138 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
Introduction
A central preoccupation of archaeologists and
historians is finding ways to assess the quality of
life of people in the past. This task is never easy
because it is an inherently subjective issue—one
person’s good life is another person’s nightmare—
but scholars nevertheless normally feel justified in
assuming that certain basic aspects of life can be
quantified to give at least a relative sense of differences
in life quality. Most commonly, these aspects
include the basic needs of humans for food, shelter,
and security—the lower strata of Maslow’s (1943)
hierarchy of needs—although esteem (status) is also
commonly considered. It is, however, fair to say
that the availability, quantity, and quality of food
is the single-most studied factor. It is not only the
most absolute necessity, but there is also relatively
plentiful evidence about it which is amenable to
study and reconstruction. The logic of studying food
availability is simple: as life must be good for those
who have plenty of food, so it must be bad for those
who have little. This measure—the differential access
to food within a society—forms the basis for
theories about social structure as well as numerous
explanations for historical change; if food availability
increases or it becomes more scarce, this might
be the root cause for, or the effect of, other changes
observed. The problem is that it can be difficult to
know how sensitive people, either individuals or society
as a whole, were to food availability. If people
were always on the brink of starvation, then it is obvious
that any change in food supply will have made
a big difference to them—a difference of life and
death—but if they had a comfortable margin, then
such changes take on a different meaning, suggestive
more of issues like adaptation, cultural preference,
or status differentiation.
In Norse Greenland, the grand narrative has
always been about failure: the question about why
the Norse settlements came to an end in the late
middle ages. The available evidence has tended to
be interpreted in the light of the end result, and it
is fair to say that the question of food procurement
has been central in this debate in recent decades. It
has been reasonably postulated that because of its
ecological marginality, Norse Greenlandic society
would have had difficulties in feeding itself and
that any changes in conditions—deteriorating climatic
conditions in particular—could have pushed
it over the edge (e.g., Barlow et al. 1997). This line
of reasoning has proven fruitful in the sense that
intensive research into it has now largely disproven
its basic premise; it now appears that obtaining
enough calories was not a problem for the Norse
Greenlanders (Dugmore et al. 2009). The emerging
picture is of an economy based on intensive,
and successful, agricultural practices (Adderley
and Simpson 2006, Arneborg 2005, Buckland et
al. 2009, Schweger 1998) and of climate change
increasing as much as decreasing the availability
of wild species, such as the harp seal, for hunting
(Ogilvie et al. 2009). In short, very little now
seems to suggest that the Norse Greenlanders left
because their subsistence system failed them. The
more sophisticated understanding we now have of
Norse Greenlandic subsistence suggests that more
complex reasons than simple want of food affected
the development and eventual demise of the settlements.
While the subsistence system is thereby not
absolved from all responsibility, this newer perspective
suggests that it might be fruitful to look
also at other needs that might have been wanting in
Norse Greenland.
Parishes and Communities in Norse Greenland
Orri Vésteinsson*
Abstract - The isolation of the two Norse Greenlandic settlements, from each other as well as from the rest of the world,
is a well rehearsed topic. Ideas about communications within the two settlements are, on the other hand, not much developed.
One way of looking at intra-settlement communication is through the parish system. The parishes arguably reflect
the community structure, but they also provided the framework for much of the social interaction in the everyday lives of
ordinary Greenlanders.
The parish system can be reconstructed by analysing the different types of churches and their spatial and chronological
distribution in relation to the location of farm sites. Based on fieldwork in southern Greenland as well as comparisons
with Icelandic data, a reconstruction of parishes in Eystribyggð is proposed. This analysis reveals significant differences
between the structure of Greenlandic and Icelandic parishes, the former being more centralized but also much larger with
correspondingly less pastoral care available to each household. These differences highlight the particular nature of Norse
Greenlandic society and may help to explain why that society came to an end in the late middle ages.
Special Volume 2:138–150
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008
Journal of the North Atlantic
*Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland; orri@hi.is.
2010
2010 O. Vésteinsson 139
The Study of Parish Systems
In this paper, I propose to use the parish system
as a window on what sort of communities the Norse
Greenlanders lived in. Community relates to slightly
higher levels in the hierarchy of needs: those of security,
belonging, and esteem—factors that are well
known to influence people’s behavior and choices of
abode. Communities of sedentary (if highly mobile)
peoples like the Norse Greenlanders have structural
characteristics which can be reconstructed through
settlement patterns. Importantly, these elements also
allow systematic comparison with other places to get
a sense of how different the Norse Greenlandic communities
were from, e.g., their neighbors’ in Iceland.
Parishes—the basic units of church organization,
consisting of a church, its priest, and the households
to which he provided pastoral care and which paid
him and/or the church owner for those services—
are vitally important for this sort of reconstruction.
Rural parishes began to take shape in Northern
Europe in the 10th century, and as a rule, they seem
to reflect pre-existing community structures. More
importantly, however, they provided the framework
for people’s everyday lives and for much of the social
interaction that took place. Parishes reinforced
community feeling not only by the coming together
for mass, but by communal feasting associated with
church festivals as well as possibly by communal
projects in maintaining and furnishing the church. It
is arguable that the communal aspect of parishes is
even more important in regions of dispersed settlement,
like Northern Norway, Iceland, and Greenland,
where people lived in separate farmsteads
and had few occasions to meet each other outside
church gatherings. The shape of the parish, in terms
of which farms belonged to it, decided which people
met each other on a regular basis. In such communities,
the role of the priest also became that much
more important as he was the only individual who
travelled regularly between the farms in the community.
