Vikings

I have always been fascinated by the Vikings.  This day last year was a red letter day for me becasue I visited the ruined Viking settlement of Hvalsey in south west Greenland.

Hvalsey was part of the Eastern Settlement, founded by an outcast Norwegian Viking called Eric the Red, who sailed from Iceland to Greenland in 982.   Imagine sailing across the North Atlantic ocean in an open boat with men, women and children, horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens!

The extra shows the church in Hvalsey which was built around 1300.  It was the location of the last recorded event in Greenlandic Norse history, when on either the 14 or 16 September 1408 a couple married there and their wedding was recorded in contemporary letters.  After that, silence.

It was 1721 before the Danish successfully sent missionaries to find their Greenlandic vassals, but all they found were ruined buildings.  No one knows when the last Greenlandic Norse died or left but probably about 1450 at the start of the Little Ice Age.

The church has lost its roof but the walls stand proud.  There were no future settlements at the site so nothing was disturbed.  There are also the clear ruins of a farmstead, a banqueting hall, livestock pens, a horse enclosure and storage buildings.

It was about 15 degrees under a band of mist the day we were there, typical summer weather.  As we sailed away, the mist parted for long enough to see the top of the huge mountain looming over the settlement (second extra, where you can just make out the church as a tiny box in the bottom right hand corner).

The books are some of my Viking mini-library plus the picture book I made using blurb of our trip.