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life_of_glamour) wrote2012-07-19 02:43 am
life_of_glamour) wrote2012-07-19 02:43 am
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Day 11: Eiríkstaðir and Breiðafjörður
There aren't many Viking-era ruins in Iceland. Well...none. Because they A) became farmers and settlers when they got here and B) they made houses out of turf, there not being much wood in Iceland. (but plenty of lava rock, yet they didn't use it to build anything...hmmm)
So any Viking-era building we see is a reconstruction, based on stone foundations found here and there. Today we visited the place where Eirik the Red (father of Leif Eirikson, discoverer of the New World) lived for a while. Now, he only lived there for 10 or so years, because he was a massive dick and couldn't get along with his neighbors and was banished, after a time, from Iceland for 3 years, at which point he sailed west and discovered Greenland. That's another story.
So we visited the site where he lived for a while in Iceland, and they've built a reconstructed turf house as they imagine his might have been:
Here's what the ACTUAL site where they think his house was looks like now, not much to look at if you ask me:
But, they're fairly sure there was a turf house on that site around 1000 CE, so I'm willing to go along with this being the actual place.
We bought our tickets and went inside where they had a fire and a nice lady was telling the story of Eirik and his adventures, first in Icelandic: "blah blah blah blah blah" *hand gestures and different voices and blah blah and whispering and waving a horn cup around* And then in English: "So he sailed off and discovered Greenland." So we sort of got the sense that Icelandic sagas are a lot more interesting in the original Icelandic. Heh.
Apparently Leif's whole family was driven out of North America eventually because his sister was a jerk. I do wonder exactly what you have to do to be banished from an entire continent...
After that we drove to a town called Stykkishólmur on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. The drive was beautiful, even if the weather had taken a turn for the atmospheric:
At Stykkishólmur we got tickets to go on a boat ride in the Fjord, which is more of a bay, and see the island strewn about made of some pretty unusual basalt rock, plus there was something about seabirds but I've already seen puffins so I'm good.
But back to Eirik's story - apparently after being driven from his home that we'd seen earlier, he was an outlaw and needed to make boats on the sly in a hidden place, so he made them here on this little bay, called Eirik's Bay by our boat captain. According to legend, these islands were heavily forested and the trees provided cover for the boat-making operation so that the search helicopters couldn't find him while he prepared to sail West to Greenland (or wherever he ended up).
Several times now we've heard references to Iceland having been forested when the original Viking settlers got here, but also that there was no wood so they had to make turf houses, and so far I've been unable to determine which of these is true. I mean, either the place had lots of trees, and therefore there should be wooden structures or remnants of them from the original settlers, or there were no trees and that's why turf houses. And, so far there's been no explanation for what happened to all of these theoretical trees. I'm really trying to figure this out but so far it's not coming to me. Having driven around this place for almost 2 weeks now I can attest that this country is much bigger than it looks on a map, and a whole country's-worth of wood doesn't just up and disappear...right? Even if they were burning them all for heat, in a tree-burning frenzy, wouldn't they have stopped and used a few logs for building shelter? Everything I read says, "It's been said that Iceland was covered with trees..." but they never say who is saying it and what they're basing it on.
Back to the basalt islands, they were really cool:
It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. They sky was cloudy and dramatic, the water was smooth as glass.
We then tried to have a meal at a place rated highly by Frommers, and found that it had been ruined by the publicity, as it was terrible, crowded, understaffed, and after waiting for 20 minutes to have somebody bring us some water we left and went to another restaurant, not as highly rated, which was perfect. I realized that I'm on vacation - I should be having more wine and cocktails! If only my stupid head would stop punishing me for alcohol with migraines. Gah.
So any Viking-era building we see is a reconstruction, based on stone foundations found here and there. Today we visited the place where Eirik the Red (father of Leif Eirikson, discoverer of the New World) lived for a while. Now, he only lived there for 10 or so years, because he was a massive dick and couldn't get along with his neighbors and was banished, after a time, from Iceland for 3 years, at which point he sailed west and discovered Greenland. That's another story.
So we visited the site where he lived for a while in Iceland, and they've built a reconstructed turf house as they imagine his might have been:
Here's what the ACTUAL site where they think his house was looks like now, not much to look at if you ask me:
But, they're fairly sure there was a turf house on that site around 1000 CE, so I'm willing to go along with this being the actual place.