He must have been an important intermediary
for all sorts of interactions and would have been well
placed to influence matters within his parish.
Given that evidence for the building blocks
of parishes—the churches and the farms—does
exist in the archaeological and historical records
for Norse Greenland, an attempt to reconstruct
the parishes can be made. This reconstruction is
problematic in many ways, however, and will need
to rely on some hypothesizing. Here, the Icelandic
parish system will be used as a model, both to aid
in the reconstruction of the Norse Greenlandic
one—on the reasonable but unprovable assumption
that they are likely to have been similar—as
well as to bring out the possible differences between
the two societies.
In Iceland, there is by now good evidence that in
the early 11th century, within decades or even years
of the decision to convert to Christianity, small
churches or chapels were built in great numbers all
over the country (Vésteinsson 2000:45–57, 2005).
Reasonable estimates suggest that as many as 1700
of these structures were built, one for every second
or third farm in the country. These simple buildings
were, as a rule, associated with cemeteries, but their
small size (most are less than 20 m2) argues against
them having had a principal function as a place of
gathering for groups larger than a household or two.
Churches big enough for larger gatherings had been
built before the end of the 11th century, but it seems
that it was not until the second half of the 12th century
that enough priests had been ordained to serve
all these larger churches, which can as a group be
associated with the ca. 330 churches served by one
or more resident priests, i.e., the parish churches.
Before the end of the 12th century, a hierarchical system
had emerged whereby churches can be grouped
in three categories:
1. Churches or chapels without a resident priest
and whose owners did not receive any tithes or
dues and were not exempt from paying tithes and
dues to other churches. There were ca. 1000 of
these chapels.
2. Churches without a resident priest which received
tithes and possibly other dues from at least
the farm they stood on and sometimes a few others.
There were ca. 350 of this intermediate type
of church.
3. Churches with a resident priest which received
tithes and dues from a number of farms, including
farms with chapels. There were some 330 of these
parish churches.
In the early 13th century, the intermediate type
of church sometimes received tithe and dues from a
number of farms, no doubt on account of a limited
supply of priests, but this had become rare by the
14th century, when such annexes as a rule had no
other revenue than the tithe and dues payable by the
household to which they belonged. The revenue of
the parish churches will have increased correspondingly,
and the later middle ages saw a very gradual
but nevertheless inexorable attrition in the numbers
of chapels and of the status of annexes, making the
system more and more centralized. The system was
nevertheless very resilient, and according to a survey
of several northern parishes in 1486–87, some 62%
or 78 out of 125 chapels and annexes in 29 parishes
were still in function (Diplomatarium islandicum
V:352–57). Burial ceased at some of these chapels
as early as the 12th century, but at others it continued
throughout the middle ages and even beyond.
The area served by a priest, the ministry,
could therefore consist of several tithe areas, most
140 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
commonly a large one with 5+ farms in addition to
one or two single-household ones. The number of
annexes and chapels a priest might have to service
varied considerably, but the larger ministries with
many annexes tended to have more priests, and
there are examples of parish churches with as many
as three priests and three deacons, some of whom
would have been kept busy the year round servicing
the annexes and chapels. In Iceland, there were on
average 1.3 priests for every parish church and some
25% of the churches had a permanent staff of two
priests or more.
The size of the ministries varied considerably,
from a single farm (usually an estate with several
households) to as many as 40 farms, but figures between
5 and 15 were typical. There was a relationship
between settlement density and sizes of ministries in
that the greater the density of settlement, the smaller
the ministries tended to be, with a correspondingly
larger number of priests per capita. In regions of
more dispersed settlement, ministries tended to be
large, with many annexes and chapels and fewer
priests per inhabitant. This tendency was particularly
pronounced in the Eastern and Western fjords, the
landscapes most similar to that of Greenland.
Based on this summary of the main contours of
the Icelandic parish system (see further in Vésteinsson
1998; 2000:45–57, 94–112, 240–45; 2005),
we can now turn to Norse Greenland to consider
the system there. In order to reconstruct the Norse
Greenlandic parish system, three types of evidence
need to be considered: First, the evidence for the
equivalents of the Icelandic parish churches; second,
the evidence for possible annexes and chapels;
and third, the evidence for the numbers of farms
that could have made up the Norse Greenlandic
parishes. The reconstruction presented below is for
Eystribyggð (the Eastern settlement), but reference
is also made to Vestribyggð (the Western settlement)
as the evidence allows.
The Parish Churches of Norse Greenland
Identifying the parish churches in Norse Greenland
is relatively straightforward, although by no
means unproblematic (Vebæk 1966 gives a useful
summary of the research history). A number of large
church ruins have long been known in Norse Greenland,
and most of those can with reasonable certainty
be identified with churches named in medieval
documents. There are two main documents: a list of
Greenlandic churches in Flateyjarbók, a manuscript
written in Iceland in 1387–94, and Ívar Bárðarson’s
description of Greenland, presumably written sometime
after his return from Greenland in 1368, but
with a more problematic transmission and surviving
only in 17th-century manuscripts. There are signifi-
cant correspondences between these documents, but
also differences in detail. The impression they give
of the number of churches is, however, very similar.
That impression is consistent with information collected
in the 17th century in Iceland (Halldórsson
1978:37–39, 235–36). These sources (see Table
1) suggest that there were 10–14 parish churches
in Eystribyggð (including the cathedral and two
monastic churches; Fig. 1) and 1–4 in Vestribyggð.
