On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the bloody
feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these transplanted
Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there were thralls among
them and the irritations growing out of thralldom. Also, while much
of their daily routine was quiet enough, they were subject to savage
weather and perils of navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up
the coast, where many of them maintained stations for that purpose at
Krogfiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric was
able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed with
him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred ample experiences
of storm and danger. These wild elements of life would tend to enhance
a certain recklessness; and the law must have been impotent to maintain
order in remote fiords and headlands, even if it had sought to do so.
In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the very
first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young wife on the
eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore together. In another
of the Greenland tales there is a bloody contention, freely involving
homicide, over the claims of the church upon the contents of two ships
which had come to grief. No doubt such instances might be multiplied;
but in the main we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders
went orderly enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and
fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a grievance,
narrated at second or third hand.
If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in a
remote region and could not present many salient features. The colony
possessed at least one monastery and the beginning of a literature,
including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a curious interest in
the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part of a distant colonist
hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside the glaciers. In art, as
distinguished from literature, they seem to have made few advances,
if any, beyond mere ornamental carving or designing on a plane hardly
surpassing that of the Eskimos.
EXPLORATIONS OF EARLY GREENLANDERS
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