The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [33]
Not long after the death of Asgeir Gunnarsson by drowning and freezing, Bishop Alf declared the souls of the Greenlanders to be in imminent peril of damnation, for, he said, not one man in five made the proper observances of fast days, especially during the forty days of Lent. It was said that Sira Jon had discovered servingmen of the bishop’s own table eating quantities of meat, and with great reveling, when they should have been fasting and meditating upon the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. The bishop was especially interested in the skraelings, and preached not a few long sermons on demons and devils and heathens, and declared that sinful contact of Christian men with she-devils was as black as darkest night in the eyes of our Lord, and after this the Greenlanders began to look about themselves and see the skraelings with different eyes. A few men, indeed, left off going among the skraeling women, but others did not, although their visits were now not so open nor so frequent.
In these years it had gotten so that the Greenlanders met the skraelings more and more often, especially hunting in the waste districts, and men and demons came to blows from time to time, but most folk said that the skraelings were happiest on the open ocean, in their skin boats. The best sign of their demon nature was that the fiercest storms could do them no harm. Men had seen skraelings in their boats disappear completely under the waves, and reappear again many ells away and be none the worse. Many said that the most frightening thing about the skraelings was their deceptive habit of smiling at everything, and that their very quietness was a sign of what plans they were hatching against the Christian Greenlanders. There was much talk of these things, but the end result was that those who wanted to trade with the skraelings did so, and those who were afraid to did not.
After first declaring that there must be no contact, the bishop changed his mind and said that it was the duty of all Christians to strive to bring the heathen to Christ. Three men brought skraeling women home, had them baptized, and married them, and some men said that these women made good-humored and willing wives, less self-willed than Christian women. These women lived peacefully among the farms of the settlement. So it was that at Gardar the talk was all of the skraelings and their ways, and among themselves the Greenlanders got a deal of amusement from this.
One woman who was not married was Margret Asgeirsdottir of Gunnars Stead. A certain Arnkel, from a farmstead in Siglufjord, had declared his intention to marry her, but then nothing was heard of this, and Arnkel returned to his steading. Folk in Vatna Hverfi district said how handsome Margret was and how large her marriage portion would have been had Asgeir managed to hold on to all of his farm, but now any man taking on Margret could well be taking on a family of dependents who would drain his own wealth. It was true that Gunnar and Margret were rich in fine things, for the men of their lineage had been abroad and the women had been skilled craftswomen, but there were more fine things inside the farmhouse than there were sheep in the fields or cows in the byre. Folk also remembered how proud and determined to have her own way Helga Ingvadottir had been, and sometimes these habits, it was said, did not appear until a woman had her own house and dairy. Arnkel told people in Siglufjord that he had had some conversations