The main difference between Flateyjarbók and
Ívar’s description is that Flateyjarbók does not mention
the two monastic churches, whereas Ívar does
not mention churches at Herjólfsnes, undir Höfða,
Table 1. Medieval sources for Norse Greenlandic churches, printed in Halldórsson (1978:37–39, 79, 133–37, 234–36).
Source Ruin group
Flateyjarbók Ívar Bárðarson Gronlandia number Modern place-name
Herjólfsnes Herjólfsfjörður Ø111 Ikigaat
Vatnsdalur í Ketilsfirði Áróskirkja í Ketilsfirði 2 kirkjur í Ketilsfirði Tasiussaq, Tasermiut
Vík í Ketilsfirði Pétursvíkurkirkja Taserssuaq, Tasermiut
Stórt klaustur inn frá Vatnsdalsbyggð Ø105 Tasermiutsiaat
Systraklaustur langt inni í Hrafnsfirði Ø149? Narsarsuaq, Unartoq
Vogar í Siglufirði Vogakirkja Siglufjörður Ø162? Narsaq, Unartoq
undir Höfða í Austfirði Austkarsfjörður Ø66 Igaliku Kujalleq
Garðar í Einarsfirði Nikuláskirkja í Einarsfirði Ófundinnfjörður Ø47 Igaliku
Einarsfjörður
Harðsteinaberg
Brattahlíð í Eiríksfirði Hlíðarkirkja } 3 kirkjur í Eiríksfirði { Ø29a Qassiarsuk
undir Sólarfjöllum undir Sólarfjöllum Ø23 Sillisit
Ísafjörður Dýrneskirkja Ø18 Narsap Ilua
Hvalseyjarfjörður Hvalseyjarfjarðarkirkja Ø83 Qaqortukulooq
Garðanes í Miðfjörðum Ø1 Nunataaq
Sandnes í Lýsufirði Steinsneskirkja Lýsufjörður V51 Kilaarsarfik
Andafjörður
Hóp í Agnafirði Agnafjörður V23a?
Ánavík í Ragnafirði Ragnafjörður V7 Ujarassuit
2010 O. Vésteinsson 141
Harðsteinaberg, or Garðanes. Ívar’s omission of
Herjólfsnes may be due to the incomplete transmission
of the text; he mentions the place several times,
and there is good archaeological evidence that the
church was in operation into the 15th century. It is
also strange that he omits undir Höfða, which from
its substantial ruin and its location must be regarded
as one of the main churches of Eystribyggð, the parish
center for the whole of Vatnahverfi. It is tempting,
on the other hand, to see the omission of Harðsteinaberg
and Garðanes as indications of change. The
information available to the compiler of Flateyjarbók
was probably not up to date, and quite likely
many decades old, and it is therefore possible that
these churches were no longer in use when Ívar was
in Greenland. His comment that the church undir
Sólarfjöllum owned all of Miðfirðir may suggest that
the parish of Garðanes had been merged with that of
undir Sólarfjöllum. Radiocarbon determinations on
human bones from Ø1 (Garðanes) suggest that the
cemetery there may have been used into the 15th century,
but the continued use of the cemetery does not
preclude the possibility that the church was demoted
to an annex. According to a 17th-century copy of a
medieval manuscript called Gripla, there were 12
churches in Eystribyggð and 4 in Vestribyggð (Halldórsson
1978:37). Another manuscript, referred to
as Grönlandiae vetus chorographia, also surviving
only in 17th-century copies (the fullest in Arngrímur
Jónsson’s Gronlandia), lists 10 churches in
Eystribyggð by location (Halldórsson 1978:38, 235–
36). The difference may be that the list does not refer
explicitly to the churches in Hvalseyjarfjörður or
Dýrnes, although both place-names are mentioned.
The omission of the two monastic churches from the
Flateyjarbók and Gronlandia lists may be a matter of
definitions, i.e., that they were not included because
they were monasteries. However, from Ívar’s account,
it is clear that they also served as parish centers,
and Icelandic monastic churches were also parish
churches, so this seems an unlikely explanation.
Another possibility might be that both foundations
were late, and that they post-dated the Flateyjarbók
list. In that case, the parishes between Ketilsfjörður
(Tasermiut) and Vatnahverfiwill originally have
been extremely large, and the Flateyjarbók list must
then predate 1308, when the monasteries are first referred
to (Diplomatarium norvegicum X:15).
Figure 1. Eystribyggð in Greenland with sites and place names mentioned in the text.
142 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
The majority of these churches have been associated
with particular ruins (Fig. 2), and on the whole
there is consensus about those identifications. Although
the names of the two churches in Ketilsfjörður
have got mixed up in either or both sources, Ívar’s
description of their locations is convincing, and one
must have been in Tasiussaq and the other on or near
Lake Taserssuaq (both in Ketilsfjörður or Tasermiut
fjord). The identification of a church ruin on the lake
with Pétursvík at Ø140 (Vebæk 1966:206–208) does
not seem to have met with widespread approval but
there can be little doubt that there must have been
a church in that general area. The identifications
of Vogar with Ø162 (Narsaq) and the convent with
Ø149 (Narsarsuaq) are generally agreed upon, but
pose some problems (Arneborg 2004:255). For one
thing, Ívar’s text seems to imply that their locations
are the other way around, i.e., that the convent is east
or south of Vogar, not northwest as Ø149 is. He also
says that the convent is “langt inni í þeim firði” (far
up that fjord), which is hardly an apt description of
the location of Narssarsuaq Ø149. Furthermore, he
locates the convent in Hrafnsfjörður, which he says
is the next fjord west of Ketilsfjörður. That fjord is
Sarqa and, further in, Søndre Sermilik, normally
associated with Álftafjörður of the medieval fjordlists,
while a few lines below he mentions Hrafnsfjörður
in a context which makes it clear that it is
Alluitsup Kangerlua, which fits other evidence better.
There is clearly some confusion here, but while
there can be no doubt that Siglufjörður is the same
as Unartoq and that Vogar therefore can be either
Ø149 or Ø162, the convent should be looked for in
either Søndre Sermilik or Alluitsup Kangerlua. To
this author, it seems to make most sense that Ø149
is Vogar; that the much smaller ruin at Ø162 is an
annex or chapel, and that the convent remains unidentified somewhere in the inner parts of Alluitsup
Kangerlua. In order not to court controversy, however,
the traditional identifications will be used in
the reconstruction below.
The location of Harðsteinaberg is the only
serious remaining problem in parish church identifications
in Eystribyggð, and the one that has
proven most intractable. It should be somewhere
between Garðar (Igaliko Ø47) and Brattahlíð
(Qassiarsuk Ø29) if the Flateyjarbók list is in true
geographical order. In this area, a possible church
has been tentatively identified at Qinngua Ø39
(Guldager et al. 2002:42–45), but an excavation
in 2001 failed to support this interpretation (Jette
Arneborg, Danish National Museum, Copenhagen,
Denmark, pers. comm.). It is not inconceivable
that either Ø33 or Ø35 are Harðsteinaberg,
but wherever it was, it seems likely that, like
Garðanes, it was demoted to annex church status
sometime before the mid-14th century, subsumed
for its part by Brattahlíð parish.
Figure 2. Plans of Norse Greenlandic church ruins. From Keller 1989:193.
2010 O. Vésteinsson 143
Arneborg et al. 2002), and on the whole, radiocarbon
datings of the human bones point towards the 11th
and 12th centuries, whereas dating on human bones
from the cemeteries of the parish churches concentrate
on the 13 and 14th centuries (J. Arneborg,
pers. comm.). Interestingly, the bones from Sandnes
(V51) in Vestribyggð have dates stretching back into
the 11th and 12th centuries, but no chapels have so
far been identified in Vestribyggð. These findings do
suggest that the chapels lost their burial rights by the
13th century, but more research is needed to ascertain
whether they also ceased to function at such an early
date. More research is also needed to determine if
burial really only commenced at the parish churches
in the 13th century or whether this result is due to
sample bias, the later graves being in better condition
and more likely to be excavated and dated than
the earlier, generally more disturbed ones.
So far, eight chapels have been securely identified (including Þjóðhildarkirkja and Ø162 associated
with Vogar), and interestingly, all but Ø162
are found in the areas of densest settlement in
Eystribyggð, in Igaliku Kangerlua (Einarsfjörður)
and Tungdliarfik Tunulliarfik (Eiríksfjörður). A
ninth site may be indicated by a fragment of a church
bell found near Qorlortorsup on the eastern side of
Vatnahverfi(Arneborg 2004:253), and the find of a
gravestone in the so-called Middle settlement may
relate to a chapel or church there (Arneborg 1994).
It is reasonable to assume that more of these sites
will come to light in the course of further research,
but intensive surveys of the Brattahlíð region,
Vatnahverfi, and Hvalseyjarfjörður in recent years
(Algreen Møller and Koch Madsen 2006a, 2006b;
Guldager et al. 2002; Vésteinsson 2008), have not
added many more sites, so it seems that the current
figures reflect the order of magnitude. If the chapels
were contemporary with the parish churches, this
distribution suggests that their purpose was not to
provide religious services to the greatest number of
people, in which case they would be expected to be
found at greater distances from the parish churches,
but rather that they represent the wealth and status
of farmers on a slightly lower tier than those who
controlled the parish churches. The proximity of
some of the chapels to parish churches can then be
seen in terms of assertion of non-dependence on a
powerful neighbor. Such patterns are well known in
Iceland (e.g., Friðriksson et al. 2004, Vésteinsson
2006:100).
Finally, it is worth pointing out that while there
is no reason to doubt that Þjóðhildarkirkja was the
first church in Brattahlíð, it later seems to have
been contemporary with the earlier of the two
stone churches for several decades if not more.
The stone churches are not accurately dated, but
the later one is believed to have been built around
In Vestribyggð, no church ruin has been found
that can be identified with Hóp, but its location
has plausibly been associated with V23a (Roussell
1941:98).
Annexes and Chapels in Norse Greenland
Since 1932, a number of small churches have
come to light in Eystribyggð which clearly do not
appear on any of the medieval church lists and are
furthermore substantially different from the parish
church ruins, both in being smaller and being mostly
inside circular enclosures. Initially, it was felt that
these small churches (which will hereafter be referred
to as chapels) predated the parish churches
known from the written sources, not least because
some of them were located close to parish church
sites, suggesting relocation (e.g., Ø48 neighboring
to Garðar Ø47 and Ø64 neighboring to undir
Höfða Ø66), and the case seemed to be clinched by
the excavation of the so-called Þjóðhildarkirkja in
Qassiarsuk (Ø29a - Brattahlíð), in the 1960s (Krogh
1982:33–52). This very small chapel is in the same
home-field as two phases of a very substantial stone
church, and there is consensus that it must have been
their precursor (e.g., Arneborg 2004:251–52).
There has, however, also been a growing realization
that it is in no way unthinkable that the
chapels were contemporary with the larger parish
churches, and that they represent a lower tier in an
hierarchical organization (Krogh 1976:308). That
would certainly be the inference from the Icelandic
evidence and is the interpretation favored here.
It is supported by evidence from Grænlendinga
þáttr (Halldórsson 1978:109–10), where it tells of
a church at a farm called Langanes (which remains
unidentified) at which no priest resided, but where
the bishop nevertheless celebrated mass in front of
a large crowd and where burial was allowed. The
phrase used, “eigi er heimilisprestr” could be lifted
directly from an Icelandic charter (e.g., Diplomatarium
islandicum I:466), and it is clear that the Icelandic
audience would have been familiar with the
arrangement where a church with burial rights could
be the scene of a major gathering without having its
own priest. Of course, it may be that the presumably
Icelandic author of this text simply assumed that the
church organization of Greenland was the same as
in Iceland. As there does not seem to be any strong
narrative reason for including this rather technical
information, it is, however, just as likely that the
author, who clearly was familiar with Greenland,
simply knew that Langanes church was an annex and
used this in the reconstruction of events.
Recent research into these chapels led by Jette
Arneborg (2002) has shown that burial took place
in their churchyards (Algreen Møller et al. 2007,
144 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
minor farms is more problematic. It was, however,
necessary, as a number of sites which have a dwelling-
type ruin and a home-field are in other respects
so insignificant that they can hardly represent more
than temporary or intermittent habitation. Such sites
can be regarded as short-term experiments or as cottages,
dependent on a larger farm, which had either
intermittent or simply small-scale occupation. In
the Vatnahverfireports (Algreen Møller and Koch
Madsen 2006a, 2006b), the authors consistently
distinguish between “mindre/lille gårdsanlæg” and
larger farm sites, and the same criteria (not described
but easily deduced) were applied to the other reports.
The results are presented in Table 2.
Although these survey areas are more or less
contiguous and all are in the heart of Eystribyggð,
there are significant differences between them,
especially in the lower proportion of permanent
farms in Vatnahverfi. This difference becomes even
more marked when farms with two farm mounds are
considered. There are 13 such sites in the Brattahlíð
region and 2 in Hvalseyjarfjörður—an addition of
25% in the number of potential farm units in both
areas—while there are only 2 in Vatnahverfi—potentially
upping the number by only 4.4%. It seems,
therefore, that the areas north of Igalikup Kangerlua
were not only more densely settled, but also that
the settlement there was more stable. It is important
to keep this in mind because it suggests that there
might be even more variation in this regard in other
parts of Eystribyggð.
In order to use these proportions to estimate the
number of permanent farms in other parts of Eystribyggð,
it is necessary first to subtract the number
of new sites (invariably in the “other sites” category)
that were discovered in the recent surveys. Equally
intensive surveys of other areas can be expected to
produce a similar number of new discoveries, so any
calculations based on the overall number of sites
must reckon without them. With 9 new sites in the
Brattahlíð region, 1 in Hvalseyjarfjörður, and 14 in
Vatnahverfi, that gives an expected proportion of
permanent farms as 53%, minor farms as 16%, and
other sites as 31%. The number of known Norse sites
in Eystribyggð is close to 500, which should, using
these proportions, break down to 265 permanent
farms, 80 minor farms, and 155 other sites.
1300, making a 12th-century date reasonable for
the earlier one. Radiocarbon dates show that burial
continued in the cemetery around Þjóðhildarkirkja
down to the 13th century (Lynnerup 1998:148),
suggesting that it continued to have a function long
after the stone church was built. Considering their
different locations in the Brattahlíð home-field, it
may be that the two churches belonged to different
households, but a more plausible scenario may
be similar to the one reported for Eyvindarmúli
in Southern Iceland in the 16th century, where a
rich landowner maintained a separate chapel out
in the home-field for her private devotion, while
the parish-church next to the dwelling received the
congregation (Vésteinsson 2000:50–51). Like at
Þjóðhildarkirkja, burial was also practiced around
the chapel in Eyvindarmúli, suggesting that such
private chapels also could serve as exclusive cemeteries
of high-status families or households.
The Number of Farms in Norse Greenland
Systematic survey of the Norse ruins in Greenland
has been underway since the 1880s, and although
much work remains to be done, the general
distribution seems well established and distribution
maps have been widely published (the most detailed,
and still useful, is at the back of Krogh 1982).
Recent work continues to add new sites, typically
minor sites of one or two ruins rather than farms,
but more significantly it is providing a much more
detailed and clear picture of sites long ago identified
(Algreen Møller and Koch Madsen 2006a, 2006b;
Guldager et al. 2002; Vésteinsson 2008). Although
it has been obvious since the 19th century that not
all Norse sites represent farms—some are shielings
or economic buildings in out-fields—and that some
farms were more permanent, wealthier, and had
more households than others (see e.g., Roussell’s
1941 classification system), the distribution maps do
not reflect such differences, and no complete inventory
of Norse sites in Greenland is available in print.
This knowledge gap is a major obstacle to parish
reconstruction, which depends on the numbers and
locations of farms being at least roughly known.
In order to get a handle on this overall inventory,
the reports of the most recent field surveys were
studied (Algreen Møller and Koch Madsen
2006a, 2006b; Guldager et al. 2002; Vésteinsson
2008), and the 176 sites described in
them grouped into farms, minor farms and
other sites. Distinguishing between farms
and non-farms was generally unproblematic.
The former have, as a rule, more buildings,
at least one of which can be characterized as
a dwelling, and a grassy area definable as a
home-field. Distinguishing between farms and
Table 2. Classification of sites in three recently surveyed regions of
Eystribyggð.
Region
Brattahlíð Hvalseyjarfjörður VatnahverfiTotal
# % # % # % # %
Permanent farms 45 56 6 43 29 35 80 45
Minor farms 6 8 2 14 16 20 24 14
Other sites 29 36 6 43 37 45 72 41
Total 80 100 14 100 82 100 176 100
2010 O. Vésteinsson 145
Considering the bias of the presently available
data just mentioned, the figure of 265 should be
considered as a maximum. The medieval manuscript
Grönlandiae vetus chorographia mentioned above
records the information that there were 190 farms
in Eystribyggð (and 90 in Vestribyggð) (Halldórsson
1978:39), a figure which is reassuringly close
to the calculated one. This tally presumably reports
the number of properties, equivalent to the Icelandic
concept of lögbýli. These properties could have multiple
households, and it is therefore to be expected
that this figure is lower than that of archaeologically
defined farm sites. Here, the figure of 190 will be
treated as a minimum and 265 as a maximum for
the number of farms in Eystribyggð. With 14 parish
churches, that gives 13.5 and 19 farms per parish,
respectively, and with 12 parish churches, it yields
16 and 22 farms per parish, respectively. In Iceland,
the national average was 11 farms per parish
(Vésteinsson 2000:241), and although there were
equally large parishes in Iceland, the Greenlandic
ones can only be described as very large. Although
these figures give cause enough for reflection, the
case can be pushed a bit harder to produce a sense of
the parish system by trying to map the figures onto
the landscape.
Reconstructing Parishes in Eystribyggð
One way of going about reconstructing parish
boundaries in Norse Greenland would be to
draw von Thiessen polygons onto the landscape.
Given that this landscape is riven by fjords and high
mountains, this would, however, produce some very
strange results, and here a more contextual, and
therefore inherently more debatable, method will be
employed. This approach tries to estimate what was
the shortest possible route (in most cases by sea)
from any given farm to a church, placing each farm
in the parish of the church it is closest to. This is by
no means unproblematic because alternative routes
(e.g., overland vs. by sea) often exist and it is in most
cases difficult to assess without detailed knowledge
of local conditions, which would be more realistic.
Where a farm or farms could be placed in either one
of two parishes on the basis of distance, it was as a
rule attributed to the parish with fewer farms on the
reasonable, but not necessarily correct, assumption
that there was a concern to divide the farms equally
between parishes. Finally, indications about parish
boundaries given by Ívar Bárðarson were taken into
consideration. In one case, he clearly states that
eight farms in Langey paid tithe to the church in
Hvalseyjarfjörður, but in all other cases, he simply
describes the area “owned” by a particular church.
In some cases, this clearly refers to landownership,
but in others, especially in the southern part of
Eystribyggð, it seems to indicate the extent of the
parishes as well (see Keller 1991:135–36).
The results of this exercise can be seen in Table 3
and Figure 3. The map shows Vogar parish based
on Ø162, but if Vogar is Ø149 and the nunnery was
further north, then that would make their parishes
more evenly sized in terms of the number of farms.
The two parishes in Ketilsfjörður, where the locations
of the churches remain unknown, are shown
as one parish, and following the hypothesis that
Garðanes and Harðsteinaberg parishes were merged
with undir Sólarfjöllum and Brattahlíð, respectively,
an attempt to split these parishes is not made either.
The number of farms is given as a range for each parish,
with the lower number corresponding to a sum
of 190 and the higher to a sum of 265. The degree
of uncertainty varies with the confidence that can
be placed in the identification of actual farm sites
within each parish. The greatest uncertainty is about
the parish of Dýrnes, which Ívar claims is the largest
in Greenland. This assertion really only makes sense
if the farms in the so-called Middle settlement (Albrethsen
and Arneborg 2004, Vebæk 1956), where
no church has been found (although a gravestone
find is reported in Arneborg [1994]), belonged to
Dýrnes. That is a very long way indeed to go to
church (more than 160 km by sea) and if true, has
profound implications about the nature of pastoral
care in Norse Greenland.
It hardly needs stressing that these numbers and
boundaries can only be considered as very rough
approximations. Accuracy cannot be aimed for, and
other reasonable premises would produce different
results. It is maintained, however, that this analysis
gives a clear enough sense of the shape and contours
of the parish system to support important observations
about the nature of Norse Greenlandic society.
Table 3. Reconstructed numbers of farms in 14 parishes in
Eystribyggð.
Suggested number Lower Higher
of farms estimate estimate
Herjólfsnes 17 15 20
Árós 10 8 12
Pétursvík 7 5 7
klaustur 12 10 15
Vogar 14 12 15
Nunnuklaustur 31 30 35
undir Höfða 30 25 35
Garðar 9 8 10
Harðsteinaberg 6 5 8
Brattahlíð 17 15 20
Garðanes 6 5 7
undir Sólarfjöllum 8 5 10
Hvalseyjarfjörður 30 25 32
Dýrnes 34 22 40
Total 231 190 266
146 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
all the farms in Eystribyggð (and presumably all in
Vestribyggð) belonged to very large parishes, while
in Iceland less than a fifth did.
Keeping these differences in mind, the implications
of the second structural aspect—the apparently
much smaller number of chapels and annexes in
Norse Greenland than in Iceland—become even more
profound. It is possible that chapels and annexes are
drastically under-identified in Norse Greenland, but
as we have seen, there is not much hope that they are.
