Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1943, Blaðsíða 127
THE ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXPEDITION TO
ICELAND IN 1939 AND ITS RESULTS
By Aage Roussell, Ph. D.,
Department Keeper in the National Museum of Copenhagen.
TO the study of our forefathers’ life and doings the house
is the natural central point. Hence it is no wonder that
Scandinavian research of buildings during recent decades
has occupied a number of able scholars, whose results have been
published in stately publications. A look at this literature, how-
ever, shows the peculiarity that the great majority of known
sites of houses derive from the first half millenium of our era.
It is immediately surprising that impetuous periods in the history
of Scandinavia such as the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages,
as regards the building custom nearly leave us in the lurch. But
the explanation no doubt is the very simple one that the farms
of later periods on the whole have remained on the sites of the
Viking Age, which they either overlie or have destroyed, and
hence it is under particular fortunate circumstances only that
an examination is probable.
Paradoxically enough, we find at the edge of the inland ice
of Greenland the best possibilities of studying the building cul-
ture of Scandinavian peasants during these centuries. The very
rich and densely populated settlements founded on the south-west
coast of Greenland by Icelandic emigrants shortly before iooo
A. D., died out before the end of the Middle Ages and have
since then lain waste and undisturbed. Only now and then an
Eskimo reindeer stalker made his way over the green ruin hills
of the old farms. This excellent material for investigation has
not been left unheeded from Danish quarters. Practically every
traveller to Greenland from the first Greenland days of Hans
Egede in the i/2oes having given accounts of findings of ruins
originating from the old Norsemen, and officers of the Royal
Danish Army and Navy of the preceding generation having
made systematic reconnaissances, the Danish government from
the beginning of the twenties has sent out upwards of half a
score of excavation expeditions led by experts. The results of
these excavations, in certain ways sensational, have been published
in the “Meddelelser om Gronland,” all in English.
Le Nord, 1943, 2—4
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