We bought our tickets and went inside where they had a fire and a nice lady was telling the story of Eirik and his adventures, first in Icelandic: "blah blah blah blah blah" *hand gestures and different voices and blah blah and whispering and waving a horn cup around* And then in English: "So he sailed off and discovered Greenland." So we sort of got the sense that Icelandic sagas are a lot more interesting in the original Icelandic. Heh.
Apparently Leif's whole family was driven out of North America eventually because his sister was a jerk. I do wonder exactly what you have to do to be banished from an entire continent...
After that we drove to a town called Stykkishólmur on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. The drive was beautiful, even if the weather had taken a turn for the atmospheric:
At Stykkishólmur we got tickets to go on a boat ride in the Fjord, which is more of a bay, and see the island strewn about made of some pretty unusual basalt rock, plus there was something about seabirds but I've already seen puffins so I'm good.
But back to Eirik's story - apparently after being driven from his home that we'd seen earlier, he was an outlaw and needed to make boats on the sly in a hidden place, so he made them here on this little bay, called Eirik's Bay by our boat captain. According to legend, these islands were heavily forested and the trees provided cover for the boat-making operation so that the search helicopters couldn't find him while he prepared to sail West to Greenland (or wherever he ended up).
Several times now we've heard references to Iceland having been forested when the original Viking settlers got here, but also that there was no wood so they had to make turf houses, and so far I've been unable to determine which of these is true. I mean, either the place had lots of trees, and therefore there should be wooden structures or remnants of them from the original settlers, or there were no trees and that's why turf houses. And, so far there's been no explanation for what happened to all of these theoretical trees. I'm really trying to figure this out but so far it's not coming to me. Having driven around this place for almost 2 weeks now I can attest that this country is much bigger than it looks on a map, and a whole country's-worth of wood doesn't just up and disappear...right? Even if they were burning them all for heat, in a tree-burning frenzy, wouldn't they have stopped and used a few logs for building shelter? Everything I read says, "It's been said that Iceland was covered with trees..." but they never say who is saying it and what they're basing it on.
Back to the basalt islands, they were really cool:
It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. They sky was cloudy and dramatic, the water was smooth as glass.
We then tried to have a meal at a place rated highly by Frommers, and found that it had been ruined by the publicity, as it was terrible, crowded, understaffed, and after waiting for 20 minutes to have somebody bring us some water we left and went to another restaurant, not as highly rated, which was perfect. I realized that I'm on vacation - I should be having more wine and cocktails! If only my stupid head would stop punishing me for alcohol with migraines. Gah.
no subject
"At the time of human settlement about 1140 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25-40% of Iceland's land area. As in agrarian societies everywhere, the settlers began by cutting down the forests and burning scrubland to create fields and grazing land. Continued sheep grazing prevented regeneration of the birchwoods after cutting and the area of woodland declined steadily. The birchwoods were important as a source of fuelwood, building material and livestock fodder, but the most important forest product was charcoal, needed to smelt iron and make iron tools."
no subject
Keep up the wonderful journal. I'm really enjoying it.
no subject
Abstract:
Ecosystem variability must be assessed over a range of timescales in order to fully understand natural ecosystem processes. Long-term climate change, at millennial and centennial scales, is a major driver of natural ecosystem variability, but identifying evidence of past climate change is frequently confounded by human-induced impacts on the ecosystem. Iceland is a location where it is possible to separate natural from anthropogenic change in environmental archives, as the date of settlement is accepted to be around AD 874, prior to which the island was free from proven human impacts. We used a lake sediment core from Breiðavatn, near Reykholt, a major farm of the Norse period in western Iceland, to examine landscape development. A change in pollen concentration in the sediments, especially the decline in Betula, indicated initial landscape degradation immediately post-settlement, whereas the chironomid fauna and reconstructed temperatures were relatively complacent during this period. The pollen evidence is corroborated by 14C analyses, which indicate an increase in older carbon entering the lake, inferred to have been caused by increased erosion following settlement. Further decreases in Betula pollen occurred around AD 1300, pre-dating a drop in chironomid-inferred temperatures (CI-T) of ~1°C over 100–200 years. The CI-T reconstruction also shows a significant cooling after ~AD 1800, likely indicative of the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age. The evidence suggests that the chironomid record was relatively unaffected by the increased landscape degradation and hence reveals a temperature reconstruction independent of human impact. source: Gathorne-Hardy et. al. 2009. Lake sediment evidence for late Holocene climate change and landscape erosion in western Iceland. Journal of Paleolimnology Volume 42, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 413-426