shelter.
Gunnarr eventually tracks Refr down with the help
of a Norwegian merchant and retainer of Haraldr
harðráði. The Norwegian is aided from afar by King
Haraldr, and what ensues is an indirect permutation
of an Íslendingaþáttr-style confrontation between
king and Icelander in which the resourceful Refr prevails over Haraldr by virtue of his technical wizardry
in the defence of his home, and the king’s retainer
winds up dead (cf. Arnold 2003:191–7). Refr’s aptitudes are exposed in the Greenlandic wilderness, but
it is in the heartlands of Scandinavian and Christian
culture that the Icelander makes good in the social
framework. Leaving Greenland, he travels to Haraldr’s court in disguise, where he leaves his calling
card by killing another of the king’s henchmen, declaring his culpability in a riddle only the king can
interpret, and effecting his escape. He finally settles
in Denmark, laden with Greenlandic trade-goods,
and dies on a pilgrimage to Rome.
The dual interest in the Greenlandic wilderness
regions—the óbyggðir—and the social environment
represented in Króka-Refs saga is more elaborately
and outlandishly developed in Flóamanna saga (CSI
III: 271–304, ÍF 13:229–327). This tale recounts
the story of Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri, an Icelandic
adventurer and Christian convert, who undertakes
journeys to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and
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Greenland. Like Fóstbræðra saga, it shows how a
champion in the old mold could make the transition
to the new social ethic of Christianity, but in this
case, the change is completed without the influence
of a proselytizing king of Norway; it is in the adversity which he faces independently in Greenland that
the Icelander consolidates his religious transformation. The tale is a typically fantastical post-classical
saga, replete with trolls, ghosts, and supernatural
phenomena. An extended sequence describes the attempt of Þorgils to settle in Greenland (chs. 20–26),
leading to a ghastly shipwreck in a haunted wilderness of ice. An epic survival tale ensues as Þorgils
and his companions endure horror in the arctic
winter, facing disease, starvation, and internal conflicts leading to the murder of Þorgils’s wife. Þorgils
finally manages to reach the Eastern Settlement with
a handful of survivors. Once there, he uses his skills
to protect the interests of the Greenlanders by killing
a predatory polar bear and then rooting out a nest of
troublesome outlaws. In the end—unlike Þormóðr
and Króka-Refr—Þorgils returns to Iceland, settling
down with his reputation established after further
adventures in the British Isles and Norway.
A common feature in the construction of Greenland in these and other texts is its function as a place
of exile. Poverty is an occasional motivation for
migration to Greenland, prompting figures such as
Auðunn of the Westfjords, or Þorbjƒrn Vífilsson in
Eiríks saga (ch. 6), to leave their homes, but exile
resulting from social conflict figures prominently in
the saga-accounts of Greenland journeys. Both sets of
circumstances are evident in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, which seems to dramatize the conditions
of continued migration as late as the 13th century.
The two versions of the saga recall the departure for
Greenland from northwest Iceland in 1208 of VígaHaukr—who had attempted to murder the rapacious
chieftain Þorvaldr Vatnsfirðingr, and had maimed one
of his followers—together with his brother-in-law
Magnús Markússon, who had recently been cheated
out of his paternal inheritance (Jóhannesson et al.
1946 I:216, McGrew 1970–1974 II:212; cf. Helgadóttir 1987:28). The landnám tradition surrounding the
foundational figure of Eiríkr rauði—outlawed from
both Norway and Iceland—may represent a cultural
memory of the social forces underlying migration
from Iceland to Greenland in the 10th and 11th centuries, or a literary reflex of more recent historical tendencies, or both. But it is also clear that the connection of Greenland with exile was a literary convention
that affirmed the marginality of the setting and the
alienation of those placed within it. Although they are
not formally outlawed, the heroes of Króka-Refs saga
and Flóamanna saga take flight from Iceland to avoid
trouble after becoming involved in violent conflicts.
In Fóstbrœðra saga, Þormóðr sails west in fulfilment
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J. Grove
of his oath of vengeance, but the exile theme comes
into play in Greenland itself when the Garðar assembly outlaws him for the killing of Þorgrímr trolli
(ch. 23). The pattern crops up repeatedly elsewhere
too. Landnámabók tells of the early and ill-starred
expedition of Snæbjƒrn Hólmsteinsson to the Gunnbjarnarsker, skerries west of Iceland from which new
land—apparently the east coast of Greenland—had
supposedly been sighted early in the 10th century (ÍF
1:194–196, Pálsson and Edwards 1972:73–74). 17
Snæbjƒrn quits Iceland after perpetrating a disproportionately comprehensive massacre in vengeance
for another killing, but his expedition destroys itself
in a conflict that leaves Snæbjƒrn dead. At the end
of Gísla saga, the two sons of Vésteinn Vésteinsson
flee Iceland after avenging their slain father; the older
brother is killed in Norway, but Helgi Vésteinsson
escapes to Greenland, where he successfully evades
vengeance, only to meet his end on a hunting expedition in the Norðrseta (CSI II:48, ÍF 6:117–6118).
In Eyrbyggja saga, Snorri Þorbrandsson and his
brother Þorleifr kimbi quit Iceland in the 990s after
becoming entangled in a prolonged feud, and travel
to Greenland; the saga reports that Snorri later accompanied Karlsefni to Vínland, where he was killed
by the skrælingar (CSI V:195, ÍF 4:135).18 A pair of
anecdotes playing off the identification of Greenland
as a place of exile even appears in konungasögur
originating in the earlier 13th century. The versions of
Óláfs saga helga conventionally attributed to Snorri
Sturluson tell of Þórarinn Nefjólfsson, who is commissioned by Óláfr Haraldsson to convey Hrœrekr,
the deposed and blinded king of Heiðmƒrk, into permanent exile in Greenland—although in the event,
storms force Þórarinn and his captive to make for Iceland instead (Hollander 1964:329–330, ÍF 27:125–
128; cf. Johnsen and Helgason 1941 I:183–188). The
survey of Norwegian regnal history in Morkinskinna
includes the story of Þrándr of Upplƒnd, whom King
Magnús góði supposedly sent to Greenland to avoid
the enmity of his co-ruler Haraldr harðráði during
their joint kingship in 1046–1047 (Andersson and
Gade 2000:159–161, Jónsson 1932:103–108).
The marked association of Greenland with social
exclusion is complemented in Króka-Refs saga and
Flóamanna saga by the focus on the desolate spaces
of the óbyggðir.19 Króka-Refr and Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri set out to take refuge in the Greenland
settlements, but they both find themselves fighting
for survival in the wilderness. For Refr, his house in
the óbyggðir becomes his last redoubt in Greenland,
before his departure for Scandinavia. Flóamanna
saga follows a reverse trajectory, bringing Þorgils
to Brattahlíð from the nadir of his shipwreck in the
wilderness. In both cases, however, the Greenlandic
óbyggðir provide a ready-made backdrop for the
examination of the hero’s capacity to prevail in ad-
35
versity, beyond the limits of normal social life, by
his own prowess and ingenuity.
In Fóstbræðra saga, Króka-Refs saga, and Flóamanna saga, the marginalization of the Icelander
is intensified by the animosity of Greenlanders in
one or both of the settlements. In each case, the Icelander is demeaned as an outsider; and in each case,
this is accentuated by reports of scandalous slurs
impugning the Icelander’s manhood. The prelude to
Þormóðr’s murder of Þorgrímr at the Garðar assembly makes emphatic his inferior status as a foreigner
(ch. 23). When Þorgrímr and his men arrive by ship,
Þormóðr is loitering at the shoreline. The Greenlanders have their hunting and fishing gear with them, as
is their custom, and as they unload, Þormóðr studies
one of the Greenlandic seal-spears deposited on the
beach. His curiosity elicits the derision of one Þorgrímr’s adherents, who refuses to acknowledge that
Þormóðr—evidently no local—might know how to
use such a thing. Þormóðr lets the matter drop, but
in the manner of skaldic poets in the sagas he speaks
a wry verse to himself in which he contrasts the
Greenlander’s insolence with the respect to which he
has been accustomed in the retinue of King Óláfr. It
is clear, however, that his pursuit of vengeance is no
longer simply a matter of duty to his dead friend Þorgeirr: Þormóðr’s own honour is at stake in this place
where his past reputation carries no weight. After the
killing of Þorgrímr, one of Þormóðr’s few Greenlandic allies commends him for his deed but identifies
the danger of his position: “‘Mikit stórvirki hefir þú
gƒrt, einn útlendr maðr ok einmani, sem þú ert hér
… ok eigi sýnt, hvárt þú kømsk í brott’” (ÍF 6:237)
(“You’ve performed a great deed, a foreigner and
alone as you are here … and it’s not certain you’ll be
able to escape” [CSI II:380]). The warning defines
Þormóðr’s plight as a fugitive, but also the challenge
that leads him to exact further vengeance.
Back in Norway, Þormóðr claims in a verse
spoken before King Óláfr to have ended up killing
so many men in restitution for Þorgeirr because the
Greenlanders had outlawed him. In typically cryptic
poetic language, the skaldic stanza objectifies the
men of Greenland as criminals, permanently shamed
by Þormóðr’s manly performance:
Éls, hefk illan díla,
Ekkils, þeims mik sekðu,
geig vannk gervidraugum,
Grœnlendingum brenndan. (ÍF 6:259–260.)
An evil mark have I branded on the Greenlanders:
I brought harm to the men [literally, “trees that
perform a storm of Ekkill (a sea-king, whose storm
is ‘battle’)”] who had me outlawed.
Þormóðr supplies another explanation for his violence, however, when he claims that the Greenlanders
36
Journal of the North Atlantic
had insulted him by saying he sought out men “sem
meri með hestum” (ÍF 6:259) (like a mare among
stallions [CSI II:391])—a conventional expression
of sexual insult, or níð, defaming his manhood by
asserting his readiness to submit to male sexual
advances. The claim does not correspond with the
details of the preceding chapters, indicating that the
theme of sexual insult has been deliberately suppressed in surviving texts of the saga (Meulengracht
Sørensen 1983:71), but it dramatically expresses the
mutual antagonism of the whole episode.
