|
|
|
"Pygmies" of the Far North
KIRSTEN A. SEAVER
Palo Alto, California
| THE 1837 Copenhagen publication of C. C. Rafn and Finn Magnusen's compilation Antiquitates Americanae provided a cavalcade of information about Norse voyages to North America gleaned from early written sources, and the work resonated both at home and abroad among readers with an interest in all aspects of the "discovery" of America in the early eleventh century. The book was more than a review of well-known sources, however: it encouraged scholars and nonscholars alike to indulge in unrestrained speculations about the Norse in North America as well as in Greenland. Among other things, readers were told that the round Newport Tower in Rhode Island was a medieval Norse church and thus proof of a successful and enduring Norse presence in that area throughout the Middle Ages.1 From this notion (alive to this day in pseudo-scholarly circles) it is but a short step to questions about the explorers' relations with North American natives, to whom Rafn and Magnusen consistently referred as "Skrælings" while recapitulating the Icelandic saga literature. |
1
|
|
The reason for the name Skræling(j)ar (Skrælings), given to the indigenous people the Norse encountered when they reached North America, is a recurring issue in discussions about the activities of the medieval Norse in Greenland. This situation owes much to the fact that modern scholars grappling with the expression Skræling(j)ar encounter problems that, like so much else concerning the vanished Norse Greenland colony, are rooted in nineteenth-century assumptions based on inadequate or wrong information leavened with intellectual and social attitudes different from our own—assumptions with a long shelf life, as demonstrated by the Antiquitates Americanae. |
2
|
|
In the eight decades since the Danish archaeologist Poul Nørlund conducted the first scientific excavation of a Norse Greenland site,2 archaeologists, historians, and philologists have successfully challenged many outdated assumptions, but sometimes without examining the intellectual climate behind their nineteenth-century colleagues' beliefs. A search for the origin of the term Skræling(j)ar must start by considering nineteenth-century thinking, however, because the avenues still guiding scholarly approaches in this area were paved late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth by two men whose influence is still felt: the Norwegian historian Gustav Storm (1845–1903) and the Danish cartographic scholar Axel Anton Bjørnbo (1874–1911). |
3
|
|
Both men were convinced that medieval Europeans had envisioned the world laid out on a disc, and both men interpreted the first European manuscript map to include Greenland in the light of this mistaken notion. As noted later in the present article, Storm's dictum on the meaning of Skræling(j)ar arose directly out of his geographical interpretations. While his etymological speculations have essentially been repudiated, what replaced them has not been convincing enough to end the debate, and his skewed cosmographical views have so far been left alone. |
4
|
| |
|
A GEOGRAPHICAL STARTING POINT | |
| During the last two and a half millennia the oekumene—the habitable world envisioned by educated Europeans—expanded in slow stages from a narrow focus on the Mediterranean basin until it encompassed the entire globe. Aided by the human predilection for trade, both geographical notions and ideas about alien peoples continued to change throughout the Middle Ages and were reflected textually as well as graphically by men of learning, who relegated the Earthly Paradise and assorted monster races to ever more remote and easterly regions. |
. . . |
There are about 10720 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
