Free Vikings in America by Graeme Davis Page B

to be travelled for timber is substantial. All the stepping-stone islands – Iceland, the Faroe, Shetland and Orkney islands – are virtually without timber. The nearest good European source of timber was Norway. Almost from the start of the Greenland colony trade was direct between Greenland and Norway, and predicated on the need for timber. A voyage via Iceland was many additional hundreds of miles, and putting in at an Icelandic port would have incurred costs and inconvenience for a Greenlandic ship. The sailing directions have been recorded, and are almost comically simple: sail west from Nidaros in Norway so as to pass midway between Shetland and the Faroe Islands, so that the top portion of the cliffs of each island group may be seen over the horizon; set a course due west from there. The south coast of Iceland may be seen to starboard; continue until Greenland’s Cape Farewell is sighted. 3 This direct route took ships south of the worst drift ice obstacles of the Denmark Strait, offering a voyage that was actually safer than the short crossing from Iceland’s Snaefelsness to east Greenland. While this route was clearly followed by hundreds, even thousands of ships, it was a major undertaking to cross the whole of the North Atlantic in one leap, and there can be no minimising the achievement of these mariners. A trade was established whereby the Greenlanders supplied at first wool, and later walrus and narwhal ivory and Arctic furs, and traded this for timber and some European luxuries. In the ivory and furs Greenlanders had a valuable, low-weight cargo for trade, something their cousins in Iceland largely lacked, and giving Greenland the potential for prosperity and even wealth.
Settlements in Greenland
    The Vikings created around 200 settlements in Greenland, of which around 160 have been identified, and many have been excavated. These settlements were not villages, but individual farms. A typical farmstead would have accommodated 20 to 30 people. At its centre was the house, often calleda hall. The building material was usually stone, sometimes stone and turf, with a turf roof supported on timber pillars. All of these halls have a similar ground plan. The sole door was situated at one end of the structure, entering into a small room sometimes described as a store – and doubtless often used in this way – but in effect a porch. The cold winters of Greenland discouraged direct entry from the outside to the living room. From the store or porch a door led into the hall proper. This was an all-purpose living room, with wooden platforms on either side that were used for sleeping at night, and for seating and as work-space by day. A double row of wooden pillars supported the roof. In the middle of the floor, in an open hearth, a fire was kept burning continually, providing both light and heat. There was no chimney; the smoke found its way up to a hole in the roof, though even this could be closed in bad weather with a wooden trapdoor, leaving the smoke to circulate within the roof space.
    The hall was identical with those found in Iceland, and elsewhere back across the stepping stones to the Faroe, Orkney and Shetland islands. Further south turf was more often replaced with stone as a building material. Viking halls were both functional and comfortable – a style of building that has withstood the test of time. Indeed, the Viking style of building offered a greater level of comfort than was offered in some areas of Britain even in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, as recently as the 1960s Scotland’s Western Isles had many families living in ‘black houses’, single rooms with an open fire in the centre, and this one room divided by a wattle screen to provide a living space, and a byre into which they brought their livestock, perhaps a cow and a few sheep, into one end of their living room. Such poverty, requiring animals to be housed alongside people, was