The Legacy of Leif Erikson in Greenland

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[00:02:05] I'm Elise and in every episode I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the called and the brave. In this episode we're talking about the history of Christianity in Greenland. So this episode has taken many different forms as I kind of worked through it and figured

[00:02:37] out how to start it. It actually started out being an episode about Hans Aguidi. We will talk about him later. But then as I was going through his story, I found things on the Vikings and I found different, tons of different things.

[00:02:50] So instead of calling this specifically like a Leif Erikson episode or a Hans Aguidi episode, I figured I'd title it the history of Christianity in Greenland because that seems more encompassing. And if you have not listened to the Vikings episode yet, I'll put it in the description.

[00:03:05] This episode is actually a really good follow up. After the Vikings became Christians, what happened to them? Greenland is the world's largest island. You look at it on a map and it's just entirely white.

[00:03:16] It looks like you're looking at Antarctica except for there's tiny bits of green around the coasts. There's less than 57,000 people that live there today and they all live along the coasts where there's little bits of green.

[00:03:28] And now that I've given you the fast facts about Greenland, let's dive into the people. And the first person we're going to talk about is Eric the Red. Everything we know about Eric the Red comes from two different sagas that I will not even attempt to pronounce.

[00:03:41] But they're fact and fiction and it can be hard to separate those two, especially because they're so old. I'll try to stick with the facts as much as is possible. We know that he was born around 950 in Norway.

[00:03:53] His father was banished for killing a man when Eric was 10 years old. Now in Viking law, you could only be banished for a maximum of three years. I assume because Vikings were so fearsome, if they banished everybody for doing bad deeds, I guess they wouldn't have anybody.

[00:04:07] So three years was what they came up with. He immigrated to the Nordic settlement of Iceland. There's really no evidence they ever moved back to Norway. So Eric has settled into life in Iceland and 20 years later, Eric's servants cause a landslide

[00:04:20] that crushed the house of his neighbor and the man died. So a couple relatives of that man avenged his death by killing the servant. So then Eric kills them and then he's banished again and lives on an island off the coast of Iceland.

[00:04:33] A couple years later, while he's building his house, he's entrusted these large rune engraved beams basically to his friend and when he's finished his house or he's ready to put them up, he comes back to get them and his friend doesn't give them back.

[00:04:48] So Eric takes them by force and then he sets a trap for his friend because he knows that his friend is going to retaliate and his friend does. And there ends up being this massive brawl and I think a couple people end up dead so

[00:04:59] then he's exiled again. So then he heads up to what is today known as Greenland. It's possible he knew about Greenland. There was a Nordic explorer about 100 years ago who had spoken about it but it was a completely deserted island when Eric landed there.

[00:05:17] He lands on the southernmost tip and he spends two years exploring the island trying to find the most hospitable places to live. He names himself chieftain of this deserted island and then he heads back to Iceland to

[00:05:28] begin recruiting people and he decides on the name Greenland, not because Greenland is green but because it sounds appealing. And so he rounds up a bunch of willing people, in fact like 400 to 500 people wanted to settle there. Greenland sounds wonderful.

[00:05:44] And they load up 25 ships, only 14 of which made it and they make two settlements east and west and everything is successful. It's going really well. He's really enjoying his life there and all the settlers are.

[00:05:57] I don't know if they feel a little bit cheated because it's not green but they don't complain enough to go back home. Eric has four children. He has three sons, one daughter and the two we'll talk about in this episode are Leif and his daughter Freda.

[00:06:12] Every American and I assume every Canadian learns about Leif Erikson in elementary school and here's some of the things we know about him. He was born in Iceland at around 970 AD and we don't know anything else about him before

[00:06:24] he sails off for Norway when he's around 30 in 1000 AD. He appears to be sent off to be a royal bodyguard for King Olaf I and there seems to be some kind of relationship between Eric the Red and King Olaf I but we don't have any more

[00:06:37] information on that. But while Leif is visiting the court doing his royal bodyguard things, he becomes a believer due to the influence of Olaf. Olaf is a bit of a controversial figure in history because he did a lot of good things

[00:06:51] for Christianity but then also he was quite fond of forced conversions and there's a couple kind of not great stories about him. He didn't appear to do that with Leif and Leif actually was a Christian for the rest of his life as far as we know.

