Herjólfsnes (Danish: Herjolfsnæs) was a Norse Icelandic settlement in Greenland, 50 km northwest of Cape Farewell. It was established by Herjólfr Bardsson in the late 10th century and is believed to have lasted some 500 years. The fate of its inhabitants, along with all the other Norse Greenlanders, is unknown. The site is known today for having yielded remarkably well-preserved medieval garments, excavated by Danish archaeologist Poul Nørlund in 1921. Its name roughly translates as Herjolf's Point or Cape.
Establishment As noted in the Landnámabók (Icelandic Book of Settlements), Herjolf Bardsson was one of the founding chieftains of the Norse colony in Greenland, and was said to be "a man of considerable stature."The Greenlanders Saga He was part of an exodus from Iceland accompanying Erik the Red, who led an expedition of colonists in 25 ships in AD 985. Landing on Greenland's southwest coast, Erik and his other kinsmen almost invariably chose to settle further inland away from the open Labrador Sea, at the heads of the fjords where the land was better suited to farming. By contrast, Herjolf's decision to establish himself at the end of a fjord directly facing the open ocean near Greenland's southernmost tip suggests that his primary intention was not farming, but rather the establishment of the new colony's major port of call for incoming ships from Iceland and Europe.Farley Mowat, Westviking (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965), pg. 84-5
Herjolf's homestead was situated on the west shore of a fjord that came to bear his name, Herjolfsfjord, and was the southern- and easternmost major homestead of the colony's Eastern Settlement.
According to the Greenlanders' saga, Herjolfsnes played a significant role in the Norse Icelandic discovery of North America. Herjolf's son Bjarni had been conducting business in Norway and returned to Iceland to spend Yule at the family's homestead, only to learn Herjolf had joined the exodus to the new Greenland colony. Bjarni set out to follow Herjolf, but was blown off course to the southwest, becoming the first known European to skirt, if not land on, the North American coast. Realizing he had overshot Greenland, Bjarni reversed course to the northeast and came to a land that matched the description he had been given. The saga states, "...they landed in the evening under a ness; and there was a boat by the ness, and just here lived Bjarni's father, and from him has the ness taken its name, and is since called Herjolfsness."The Greenlanders Saga The saga then relates how Bjarni travelled to Norway and made his discovery known to the court of Erik Jarl. Erik is said to have treated him well, but others in the court criticized Bjarni's lack of initiative for failing to explore the new lands he had seen. Upon Bjarni's return to Herjolfsnes, he is said to have given up seafaring and lived there with his father, and upon Herjolf's death "afterwards dwelt there" presumably as the chieftain of the homestead and the immediate district.
In Erik the Red's Saga (which covers essentially the same events as the Greenlanders Saga), the famous Icelander Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir is said to have landed at Herjolfsnes after a difficult journey, and lived there for a while. Curiously, although this saga specifically denotes the homestead as Herjolfsnes, it is described as being owned by a man named Thorkell, and makes no mention of Herjolf or Bjarni. Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad believed that the saga's author may have written the two men out of the story in order to elevate the exploits of Leif Eriksson, the first known European to land in North America.Helge & Anne Stine Ingstad, The Viking Discovery of America (St. John's: Breakwater, 2000) pg. 71 By contrast, in The Greenlanders Saga, Leif is said to have prepared for his voyage to Vinland by purchasing Bjarni's ship, during which he presumably received counsel and directions from Bjarni.
After the colony's conversion to Christianity in AD 1000, Herjolfsnes was one of 16 known sites in the Eastern Settlement on which a church was raised. The ruins that are visible today are those of a church built in the 13th century, which was likely raised on the site of an older, conversion-era church. It had a rectangular foundation similar to that of the churches at Hvalsey and Brattahlid further north in a style that was common in medieval northern Europe. The Herjolfsnes church was the 3rd largest in the Norse Greenland colony, behind Gardar and Brattahlid.Helge Ingstad, Land Under the Pole Star (New York: St. Martin's, 1966), pg. 254 Gardar was the seat of Norse Greenland's bishopric and also the seat of its Althing parliament, while Brattahlid was the most prominent single homestead due to its association with Erik The Red and his descendants, so Herjolfsnes' comparably sized church is an indication of the homestead's relative importance and stature among the Norse Greenland settlements.
