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By Root 2234 0

meat and fish so often get tabooed, they are much more likely than plant foods to develop bacteria or protozoa that give us food poisoning or parasites if we eat them. That’s especially likely to happen in Iceland and Scandinavia, whose people employ many fermentation methods for long-term preservation of smelly (non-Scandinavians would say “rotting”) fish, including methods using deadly botulism-causing bacteria. The most painful illness of my life, worse even than malaria, arose when I contracted food poisoning from eating shrimp that I had bought in a market in Cambridge, England, and that were evidently not fresh. I was confined to bed for several days with awful retching, intense muscle pain, headaches, and diarrhea. That suggests to me a scenario for the Greenland Norse: perhaps Erik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an equally awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is for you, and how we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desperate grubby ichthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.

Greenland’s marginality for raising livestock meant that the Greenland Norse had to develop a complex, integrated economy in order to make ends meet. That integration involved both time and space: different activities were scheduled at different seasons, and different farms specialized in producing different things to share with other farms.

To understand the seasonal schedule, let’s begin in the spring. In late May and early June came the brief but crucial season of seal hunting, when the migratory harp and hooded seals moved in herds along the outer fjords, and the resident common seals came out on beaches to give birth and were easiest to catch. The summer months of June through August were an especially busy season, when the livestock were brought out to pastures to graze, livestock were yielding milk to turn into storable dairy products, some men set out in boats for Labrador to cut timber, other boats headed north to hunt walruses, and cargo boats arrived from Iceland or Europe for trading. August and early September were hectic weeks of cutting, drying, and storing hay, just before the weeks in September when the cows were led back to barns from pastures and the sheep and goats were brought nearer to shelter. September and October were the season of the caribou hunt, while the winter months from November to April were a time to tend the animals in barns and shelters, to weave, to build and repair with wood, to process the tusks of walrus killed during the summer—and to pray that the stores of dairy products and dried meat for human food, the hay for animal fodder, and the fuel for heating and cooking didn’t run out before the winter’s end.

Besides that economic integration over time, integration over space was also necessary, because not even the richest Greenland farm was self-sufficient in everything required to survive through the year. That integration involved transfers between outer and inner fjords, between upland and lowland farms, between Western and Eastern Settlement, and between rich and poor farms. For instance, while the best pastures were in the lowlands at the heads of the inner fjords, the caribou hunt took place at upland farms suboptimal for pasturing because of cooler temperatures and a shorter growing season, while the seal hunt was concentrated in outer fjords where salt spray, fog, and cold weather meant poor farming. Those outer fjord hunting sites were beyond reach of inner-fjord farms whenever the fjords froze or filled up with icebergs. The Norse solved these spatial problems by transporting seal and seabird carcasses from outer to inner fjords, and caribou joints downhill from upland to lowland farms. For instance, seal bones remain abundant in the garbage of the highest-elevation inland farms, to which the carcasses must have been carried dozens of miles from the fjord mouths. At Vatnahverfi farms far inland, seal bones are