Instead, it seems that they are mainly conspicuous by
their absence from the Norse Greenlandic landscape.
Figure 5 compares Eystribyggð with Vestfirðir,
the northwestern region of Iceland most similar to
Greenland in terms of geography and settlement patterns.
It is a landscape cut through with deep fjords,
and settlement there is largely confined to narrow
Discussion
Two structural aspects of the Icelandic and Norse
Greenlandic parish systems can be compared. One
is parish size, and Figure 4 presents an attempt to
draw out the difference. Given the uncertainty about
the Norse Greenlandic parish sizes, the numbers for
Greenland can be distributed differently across the
size categories and so they cannot be taken literally,
but Figure 4 allows three main conclusions:
first, that the systems are similar in general outline;
second, that very small parishes (1–5 farms) did not
exist in Norse Greenland; and third, that very large
parishes (25+ farms) were much more common
in Greenland, making up more than a third of the
whole, while in Iceland very large parishes are less
than a tenth. To put it differently: more than half of
Figure 3. Reconstructed parish boundaries in Eystribyggð.
2010 O. Vésteinsson 147
Figure 4. Parish sizes in Iceland and Eystribyggð compared. Icelandic figures from Vésteinsson
2000:241 (Table 9), based on actual figures for ca. 66% of Icelandic parishes.
Figure 5. Comparison of the proportions of farms with parish churches, chapels, or annexes, or
with neither, in Eystribyggð in Greenland and Vestfirðir in Iceland.
in Eystribyggð, but this was offset by a much greater
number of annexes and chapels. It is reasonable to
equate the latter group of churches with a middle
class—small landowners and well-off tenants—who
maintained a degree of independence in relation to
the parish centers, which were either ecclesiastical
benefices or bases of secular power. That this class
of people is so poorly attested in Norse Greenland
suggests that Norse Greenlandic society was a
more decidedly two-tier society, with a small upper
class and a more
homogenous lower
class. The larger
parishes also relate
to this pattern,
suggesting that the
Norse Greenlandic
communities were
more centralized,
with relatively
fewer centers, but
that each center not
only had a larger
resource base but
also controlled a
greater proportion
of the available
revenue than their
counterparts in Iceland.
In the North
Atlantic, there
seems to be a correlation
between
greater settlement
dispersal and larger
parish sizes and
fewer churches and
chapels. This relationship
is certainly
the case within Iceland,
and the data
from Norse Greenland
suggest that the
communities there
exhibit the same
trend in extreme.
Vestribyggð was
even more exaggerated
in this respect
than Eystribyggð,
with ca. three 30-
farm parishes and
no chapels or annexes.
That this
correlation exists
may suggest that
parish structure
coastal strips. In the Icelandic context, Vestfirðir is
a region of large parishes and relatively few chapels
and annexes, but the difference with Norse Greenland
is nevertheless striking.
In Vestfirðir, there were 35 parish churches, and
133 chapels or annexes have been identified (the actual
total is likely to be higher), while farms without
church or chapel were ca. 360 in the 14th and 15th
centuries to which these figures apply. The average
parish in Vestfirðir was, in fact, slightly larger than
148 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
was to a large degree a function of the economic
base, that the poorer the land and hence greater the
dispersal of settlement, the larger the ecclesiastical
units had to be. That might imply that the more
dispersed settlement units were smaller in terms of
population and/or less productive than units in more
densely settled areas because otherwise they would
have been able to support at least the same relative
number of churches. This line of argument might
hold in a purely agrarian economy, but in the North
Atlantic, it is arguable that units in areas of extreme
settlement dispersal were often highly productive;
they could occupy isolated pockets of good land
for animal husbandry and have access to extensive
pastures, but more likely they had access to plentiful
wildlife. The vulnerability of such units might not
relate so much to the economic base, but rather to
problems of manning the operations. It is possible
that in some cases such units were only viable with
a relatively large crew (e.g., enough to man a boat
or to round up herds dispersed over large areas), and
that they had to rely on recruiting workers (perhaps
seasonally) from somewhere else, individuals who
would have had limited incentive or opportunity to
settle down in the region. Even if such units could
be operated by single family households, they might
not have been considered such desirable places to
live in by family folk either. Eating seal until it
comes out of the ears is only an exciting prospect
for a hungry person. Places which have nothing
to offer except calorific abundance are inherently
vulnerable to competition from places that offer
more excitement, especially in good times. This is
the vulnerability of areas of dispersed settlement,
and the risk of periodic abandonment of the units
will have had to be factored in to decisions about
building infrastructure like churches. Such churches
had to spread the risk of abandonment by having
larger parishes, and they could not tolerate any siphoning
off of revenue to lesser churches. It follows
that while the risks of building a church in areas of
dispersed settlement could be high, the profits could
also be exponentially greater than in areas of more
predictable, and hence more safely dividable, revenues.
This in turn suggests that church owners in
such areas of dispersed settlement would be likely
to become actively involved in maintaining the
population level of their parishes. If farms became
abandoned, the church owners would have been well
placed, and it would have been in their interest, to
buy them in order to encourage speedy reoccupation.