[00:07:06] Unlike a lot of the Vikings who were forced to conversion and then they kind of went back and weren't Christians when they kind of returned to safety but with Leif it was a genuine conversion.

[00:07:17] King Olaf then tasks him with returning to Greenland to spread Christianity and it is successful. A lot of his family members did become believers. His mother was the most enthusiastic one and she actually asks her husband Eric to

[00:07:31] build a church and he agrees but he doesn't like it and he never visits it and she's not happy that he just refuses to become a Christian so she refuses to share a bed with him.

[00:07:42] We don't really know how long that goes on but as far as we know Eric never becomes a Christian. Now I searched high and low looking for examples of kind of the early spread of Christianity

[00:07:55] in Greenland and I could not find anything and I'll explain why that might be a little bit later in this episode but the next thing we see in Leif's life is this discovery of the new world.

[00:08:08] While Leif is in Greenland he hears about a guy who saw a new coastline. He had been blown off course and he sees kind of this rocky outcroppings and he comes back to Greenland and he's talking about it.

[00:08:19] Now some people because we're always looking for the first person to go here or the first person to go there we keep pushing further and further back. So some people want to credit this guy whose name I forget with discovering the new world.

[00:08:32] Now personally I think that's a little bit ridiculous because the guy never landed there. For example, I've been in the Russian airport. Does that mean I can say that I've been to Russia? No. So Leif Erikson is the first European that we have documentation of that visited the

[00:08:46] new world. Leif gets really excited and he wants the whole family to come along and Eric is actually almost going to go but before the voyage sets off he falls off of a horse and takes it as a bad omen that he's not supposed to go.

[00:09:01] And he actually doesn't last much longer after this. In fact he dies before Leif actually returns from the new world. When Leif sets out he finds a place that is just filled with grapes and vines and it's luscious and it's green and he calls it Vinland.

[00:09:15] And there's no concrete evidence of what Vinland is. Most likely according to the experts it is the northern part of Newfoundland. He also discovers Baffin Island which he's not super keen on because he says it's a slab of gray rock.

[00:09:31] He finds Newfoundland and Labrador and there's archaeological discoveries backing all of this stuff up. We know that he overwintered there and then he comes back with grapes and timber and just wild stories. And I want to insert here a story about his sister Freyda.

[00:09:47] Freyda is the exact opposite of her brother in every single way. From what we know about Leif he was tall, handsome, kind. Everybody liked him. Freyda was much more like her father but even worse.

[00:10:00] After Freyda hears about Leif making all this money in the new world she also wants in on the action and so she begs her brother to let her stay in his settlement. He had a couple buildings, you know, something to live in. And he agrees. And he agrees.

[00:10:13] And she ends up actually partnering up with another group, like two brothers I think, two or three brothers. And they end up going there before she does but she ends up smuggling a lot more of her people in this ship.

[00:10:25] So when she lands in the new world they've already taken over the cabin and she boots them out and relationships pretty much sour and they're not great. And Freyda goes over to their encampment one night and they bury the hatchet so to speak and everything sounds great.

[00:10:43] But then Freyda goes back to her people and tells them that they attacked her and she says if you do not kill them I'm going to be really upset.

[00:10:52] And so they go over and they kill all of the men and then they come back and she says why did you leave the women alive? There were five women in the camp. So she goes back and she slaughters the women.

[00:11:03] And then they come back and they have this story and they say well their brothers died of illness or they died of attack or some such thing. But then the truth leaks out that what she had done and to Leif it was so abominable

[00:11:16] that he was just disgusted with his sister. But because she was his sister he couldn't do anything to her so he ended up taking out the punishment on her men and he was very very upset with Freyda. So it's opposite as night and day, Freyda and Leif.

