Bringing the Vikings to life!

Location of "Hvalsey" the capital of Viking Greenland

Ok, maybe not quite to life, but I am writing this literally jumping with excitement at the wonders of technology. Now, my friends are well aware that I have been utilising a little trick to write about the wonders of the land in which my Vikings lived, namely in the section on Norway I used Google Street View to jump on the Norwegian roads and actually wander around what I was trying to talk about, getting some really nice descriptions going about the landscape through which they wandered, and the obstacles they had to face. Had I not been able to do this I would have had to splash out several hundred pounds to travel to Bergen and Trondheim proper in order to get a real feel of the land, the Norwegian landscape being so exotic and different to anything I have myself experienced.

Having found this little treasure trove I began to try the same technique on Greenland, but much to my annoyance the people at Google have not yet mapped out the roads there, and as such there is no Street View; the entire map in fact feels decidedly empty (take a look yourself, Greenland is just a white shape on the map). I then began to look up flights to Greenland, planning to do a little research and was shocked at the price (the cheapest was something like £1300). Despairing I began to search all over the place for pictures of the region and found several good ones, but they tended to focus on one thing in particular (most often being Thjodhilde’s little church) and lacked any real details of what the land looked like, and the impact of the background. Now, a good photographer would never just take a picture of a grassy meadow, or of a rocky beach (unless they happen to live in Brighton, in which case those stone seem to be a focal point!), simply because they are boring. To an author however, who lives on the little detail this was a massive setback, as I simply couldn’t envision the settlement of Hvalsey in my mind.

All this changed with a little more exploration, on a whim I decided to pinpoint the exact location of Hvalsey in Greenland, so that I could at least say the size of the fjord on the slopes of which their settlement was built when I had a major breakthrough. Just because Street View didn’t work, did not mean that Google Earth failed entirely, we still have the satellite images. Now I am not one of those people who perused the service at its inception trying to find conspiracy buildings arranged to look like a swastika, nor did I try to find area 51, in fact the only thing I did look at was the massive bomber graveyard in America just because that sounded so cool. I didn’t realise you could zoom, and it would actually zoom in and give you highly detailed shots, I had been expecting just increasingly pixelated shots in which the sea began to look like the mountains which rose of out it.

Eiriksfjord, on the banks of which Erik built his home.

With some searching I found the Inuit (and as such modern Greenlandic) names of the various settlements, eventually discovering that “Qassiarsuk” was the nearest modern settlement to Hvalsey. A little more searching and I found it on Google maps. Great, I had the basic details of the land now, it was a relatively green patch of the normally icy Greenland, with a massive fjord feeding into it through a series of islands. So far so good, this was pretty much what I had expected.

I zoomed in; is that a path? It was. I went in closer, are those ruins? No, they were just sheep. Disappointing, still this was pretty cool so I followed the road, they tend to go somewhere right?

Then, suddenly like a flash I noticed something I recognised from the photo’s I had found earlier, it was a stone wall with what looked to be a grass roof. Could it possibly be? Perhaps.

Then I saw next to it a smaller structure housed within a small wooden fence. I had found it, there was Brattahlid, the home of Erik the Red staring right up at me from the computer screen. Oh the wonders of modern technology!

The circular structure is the wooden fence, at the centre of which is Thjodhilde's church. Right above that is Brattahlid, home of Erik the Red!

 With many, many thanks to the enterprising people at Google!

Playing chicken, with a horse

So it has been over a week since my last blog post, and I can only apologise for that. I just came back from a holiday in Wales in which we saw many castles, waterways and best of all sampled many different beers. Now, you may be wondering how on each does this relate to the Vikings and how does any of this fit in with Vinland?

The secret to Viking power?

Well, firstly there was life on the water, clearly this wasn’t somewhere in the North-Atlantic during the mid-winter storms but still one had to consider the etiquette on the canals and generally ensure that you do not crash into the banks, or worse another boat... this is harder than it sounds. On the first day we managed to get wedged up with another boat just outside of a bridge, then a couple of hours later nearly crashed into another boat in what became a rather amusing game of chicken, in which one of the chickens was actually a horse.

Eh, what!? I can hear you exclaim, well a boat was coming right at us, and our pilot was adamant that the oncoming vessel was on the wrong side of the canal and that it would move. Unfortunately he did not reckon with the fact that it was being pulled along by a horse on the towpath. It had no motor and was entirely unable to avoid us, and apparently it is too much to ask a horse to get in the water and swim in order to move the boat aside. Finally seeing the problem our helmsman swerved the boat off to the far side of the canal after having scared most of the passengers nearly to death. He did this not once, but twice. On the same day. With the same boat. 

Thus you will see that life in the water-lane is actually quite stressful, I can only imagine how the Vikings felt when they were not only dodging other boats, but pirates, icebergs, seagulls and the dragons at the edge of their maps. 

Now to become a little more serious for a moment, I took a book called “The Hammer and the Cross” by Robert Ferguson with me on the trip. It is at its heart a exploration into the relations between the Christian missionaries and the Norse heathens, and how the Christians tried to convert the Vikings for nearly 200 years with often catastrophic results. Now while this was interesting, it was the little details that he highlighted which were the most interesting to me, including a very in depth rendition of the buildings found in Greenland which was a major revelation to me.

The Vikings basically lived in bunkers, yes, bunkers! Essentially they had massive houses which eventually reached something like 60 rooms. Due to the lack of wood in Greenland, they tended to be built out of stone and turf, and were built a little into the ground in order to conserve heat. There is far more to tell about them as they really are fascinating structures, but to find out, you will just have to read my book!

 

With thanks to : http://planetoddity.com/russian-world-war-2-bunkers/