Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [115]
Burning wood itself does not yield a temperature high enough for working with iron. Instead, the wood must first be burned to form charcoal, which does sustain a sufficiently hot fire. Measurements in several countries show that it takes on the average about four pounds of wood to make one pound of charcoal. Because of that requirement, plus the low iron content of bog iron, Viking iron extraction and tool production and even the repair of iron tools consumed enormous quantities of wood, which became a limiting factor in the history of Viking Greenland, where trees were in short supply.
As for the social system that Vikings brought overseas with them from the Scandinavian mainland, it was hierarchical, with classes ranging at the lowest level from slaves captured in raids, through free men, up to chiefs. Large unified kingdoms (as opposed to small local chiefdoms under chiefs who might assume a title of “king”) were just emerging in Scandinavia during the Viking expansion, and overseas Viking settlers eventually had to deal with kings of Norway and (later) of Denmark. However, the settlers had emigrated in part to escape the emerging power of would-be Norwegian kings, so that neither Iceland nor Greenland societies ever developed kings of their own. Instead, the power there remained in the hands of a military aristocracy of chiefs. Only they could afford their own boat and a full set of livestock, including the prized and hard-to-maintain cows as well as the less esteemed low-maintenance sheep and goats. The chief’s dependents, retainers, and supporters included slaves, free laborers, tenant farmers, and independent free farmers.
Chiefs constantly competed with one another both by peaceful means and by war. The peaceful competition involved chiefs seeking to outdo each other in giving gifts and holding feasts, so as to gain prestige, reward followers, and attract allies. Chiefs accumulated the necessary wealth through trading, raiding, and the production of their own farms. But Viking society was also a violent one, in which chiefs and their retainers fought each other at home as well as fighting other peoples overseas. The losers in those internecine struggles were the ones who had the most to gain by trying their luck overseas. For instance, in the A.D. 980s, when an Icelander named Erik the Red was defeated and exiled, he explored Greenland and led a band of followers to settle the best farm sites there.
Key decisions of Viking society were made by the chiefs, who were motivated to increase their own prestige, even in cases where that might conflict with the good of the current society as a whole and of the next generation. We already encountered those same conflicts of interest for Easter Island chiefs and Maya kings (Chapters 2 and 5), and they also had heavy consequences for the fate of Greenland Norse society (Chapter 8).
When the Vikings began their overseas expansion in the A.D. 800s, they still were “pagans” worshipping gods traditional in Germanic religion, such as the fertility god Frey, the sky god Thor, and the war god Odin. What most horrified European societies targeted by Viking raiders was that Vikings were not Christians and did not observe the taboos of a Christian society. Quite the opposite: they seemed to take sadistic pleasure in targeting churches and monasteries for attack. For instance, when in A.D. 843 a large Viking fleet went plundering up the Loire River in France, the raiders began by capturing the cathedral of Nantes at the river’s mouth and killing the bishop and all the priests. Actually, though, the Vikings had no sadistic special fondness for plundering churches, nor any prejudice against secular sources of booty. While the undefended wealth of churches and monasteries