Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 16

Klavs Randsborg
took over the North Atlantic traffic. In
reality, this transfer of Norwegian power
isolated Greenland even more from
mainland Scandinavia - provided that the
Norse settlement was still in existence
by, say, 1450 or even 1500, which is
highly doubtful.
Nevertheless, Denmark of the Late
Middle Ages was successful in protecting
Scandinavia on two fronts - by keeping
the English/British at bay in the North
Atlantic, and the German continental
powers in the Baltic.
The Old Norsemen of Greenland
were not entirely forgotten, although no
concerted attempt was made at contact.
Probably, the most likely explanation for
this is that Copenhagen by then somehow
knew, or at least strongly supposed, that
the Greenland settlements had ceased to
exist, for instance, no attempt was made
after the Reformation in Denmark, 1536,
to make the Catholic Greenlanders
Protestant. Neither did the intrepid
Christian IV, sending Danish fleets to the
far comers of the Globe in the early sev-
enteenth century, press to come to the
rescue of the Greenlanders, in spite of his
expedition to Hudson Bay in 1619-20.
EARLY NORSE ARCHAEOLOGY
IN GREENLAND
The interest in the old Christian
Greenlanders was nevertheless alive in
Denmark during the Renaissance
(overview in, e.g., Krogh 1967;
Fyllingsnes 1990; cf. Gad 1984). The
Renaissance provided an intellectual
environment for historical speculations
and cultural considerations, and the ques-
tions of the Christian Norse in Greenland
were still prominent in the discussions
and eventually in the decisions to re-
establish contact (cf. Egede 1741; etc.).
Not encountering any Norse Greenlanders
on their arrival, the new Scandinavian
settlers of the eighteenth century imme-
diately took to investigations and
enquiries to gain knowledge.
Thus, the "Apostle of Greenland",
Hans Povelsen Egede, carried out an
excavation in the beautiful ancient Norse
church min at Hvalso (Qaqortoq) in 1723
(Eastern Settlement Site 83) (Fig. 1). The
almost palatial Hvalso church was proba-
bly erected around or even after 1300,
although it shows no impact from the
Gothic style. At any rate, it is probably
later than 1261 when the Greenlanders
accepted the sovereignty of the king of
Norway. The church is known from writ-
ten sources to have been in use for a wed-
ding on the 16th of September, 1408 (as
confirmed by two Greenland priests on
April 16, 1409). In fact, this peaceful
event is the last historical record of the
Norse in Greenland with a degree of cer-
tainty. The married couple left for
Norway on what, to the records, was to
become the "last ship out", namely in
1410 (cf. above). Incidentally, the year
before (1407), a man had been bumed at
the stake at Hvalso Church for seduction
of a (high-ranking) married woman by
"black magic", an event seemingly
denoting at least a measure of legal nor-
mality in the settlement at the beginning
of the fifteenth century, however cmel
the punishment. Certainly, nothing
denotes the imminent decline of the
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