Lyonel Perabo, a Perspectives columnist for TWH, contributed to this article.
TWH – Two new reports provide information about Norse culture. One report involves the latest find at Gjellestad, an Iron Age Norse site. The other explores how climate change led to the demise of the Norse settlement in Greenland.
Large Longhouse discovered at Gjellestad
Last month, a statement from Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) noted that archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to discover five longhouses at Gjellestad. Of those five longhouses, one is much larger than the others, measuring 60 meters (196.9 feet) in length and has a width of 15 meters (49.2 feet). Its size makes it one of the largest longhouses ever found in Scandinavia.
Inside Longhouse at Lofotr Viking museum; women in traditional Norse costumes doing needlework etc – Image credit: Finn Bjørklid – CC BY-SA 4.0
The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) reported that they had found four other longhouses. Those other longhouses ranged in length from 15 meters (49.2 feet) to 30 meters (98.4 feet), with widths up to 13 meters (42.6 feet).
Earlier research at Gjellestad had found a ship burial, more longhouses, and burial mounds. The Wild Hunt has reported on those previous discoveries.
Norse longhouses
No consensus exists about the function of this larger longhouse. Lars Gustavsen, the archaeologist at the site, believes that the Norse used this large longhouse as a ceremonial hall. A ceremonial hall could serve religious, social, or political purposes. He does not believe the Norse lived in it.
However, another archaeologist, Sigrid Mannsåker Gundersen said, “We do not know how old the houses are or what function they had.”
Reconstruction of a 2.000 years old Viking house, on its original location. Located in Ringerike, Buskerud, Norway – Public Domain
Lyonel Perabo, a scholar of the Old Norse Religion, and based in Arctic Norway said, “Longhouses were essentially manorial houses, residential spaces used by the Norse aristocracy.”
Longhouses were more than homes. Besides the chieftain’s family, servants/slaves, retainers, and animals would have lived within. He described them as symbols “of the chieftain’s control over an area, as well as a display of wealth and power.”
The Gjellestad site
Archaeologists have found material remains at the site dating from 500 B.C.E. to 800 C.E. They have not yet dated the longhouses. Sometime between 750 to 850 C.E., the local Norse buried the ship. No one knows if these longhouses pre-date or post-date the ship burial. In the same neighborhood, lies Norway’s second-largest burial mound.
The Østfold University College and the Viken County Council have put together a website that tells Gjellestad’s story. It reports that the Norse had obliterated or “recycled” some burial mounds. People would build one burial mound over another.
This “recycling” could represent power struggles at the site. The victors would bury their dead on top of, or within, the burial mounds of those they had defeated. Burials became a way to display their triumph and assert their power.
NIKU reported that this 60-meter longhouse proved the centrality of Gjellestad to the “late Nordic Iron Age.”
Perabo discussed the importance of Gjellestad to Pagans and Heathens. These communities have been following news from Gjellestad as soon as it comes out.
He said, “So far, very few finds which could pertain to Old Norse beliefs and rituals have been presented. The most significant might be the axe, which was placed under the ship, as well as the cremated human remains which were found on the ship itself.”
A few years ago, archaeologists found another large longhouse. Perabo said, “It helped give us a much better understanding of the local Viking Age history and society, as well as reveal a number of probably sacred artifacts.”
Climate change may have doomed the Norse settlement in Greenland
Research has found that that massive sea-level rise contributed to the doom of the Norse Greenland settlement. Oddly, this sea-level rise resulted from increasing coldness rather than increasing heat.
The Inuit began migrating from North America to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) around 2500 B.C.E. Around 981 CE, Europeans established long-term settlements in Greenland, a migration that lasted until the 15th Century.
The Norse settlement co-occurred with the Medieval Warm Period. That era lasted from 900 to 1300. Then, it began to get colder in the North Atlantic. The Little Ice Age had begun. It lasted from 1300 to 1850.
Scientists have long believed that climate change doomed Norse Greenland.
At the American Geophysical Union in December 2021, scientists presented a new theory about the Little Ice Age and Norse settlement. It focused on rising sea levels flooding Norse farming and grazing lands.
Icebergs off the coast of the city of Ilulissat, Greenland – Image credit: Buiobuione – CC BY-SA 4.0
To modern ears, this sounds wrong. Colder temperatures should lower sea levels, not raise them. In the Arctic, increasing cold should cause more water to be stored on land in the form of glaciers.
Geophysicist, Marisa Borreggine, found that regional differences exist in how seawaters rise, and fall. Around Greenland, as glaciers expanded, sea levels rose. Glaciers, covering so much of Greenland, drove this process.
In the Little Ice Age, the advancing Greenland Ice Sheet grew in size. Glaciers weigh a lot. That increased weight pushed down the ground underneath it. As land sank under the weight of the glacier, seawater would have advanced over the sinking land.
The advancing glaciers had a large and growing mass. That mass exerted a gravitational pull on seawater. It attracted seawater to the sinking land of the coastal area. Advancing ice sheets occupied much of the rest of Greenland. Norse settlements found themselves trapped between advancing glaciers and rising seawaters.
Researchers tested their climate theory against models of estimated ice growth and sea-level rise. They plotted these growth patterns against known Viking settlements. Between 1000 and 1400 C.E., they found a rise in sea levels of 4.9 meters (16 feet). That would have flooded 139.9 square kilometers (54 square miles) of coastal land. they found that the Little Ice Age would have disrupted trade and contact between Greenland and Europe. Increased sea ice in the waters off Greenland would have made sailing more dangerous.
In the middle 1300s, the Bubonic Plague killed at least a third of the population of Europe. That much loss of life would also have disrupted trade networks. It would also have disrupted social knowledge of how to conduct trade.
Contact with Europe broke off in the last years of the settlement. The last written contact, a letter, was written in 1408 about a wedding. That couple moved back to Iceland a few years later. In 1771, Norwegian missionaries sailed to Greenland. They hoped to find the remnants of the Norse settlements and convert them to Protestantism. They only found ruins of the Norse settlement.
The Østfold University College and the Viken County Council website has a stunning visual narrative of the development of Gjellestad.
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