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By Root 1933 0

front of the bishop’s house. Adjacent structures included a bell tower 80 feet high, and a ceremonial hall with a floor area of 1,400 square feet, the largest hall in Greenland and nearly three-quarters the size of the hall of the archbishop of Trondheim in Norway. On an equally lavish scale were the cathedrals’ two cow barns, one of them 208 feet long (the largest barn in Greenland) and fitted with a stone lintel weighing about four tons. As a splendid welcome to visitors, the cathedral’s grounds were decorated with about 25 complete walrus skulls and five narwhal skulls, which may be the only ones preserved at any Greenland Norse site: otherwise, archaeologists have found only chips of ivory, because it was so valuable and was almost all exported to Europe.

Gardar Cathedral and the other Greenland churches must have consumed horrifyingly large amounts of scarce timber to support their walls and roofs. Imported church paraphernalia, such as bronze bells and communion wine, were also expensive to Greenlanders because they were ultimately bought with the sweat and blood of Nordrseta hunters and competed against essential iron for the limited cargo space on arriving ships. Recurrent expenses that their churches cost the Greenlanders were an annual tithe paid to Rome, and additional Crusade tithes levied on all Christians. These tithes were paid with Greenland exports shipped to Bergen and converted to silver there. A surviving receipt for one such shipment, the six-year Crusade Tithe of 1274-1280, shows that it consisted of 1,470 pounds of ivory from the tusks of 191 walruses, which Norway’s archbishop managed to sell for 26 pounds of pure silver. That the Church was able to extract such tithes and complete such building programs testifies to the authority it commanded in Greenland.

Church-associated land ultimately came to comprise much of the best land in Greenland, including about one-third of the land of Eastern Settlement. Greenland’s church tithes, and possibly its other exports to Europe, went through Gardar, where one can still see the ruins of a large storage shed standing immediately next to the cathedral’s southeast corner. With Gardar thus boasting Greenland’s largest storage building, as well as by far its largest cattle herd and richest land, whoever controlled Gardar controlled Greenland. What remains unclear is whether Gardar and the other church farms in Greenland were owned by the Church itself or else by the farmers on whose land the churches stood. But whether authority and ownership rested with the bishop or with the chiefs doesn’t alter the main conclusion: Greenland was a hierarchical society, with great differences of wealth justified by the Church, and with disproportionate investment in churches. Again, we moderns have to wonder if the Greenlanders wouldn’t have been better off had they imported fewer bronze bells, and more iron with which to make tools, weapons to defend themselves against the Inuit, or goods to trade with the Inuit for meat in times of stress. But we ask our question with the gift of hindsight, and without regard to the cultural heritage that led the Greenlanders to make their choices.

Besides that specific identity as Christians, Greenlanders maintained their European identity in many other ways, including their importation of European bronze candlesticks, glass buttons, and gold rings. Over the centuries of their colony’s existence, the Greenlanders followed and adopted changing European customs in detail. One well-documented set of examples involves burial customs, as revealed by excavations of bodies in Scandinavian and Greenland churchyards. Medieval Norwegians buried infants and stillborns around a church’s east gable; so did the Greenlanders. Early medieval Norwegians buried bodies in coffins, with women on the south side of churchyards and men on the north side; later Norwegians dispensed with coffins, just wrapped bodies in clothing or a shroud, and mingled the sexes in the churchyard. Greenlanders made those same shifts with time. In continental European cemeteries