THE OLD WOMAN OF HVALSEY

I think some of you know I was selected as a blogger to write about climate change for the THINKABOUTIT competition run by the European Journalism Centre. The Competition hasn't started yet and we haven't had our trip to Copenhagen which is later this month, but I wrote this preliminary piece below and as I was quite pleased with it I thought I would crave your indulgence and post it here. It is basically true in all its grander particulars, though I may have elided one or two bits here and there in the interests of the plot. Artistic licence you can call it. Hvalsey is in South-Eastern Greenland. Google maps finds it quite well. (And for Rosie - or rather for Joni if she sees this - this is a story about Norwegians - well Norsemen anyway - that
I hope you will find every bit as compelling as recycling things).


THE STORY

Here is a story about climate change - although not about global warming. And if it’s not a story about Danes and Copenhagen, then it’s still a story about Scandinavians. It’s a story that I first heard about long ago, in a bout of childish illness, on the radio. The words climate change were unknown then - at least to the general public, but I remember this tale of an old woman, whose voice seemed to fill my sickroom with a chill.

She spoke of a little colony by the sea, somewhere where once there had been trees, great birches six metres tall and abundant grass with which the farmers made hay to feed their wintering animals in great turf-roofed byres. Indeed, so green was this land that Erik the Red, the Norseman who founded the colony, called it Greenland. Ships came from Iceland and further east and the colony thrived for several hundred years.

The settlers built houses with the flat stones that lay close to the surface and at Hvalsey, one of the biggest settlements, they built a high and wide church and plastered the outside with pulverised mussel shells whose nacre glowed in the low rays of the sun, making the church appear white and sparkling and fluorescent.

The colony thrived until some time around the beginning of the fourteenth century the farmers began to notice how little soil there now seemed to be. The rich loam that had lain under the birch trees had been eroded by the rain and the wind and washed into the sea. The trees had been cut for building and for firewood and to make fields but now the summers seemed to be shorter, the winters longer. The settlers had to go further for timber, the fields were less productive, everyone was poorer.

The church elders sought a dispensation from the Pope; from 1345 and on account of their poverty the settlement was absolved from the payment of tithes. Some settlers began to leave. But the Norse folk are hardy and tenacious. Most clung on. But the old woman, whose words had chilled me, said that the colony was doomed. The colony was doomed because it would be extinguished by the cold and the snow.

She said that on the low hills that rose above the sea, where once the beech trees had grown, snow now lay. Of course the hills had always been snow-covered in winter but the summer sunshine would melt the snow and the cattle would graze on the summer pasture and the wildflowers. But now there were patches of snow that didn’t melt all summer long, even on those hills beside the sea.

So snow began to fall on snow. Each summer the size of the permanent snowfield grew. The farmers marked it out with sticks. Sometimes the snow retreated. Then the farmers were happy for a year, or perhaps two. But the old woman foretold that decade by decade the summer snowfield would grow and keep on growing, faster and faster, until at last it came down the hillside and overwhelmed their crops.

And so it came to pass together with a sad succession of ‘lasts.’ In the year 1408 came the last marriage to be performed in the church with its nacre plaster. We even have the names of the bride and groom. For love flourishes even in the harshest conditions. She was Sigridur Björnsdóttir, high born and originally from Iceland, who had sailed to Greenland as a young woman to marry a man who had many farmsteads at Hvalsey. He died and she was left a widow.

Her groom in this last marriage was Thorsteinn Ólafsson, a sailor, captain of his ship in fact. He had been blown off course and by a happy accident had put in at Hvalsey in 1406. While making repairs he met and fell in love with the grieving Sigridur. And so occurred the last marriage in Hvalsey. The final recorded Norse document to come out of the settlement.

Sigridur and Thorsteinn didn’t stay long. The conditions had become too harsh. The colony was breaking up. His ship seaworthy again, Thorsteinn Ólafsson sailed out of the fjord and turned south before rounding the cape and running before the west wind up to Iceland and home.

That wasn’t the last of the colony, though; ships continued, very occasionally, to call. But the few families left who clung to their homes and to life itself through those chilling, snow-enveloping winters when all was dark, were famine struck and riddled with disease. All were desperately poor.

And in their poverty and misery and the bleakness of their environment they turned upon each other. The colony died a slow and lingering death, killed by the snow.

But before it did those that were left turned upon the old woman, who, years ago now, had foretold what would happen when snow began to fall on snow unmelted from the winter before. They accused her of witchcraft, of poisoning the colony, of bringing insanity and death to its people. She was bundled into the church and there she was condemned to death.

And in a last act, to propitiate the gods of weather, as if fire itself could drive away the snow and the white glow of the earth, the settlers tied her to a stake and used what little firewood remained to burn her to death.

It is said that those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Today, little remains at Hvalsey, though the church, now without its turf roof and fluorescent plaster of ground mussel shells, is well known. Yet the more things change the more they stay the same. The old woman who prayed that the ice would retreat has had her prayer granted. Six hundred years later we would do well to listen to her story.

Picture is courtesy of Wikipedia