In this light, it may not seem so farfetched to
take Ívar’s description literally to mean that many of
the parish churches of Eystribyggð actually owned
all the land in their parishes. In this sort of system,
not only the tithe and other church dues went to the
church-lord but also rent, presumably both of land
and livestock, and quite likely he or she might also
be responsible for collecting taxes, tolls, and fines
for the royal and ecclesiastical treasuries. The high
degree of economic centralization implied by this is
manifested in the building works at these centers,
the stone churches and feasting halls. The emphasis
on providing a setting for social interaction and
religious services is apparent and it suggests that
the church-lords tried to out-do each other in order
to hold on to and attract enough people to man the
farms that kept the system afloat. However, while
they could put on magnificent feasts and religious
celebrations for their parishioners, the church-lords
could not really make up for the social drawbacks
of the isolation of the farms, the root-cause for the
shape of the system. To get a sense of how very
dispersed settlement in Norse Greenland was, it can
be noted that Eystribyggð was some 15,000 km2 and
had 190–260 farms, while Vestfirðir in Iceland, a
region of high settlement dispersal in the Icelandic
context, was 10.000 km2 with some 530 farms. In
Hvalseyjarfjörður, the mean distance to the nearest
neighbor was 4.1 km (i.e., when all the farm
sites were occupied), which is a significantly higher
figure than the area of greatest settlement dispersal
in Iceland (Hornstrandir, with 2.5 km mean distance
to the nearest neighbor [Vésteinsson 2006:93
(Table 5.1)]). Settlement was denser in parts of the
Brattahlíð region and Vatnahverfi, but there were
also other areas where distances between farms
were much greater, suggesting that this is a fairly
representative figure. This sparse settlement pattern
means, in effect, that social interaction between
farms in Norse Greenland would have been rare and
in most cases would have required special effort,
such as going to a feast or a mass, or the gathering
for joint expeditions. These occasions would have
been separated by long periods of isolation, and for
some members of the households—young children,
the old and infirm, as well as women—such interactions
would be even fewer than for others, especially
young men.
It is quite possible to imagine a society where
this very low level of social interaction is the norm
and where no one thinks it is anything to complain
about. Once other standards intrude, however, things
can change rapidly. In the earliest Icelandic church
legislation, The Old Christian Law Section, originally
composed in the 1120s, there is a palpable sense
of worry about how to maintain sufficient levels of
pastoral care in a country of dispersed settlement.
This angst is most apparent in the regulations about
baptism, requiring the priest always to be ready to
baptize at short notice and grown-ups to be able
to perform a short-order baptism in case a priest
2010 O. Vésteinsson 149
could not be reached (Grágás 1852:4–5), but it can
also be inferred from the law’s mention of visitation
of the sick, hearing last confession, and administering
extreme unction (Grágás 1852:12, 21). Birth and
death were the two most significant moments in a
medieval Christian’s life, and the system of pastoral
care developed from the 10th century onwards
intended a priest to be at hand at these moments to
make sure that the soul stayed on the path to salvation.
This system, modelled on European village
societies, also intended a priest to be a constant presence,
guiding his flock through every step of their
lives, achieved by regular church attendance. Applying
these principles in the North Atlantic was clearly
problematic. Short-cuts were developed, and the Icelandic
system of itinerant priests who serviced the
chapels and annexes away from the parish church
was clearly, in part at least, a response intended
to provide a more effective cure of souls. How the
Norse Greenlandic church adapted to the more extreme
conditions of that country is difficult to know.
It is reasonable to assume that the parish churches as
a rule had more than one priest, and it is conceivable
that some of these would have been itinerant, if not
so much to service chapels and annexes—because
there were not many of those—but simply to visit
the households of their far-flung ministries and provide
pastoral care. That Greenlandic conditions were
known to call for special solutions is evident by the
account in Eiríks saga rauða of how the Greenlanders
buried their dead at their farms in unconsecrated
ground, placing a wooden stick vertically on the
corpse’s breast which was then taken out when a
priest came by and holy water poured into the hole
(Íslenzk fornrit IV:217). Such stories do not have to
be taken literally (although see Magnússon 1972),
but they do attest to a perception of Greenland as
a place of great distances and isolation, a perception
the Greenlanders themselves cannot have been
completely unaware of. The knowledge that one inhabits
a frontier where all modern amenities are not
available does not have to have negative effects on a
society as long as there is a sense of progress: a realistic
prospect that at least some of those amenities
will be provided in the not-so-distant future. While
the parish system was developing in Greenland in
the course of the 12th and 13th centuries, with steady
improvements in the cure of souls and build-up of
the church centers, the Norse Greenlanders may well
have been content with their lot. However, once the
system became consolidated and ceased to expand
or improve, the realization that this is as good as its
gets will have started to have an impact on the Norse
Greenlandic psyche. Once the limits of growth had
been reached, the negative aspects of life in Greenland
will have become all the more glaring.
Conclusion
The isolation of the Norse Greenlanders was
twofold. They were not only isolated from the rest
of the world, but they also lived in an isolation from
each other which was of an order of magnitude
greater than in any other whole society in medieval
Christendom. The settlement patterns established
in the late 10th and early 11th centuries shaped the
parish system that took form in the 12th century and
continued to develop throughout the 13th century
as evidenced by major building-works at the parish
centers, mostly completed or halted by the first
half of the 14th century. Compared to Iceland, this
parish system was highly centralized, suggesting
that Norse Greenlandic society was more abruptly
divided in two tiers, an upper class and a lower
class, and that the Norse Greenlandic upper-class,
the church-lords, were much more completely in
control of the surplus production. As long as this
system continued to grow, and competition between
the church-centers is evident, isolation and long
distances would have been perceived as obstacles
to be overcome, but once growth slowed down and
stability was reached, the quality of life in Norse
Greenland would have started to be considered as
poor, irrespective of how much food could be put on
the tables. Had Jesus been a Greenlander, he might
have said: “Man does not live by seal alone,” and he
would have been right.
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