The church's graveyard contained the remains of local inhabitants and also of those who had died during ocean voyages to the colony. One account tells of 12th century Icelanders who were shipwrecked on the east coast and perished while trying to cross the inland glaciers in an attempt to reach Herjolfsnes, only to be buried there instead. For bodies lost or buried at sea, it appears to have been the custom to carve commemorative runes onto a stick which was then placed in the Herjolfsnes graveyard when the ship made landfall there. One such runestick found at Herjolfsnes reads, "This woman, whose name was Gudveg, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea."Niels Lynnerup, "The Greenland Norse," Monographs on Greenland no. 24 (1998): pg. 54
Some of the deceased at Herjolfsnes had been laid to rest in wooden coffins. However, perhaps owing to the scarcity of wood, it increasingly became the practice to wrap the deceased in layers of wool clothing.Else Østergård, Woven Into The Earth (Aarhus: Aarhus U Press, 2004) pg. 22 This practice inadvertently created a treasure trove of medieval textile and fashion artifacts when the graves and well-preserved clothes were excavated in the early 20th century.
Later history Ivar Bardarson, a Norwegian priest who lived in the colony for nearly 20 years in the mid 14th century as a representative of the Norwegian Crown and the Catholic church, wrote that Herjolfsnes served as the major harbour for Greenland's inbound and outbound traffic and was well known to North Atlantic sailors, who referred to it as "Sand".Land Under the Pole Star, pg. 254 It is not clear if the harbour was in the immediate area of the church and homestead. The nearby Makkarneq Bay, which offers much better shelter than Herjolfsnes proper, features several Norse ruins that appear to include the foundations of stone warehouses, and is thus a possible site of the Sand harbour that Bardarson described.Jette Arneborg, Saga Trails - Four chieftain’s farmsteads in the Norse settlement of Greenland (The National Museum of Denmark) pg. 75
Herjolfsnes is the only Greenland settlement shown on the Skálholt Map from the late Middle Ages, which shows the North Atlantic's European and North American coastlines as perceived by Norse explorers.
Contact with other peoples Prior to the arrival of the Norse Icelanders, successive waves of Paleo-Eskimo cultures had inhabited Greenland, perhaps as far back as 2500 BC. However, the island is believed to have been uninhabited by the time of the Norse arrival, except perhaps for the extreme northwest region, by the Dorset culture. The Little Climatic Optimum then under way would have made the southwest coast especially unsuited to the Dorset's arctic hunter-gatherer way of life; they are believed to have had great difficulty adapting to this warm period, and retreated progressively farther north. As a result, it is believed that the first North American aboriginals that Norse Greenlanders encountered were actually the Beothuk in Newfoundland. It was only later that the Norse came into direct contact with related peoples in Greenland itself, the Thule culture, who supplanted the Dorset throughout the North American Arctic starting circa AD 1000. These contacts likely started when the Norse began to make regular hunting trips far north of their settlements - or to the island's east coast - to obtain walrus and narwhal ivory.
With the advent of the Little Ice Age, Greenland's cooling climate prompted the Thule to increase their southern range, and brought them into greater contact with the Norse than had been the case with the Dorset.
Modern Inuit Greenlanders have oral histories about their ancestors' contact with the Norse, which recount instances of both friendship and hostilities. One legend tells of a Norse chieftain named Ungortoq and his enemy, an Inuk leader named K'aissape who was said to have burned the Hvalsey settlement and pursued Ungortoq from Hvalseyfjord all the way down past Herjolfsnes to Cape Farewell.
Recent archaeological soil testing of Norse and Thule building ruins in Makkarneq Bay a few kilometres west of Herjolfsnes suggests that both peoples occupied the area at the same time.Kirsty A. Golding A & Ian A. Simpson, The historical legacy of Anthrosols at Sandhavn (Stirling: University of Stirling, 2010) pg. 22 This may be evidence that the Thule were active participants in the Herjolfsnes ivory trade during the Norse period.
Disappearance Having endured for nearly a half-millennium, the exact fate of the Norse Icelandic settlers in Herjolfsnes and the entirety of Greenland remains unknown, although several factors were likely involved. The Greenlanders' pastoral way of life would have been severely challenged by the onset of the Little Ice Age, much more so than their counterparts in Europe. DNA analysis of human remains from Herjolfsnes and other settlements shows that marine-based protein (especially from seals) became an increasingly large part of their diet, compared to the pastoral diet of Erik the Red's time. Other theories include the possibility of conflict with Thule Inuit and predation by European pirates. There is no indication from archaeology or human remains that the Norse intermarried with the Thule or adopted their way of life, nor any record from Iceland or Norway that hints of an exodus out of Greenland.