The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1961, Side 46

44
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1961
Europeans their first information
about continental America and the
Arctic archipelago. From Greenland
polar bears were exported to become
the most highly prized pets of Euro-
pean potenates and from Baffin Land
came the white falcons, the most high-
ly valued birds in that mo9t popular
of all mediaeval sports, falconry.
In the eleventh century Leifr Eiriks-
son and borfinnr karlsefni made voy-
ages to the east coast of North Amer-
ica, which had been first sighted a few
years before by Bjarni Herjulfsson.
Here Karlsefni attempted to found a
colony and here the first white child
was born in North America. However,
not in the temperate zones of New
England did the Viking Spirit choose
to make its abode, but in the vigorous
north it met and overcame the chal-
lenge of one of the severest natural
environments ever encountered by
man. In the ensuing centuries the Vik-
ing Spirit carried the Greenlanders to
regions which in many cases were never
again even assailed, much less penetra-
ted, by white men until the eighteen
hundreds. The names of most of these
pioneers of Arctic exploration are by
now unknown but the relics of their
achievements are still to be met with
in these northern lands. In the twelfth
century a single line in an old chronicle
tells us that Bishop Eirikr upsi went
from Greenland to search for Vinland
but of his fate nothing is known, al-
though Lyschander, the Royal Danish
historiographer of the 16th century,
tells us that his bones rest at GarSar
in Greenland.
In the thirteenth century few names
stand out, but we know that exped-
itions were made to the northern parts
of the west coast of Greenland and
probably to Ellesmere and other islands
of the Arctic archipelago, where cairns
and eider duck shelters, which can have
been built by no one but the Green-
landers, still testify to their visits, and
where extensive house ruins very prob-
ably are those of Norse settlements.
It is also from the thirteenth century
that we possess one of the finest des-
criptions of Greenland and its marvels,
such as the northern lights, in the
Speculum Regale or the King’s Mirror,
written anonymously in Norway, test-
ifying to close contact with Greenland.
In the fourteenth century Erlingur
Sigvatsson, Bjarni horftarson and Ein-
driSi Oddsson left a runic stone as a
relic of their presence as far north as
73° n. lat., near the present Danish
colony of Upernivik. In the same cen-
tury it seems that many of the Green-
landers fell from Christianity, migrated
to America and intermarried with its
aborigines. Later those who remained
in Greenland intermixed with newly
arrived Skraelings and lost the Ice-
landic language and the Christian
religion, although much of the intel-
lectual and material culture may have
been preserved. From the fourteenth
century we also possess the extremely
valuable description of Greenland by
the administrator of the see of GarSar,
Ivar BarSarson, a work on which the
English monk, Nicolas of Lynn, may
have founded the account of his al-
leged trips to Greenland and the Arc-
tic, which he recorded in the now lost
Inventio fortunata, a book which is
known to have influenced Columbus.
The same century, too, saw the visit to
Greenland of Bjorn the Jerusalem-
farer (for the Scandinavians travelled
much to southern Europe and often
as far as Jerusalem in the Middle Ages,
some even taking part in the Crusades
as e.g. the king of Norway, SigurSur
the Jerusalem-farer).
The fifteenth century—that obscure
but tremendously vital period whose
history someone has said can never be