There are no such indications of expurgation in
the text of Króka-Refs saga (cf. Meulengracht Sørensen 1983:39–44). Refr’s homicidal vengeance on
the family of his objectionable Greenlandic neighbour Þorgils Víkarskalli is stimulated by the same
sort of sexual calumny, but here the insult is logically
articulated in the narrative sequence. It also involves
an even more clearly expressed opposition of regional
identities. Refr establishes himself in the Eastern Settlement by marrying Helga, the daughter of a wealthy
farmer, and taking over her father’s farm. This wins
him the enmity of Þorgils, whose son Þengill’s suit
Helga had previously rejected. The hostility between
the two households blossoms into open conflict when
it is put about that Refr had shunned an encounter
with a predatory polar bear subsequently slain by
Þorgils’s sons. The successful immigrant is reviled
by his neighbours as an unmanly coward and a sexual
deviant who transgresses the bounds of nature, and
has no place in Greenland. “‘Hygg ek þat, at aldri hafi
dáðlausara höfuð komit til Grænlands en hann ber’”
(ÍF 14:134) (“I don’t think that a fainter heart has
come to Greenland than the one in his breast” [CSI
III:406]) asserts Þengill Þorgilsson,20 and he embroiders the tale of Refr’s cowardice by claiming that he
pissed himself as he fled—when he had in fact been
running to fetch an axe. It is Þorgils who introduces
the element of sexual ridicule, by asserting that Refr
had been exiled from Iceland because “hann [var]
ekki í æði sem aðrir karlar” (“he was not like other
men in his nature”). Adopting the grotesque exaggeration conventional in níð, Þorgils alleges that Refr
had been accused of taking the form of a woman every ninth day in order to have sexual intercourse with
men: “ávallt mætti Grænland rauða kinn bera, er þat
heyrði Refs getit” (“Greenland will always have to
blush when it hears Refr named”), he states, adding,
“ek sá, þegar hann var hingat nýkominn, at öfluð hafði
verit áðr Grænlandi in mesta skömm” (“when he first
came here I already saw that Greenland had been affected by a great scandal”). Such insults are designed
figuratively to emasculate the accused, depriving him
of prestige and social agency; here, as once seems to
have been the case in Fóstbrœðra saga, they focus
attention on the test of manhood at the center of the
Greenlandic narrative.
Special Volume 2
The theme of sexual insult appears again in
Flóamanna saga, but this time in the context of an
actual transgressive situation in the story, which
reads like an attempt to enact and surpass the kind
of ostentatiously implausible perversions of nature
customarily invoked in the traditional rhetoric of
Norse insult. The saga describes the gradual process
by which the intemperate Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri
learns to curb his self-seeking aggression following
his conversion to Christianity. A significant moment
in this transformation takes place during the trauma
of the shipwreck in the Greenlandic wilderness,
when the hardy warrior successfully breastfeeds
his newborn son Þorfinnr after his wife is brutally
murdered. In an unparalleled scene in saga literature,
Þorgils slices open one of his nipples, and squeezes
until milk flows from his breast: “Fór fyrst út blóð,
síðan blanda, ok lét eigi fyrr af en ór fór mjólk, ok
þar fæddist sveinninn upp við þat” (ÍF 13:289) (First
blood came out, then a mixed fluid, but he did not
stop until milk came out, and he nursed the boy with
it [CSI III:291]). This act is evidently connected
with the theme of Þorgils’s acceptance of Christ. Analogues for the motif of male lactation in medieval
ecclesiastical art, learned writings, and hagiography
of the 12th to 14th centuries reflect the emergence of
the idea of Christ as mother, imparting grace upon
sinful humanity like mother’s milk.21 By producing
life-giving milk from a self-inflicted wound, the
recent convert Þorgils imitates the self-sacrifice of
Christ, making himself like the pelican, the commonplace Christological symbol of the medieval
bestiaries and encyclopaedias, which fed its young
by piercing its own breast and pouring out blood like
milk.22 Flóamanna saga is no programmatic ecclesiastical text, however. The specific narrative context
of shipwreck and extreme privation suggests that the
story reflects an awareness of the unusual but welldocumented physiological effect of spontaneous
lactation, known to occur sporadically in men recovering from protracted periods of severe physical
hardship and malnourishment—conditions that were
not unknown in the medieval North Atlantic.23 In its
narrative context, the breast-feeding of Þorfinnr by
his father is an epiphany, but it also encapsulates the
extreme conditions of shipwreck, and the suspension
of all familiar norms in the travails of the Greenlandic wilderness setting as seen from Iceland. In the
Eastern Settlement, however, the genuine ambiguity
of gender that the nursing of Þorfinnr suggests leads
to the customary pattern of accusation. By the time
Þorgils and his loyal companions finally escape to
Brattahlíð, Þorfinnr is weaned, but the strange story
reaches the ears of the Greenlanders. One night, seated in the communal privy, Þorgils’s friend Kolr and a
member of Eiríkr’s household engage in a mannjafnaðr, a formal comparison of male accomplishment,
2009
J. Grove
concerning the relative merits of Eiríkr and Þorgils
(ch. 25). Understandably, perhaps, the Greenlander
points out that he cannot tell whether Þorgils is a
man or not. Kolr kills him for his impudence; but
it is soon after this that Þorgils takes on the band of
outlaws that troubles the settlements, proving his
manhood by defending the Greenlanders when they
need help. Eiríkr, however, is an intransigent pagan,
and he becomes increasingly cool and unwelcoming
towards his heroic houseguest, prompting Þorgils’s
final departure (ch. 26), and his eventual reaffirmation of his place in Christian Iceland.
Bárðar saga, Gunnars saga, and Jökuls þáttr
Búasonar
In Flóamanna saga, Þorgils’s encounters with
polar bears and pirates in the Greenlandic settlements stand cheek by jowl with supernatural meetings in the óbyggðir. The giants and trolls faced by
the heroes of the remaining, more fabulous texts
in our group of Íslendingasögur—Bárðar saga
Snæfellsáss, Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífl s, and
Jökuls þáttr Búasonar—represent the increasing
focus on Greenland as a fantastical setting.24 The
tendency towards the adoption of a narrative mode
concerned with superhuman feats in outlandish settings complies with the changing generic parameters
of post-classical saga literature in the 14th century.25
It is nevertheless striking that the remaking of Greenland as a rendezvous for fabulous adventures with
little regard for even the most vaguely historicized
human dimension becomes most apparent at a time
when regular communications with Greenland were
diminishing, but, strangely perhaps, not necessarily
before they had ceased altogether—if we assume that
the conventional dating of these texts is correct.
Bárðar saga (CSI II: 237–266, ÍF 13:99–172)
constitutes a special case among the Íslendingasögur. It relates, in the style of a family saga, a
tale of Norse landnámsmenn in western Iceland;
but this is the family of the half-human, half-giant
Bárðr, who occupies Snæfellsjökull with his daughter Helga. The saga is filled with fantastical and
folkloric elements. Two episodes are connected
with Greenland. The first describes how Helga
Bárðardóttir is accidentally carried to Greenland
on a storm-driven ice floe (ch. 5). She stays with
Eiríkr rauði at Brattahlíð, where she encounters
Miðfjarðar-Skeggi, a visiting Icelander of the more
conventional (human) type who is residing there.
What we have here is an embedded tale about an
Icelandic hero proving himself in Greenland, but
with the narrative focus on the she-giant Helga. She
helps Skeggi accomplish feats of heroism in which
he destroys a family of trolls, before she returns
to Snæfellsnes and he to Miðfjörður, where he be-
37
comes a great chieftain. In the second episode (chs.
18–21), the focus is on the exploits in the Greenlandic óbyggðir of Gestr, the son of Bárðr and one
of Miðfjarðar-Skeggi’s daughters. Gestr becomes
a retainer of Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway, and a
reluctant convert to Christianity. At Óláfr’s court,
he accepts a challenge from the revenant corpse
of an undead Viking called Raknarr, and sets out
to traverse Greenland en route to northern Helluland, where he wrestles Raknarr in his tomb and
vanquishes him with the help of a priest and Óláfr’s
miraculous intervention (cf. Sayers 1994).
Bárðar saga was certainly written before the
mid-14th century, and still displays a vestigial concern with the human inhabitants of Greenland in its
use of the familiar pseudo-historical setting of Brattahlíð. The descent into the realms of pure fantasy in
the Greenlandic wilderness in the latter part of the
saga anticipates the direction of our youngest saga
texts, in which the Greenlandic setting becomes
almost entirely abstract. Gunnars saga (CSI III:
421–36, ÍF 14:341–79) tells the adventures of Gunnarr Þorbjarnarson, an unpromising layabout who
blossoms as a champion in an icy wilderness far
out in the northwest Atlantic (chs. 5–6). Gunnarr
flees Iceland to escape the vengeance of a chieftain
whose son he has killed. He takes passage for Scandinavia with a Norwegian merchant, but the ship
is driven west by storms to a glacial coastline. The
place is not identified as Greenland, but the setting
in which Gunnarr finds himself corresponds with the
óbyggðir of Flóamanna saga, Króka-Refs saga, and
Bárðar saga.26 Gunnarr’s powers now come to the
fore and he organizes the ship’s company to house
themselves and survive the winter. He pioneers the
glaciers above their camp alone, and demonstrates
his prowess by defeating adversaries including
the statutory polar bear and various giantesses and
trolls. The ship returns to Norway in the spring,
where Gunnarr’s stature is sufficient to win the jealousy of Hákon jarl of Hlaðir. After going on viking
expeditions, he returns to Iceland where he finds the
vengeful chieftain dead, marries his daughter and
takes over his authority. In Jökuls þáttr Búasonar
(CSI 3:328–334, ÍF 14:45–59), too, the story is
bereft of any effort at historicization, and is marked
by the ascendancy of the fantastical generic conventions customarily associated with the fornaldarsögur, romances of the legendary past mostly
thought to have been composed in the 14th and 15th
centuries. Nevertheless, it offers a reflex of the same
sort of traditions about voyages to Greenland that
we find in Bárðar saga and Gunnars saga. Jökull—
the half-human grandson of the Norwegian giant
who had fostered Bárðr Snæfellsás in his youth—
is forced to flee Iceland, abandoning his claims to
his paternal inheritance after he accidentally kills
38
Journal of the North Atlantic
his human father in a wrestling match.27 When his
ship is driven west and wrecked on the Greenlandic
coast, Jökull comes into his own. After conveying
his companions to safety on the shore, and finding
shelter for them, he establishes his heroic credentials by killing various Greenlandic giants and trollwomen. He finally manages to leave Greenland, and
eventually ends up as king of a legendary realm in
the Orient. In Gunnars saga and Jökuls þáttr, the
wilderness setting displaces the interest in conflict
in societal contexts. Both protagonists flee conflict
situations in Iceland, maintaining the customary
exile theme, but they are driven west involuntarily
in fierce storms, and experience Greenland only in
its guise as supernatural wasteland. The separation
from even the most vaguely discerned historical
contingencies is complete in Jökuls þáttr, in which
the hero’s adventures in the óbyggðir lead him not
to a re-determination of his religion or his relations
with any identifiable ruler in Norway, or to improved
circumstances in Iceland, but to his acquisition of
fabulous wealth and power in the imaginary east.
The Conversion Theme
Testing encounters in the settled and wilderness
spaces beyond the cultural centers of Iceland and
Scandinavia provide the central focus of the Íslendingasögur set in Greenland. But a recurrent feature
of the tales under discussion here, which connects
them rather closely to the Vínland sagas, is their tendency to make Greenland a theater for the religious
conflicts and ambiguities remembered as having
attended the transition from paganism to Christianity.28 Religious conversion is an important theme in
the Íslendingasögur, but it achieves special prominence in Greenlandic settings, almost certainly because of the recollection in medieval Icelandic writings and the memorial traditions upon which they
depended of the proximity between the settlement
of Greenland and the formal acceptance of Christianity in the North Atlantic colonies in around 1000.
In the pseudo-historical saga traditions concerning
the settlement of Iceland in the late 9th and early
10th centuries, the landnámsmenn are frequently
represented as having secured the sanction of pagan
gods, the only divine forces that the majority of the
settlers recognized.29 By tacitly condoning these traditions, the texts indicate that the supervision of the
Icelandic land-taking by non-Christian supernatural
authorities in the pagan period was allowed to anticipate the divine legitimization of the settlement
from a later Christian perspective, establishing the
Icelanders’ god-given right to the land which was
finally perfected with their conversion (Clunies Ross
1997:18–25; cf. Barnes 2001:11). There is no corresponding attempt to conceptualize the colonization
Special Volume 2
of foreign territory in Greenland in such terms, for
the action of pagan deities could not be allied with
divine ordinance as the age of the missionary kings
Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson approached
in the accounts of the sagas. Whereas the pre-Christian religion of the first Icelanders was pardonable,
the intransigent paganism of Eiríkr rauði and his
generation is made a symptom of cultural backwardness in a time of religious transformation; in Eiríks
saga (ch. 5), he resists the efforts of his own son,
sent as a missionary to Iceland by Óláfr Tryggvason.30 Icelandic visitors to early Norse Greenland
in the sagas find themselves flung into a context of
profound religious uncertainty and confrontation.
Þormóðr Bersason only escapes Greenland with the
miraculous intervention of Óláfr Haraldsson and,
more strangely, the magic of an old woman too frail
to go to church, but whose carved image of Þórr
reminds her of the superiority of the Christ. Gestr
Bárðarson defeats the undead viking warrior Raknarr
with the help of a Christian priest and the miraculous
assistance of Óláfr Tryggvason. Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri’s Greenland odyssey is set against his efforts
to defy the threats of a jilted Þórr. In each case, it
is only with the return from the volatile transitional
space of Greenland that full resolution is achieved;
the Greenlandic experience is made constitutive for
a Christian history lying outside Greenland itself.
Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga close with
Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir and Þorfinnr karlsefni quitting a Greenland disturbed by witches and unquiet
corpses and re-establishing themselves in Iceland.
After Karlsefni’s death, Guðríðr makes a pilgrimage
to Rome and becomes a nun and anchoress, but they
both achieve a place as foundational figures in the
Christian history of Iceland, as great-grandparents
of the 12th-century bishops Þorlákr Runólfsson of
Skálholt, and Bjƒrn Gilsson and Brandr Sæmundarson of Hólar. Flóamanna saga makes the convert
Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri more than equal to Guðríðr
and Karlsefni, asserting his position as a forefather
of the bishop-saint Þorlákr Þorhallsson of Skálholt,
and the later Jörundr Þorsteinsson of Hólar (d. 1313).
In Króka-Refs saga, set in the mid-11th century, we
find ourselves outside the context of the main missionary period in the history of Scandinavia as it was
seen in the sagas. Even in this case, however, Refr
finally dies on pilgrimage to Rome, and the saga
claims that one of his descendants was Absalon,
bishop of Roskilde and archbishop of Lund in the
later 12th century (d. 1201).31 What we seem to have
here, then, is a set of close intertextual connections
between these texts and the Vínland sagas, deriving
conventional elements from other parts of the saga
tradition which are then deployed repeatedly and
consistently in order to enhance the cultural liminality of the Greenlandic setting.
J. Grove
2009
The Historical Setting
Further textual parallels and interconnections
among these texts are identifiable in the way in
which episodes outside Eiríks saga and Grœnlendinga saga set in Greenland in the 10th and 11th
centuries are anchored historically to the figure of
Eiríkr rauði. Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri’s voyage to
Greenland is presented as a response to an invitation
from Eiríkr, and it is to Brattahlíð that he makes his
way after escaping from the wilderness (Flóamanna
saga ch. 24). It is Eiríkr, again, who receives Helga
Bárðardóttir when she washes ashore in Greenland
(Bárðar saga ch. 5). It is to Leifr Eiríksson at Brattahlíð that Óláfr Haraldsson commands Þórarinn
Nefjólfsson to bear the deposed king Hrœrekr in
versions of Óláfs saga helga; and Þormóðr Bersason’s first port of call is once again Brattahlíð, where
Þorkell Leifsson, an otherwise unknown grandson
of Eiríkr, is supposedly established as the dominant
figure in the Eastern Settlement (Fóstbrœðra saga
ch. 20). As we have seen, Eiríkr rauði’s landnám
was remembered in Icelandic writings from as early
as Íslendingabók. It was to his household that the
story of the conversion inevitably cohered in the
story of Leifr Eiríksson and Óláfr Tryggvason in
Eiríks saga, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and Kristni
saga.32 The story of Leifr’s mission had arisen by
the early 13th century (Halldórsson 1978:381–389,
1981; Kristjánsson 1997:272–273), and it seems to
be a reflex of the historical traditions regarding the
chieftains Gizurr hvíti and Hjalti Skeggjason, who
were supposedly converted at Óláfr’s court and then
sent home as native missionaries, setting in motion the events leading to the formal acceptance of
Christianity at the Icelandic Alþingi in ca. 1000. It is
interesting, however, that Icelandic saga narratives
have no other concrete information to offer about
historical circumstances in early Greenland. There
is no attempt to invoke any broader framework of
10th- or 11th-century Greenlandic genealogical relations, no references to other families or individuals
who must have been influential in Greenland in the
period, beyond the lists of principal landnámsmenn
remembered as having left Iceland in ca. 985.33 The
connection with Eiríkr or Brattahlíð is sufficient to
establish a recognizable context in most of these
texts; the Icelandic saga writers evidently had nothing to gain from more elaborate historicization.
Only in Grœnlendinga þáttr do we find an attempt
to supplement the stories regarding the emigration
west from Iceland in the late 10th and early 11th centuries with more detailed material on Greenlandic
affairs.34
The historical information in Icelandic accounts
of Greenland is surprisingly thin. The exact extent
of Icelandic interactions with Greenland after the
settlement is hard to gauge, but there can have been
39
no lack of opportunities to gather narrative material
from Greenlandic oral or written sources, if only
from intermediaries who had made the voyage west
or heard travellers’ tales in Norway. Although they
became increasingly sporadic, Norwegian commercial and administrative communications with
Greenland persisted intermittently down to 1377
or 1378, when the last bishop of Garðar died and
was not replaced (Seaver 1996:139–1). It is possible that Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen
meant to place the Greenlandic church under the
supervision of the Icelandic see at Skálholt in 1056
(Schmeidler 1917:274, Tschan and Reuter 2002:218;
cf. Halldórsson 1981:204), but any such connection had been broken by 1124, by which point archiepiscopal jurisdiction had shifted to Lund and,
according to Grœnlendinga þáttr (ch. 1), Sigurðr
Jórsalafari of Norway sponsored the consecration of
the Norwegian priest Arnaldr as bishop of Garðar.
Lay connections between Greenland and Iceland
were sufficiently close, however, that Grágás (the
law code of the Icelandic Commonwealth) includes
provisions accepting the jurisdiction of local law
over Icelandic expatriates involved in manslaughter
cases or claiming inheritance in Greenland (Dennis et al. 1980–2000 I:235, II:247–8; Finsen 1852
I:240, 249, 1879:71, 90, 389–90).35 If the testimony
of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar is correct, Icelanders still migrated west occasionally in the early
13th century,36 and some mobility may even have
been known in the late 14th and early 15th centuries
when communications finally petered out.37 There
were certainly more Greenlandic visitors to Iceland
than those few deemed exceptional enough for one
reason or another to have warranted notices in the
samtíðarsögur, and in the late medieval Icelandic annals which began to be compiled towards the end of
the 13th century: the comically named but otherwise
mysterious Ásmundr kastanrazi (“Wriggle-arse”),
who arrived in 1189 in a strangely constructed boat
from Krossey and Finnsbúðir, in the wilderness at
the southeastern tip of Greenland, but was lost at sea
the following year (Storm 1888: 22, 61, 120, 180,
477; cf. Jóhannesson et al. 1946 I:138–9, Karlsson
1983:69);38 Bishop Óláfr of Garðar, who visited Iceland in 1262 (Storm 1888:27, 67, 134, 193, 330); the
company of a Greenlandic ship wrecked in western
Iceland in 1266 (Storm 1888:136, 258 [s. a. 1265],
330); and another crew, blown off course while sailing home from the North American coast in 1347
(Storm 1888:213, 353, 403). Páls saga biskups,
the biography of Bishop Páll Jónsson of Skálholt,
refers in passing to the visit in 1203 of Bishop Jón
smyrill of Garðar, who taught his Icelandic hosts
how to make communion wine from crowberries (ÍF
16:311). Less memorable encounters than these, in
Iceland, Greenland, and Norway, must have promot-
40
Journal of the North Atlantic
ed the exchange of information and the swapping
of tales between Icelanders and Greenlanders for
four centuries or more. Yet, although some historical notices concerning Greenland occur in Icelandic
writings,39 and the annals indicate that contacts with
Greenlanders might sometimes have stimulated local Icelandic folklore,40 the opportunities for acquiring knowledge of the Greenlandic past do not seem
to have provided any real grist for the saga-writers.
Despite the fact that the Icelander customarily remains a foreigner in those texts in which Greenlandic
settings are developed, accounts of the Norse colony
itself emphasize the similarities and kinship between
Greenland and Iceland: the settlements are composed
of scattered farms, chieftains preside over assemblies, and a recognizable way of life is practiced in a
recognizable domestic environment. References to a
few distinctive aspects of life in Greenland become
key markers of setting for the Icelandic writers and
their audiences. Polar-bears prowl the meadows,41
and the special importance to the Greenlanders of
hunting and fishing attracts occasional comment.42
One of the most significant aspects of Greenlandic
life in these narratives, however, which would certainly have been well-known and enviable to many
Icelandic observers while communications continued, is the importance of the trade axis between
Greenland and Norway. In its heyday, Greenland
supported a trade in high-value goods of which
Iceland could only dream (Seaver 1996:48, 80–88;
cf. Jónsson 1920–21:71–2, Larson 1917:142). The
commercial lure of Greenland is clearly identified
in Fóstbrœðra saga and Króka-Refs saga. There are
repeated references in Króka-Refs saga to the special
Greenlandic goods for which the Greenland trade was
famous: walrus-hide ropes, walrus ivory, and arctic
furs (chs. 10, 11, 14, 18), and Fóstbræðra saga refers
to the fine clothes, linen, and valuables that moved in
the opposite direction, and were deemed too good for
the Icelandic market (ch. 16). In 13th- and 14th-century
Iceland, it would have been patently obvious even to
the most retiring saga-writer that the Greenland trade
with Norway had important political implications,
especially after the expansion of Norwegian royal
authority in the North Atlantic in the 1260s and its
concomitant trading privileges. Little surprise, then,
that the trade in Greenlandic commodities is a matter
of royal interest in the sagas. The Greenlandic merchant Skúfr, who conveys Þormóðr to Iceland in Fóstbræðra saga, is identified as a friend of King Óláfr,
and in his paid employ (ch. 18). In Króka-Refs saga,
Haraldr harðráði sends his retainer Bárðr, a merchant,
to Greenland to bring back a cargo of walrus ivory
and ship-ropes (ch. 10). Access to Greenlandic wares
provides access to an important source of social leverage. Bárðr’s Greenlandic ally, Gunnarr, wins the
favor of Haraldr with characteristic gifts: a gaming
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board carved from walrus ivory, a vessel of walrus
skull, and a tame polar bear (ch. 11).43 At the end of
the saga, in a transparent exercise in Icelandic wishfulfilment, Refr’s victory over his Greenlandic and
Norwegian foes is represented in his establishment as
a man of means in the kingdom of Denmark, enriched
by his cargo of Greenlandic wares:
Kom þat upp, at þeir hefði of fjár í svörð ok tannvöru ok skinnavöru ok mörgum þeim hlutum, er
fásénir váru í Danmörk af grænlenskum varningi.
Þeir höfðu fimm hvítabjörnu ok fimm tigi fálka ok
fimmtán hvíta. (ÍF 14:157.)
It became known that they had great wealth in
walrus-hide ropes, walrus ivory, and furs, and that
they had many kinds of Greenland wares which
were seldom seen in Denmark. They had five polar
bears, and fifty falcons including fifteen white
ones. (CSI III:418–19.)
As the example of Króka-Refs saga shows, the
Icelandic interest in Greenlandic trade resources
partly explains the abiding fascination of the Greenlandic óbyggðir in Icelandic writings, for it was
the immense hinterlands of the arctic wilderness
—notably the Norðrseta on the west coast—which
supplied Greenland’s overseas trade. The wilds of
Greenland exercised a potent hold on the imagination of some Icelanders in the 13th and 14th centuries.
This was not merely a literary preoccupation. In
1285, two Icelandic brothers facing severe financial
difficulties set out on a voyage of discovery west
of Iceland, and returned claiming to have found a
place which they called Nýjaland (New Land) or
Dúneyjar (Eiderdown Islands) (Storm 1888:142,
196; cf. 50, 337, 383). The Höyersannáll version of
the Icelandic annals located this place in “Grænlands
óbyggðir” (Storm 1888:70), and although it is not
known exactly where the brothers went and what
they found, it seems likely that the land they claimed
to have discovered lay somewhere on the east coast
of Greenland, which would have remained largely
unexplored in the late 13th century and evidently offered a powerful lure to Icelanders eager to obtain
their own supply of Greenlandic trade-goods. The
brothers apparently exaggerated the success of their
venture, however, for accounts of their dealings after
1285 indicate that their circumstances were not improved. Nevertheless, the tale of discovery found a
receptive audience in Norway—in 1289, King Eiríkr
Magnússon dispatched an envoy named Hrólfr to
seek out the new territory, but the unfortunate royal
henchman never made it beyond Iceland, where he
died in 1295 (Pálsson 1964). The fictitious story of
Króka-Refr’s acquisition of “great wealth” from
his haunts on the east coast in the mid-11th century
evidently tapped a rich seam of Icelandic wishful
thinking in the later medieval period.
J. Grove
2009
Getting to Greenland
The tendency to take a piece of common lore
about Greenland and develop from it a conventional
literary pattern is evident elsewhere in our texts. So
for example, there is rarely in these sagas any such
thing as an easy voyage to Greenland. There is no
reason, of course, to doubt the hardship of sailing
the North Atlantic in open boats, and the hazards are
widely acknowledged in medieval sources.44 Yet the
turbulent voyage becomes a principal leitmotif of
Icelandic tales concerning Greenland and the lands
further west. Of twenty-five ships in the first wave
of colonists Landnámabók remembered as having
left Iceland in about 985, only fourteen are supposed
to have reached Greenland (ÍF 1:132–133, Pálsson
and Edwards 1972:49). Landnámabók and Grœnlendinga saga (ch. 1) preserve fragments of a poem
called Hafgerðingadrápa, attributed to a Hebridean
Christian aboard one of the ships that brought settlers
to Herjólfsnes, which comprises a prayer for deliverance from giant waves (ÍF 1:132–134, Pálsson and
Edwards 1972:50).45 The Vínland sagas recall other
troubled journeys. The ship which bears Þorbjƒrn
Vífilsson and his daughter Guðríðr to Greenland in
Eiríks saga experiences favorable conditions at first,
but then disease strikes, followed by storms, and
they spend the whole summer at sea before reaching
Greenland and the shelter of Herjólfsnes at the start
of winter (ch. 3); in Grœnlendinga saga, Leifr discovers Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir and her first husband
Þórir wrecked on a skerry within sight of Greenland
(ch. 3).46 When Bjarni Herjólfsson attempts to join
his father in Greenland in Grœnlendinga saga (ch. 1),
his voyage starts well, but they are taken in wind and
mist to within sight of Vínland—while in Eiríks
saga, it is Leifr who discovers Vínland, after enduring prolonged storms during his return to Greenland
from Norway (ch. 5).47
These tales may in part reflect the pattern of
inherited oral traditions regarding historical circumstances in the pioneering period, but they were also
congruent with more recent experience. The Icelandic annals are littered with references to ships that
never made their intended ports, including several
that disappeared on the voyage to or from Greenland (Storm 1888: 22, 61, 120, 180, 228, 258, 323
[s.a. 1185, 1189, 1265, 1369]), that were driven off
course to Greenland while sailing between Norway
and Iceland (Þorsteinsson 1922–27:13–20 [s.a. 1209,
1381, 1382, 1384/85, 1406]; Storm 1888:123, 282,
364–6, 414), and that were in some cases wrecked
on Greenland’s east coast (Storm 1888:282, 364–5
[s.a. 1382]). So repetitious are the references in the
annals and Norwegian documentary sources to ostensibly accidental voyages west by Icelandic trading ships in the final period of contact in 1381–1406
that it has been suggested that these were in fact tall
41
stories told by Icelandic ship-owners to cover their
deliberate flouting of trading privileges reserved to
the Norwegian crown; however, if this was so, the
tales of Atlantic storms were still convincing enough
to satisfy royal officials (Seaver 1996:146–158).
Historically and experientially grounded as the
accounts of gruelling westbound voyages may have
been, in the immediate narrative contexts of the sagas they serve the literary effect of distancing Greenland from the central reference point of Iceland. In
Fóstbrœðra saga, Þormóðr toils to keep his ship
afloat in storm conditions (ch. 20). The accounts of
Greenland voyages in Króka-Refs saga, Flóamanna
saga, Gunnars saga, and Jökuls þáttr are all closely
related to one another and to the accounts of troubled
trips in the Vínland sagas—notably the long journey
west of Þorbjƒrn Vífilsson. Þorgils Ørrabeinsfóstri’s
ship lies becalmed on the ocean for months before
it is caught up in storms that leave it wrecked in the
wilderness beneath the glaciers of Greenland (Flóamanna saga ch. 22). The ship Jökull Búason had
expected to take him to Norway is broken on skerries
off the Greenlandic coast after enduring a summer
lost on the ocean, and autumnal storms (Jökuls þáttr
ch. 1). Króka-Refr and Gunnarr Keldugnúpsfífl experience similarly testing voyages, making landfall
in the wilderness (Króka-Refs saga ch. 6, Gunnars
saga ch. 5). The topos gets a suitably fabulous spin
in the account of Helga Bárðardóttir’s mishap when
she is washed to Greenland while playing on an
ice-floe that is suddenly blown west from the foggy
coast of Snæfellsnes (Bárðar saga ch. 5). Getting
back from Greenland does not generally seem to
involve the same difficulties as getting there in these
tales, and we hear of no corresponding wrecks on
the fearsome Atlantic lee shores of Iceland, Scandinavia, or the British Isles on the return journey.
The asymmetrical pattern bespeaks the artificiality
of these narratives. Getting away is part of the point
in tales set in Greenland after the settlement era, and
the voyage home is not usually a matter for concern
once affairs in the west have been tied up and indicators of remoteness are no longer required.48
Parallel accounts of storms at sea occur in several stories of voyages to Iceland during the pioneering period in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. In
the story in Landnámabók of the original discovery
of “Snowland,” Naddoddr is driven west by storms
while trying to reach Faroe from Norway, and he
is forced to spend the winter in the uninhabited
wilderness (ÍF 1:34–35, 37; Pálsson and Edwards
1972:16). The pattern is familiar and entirely formulaic, but neither the tale of Naddoddr nor those
of the explorers and landnámsmenn who followed
him include references to such hardships as their
successors are remembered as having faced on the
sea-routes to Greenland: the winds that blow about
42
Journal of the North Atlantic
early Iceland in the sagas tend to draw pioneers
to their destined land-holdings in the new country
rather than threatening them with hardship and destruction at the edge of the known world (e.g., Egils
saga Skalla-Grímssonar chs 23, 27 [CSI I:58, 64; ÍF
2:58, 71–72]).
The currency of the motif of the storm-tossed
voyage suggests that the interrupted journeys to
Greenland in the story of Þórarinn Nefjólfsson and
King Hrœrekr and in Grœnlendinga þáttr should be
read as marked deviations from a narrative pattern
that was well-established in the 13th-century Icelandic tradition. In each case, the unexpected arrival in
Iceland of a prestigious Norwegian visitor sets up
a tacit contrast between circumstances in the two
colonies. When Þórarinn is commissioned by Óláfr
Haraldsson to carry the deposed king of Heiðmƒrk
into exile at Brattahlíð, he expresses apprehension at
the danger of the voyage, and Óláfr assures him that
it will be a fitting test of skill for such an experienced
skipper, but that he may take Hrœrekr to Iceland as
an alternative. Þórarinn’s fears are proved correct,
and the saga describes how he labours futilely off
Greenland through the summer in fierce storms and
heavy seas. When Þórarinn finally brings his ship
in to Iceland rather than Eiríksfjƒrðr, Hrœrekr is received by Þorgils Arason and Guðmundr Eyjólfsson,
chieftains as proud and magnificent as any regional
king of former times in Norway, by whom he is
vexed to find himself treated merely as a social equal
(ÍF 27:127–8, Hollander 1964:330; cf. Johnsen and
Helgason 1941 I:187–8). In Grœnlendinga þáttr
(ch. 1), Bishop Arnaldr’s ship is likewise forced to
take shelter in Iceland on his way to Garðar, and he
winters with Sæmundr fróði at Oddi before continuing his journey. But Arnaldr’s stay at Iceland’s most
important cultural center in the early 12th century
is counterpointed with the grim fate of Arnbjƒrn, a
Norwegian skipper who had sailed in company with
the bishop, and who is later found to have died with
his entire crew after they were wrecked on the east
coast of Greenland (ch. 2).
The pattern of close intertextual correspondences
in the saga accounts of voyages to Greenland is
maintained in those tales that take their stormtossed Icelanders onto dry land in the óbyggðir. In
Króka-Refs þáttr and Flóamanna saga, in the tale
of Gestr in Bárðar saga, and in Gunnars saga and
Jökuls þáttr, the Icelander protagonist and his companions makes landfall on the wilderness east coast
of Greenland late in the year, close to the beginning
of winter. In each episode, the party constructs—
or, in the case of Jökull, finds—a skáli, a hall in
which to pass the winter months. Króka-Refs saga,
Flóamanna saga, Gunnars saga, and Jökuls þáttr
describe the fjord setting in some detail, surrounded
by mountains and glaciers. In Refr’s case, this is a
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kind of Shangri-La away from the complications of
society, whether in Iceland or the Greenlandic settlements, and a redoubt in which he can resist his foes.
In a still more simplistic fantastical mode, Gestr,
Gunnarr and Jökull are able to undertake various adventures from their places of refuge against the wild
and supernatural denizens of this place. For Þorgils,
the site of his shipwreck is an inhuman nightmare,
in which human relations and social hierarchies are
submitted to the most extreme pressures, and from
which only Þorgils and his most loyal adherents escape with their lives.
The frightful experience of Þorgils in the
Greenlandic óbyggðir in Flóamanna saga has a
number of parallels in other texts. A significant
precedent lies in the account in Landnámabók of
Snæbjƒrn Hólmsteinsson’s calamity in Greenland
in the mid-10th century. Snæbjƒrn comes ashore on
a desolate coastline amid “frost ok kulða, / feikn
hvers konar” (ÍF 1:195) (frost and cold, every kind
of ill-omen), but he is murdered in the strife that
breaks out while his party is holed up for the winter
in their skáli.49 The survivors retreat in the spring.
Grœnlendinga þáttr describes the horrific scene at
a site on the southeast coast of Greenland where the
marooned survivors from the wreck of Arnbjƒrn’s
ship perished. In this case, the story is told from
the perspective of the Greenlandic hunter Sigurðr
Njálsson who finds a skáli and the bodies of the
survivors of the wreck, who appear to have died
later of starvation or disease (ch. 2). A very similar
situation—the discovery by Greenlanders of the
corpses of shipwrecked mariners on the southeast
coast—is referred to in an anecdote in the version of
Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar in the early 14th-century
Hauksbók miscellany, which describes an encounter
between Haraldr harðráði of Norway and a Greenlandic skipper called Líka-Loðinn (Corpse-Loðinn).
Like Sigurðr Njálsson, Loðinn is remembered for
recovering corpses from the óbyggðir, for he had
supposedly retrieved the body of Óláfr Haraldsson’s
nephew Finnr from the site of a shipwreck at the site
known thereafter as Finnsbúðir, “fyri austan jokla a
Grænalandi” (Fellows Jensen 1962:41) (east of the
glaciers in Greenland).
For further analogues to these tales of shipmates
thrown ashore on remote coastlines, holed up in cabins, and sometimes subject to bouts of fatal conflict,
one need only look as far as the Vínland sagas, and
their accounts of the temporary settlements made by
Norse expeditions to the fabled lands lying south and
west of Greenland. It cannot easily be ascertained
whether the accounts of Leifsbúðir (Grœnlendinga
saga ch. 2) or the búðir of Karlsefni at Hóp (Eiríks
saga ch. 10), and stories of the dissension in Karlsefni’s winter camp at Straumsfjƒrðr (Eiríks saga ch.
12) or the disastrous stay of Freydís at Leifsbúðir,
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which ends in massacre (Grœnlendinga saga ch. 7),
provided literary models for the Greenlandic stories
or a set of parallel reflexes of a commonplace theme
in Icelandic narrative tradition. Either way, we are
clearly dealing with a well-used literary motif, in
which the circumstances and fate of each expedition
seems to reflect its moral integrity and cohesion far
from home.
Yet among the stories of violence and lingering
death following shipwreck in Greenland, there is an
important additional case, which must have begun
to take shape in Iceland from reports circulating in
the 1190s and the first decade of the 13th century,
but which only survives in the various much later
versions of Guðmundar saga biskups, the saga of
the turbulent 13 th-century bishop and uncanonized saint Guðmundr Arason of Hólar. These texts
contain references to the shipwreck and death on
the east coast of Greenland of two of Guðmundr’s
paternal uncles, the brothers Einarr and Ingimundr
Þorgeirsson. The accounts appear to derive from
oral reports connected with the discovery of the
corpses, which were absorbed into the 13th-century
textual traditions thought to underlie the extant versions of Guðmundar saga (Hagland 1996:99–100).50
The opening chapters in the so-called Prestssaga
Guðmundar góða in the Sturlunga saga compilation
and in the separate Guðmundar sögur give information on Guðmundr’s genealogical background and
relate how his uncle Einarr lost his life “á Grænlandi
í óbyggðum” (Jóhannesson et al. 1946 I:116) (in the
wastelands of Greenland [McGrew 1970–4 II:93]).
The texts state explicitly that two different versions
of the story were known, before supplying the version derived from the account of a Greenlander
named Styrkárr Sigmundarson, who is identified
explicitly as a notable and reliable source of oral lore
(sagnamaðr mikill ok sannfróðr):
Skip þeira hefði fundizt í óbyggðum, en lið þeira
hefði gengit í tvá staði ok barizt um þat, er aðra
hafði fyrr þrotat vist en aðra, ok komst Einarr brott
við þriðja mann ok leitaði byggðar, hann gekk á
jökla upp, ok létu þar lífi, er dagleið var til byggðar, —ok fundust vetri síðar. Lík Einars var heilt ok
ósakat, ok hvílir hann á Herjólfsnesi. (Jóhannesson
et al. 1946 I:116; cf. Karlsson 1983:17, Vigfússon
and Sigurðsson 1856–1878 I:408.)
Their ship was later found in the wilds of Greenland, but the crew had divided into factions and
fought each other when one party had used up all
its provisions. Einar escaped with two companions
in search of the settlements; he climbed among the
glaciers and died there within a day’s journey of the
settlement, and his body was found a few winters
later; it was intact and uncorrupted and is now buried on Herjólfsnes. (McGrew 1970–1974 II:93.)
43
Later on, the different versions of the saga relate
the parallel tale of Guðmundr’s uncle Ingimundr,
although without making any explicit connection between the two episodes. Ingimundr attempted to sail
to Iceland from Norway in 1189 on a ship named the
Stangarfoli (cf. Storm 1888:22, 120–121, 180–181).
Three years earlier, he had rejected the offer of the
bishopric of Greenland, but he was to end his days
there whether he liked it or not:
Skip þeira kom í óbygg[ð]ir á Grænlandi, ok týndust menn allir. En þess varð svá víst, at fjórtán
vetrum síðar fannst skip þeira, ok þá fundust
sjau menn í hellisskúta einum. Þar var Ingimundr
prestr. Hann var heill ok ófúinn ok svá klæði hans,
en sex manna bein váru þar hjá honum. Vax var
ok þar hjá honum ok rúnar þær, er sögðu atburð
um líflát þeira. (Jóhannesson et al. 1946 I:138;
cf. Karlsson 1983:68, Vigfússon and Sigurðsson
1856–1878 I:435.)
Their ship was lost on the deserted shores of
Greenland, and they all perished. This came to
light fourteen years later when their ship was
found and the remains of seven men in a cave.
Ingimund the Priest was one of them: his corpse
was intact and undecayed, as were his clothes,
and the skeletons of the other six were by his side.
They also found a wax tablet close to him with
runes that told the story of their death. (McGrew
1970–1974 II:118.)
The coincidence of two brothers dying in such
similar circumstances on two separate occasions
would stretch plausibility beyond its limit, and Jan
Ragnar Hagland (1996:102–3, 106) has argued that
the story of Ingimundr must represent the alternate
version of the tale previously told about Einarr. The
two separate anecdotes would therefore derive from
Greenlandic reports of the initial recovery of Einarr
and his companions and the discovery some years
later of Ingimundr and his party with their account
of the wreck written in runes.51 The bifurcated tale of
the doomed survivors of the Stangarfoli, stranded in
a barren waste, divided into hostile factions, reflects
a narrative pattern similar to that which informs
the stories of Snæbjƒrn Hólmsteinsson and Þorgils
Ørrabeinsfóstri, and there is evidently also a close
relationship with the accounts of the discovery of
dead mariners by Líka-Loðinn and Sigurðr Njálsson.52 It would be tempting to argue that the circulation of the story of Einarr and Ingimundr might have
influenced the accounts of earlier disasters in the
sagas, but establishing the relative chronology of
the different texts in their earliest forms is too problematic to allow us to determine the priority of this
particular narrative and, say, the tales of Snæbjƒrn’s
10th-century expedition, or the wreck of Arnbjƒrn in
1124, as we now know them. It seems wisest to argue
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Journal of the North Atlantic
that the accounts relating to the 1189 wreck were
assimilated into a conventional story pattern that
was sustained by its connection with known events.
The historical authenticity of the accounts of Einarr
and Ingimundr in the form in which they appear in
the Guðmundar sögur, let alone hypothetical earlier
stages in the development of the story, simply cannot be taken for granted. The twin versions of the
tale have only survived because they served the purposes of the biographers of Guðmundr Arason: the
discovery of the unblemished corpses of the two Icelanders introduces a markedly hagiographical tone,
anticipating the assertions of their nephew’s sanctity
(Hagland 1996:105). The duplication of this motif
plainly reflects the concerns of the Icelandic texual
community, and it may have seriously distorted the
shape of an underlying tale if we assume that Einarr and Ingimundr’s parties represent the opposed
factions among the survivors of the shipwreck—in
which case, it would be unusual for both men to have
been imagined as dying with something of the aura
of sanctity about them. It is striking too that there is
no reference at all to the broader Greenlandic contexts of the story in its surviving form, aside from
the passing allusion to Styrkárr Sigmundarson. The
bleak shores and icy wastes where the Icelanders had
struggled and died loom large here, but the Greenlanders who discovered the bodies—the counterparts of Líka-Loðinn and Sigurðr Njálsson—are left
unidentified. Extraneous narrative details have been
stripped away, leaving the Greenlandic setting in its
most restricted form as a perilous and otherworldly
region. It seems probable that whatever its historical
authenticity, the reference to the use of runic letters
in extremis by Ingimundr or another member of his
party as a means of communicating from beyond
death in the wilds would have accentuated the sense
of estrangement from familiar cultural settings. That
the writer in the narrative chose to use runes on his
wax tablet and not Latin letters suggests that we are
to understand that in this context the elevated script
of the church could not be expected to be comprehensible to anyone likely to find the bodies.53
The Geography of Greenland in the Sagas
Although at least as late as 1410, some Icelandic
shipowners had first-hand acquaintance with Norse
Greenland, geographical accuracy is no more a conspicuous concern in the Icelandic narrative literature
than historical depth. Accurate knowledge was still
to be had, as reflected in the lists of fjords colonized
during the settlement period,54 and the sailing directions across the North Atlantic seaways to Greenland
preserved in Landnámabók (ÍF 1:132–5; Pálsson
and Edwards 1972:16),55 but the spaces mapped out
in saga narrative are not always designed to tell us
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much about the geographical and historical actualities of place. We should not necessarily be surprised
if they reflect historical realities on some levels, but
the mental maps detectable in the sagas are less often
a vestige of Viking Age mnemonics, more often the
simplified intertextual arrangements that emerged to
serve the needs of medieval storytellers.56
The geography of Greenland impacts on the narratives in our core group of Íslendingasögur in various ways. Fóstbrœðra saga focuses on the Eastern
Settlement, and the vicinity of Brattahlíð and Garðar,
in Eiríksfjƒrðr and Einarsfjƒrðr. The attention to this
limited human setting in the cycle of vengeance
meted out by Þormóðr reflects much closer attention to local geography than we encounter in any
other text apart from Grœnlendinga þáttr, including
the Vínland sagas. As we have seen, the other tales
exhibit an interest in the remote wilderness settings
of Greenland to which Fóstbræðra saga does not
aspire. Flóamanna saga and Króka-Refs saga both
set up a basic opposition between the óbyggðir and
the settlements, the byggðir. The Greenland episode
in Flóamanna saga opens with the drama of Þorgils’
shipwreck in a barren fjord beneath the ice-sheet.
This scene is clearly based on accounts of the harsh
eastern seaboard of Greenland, upon which shipping must frequently have foundered. Þorgils and
his companions eventually escape southwards down
the coast, into the haunts of an outlaw called Hrólfr,
who was an exile from the Western Settlement (ch.
24). They travel on “south along the shore” (CSI
III:294, ÍF 13:300) and, having met an Icelandic
trading vessel making landfall on the coast, they
continue to Brattahlíð, and eventually also to the
Western Settlement (ch. 25). The spatial relationships identified here basically correspond with the
“real” geography of Norse Greenland, but they seem
to have been simplified along a roughly diagonal
north–south axis, which conflates the wild east coast
of Greenland with the Norðrseta, on the arctic west
coast. Hence Hrólfr, an outlaw from the Western
Settlement, seems to have ended up on what we
would naturally think of as the east coast, construed
as the “north” of Greenland, eventually returning to
the Western Settlement after Þorgils intervenes on
his behalf.57
Geographical simplification also marks the
disposition of the main settlements. In Flóamanna
saga, Brattahlíð essentially is the Eastern Settlement. No other farmsteads there are named, and
none are identified in the still more remote Western
Settlement. The two main centers are placed far too
close to one another, so when Þorgils kills a troublesome polar bear at Brattahlíð, he wins a reward from
all the Greenlanders, including the people of the
Western Settlement (ch. 25). Likewise, the encampment of a group of outlaw vikings inhabiting coastal
2009
J. Grove
islands off Eiríksfjƒrðr, in the Eastern Settlement,
is explicitly identified as lying just off the Western
Settlement, as if the two locations were immediately
adjacent, and not 500 kilometers apart.
The same sort of simplified geographical arrangement is adopted in Króka-Refs saga, in which the
óbyggðir are situated northwards up a simple coastal
axis, below which lie the Eastern Settlement and the
Western Settlement respectively. Króka-Refr’s first
landfall from Iceland brings him to his hidden valley
under the glaciers, where he establishes his place of
refuge, far to the north of human habitation (chs. 6, 9).
When Refr eventually flees back there from his farm
in the Eastern Settlement, the Greenlander Gunnarr, a
resident of the Western Settlement, sends men “norðr
í óbyggðir” (ÍF 14:138) (north into the wilderness
[CSI III:408]) to hunt him down; and correspondingly, when Refr sends his sons on an errand out of the
wilderness, they travel “suðr til byggðar” (ÍF 13:146)
(south to the settlements [CSI III:413]).58
In different ways in Flóamanna and Króka-Refs
saga, the depiction of Icelandic visits to the Norse
settlements in Greenland is bound up with the drama
of wilderness survival, whether conducted by necessity or choice. In Gunnars saga and Jökuls þáttr, we
find only a harsh arctic desert inhabited by polarbears and supernatural beings, in which a previously
idle youth shows his true mettle by protecting and
providing for his companions. It is this same desert
aspect that marks the second journey west in Bárðar
saga, where the Greenlandic wilderness borders the
otherworld space of northern Helluland. The description of Gestr’s journey seems to embody a geographically distorted account of an east–west traverse of
Greenland, from sea to sea; but it introduces bizarre
images of what appears to be a volcanic landscape
(ch. 18). Some of Gestr’s companions are swallowed
up in the ground when they try to approach a strange
cauldron full of gold slung on two golden poles (CSI
II:262, ÍF 13:163), which appears to represent a folkloric reanalysis of a pool of simmering magma (Falk
2007:11–12). Their journey then continues across
ancient lava fields; the vision of Greenland imparted
in the text is one of a peculiarly Icelandic wilderness
of glaciated volcanic terrain:
Þeir gengu fyrst eftir landinu milli vestrs og útsuðrs; síðan snéru þeir um þvert landit; váru fyrst
jöklar og þá tók til brunahraun stórt … Svá gengu
þeir upp þrjá daga. En er hraunit þraut, kvámu þeir
at sjó fram. (Bárðar saga 1991:164–165.)
[T]hey went overland in a southwesterly direction; then they turned across the land. They came
to glaciers first, then enormous stretches of burnt
lava … They walked like this for three days. When
the lava field ended, they came to the sea. (CSI
II:263.)
45
The conjunction in Bárðar saga of the Greenlandic wilderness and Helluland, the most barren and
northerly of the lands at the western edge of the
known world in the exploration narratives of
the Vínland sagas, signals a new development in the
construction of remote North Atlantic locations in
the sagas. Geraldine Barnes has observed that
Helluland displaces Vínland as the locus of fantastical encounters in the utmost west in the legendaryheroic sagas of the 14th and 15th centuries (Barnes
2001:33–4). In the long version of ¯rvar-Odds saga
(ch. 21)—which survives in manuscripts dating
from the 15th century—the legendary hero Oddr
travels across Grænlandshaf (the Sea of Greenland),
in pursuit of a giant foe. Arriving at the far shore, he
turns south and west along the coastline to reach
Helluland. 59 The only living creatures he meets
along this coast—evidently Greenland itself—are
two sea-monsters (Boer 1888:131–2, Pálsson and
Edwards 1985:86). Elsewhere, Greenland is elided
altogether: in Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra (ch. 4),
which only survives in 15th- and 16th-century vellums, the sea-routes west of Scandinavia and the
British Isles lead to Helluland, and Greenland does
not figure at all (Jónsson 1954a:297). This focus on
Helluland partly reflects the logical consistency of
Icelandic writers in their fabrication of the past, for
these tales supposedly took place in a legendary period “before” Greenland was discovered and settled.
Yet the new interest in this “pre-historical” setting
nonetheless complements the gradual fading out of
Norse social environments in saga accounts of
Greenland. The old tales of Norse Greenland continued to be read and copied—after all, it is only from
the very end of the 14th century that our texts of
Grœnlendinga saga and Grœnlendinga þáttr in
Flateyjarbók date, and the Skálholtsbók version of
Eiríks saga was set down in the first half of the 15th
century—but as time drew on, the view of the lands
west over the sea in the Icelandic sagas became increasingly bleak and dehumanized.
Conclusions
The medieval accounts of Greenland discussed
here embody the constant renewal and adaptation
of traditional elements that is a general characteristic of Icelandic saga literature. Sagas of pioneering adventure even further than Iceland from the
centers of Scandinavian culture allowed Icelandic
writers and their audiences to emphasize the distinction of their own origins and the social and spatial contexts by which they defined themselves and
their changing perspective on their past. Accounts
of Greenland allowed Icelandic writers to chart the
parameters of Icelandic cultural self-consciousness
in their writings, against the ever-receding memory
46
Special Volume 2
Journal of the North Atlantic
of social mobility in the North Atlantic during the
Viking Age.
Saga traditions concerning Greenland were perpetuated in Iceland with the reformulation of old
literary material in post-medieval contexts. The first
antiquarian accounts of Greenland in the late 16th
and 17th centuries leant heavily on medieval lore,60
but in one case, the shape of an otherwise unknown
medieval tale is preserved in the more popular versenarrative tradition. Surviving in 16th-century and
later manuscripts are the Skáld-Helga rímur (Jónsson
1905–12 I:105–65), a sequence of verse narratives
concerning an 11th-century Icelandic poet which
seem to have been based on a lost saga (Helgason
1976).61 The exact shape of the medieval story is not
known, but it seems to have comprised an interesting
permutation of conventional patterns, for unlike the
central figures in other tales of Icelanders who travel
west in the 11th century, Helgi chooses to remain in
the west. Taking a wife, he settles at Brattahlíð—
unsurprisingly perhaps—becomes the legal expert of
the colony, and is recognized as “merkismaðr mestr
á Grænalandi” (Jónsson 1905–1912 I:161, st. 54)
(the most remarkable man in Greenland). Many of
the elements of the story are familiar, however: the
hero is an exile from Iceland, his ship is driven by
storms to Greenland, and there he encounters pagan
witchcraft and conducts a bloody feud in the wilderness. Helgi even goes on pilgrimage to Rome, like
other Greenland-farers before him, although in order
to accommodate the reversal whereby he remains
permanently in the west the rímur relate that it was
during his attempt to return home to Iceland from his
pilgrimage that Helgi was driven out west. Narrative
conventions connected with Greenland that had originated in the late medieval tradition remained alive
in Icelandic literary culture, even as times changed
and early-modern navigators brought this land—now
devoid of its former Norse colonies—back into the
finite spheres of European knowledge.62
The special interest of Greenland in medieval
contexts lay of course in the recognition of its historical origins as a secondary settlement from Iceland—but one that was situated in a more extreme
context and existed on a much smaller scale, with its
own political organization and its own connections
with Norway. As transatlantic links grew more tenuous, and eventually failed altogether in the early 15th
century, the notion of the óbyggðir, which looms so
large in Icelandic tales of outlawry, plays an increasingly prominent role in the Greenlandic setting, taking over from the focus on societal contexts.
Even though there was still sporadic contact
between Iceland and Greenland as late as 1410, the
Icelandic accounts of Greenland usually thought to
have been composed in the 13th and 14th centuries
were not informed by any broad base of historical
knowledge. The marginality of Greenland in the
Icelandic narrative tradition, and the limited quantity of specific local information supplied in these
texts, amount to a tacit acknowledgement that Norse
Greenland was a place with its own identity and history, and a story that was not expected to be fully
encompassed within the medieval Icelandic literary
tradition. The memory of Viking-age Greenland
suffered a sea-change in the Íslendingasögur, and
became, if not always something rich, then certainly
something strange. Greenland never took on the
lustre of the exotic that can be identified in the tales
of Vínland. Instead, these texts present a series of
distorted images of Greenland as an extreme environment, an increasingly remote outpost of the
Norse world, perpetuating a tradition of alterity that
was already established in Íslendingabók and exaggerated in the Vínland sagas.