[00:11:32] Leif lives out the rest of his days in Greenland. We don't have any more information on what happens to him. In the 1400s there is complete radio silence in Greenland. The colony seems to be doing really well for about the first 300 to 400 years and then

[00:11:47] there's just nothing from it. And that is the great mystery of Greenland. And that is something that came to haunt Hans Giedi. Now we're jumping forward a little bit. In the early 1500s there was the Danish Reformation and so Lutheranism and not Catholicism is the new thing.

[00:12:06] Hans is born in 1687 to Norwegian parents. His father is a civil servant and they live on an island about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And he was taught by his uncle who was a pastor at the local Lutheran church.

[00:12:20] And at 18 he leaves home for far away Copenhagen to study theology. And at this time in the theological circles there's this renewed interest in overseas missions. He finishes his degree in 18 months and he heads back home. His father dies a few months after his return.

[00:12:38] And not long after that Hans is ordained and is assigned to a parish in Lofoten which is an absolutely gorgeous looking archipelago in Norway. Look it up, it's really pretty. Before he leaves for the parish he gets married to a lady named Gertrude.

[00:12:53] When they move to the island they find that it is steeped in Viking lore. He hears about Erik the Red and his settlements on Greenland and nothing had been heard from them for 200 maybe 300 years.

[00:13:06] He wanted to know what happened to them, were they still there, were they following Christ, were they Catholic, had they even heard of the Reformation? And he wanted to go to Greenland to be their pastor. And his wife and family and friends all say no it's too dangerous.

[00:13:21] He goes to the church, the local government and even to the king and they all said no. And even though his wife didn't agree they both decided to lay the matter before God in prayer.

[00:13:31] She writes, the answer was the bending of her will so that she confidently promised to follow me wherever I went like a true Sarah thus strengthening my will to persevere. By her faith and consistency I cannot say how much she encouraged me.

[00:13:44] She, a frail woman, showed greater faith and manliness than I. And then while trying to convince the king he wrote to him, all Christians have a duty towards missions as long as any heathen exists. Christians will be called severely to account if they content themselves merely in carrying

[00:14:00] on trading with the heathen. This really was a scouring rebuke to the king of Norway and honestly to a lot of the Protestant kingdoms. For example, in the Netherlands they had no problem with going and trading in Japan even

[00:14:14] if they had to step on an icon of Christ every time they did it basically saying I'm not a Christian. And they got around it saying well I'm not a Catholic so that image doesn't mean anything to them.

[00:14:25] And Jonathan Swift wrote a satire about them and he said you know exactly what it is that you're doing. And so Hans actually had quite a bit of courage to write this to the king.

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[00:16:11] Hans is still trying to work out exactly how he's going to reach them and he comes up with the idea of through trade because that is the easiest methodology. What we would consider it today is I guess is like tent making.

[00:16:36] He's decided to sell them furs and blubber etc. and he waits for 13 long years. Can you imagine that you have been, you feel this call from God to go to Greenland and everybody's telling you no and everything's going really slowly.

[00:16:53] You have the support of your wife but you have to wait for 13 years. Eventually what you'd be saying like does God want me to go? Is this a failure? But eventually he is financed by several merchants that come together with the idea of setting

[00:17:08] up a trading post in Greenland on the southernmost tip there. In May of 1722 they set out with their four kids in tow and they arrived two months later. The ships had to be very quick to head back otherwise they would get caught in the ice

[00:17:22] flows so they basically worked really hard to build a house that would last and they headed back. A small contingent of traders also stayed behind and the Greenlanders were not interested in all at the gospel. In fact they were even a little bit hostile.

