The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown by Harcourt Nancy Marie Brown (2007)

Author:Harcourt, Nancy Marie Brown (2007)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2008-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Land of Wine or Walrus

A ship came to Greenland from Norway that summer. Its captain was a man named Thorfinn Karlsefni. He was the son of Thord Horse-Head, a son of Snorri Thordarson from Hofdi. Thorfinn Karlsefni was very rich. He spent the winter at Brattahlid with Leif Eiriksson and soon fell in love with Gudrid.

—The Saga of the Greenlanders

WALRUS IVORY BROUGHT KARLSEFNI TO GREENLAND. In the Viking Age, walrus ivory was as valuable as gold, and the only place to get it was in the north, where the seas are iced over nine months of the year, and mussels, the walrus’s favorite food, seed the shallow bottoms of the bays. Five hundred miles north of Sandnes, the walrus congregated on the beaches each August. Eirik the Red’s men would sail to Sandnes, replenish their supplies, and set out in hunting parties for Nordsetur—the Northern Camp. Then came the slaughter.

The Norse had no harpoons, so they trapped the huge beasts on land, where they were clumsy. They came at the animals with lances and spears, like Sir James Lamont did in 1858 in Spitsbergen, in northern Norway. “In all my sporting life I never saw anything to equal the wild excitement of these hunts,” he writes. Sixteen men stole along the sea’s edge, then rushed at the thousands of walrus lounging on the rocks, stabbing those nearest the water.

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