The Íslendingasögur that have been discussed
here reflect the coming together of different types
of lore, some of which reflected knowledge of historical conditions in Norse Greenland. Yet this was
attenuated by the passage of time, by generic conventions that did not value historical and geographical
specificities in the account of that “cold world”—as
Sturla Þórðarson called it—and above all by the fact
that these texts were written by Icelanders, for Icelanders, about the place occupied by Iceland and its
people in their own literary imaginations.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the managers of the University of
Cambridge Scandinavian Studies Fund for supporting my
participation in the Hvalsey Conference. Eleanor Barraclough and Rosie Marshall read the paper in draft and
made several helpful corrections and comments alongside
those of two anonymous referees; Judith Jesch and Kirsten
Seaver both kindly allowed me to see transcripts of the
pieces presented by them at Qaqortoq, neither of which
was submitted for publication in these proceedings.
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upa sögur. Möller, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2 vols.
J. Grove
2009
49
7
Vigfússon, G., and C.R. Unger (Eds.). 1860–1868. FlatMatt XIII:45–6: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like
unto a merchant, seeking goodly pearls, who, when he
eyjarbók: En samling af Norske Kong-Sagaer med
had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that
indskudte mindre foretællinger om begivenheder i
he had, and bought it.” For references to the export of
og udenfor Norge samt annaler. Malling, Christiania,
live polar bears from Greenland in the sagas, see Kreutzer
Norway. 3 vols.
1985 and Miller 2008:18, n.8.
Þorláksson, H. 2001. The Vinland sagas in a contemporary
8
More detail concerning Auðunn’s stay in Greenland is
light. Pp. 63–77, In A. Wawn and Þ. Sigurðardóttir
(Eds.). Approaches to Vinland. Proceedings of a Consupplied in the Flateyjarbók version of the tale, in which
ference on the Written and Archaeological Sources for
Auðunn acquires his bear from a Greenlandic hunter in
the Norse Settlements in the North-Atlantic Region
the Western Settlement (Vigfússon and Unger 1860–1868
and Exploration of America. The Nordic House, ReykIII:411; Miller 2008:7).
9
javik, 9–11 August 1999. Stofnun Sigurður Nordal,
Eiríks saga is preserved in two manuscripts, Hauksbók
Reykjavík, Iceland. 238 pp.
(ÍF 4:193–237), from the first half of the 14th century,
Þorsteinsson, H. (Ed.). 1922–1927. Annálar 1400–1800.
and Skálholtsbók (ÍF 4:401–434), from the first half of
Vol. 1. Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, Reykjavík, Icethe 15th century, both based on a version set down after
land. 732 pp.
1263. For a translation of the Skálholtsbók version, see
Þorvaldsdóttir, V.E. (Ed.). 2009. Hrynhenda. Pp. 676–98, In
CSI I:1–18; significant variants from the Hauksbók verK.E. Gade (Ed.). Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From
sion are supplied in the translation in Jones 1986:207–32.
c. 1035–c. 1300. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian
Grœnlendinga saga (ÍF 4: 239–269; CSI I:19–32) is
Middle Ages. Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium. 916 pp.
preserved in the version of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en
mesta in Flateyjarbók. Scholars have usually argued that
both sagas originated in the early 13th century (Halldórsson
1978:398–400, 2001), but the evidence is insecure
Endnotes
(Þorláksson
2001).
1
10
Texts in Latin script must have been known in Norse
Since the publication of the foundational compilation of
Greenland, if only to support ecclesiastical needs, but
textual sources on Norse Greenland in Magnusen and
surviving writings consist entirely of terse runic inscripRafn 1838–1845, standard accounts of the medieval
tions (Stoklund 1981). The late 13th-century Icelandic
Icelandic writings on Greenland (e.g., Halldórsson 1978,
Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda identifies the heroic
Jansen 1972:26–31, 41–67) have addressed the Vínland
poems Atlakviða and Atlamál as Greenlandic. Dronke
sagas—implying greater confidence in their value as
rejects this possibility in the case of Atlakviða, arguing
sources for Viking-age activities—but they offer little or
that the poem may predate the Norse settlement, but finds
nothing on the other sagas with Greenlandic settings.
some internal evidence supporting the Greenlandic origin
11
For a recent discussion of the emergence of the postof Atlamál (Dronke 1969:45, 107–710).
classical sagas, focussing on Fóstbræðra saga and
2
See ÍF 1:132 (translated in Pálsson and Edwards 1972:49);
Króka-Refs saga, see Arnold 2003, especially pp.
ÍF 4:201, 406 (CSI I:3). For the text in Óláfs saga Trygg141–232.
vasonar, see ÍF 1:242, Vigfússon and Unger 1860–1868
12
ÍF 4:271–292, CSI V:372–382. Like Grœnlendinga
I:430 (ch. 1 of Grœnlendinga saga in Jones 1986:186).
3
saga, the þáttr survives only in the late 14th-century saga
The poem details the events of 1247–1262, and forms
compendium Flateyjarbók.
part of a sequence of four encomia on Hákon transmitted
13
Halldórsson (1978:401–405) argues that Grœnlendinga
piecemeal in Hákonar saga. Hrynhenda was probably
þáttr was compiled from eyewitness accounts of the
composed for Sturla’s visit to Norway in 1263, the year of
events to which it refers, but Ebel (1999) has shown that
Hákon’s death. The rest of the sequence was completed as
the plot depends on changes in the Icelandic laws of sala memorial to the king. Cf. Pálsson 1988:68–82.
4
Ecclesiastical and commercial connections between Norvage, so the text in its extant form dates from no earlier
way and Greenland in the 13th and 14th centuries register
than the mid-13th century.
14
in some contemporary documents, and in the mid-14thThe saga is preserved in two medieval versions. There is
century description of the Greenlandic church attributed
no consensus on the date of original composition, or the
to the Norwegian priest Ívarr Bárðarson, which survives
priority of the different versions; the saga has been dated
in a 16th-century Danish redaction (Jónsson 1930).
variously to the earlier and later parts of the 13th century.
5
15
See the description of Greenland in the Icelandic manuFlóamanna saga survives in two versions, but the longer
scripts AM 736 I 4to, composed ca. 1300, and AM 194
version—usually thought to be closest to a late 13th- or
8vo, dated 1387 (Kålund 1908:12; cf. Jones 1986:20,
earlier 14th-century original—is fragmentary. Króka-Refs
Simek 1986:247). Narrative reflexes of this tradition ocsaga exists in its entirety in a single 15th-century vellum
cur in the late legendary romance Samsons saga fagra
and various later paper copies, but is usually thought to
(Jónsson 1954b:380–381), and the tale of Hallur geit, prehave been composed in the 14th century.
th
served in the 17 -century, who travelled from Greenland
16
Refr’s vengeance so strongly recalls Þormóðr Bersason’s
to Norway on foot (Halldórsson 1978:52).
activities that it has been suggested that the author of
6
th
The þáttr is preserved in the late 13 -century manuscript
Króka-Refs saga was directly indebted to the Fóstof Morkinskinna, a chronicle of the kings of Norway, but
brœðra saga account. See Amory 1983:13–14, Arnold
derives from an archetype set down ca. 1220 (Andersson
2003:197–203,
ÍF 14:xxxv–vi.
and Gade 2000:24, 66–67). An alternate version differing
17
According
to
Eiríks
saga ch. 2 and both main versions of
in minor details appears in the related assembly of tales
Landnámabók (ÍF 1:131, Pálsson and Edwards 1972:49),
in Flateyjarbók, compiled ca. 1387–1395 (Vigfússon and
Eiríkr rauði’s voyage west was planned as a search for
Unger 1860–1868 III:410–415; Miller 2008:7–12).
this place.
50
Journal of the North Atlantic
Special Volume 2
18
31
Cf. Eiríks saga ch. 11, according to which it is Snorri’s
The pilgrimage motif also surfaces in Auðunar þáttr,
son Þorbrandr who is slain.
and in Fóstbrœðra saga ch. 24, in which Þormóðr’s
19
The conception of wilderness as exile country is comally Bjarni Skúfsson dies on a pilgrimage to Rome after
monplace in tales set in Iceland itself, notably the outlaw
quitting Greenland, but the textual parallels are not so
sagas Grettis saga, Gísla saga and Harðar saga. Cf.
pronounced in these cases. Pilgrimages occur in a numHastrup 1985:142–145, Ólason 1998:186.
ber of Íslendingasögur, including the closing sequences
20
The Old Norse may be rendered more literally, “I think
of Njáls saga, Grettis saga, and Laxdæla saga, and in
that a more uncourageous head has never come to Greenvarious other texts. Cf. Hill 1993.
land than the one he bears”.
32
See endnote 30, above.
21
The standard accounts of these themes remain Bynum
33
See Landnámabók (ÍF 1:134–135; Pálsson and Edwards
1982:110–169, 1987:165–180, 270–275. The motif of the
1972:50) and the Flateyjarbók version of Óláfs saga
holy man suckling an infant—the closest medieval literTryggvasonar en mesta (ÍF 4:243; Jones 1986:187; cf.
ary analogue for the motif in Flóamanna saga—occurs in
Vigfússon and Unger 1860–1868 I:430), and the accounts
Irish ecclesiastical texts, discussed in Bray 2000.
22
of individual landtakings in Grœnlendinga saga ch. 1 and
The analogy between the blood of salvation and mother’s
Eyrbyggja saga ch. 48 (ÍF 4:135–136; CSI 5:195).
milk is strengthened in medieval medical lore, according
34
See Ebel 1999 on the operation of legal norms estabto which breast-milk was a form of processed blood (see
lished in mid-13th century Iceland in determining the
Bray 2000:287–288; Bynum 1982:132, 1987:270).
23
Many recorded instances of spontaneous lactation in
development of the hostility between the Greenlanders
men can be ascribed to disruptions in the balance of
and Norwegian merchants described in the text.
35
hormone-production and regulation following exposure
The prohibition of bigamy in Iceland and “í várum
to extreme physical stress and starvation (Diamond
lƒgum” (Finsen 1852 I:226, 1879:70) (where our laws
1997:53–54, Greenblatt 1972).
obtain [Dennis et al. 1980–2000 II:8]) apparently refers
24
The earliest manuscripts of Bárðar saga date from the
to Greenland, indicating that the activities of visiting
th
th
late 14 or 15 century, and the text probably originated
Icelanders were subject to the legal strictures of home.
th
in first half of the 14 century. The earliest manuscripts
36
The memory or continued expectation of reverse migraof Gunnars saga and Jökuls þáttr are paper copies of
tion
from Greenland in 13th-century Iceland may be at
th
the 17 century. These sagas contain romance elements
work
in Fóstbrœðra saga ch. 24, which describes the
that are thought to be indicative of comparatively late
th
th
relocation
to Norway of Þormóðr’s Greenlandic allies
origins, in the later 14 or 15 centuries.
25
Skúfr and Bjarni and the widow Sigríðr of Hamarr and
Traditional theories regarding the diachronic developher son.
ment of different modes of writing in the sagas are now
37
Seaver 1996:151–158 discusses the last recorded Icelancontested, but a general consensus that the taste for
dic visit to Greenland in 1406–1410. She argues that the
fantastical material grew in the 14th and 15th centuries
remains (Ólason 1998:60–61).
Icelander Sigríðr Bjarnardóttir, who married her com26
The only historical figure in the text is the Norwegian
patriot Þorsteinn Óláfsson at Hvalsey in 1408 and left
jarl Hákon Sigurðarson of Hlaðir (970–995); it is posGreenland with him in 1410, was the widow of a Greensible that the story is supposed to be set before the settlelander to whose household she was sent from Iceland in
ment in ca. 985.
1392 or shortly thereafter.
27
38
The death of Búi Andríðsson is recounted at the end
The Annales regii and the Oddaverjaannáll report
of Kjalnesinga saga (ÍF 14:43, CSI III:327), to which
Ásmundr’s arrival on a ship “er seymt var trésaumi
Jökuls þáttr is a sequel.
einum nær, þat var ok bundit sini” (Storm 1888: 120,
28
Of the main saga texts under discussion here, only in the
477) (which was tightly seamed with wooden pegs; it
late adventure stories Gunnars saga and Jökuls þáttr is
was also bound with sinew). Notices in other annals
there no reflex of these patterns. See Barnes 2001:3–9
and in versions of Guðmundar saga simply register
for a discussion of religious themes in the Vínland sagas,
Ásmundr’s arrival from Greenland. The late Danish text
Fóstbrœðra saga, and Flóamanna saga.
29
of Ívarr Bárðarson’s description of Greenland locates
This is best exemplified in those tales in Landnámabók
Finnsbúðir and Krosseyjar east of Herjólfsnes (Jónsson
and the Íslendingasögur in which settlers reach their
1930:21–22).
allotted destinations on arrival in Icelandic waters by
39
17th-century excerpts of Hauksbók show that the coma form of cleromancy, casting overboard their carved
pilation once included a letter from Greenland written
wooden high-seat pillars (ƒndugissúlur) and following them ashore. See the accounts of Ingólfr Árnason
soon after 1266, referring to an exploratory expedition
in Landnámabók (ÍF 1:42–45; Pálsson and Edwards
in the Norðrseta (Halldórsson 1988:238–239). Flateyjar1972:19–21), and Þórólfr Mostrarskegg in Landnámabók
bók supplies a list of Greenlandic churches and the bish(ÍF 1:124–125; Pálsson and Edwards 1972:45–46) and
ops down to 1314 after Grœnlendinga þáttr (Vigfússon
Eyrbyggja saga ch. 4 (ÍF 4:7–8; CSI V:133).
and Unger 1860–1868 III:454). The Icelandic annals and
30
The story of Leifr and Óláfr also appears in versions
samtíðarsögur contain references to the consecration
of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar (ÍF 26:334; Hollander
and westward voyages of bishops of Garðar.
1964:218; cf. Halldórsson 1958–2000 II:170–171, 200)
40
The Höyersannáll redaction of the Icelandic annals reand in Kristni saga (ÍF 15 II:30; Grønlie 2006:47).
fers to the coming of Ásmundr kastanrazi in 1189; but the
Comparatively early texts such as Fagrskinna and Oddr
1192 entry notes the arrival in Breiðafjörður of another
Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar link the converboat, described in identical terms to Ásmundr’s craft in
sion of Greenland to Óláfr without mentioning Leifr;
the Annales regii and Oddaverjaannáll (Storm 1888:61;
references to the conversion of Greenland in Adam of
cf. endnote 46, below). It too is said to have sailed from
Bremen’s Gesta, Historia Norwegiae and Grœnlendinga
Krossey and Finnsbúðir, but the annal states that the
saga make no mention of either figure.
crew had been in the wilderness for 7 years—which may
J. Grove
2009
51
indicate that they were supposed to be survivors of the
story of Loðinn stating that runic inscriptions were often
Greenland-bound ship lost in 1185 (Storm 1888:22, 61,
found at the sites of Greenlandic shipwrecks (Halldórs181, 323): compare the account in Flóamanna saga ch.
son 1978:56–57; cf. Hagland 1996:106–107).
53
See Hagland 1996:105–6 for the argument that this refer23 of Þorgils’s escape from the óbyggðir in a coracle
ence to the use of runes on a wax tablet provides unique
made of hides and wood. The annal goes on to outline a
testimony to the parallel use of runes and Latin letters in
sinister ghost story, reporting that the crew died on arIceland in the mid-13th century, when the story was set
rival, but would not lie quietly in their graves.
41
down.
See Króka-Refs saga ch. 7; Flóamanna saga chs 24, 25;
54
See endnote 33, above.
Gunnars saga ch. 5.
55
42
See also Halldórsson 1988 for an attempt to reconstruct
Fóstbrœðra saga chs 22, 23; see also the references to
a
medieval Icelandic description of Greenland used as a
professional Greenlandic hunters in Eiríks saga ch. 8
source in 16th- and 17th-century antiquarian texts.
and in the Flateyjarbók version of Auðunar þáttr (Vig56
For a more positive view see the discussion in Sigurðsfússon and Unger 1860–1868 III:411; Miller 2008:7).
43
son 2004:253–302 of saga accounts of the Vínland voyCf. Grœnlendinga þáttr ch. 1, in which Einarr Sokkason
ages and Viking-age mental maps supposedly underlying
courts favour in Norway with gifts of walrus-hide ropes
them.
and ivory.
57
The operation of the same spatial arrangement may
44
Historia Norwegiae and Konungs skuggsjá note the danexplain the passage in Grœnlendinga saga ch. 5 describgers of voyages to Greenland, real and imagined (Ekrem
ing Þorsteinn Eiríksson’s failure to reach Vínland. He
and Mortensen 2003:54–57; Jónsson 1920–21:64–72;
spends a whole summer at sea, tossed by storms beLarson 1917:135–42). Cf. Adam of Bremen’s account of
tween Iceland and Greenland, but finally washes up in
a Frisian expedition in Arctic waters in 1035/43 (Schmeithe Western Settlement, just before winter. The implicit
dler 1917:276–278; Tschan and Reuter 2002:220–221).
notion that the easternmost settlements in Greenland lay
45
Hafgerðingadrápa was probably composed no earlier
further north than Eiríksfjƒrðr may also help make sense
than the later 11th century (Benediktsson 1981:27–32).
of the confusing account of Eiríkr rauði’s explorations in
Konungs skuggsjá describes hafgerðingar off Greenland
Eiríks saga, Landnámabók, and Óláfs saga Tryggvaso(Jónsson 1920–1921:66; Larson 1917:137–138).
nar (for references, see endnote 2, above).
46
Cf. Eiríks saga ch. 3 for an alternative account, in which
58
This distortion resurfaces in the reference to Líka-Loðinn
the wrecked ship is not Guðríðr’s.
in
the 17th-century Grænlandsannáll, which views Her47
Cf. the accounts of Þorsteinn Eiríksson’s failed Vínland
jólfsnes as the northernmost graveyard in Greenland,
expedition in Eiríks saga ch. 5, Grœnlendinga saga ch. 5.
on the grounds that Loðinn brought the bodies of dead
See also the tales of accidental journeys to Hvítramannasailors there from the northern óbyggðir (Halldórsson
land, a fabled land adjacent to Vínland, in Landnámabók
1978:7). The error is repeated in the Seiluannáll, s.a.
(ÍF 1:162; Pálsson and Edwards 1972:61) and Eyrbyggja
1652 (Þorsteinsson 1922–1927:301).
59
saga ch. 64 (ÍF 4:176–180; CSI V:215–217)—cf. Eiríks
The identification of the óbyggðir in Gunnars saga as
saga ch. 12. See further Mac Mathúma 1997 for a dispart of Greenland is dependent on parallels with the
cussion of the connections between these episodes and
accounts of other Greenlandic texts: but Gunnarr’s admedieval Irish voyage tales.
ventures take place in a fjord called Skuggi, which is the
48
An exceptional case is the account of Þorgils Ørrabeinsname of Oddr’s destination in Helluland.
60
fóstri in Flóamanna saga ch. 26, who is driven by storms
See Halldórsson 1978:147–292 for an account of the
from Greenland to Ireland, Norway, and finally Iceland.
composition and medieval sources of Grænlandsannáll,
See also Leifr’s passage to Norway in Eiríks saga ch. 5,
compiled by Jón lærði Guðmundsson in ca. 1623. On the
in which storms carry him to the Hebrides.
wider context of early antiquarian writings on Green49
land, cf. Benediktsson and Samsonarson 1980:218–232.
The verses derive from a prophetic stanza spoken by the
61
I am grateful to Judith Jesch for drawing my attenkiller of Snæbjƒrn, predicting both their deaths.
50
tion to these parallels in her unpublished paper from
The 14 th-century versions of the separate Guðmunthe Hvalsey conference, “The most remarkable man in
dar saga are thought to build on a lost account of
Greenland: The literary history of Skáld-Helgi.”
Guðmundr’s early career before his episcopal ordination
62
Two Icelandic folktales collected in the mid-19th century,
in 1203, composed in the mid-13th century (cf. Karlsson
the tales of Grímr Skeljungsbani and Skessu-Jón (Árna1983:cl–cliii, Kristjánsson 1988:185). This text appears
son 1954–1961 I:238–247, III:271–275), demonstrate
in an abridged form in the Sturlunga saga compilation
the enduring productivity of the medieval narrative conassembled in ca. 1300, from which all quotations here
ventions, with their stories of accidental voyages, and
are drawn.
encounters with the giants of the Greenlandic óbyggðir.
51
Ingimundr’s remains were found in 1203 or 1207 acStandard forms are entertainingly reversed in the tale of
cording to the different versions of Guðmundar saga
Skessu-Jón, who encounters an amorous Greenlandic gi(Jóhannesson et al. 1946 I:138; cf. Karlsson 1983:68,
antess who has been driven by storms to an isolated spot
Vigfússon and Sigurðsson 1856–1878 I:435), but in
in the West Fjords of Iceland, where she and her sister
1200 according to the Icelandic annals (Storm 1888:121,
quarrel about the division of food (recalling the frac181, 477).
tiousness of Icelandic parties marooned in Greenland).
52
The similarity with the tale of Líka-Loðinn is underscored by the deliberate or accidental conflation of the
two narratives in the 17th-century antiquarian compilation Grænlandsannáll, which includes a variant of the