[00:17:37] They just wanted him to trade and leave and so this would be very discouraging as well. You spend 13 years trying to get here. You get here and nobody cares at all. But even with all that discouragement they still set about learning the language and

[00:17:50] their kids were immensely helpful in this regard because children just pick up language a lot faster than adults do and they were able to help their parents. And I'm not entirely sure that Hans ever became fully fluent.

[00:18:02] His son Paul was and his son was very helpful to him in his ministry. And speaking of children Hans' idea was actually to reach out to the children. He didn't focus so much on the adults.

[00:18:13] Obviously they were more than welcome at meetings and he didn't scorn them but he had much more of a focus on the children. And eventually one child was baptized and then a couple more.

[00:18:22] It was a really really tough slog though and Hans' biggest headache was the traders that stayed there on the island and they basically stood in direct opposition to his message through their hedonistic lifestyles and it was very difficult for him to work with them.

[00:18:38] Now if you remember Hans' original goal was to reach out to the Nordic settlements and find out what happened to them. And when he lands he doesn't find any Nordic settlements. He doesn't find any Nordic people living there and the population he finds instead is entirely Inuit.

[00:18:53] I mentioned that Erik the Red was the first person to settle Greenland and that's true and actually the Nordic settlers were there for a few hundred years before the first Inuit settlers began to arrive. They started arriving between 1200 and 1400.

[00:19:07] And so you can imagine Hans' shock a little bit when he doesn't find any Nordic settlers. In fact there's not even a sign that there was any intermarrying between the two. Hans never finds out what happens to the Nordic settlements.

[00:19:20] There are ruins that are around, there's some houses, there's even a church which more than likely was built by Erik the Red at the behest of his wife. And Hans asks around but the Greenlanders aren't particularly keen on answering and he just never knows.

[00:19:33] And today we do have some more information on what happened to them but not anything definitive. For years the extinction of their settlement was blamed on the Little Ice Age. The farming Nordics didn't adjust their ways like the Inuits did but that's not true.

[00:19:47] So after more digging in the area they discovered that they did live more consistently in line with the Inuits. They ate more fish, they relied less on farming, they hunted whales and seals and they traded with them with other Nordic colonies.

[00:20:01] And there are signs that they were struggling as time wore on but there's no sign of massive attack or of immigration. In 1929 a Danish historian found human remains from the eastern settlement in a courtyard

[00:20:13] and these bodies were dressed in 15th century medieval clothing with no indications of malnutrition or inbreeding. Most of them had crucifixes around their necks and their arms were crossed in a stance of prayer and Roman papal records indicate that Greenlanders were excused in 1345 of paying

[00:20:29] their tithes due to poverty. The last reported ship to reach Greenland was a private ship that was blown off course funny how that happens all the time in history. They were reaching Greenland in 1406 and they departed four years later with the last

[00:20:43] news of Greenland which was the burning at the stake of a condemned male witch, the insanity and death of a woman this witch was accused of attempting to seduce through witchcraft and the marriage of the ship's captain and a fellow Icelander.

[00:20:57] There may have been other points of contact but nothing definitive. What we do know is that they came to rely very heavily on the sale of ivory but in the 1400s ivory began coming from Africa and from Russia from African elephants and Russian walruses

[00:21:12] and there wasn't as much of a demand for the ivory that was coming from Greenland. Any other accounts that we might have discovered about what happened to the Nordic settlements were destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen in 1728.

[00:21:28] That might have been what happened to any further records of Leif Erikson, could have been what happened to the mystery of the settlements in Greenland. In fact it's sad to think about how much information we might have on this colony if only there hadn't been that fire.

[00:21:43] Going back to Hans. He sends a small crew along with a few baptized children to encourage the king to support the mission to Greenland and it goes fantastically. Everybody's wowed, they think this is amazing good ministry.

[00:21:57] They return to Greenland with a few missionaries and monetary support from the king and a case of smallpox which rapidly ravaged the island. Hans and Gertrude worked day and night ministering to the sick and burying the dead and this was

[00:22:10] a bigger testimony to the Greenlanders than anything else he had done up to that point. That he cared enough to risk death to care for the sick and the dead spoke volumes about the message he had been spreading, but it wasn't just words that he actually cared.

