Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 128

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The Norse colonies in Greenland were Christianised like Iceland, and
even had their own bishop after 1126; they established their own Alþing,
shared by the two settlements (Vestribyggð and Eystribyggð), and eventu­
ally they pledged allegiance to the Norwegian king in 1261, a year before
Iceland. The story thus far is parallel to that of Iceland, but it took its own
turn with the disappearance of the settlements. Characteristically, the lin­
gering explanation for this is the enmity of the skrælingar. It is very likely,
however, that changes of climate and a decline in commercial and other
forms of exchange with Iceland proper, as well as countries further away,
were the main factors. We know how in Iceland, similar developments
account for a remarkable demographic and social decline (Hastrup 1990a).
the settlers died out, the story goes, and quite likely they had trouble
in reproducing themselves. However, with a stock of c. 5000 people at
their height (KLNM XIII, 654), the settlements would not have died out
over night, without leaving a solid trace of human remains. We therefore
may have to think in different terms; instead of dying out, possibly the
Norsemen in Greenland were ‘defined out’; they no longer knew them­
selves as before. By no longer adhering to old farming and herding ways,
and having out of necessity adopted local ‘Thule’ ways, the Norsemen – as
they knew themselves until then – ceased to exist. (The Hellenes had
merged with the Scythians, so to speak.) In Iceland, we know how the
farmers at the Alþing recurrently sought to counterbalance the demograph­
ic decline by introducing various restrictions on fishing (Hastrup 1990a,
67ff). As a kind of hunting, it could not take centre stage in a population of
soi­disant farmers, even when farming was seriously hampered by climatic
and other developments.
Farmers and hunters were not on a par; the former were civilised, the
latter were barbarians. By becoming one with the Other, the Norsemen in
Greenland could no longer be distinguished. they had ‘died out’. the norse
colonies simply fell out of the civilisational range, and the metaphor of
Thule took on a new life. Thus, when the Spanish King Charles V set out to
conquer the New World, he took Virgil’s Tibi serviat ultima Thule as his
motto (Harbsmeier 2002, 37). His quest did not take him north, but others
went there and warned their compatriots. Jean Malaurie, who went to the
northernmost part of Greenland in the 1950s, quotes a certain Pierre Bertius,
cosmographer of the Roy Trés-Chrestien, Louis XIV, who wrote in 1618: