Question

A Typical Week in the Life of a Greenland Bishop

While off hunting with 14 friends, Sigurd Njalsson found a beached ship full of valuable cargo. In a nearby hut were the stinking corpses of the ship’s crew and its captain Arnbjorn, who had died of starvation. Sigurd brought the bones of the crew back to Gardar Cathedral for burial, and donated the ship itself to Bishop Arnald for the benefit of the corpses of the souls. As for the cargo, he asserted finders/keepers rights and divided it among his friends and himself.

When Arnbjorn’s nephew Ozur heard the news, he came to Gardar, together with the relatives of others of the dead crew. They told the Bishop that they felt entitled to inherit the cargo. But the Bishop answered that Greenland law specified finders/keepers, that the cargo and the ship should now belong to the church to pay for the masses for the souls of the dead men who had owned the cargo, and that it was shabby of Ozur and his friends to claim the cargo now. So Ozur filed a suit in the Greenland Assembly, attended by Ozur and all his men and also by Bishop Arnold and his friend Einar Sokkason and many of their men. The court ruled against Ozur, who didn’t like the ruling at all and felt humiliated, so he ruined Sigurd’s ship (now belonging to Bishop Arnold) by cutting out planks along the full length of each side. That made the Bishop so angry that he declared Ozur’s life forfeit.

While the Bishop was saying holiday mass in church, Ozur was in the congregation and complained to the Bishop’s servant about how badly the Bishop had treated him. Einar seized an ax from the hand of another worshipper and struck Ozur a death-blow . . . The Bishop didn’t want to give Ozur a church burial, but Einar warned that big trouble was on its way.

. . . Ozur’s relative Simon, a big strong man, said that this was not the time for merely big talk. He gathered his friends Kolbein Thor Jonsson, Keitel Kalfsson, and many men from Western Settlement. An old man named Sokki Thorisson offered to mediate between Simon and Einar. As compensation for having murdered Ozur, Einar offered some articles including an ancient suit of armor, which Simon rejected as rubbish. Kolbein slipped behind Einar and hit him between the shoulders with his ax, just at the moment when Einar was bringing down his own axon Simon’s head. As both Simon and Einar fell dying, Einar commented, “It is only what I expected.” Einar’s foster-brother Thord rushed at Kolbein, who managed to kill him at once by jabbing his ax into his throat.

. . . At a peace meeting organized by a level-headed farmer called Hall, Kolbein’s side was ordered to pay compensation because Einar’s side had lost more men. Even so, Einar’s side was bitterly disappointed in the verdict. Kolbein sailed off to Norway with a polar bear that he gave as a present to King Harald Gilli, still complaining about how cruelly he had been treated. King Harald considered Kolbein’s story a pack of lies and refused to pay a bounty for the polar bear. So Kolbein attacked and wounded the king and sailed off to Denmark but drowned en route. And that is the end of this saga.

Jared Diamond, Collapse. Viking, 2005.



1. Based on the passage, which of the following is true about Christianity among Greenland Vikings?

a. Church services were sacred spaces free from violence

b. Church law prevented clergy from profiting from their positions

c. Prayer before battle prepared them to die in good conscience

d. Their Christian faith did not immediately change a culture of violence





2. Which of the following likely contributed to the failure of the Vikings’ Greenland colony?

a. A society is torn apart by violent feuds

b. Being unable to return to Europe

c. Lack of settlements with permanent structures

d. No access to Christian worship





3. What does the passage suggest about the Vikings’ seafaring abilities?

a. Tragedy sometimes struck Viking crews

b. Travel between Greenland and their homelands in Norway and Denmark was not uncommon

c. Finding abandoned cargos happened fairly often

d. All of the above





4. What does the passage reveal about the status of Viking kings?

a. They were democratically elected and could be removed from the throne by a warriors’ council

b. They were subject to attack by angry Vikings

c. Gifts presented to them were never rewarded

d. They were chosen by a council of bishops

Answer 1

ANSWERS

1.- d. is the correct answer. The conversion of the Vikings took place over centuries. Even when a Danish or Swedish king became Christian and proclaimed his people were Christian, many still practiced their pagan ways and held to the old gods. By the end of the Viking Age, however, most Vikings had become fully Christian and were baptized and buried in that faith.

2.- a. is the correct answer. Culture and values significantly affect a society’s ability to adapt and respond to change. In hard conditions individuals compete with each other for increasingly scarce resources. Lastly, it is theorized that supporting a social class system tied to the Christian church spelled doom as scarce Greenland resources were traded to support the import of luxury items for the church and the wealthiest families.

3.- d. is the correct answer. The high value that medieval Europe placed on walrus ivory favoured the creation of trading routes between Greenland and Norway, Denmark and Europe, a hard but rewarding journey, sometimes ending in tragedy. However, measurements of salt particles in ice cores suggest that storminess rose toward the end of the occupation, making voyages to hunt and trade walrus ivory even more dangerous, as a result, shipwrecks and abandoned cargos showed up more frequently in Greenland's shores.

4.- b. is the correct answer. Vikings kings appeared in the beginning of the Viking Age, and they were only regional leaders. The most powerful individual Viking kings who ruled over most of the Scandinavian lands appeared at the end of the Viking Age. Kings were not viewed as sacred, or special. Instead, they were viewed as exceptionally able and imperious men. The concept of a regal king was foreign to Norsemen.