[00:22:25] Gertrude herself contracts smallpox and she dies in 1735. Hans leaves to bury her in Norway. The following year he's absolutely grief stricken and he leaves his sons in charge of the ministry. He feels responsible for the spread of smallpox even though it's not his fault, there's

[00:22:41] something he could have done about it. But this is important, he doesn't wallow. He founds the Greenland Mission Seminary and in 1740 he's named the Lutheran Bishop of Greenland and he creates a catechism specifically for Greenland that becomes the cornerstone of missions work in Greenland.

[00:22:59] He also worked to create multiple missions and trading centers along the coast, multiple books, maps, and the first Greenlandic dictionary. He died in Denmark in 1758 at the age of 72 and at the time of his death he was known

[00:23:13] as the Apostle to Greenland and his sons and his grandsons carried on his work. He also inspired the German noble Count Zinzendorf to send a contingent of the newly founded Moravian Brotherhood to Greenland after hearing the Greenlandic children Hans had sent to the

[00:23:28] court of the King of Denmark. The Moravian missionaries have a really interesting story. They went to some really cool places. They're actually the very first Protestant missions agency and they went to some really cool places like Greenland and Africa and they worked with Native American tribes really

[00:23:44] early on and they have a really interesting history. And they're actually the reason that Greenlanders have last names today, names that are German and Danish because they along with Hans would give the new believers last names during their christening and that's kind of a fun fact.

[00:24:00] So what about Greenland today? Well, it's 95% Lutheran but it's mixed with a lot of Inuit superstition. 2% of the population actually hails from China, Thailand, and the Philippines which is unexpected. I'm curious what brought them there especially the ones from Thailand and the Philippines.

[00:24:17] I thought that's got to be a really harsh climate to adjust to. One in five residents have made at least one suicide attempt. That's 20% of the country's 57,000 residents. And a few years ago the statue of Hans Agiti was defaced in the capital of Greenland and

[00:24:34] there's been this strong desire to return to the more Inuit beliefs and Hans Agiti is a testimony to the Christian history of Greenland. Lutheranism is state sponsored in Denmark and Denmark and Greenland have very close ties.

[00:24:49] Generally speaking, Greenland is autonomous but it's also closely linked to Denmark in a lot of ways. So that 95% doesn't necessarily equate to an actual Bortigain believer just somebody who happened to be baptized into the Lutheran church.

[00:25:04] And in fact these can be some of the most spiritually dead places of all because everyone is baptized into the church and so they feel no actual commitment to a personal relationship with Christ and they kind of feel as though they have this legacy.

[00:25:17] So it's not really that big of a deal to them to actually be accountable for their own faith. And we've seen this in different episodes. Mitsuo Fuchida ran into it in Germany, people ran into it in Britain.

[00:25:29] So just because statistically on paper the country is majority Christian it doesn't mean that majority of people are actually born again believers. We know this of course and there are many missionaries who do reach out to these places

[00:25:42] and from what I've heard these are some of the most difficult mission fields of all. So for the close of this episode I would encourage you to be in prayer for people who are doing

[00:25:50] missions work in Greenland or in other places that are very similar to it where they have this state sponsored religion but it's a spiritually dry dead place desperately in need of the gospel and of revival.

[00:26:01] I hope you enjoyed this episode learning more about the history of Greenland and I'm always happy when I can find a Viking story. I find their history incredibly fascinating. If you have any missionary stories that you would like to see covered on the show feel

[00:26:24] free to email me, to tweet at me, whatever the best method of communication is for you and I will add them to my list of people to cover on the show. As always thank you for listening to Martyrs and Missionaries. I'm Elise.

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[00:27:50] Shopify offers all the tools to build your online business on a single secure platform. Test for free and present your business to the world. Visit shopify.de-try Simply enter shopify.de-try and start. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify.