CHAPTER FORTY-THREE ( 1 )

THE NORTH ATLANTIC FARM

AN ENVIRONMENTAL VIEW

Paul Buckland

V

iking expansion across the North Atlantic, to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and
briefly to Newfoundland between the ninth and early eleventh centuries, took a
north European farming system to islands which were either previously unoccupied
or intermittently utilised by hunter–fisher communities. According to the one near-
contemporary source, Dicuil, writing at the court of Charlemagne’s successors in France
c. 825 , Irish hermits may have been present in the Faroes and possibly Iceland, although
they have been singularly difficult to trace in the archaeological and palaeoecological
record (Buckland 1992 ; Buckland et al. 1995 ; but see Hannon and Bradshaw 2000 ).
The Landnámsmenn therefore may have found feral sheep on the Faroes (ON Færeyjar,
maybe meaning ‘sheep islands’), but they also introduced a regular European set of farm
animals – cattle, pig, horse, goat and sheep – and crops – principally barley (ON bygg),
to landscapes previously showing little or no human impact (Amorosi et al. 1997 ;
Dugmore et al. 2005 ). In the late twelfth century Ari Froði wrote of Icelandic landnám –
Í þann tíð var Ísland viði vaxið á milli fjalls og fjöru (Íslendingabók) – and the destruction
of the predominantly birch woodland cover is well documented in the pollen record
(Einarsson 1961 ; Hallsdóttir 1987 ). Subsequent soil loss, largely as a result of over-
grazing, has been extensively researched (e.g. Þórarinsson 1961 ; Dugmore and Buckland
1991 ; Simpson et al. 2001 ). A similar pattern is evident in south-west Greenland
(Fredskild 1988 , 1992 ), but the absence of woodland in the Faroes leads to difficulties in
the pinpointing of landnám (lit. ‘the taking of land’) by palynological means, and the
macrofossil record is more precise, if still debatable (cf. Jóhansen 1985 ; Buckland and
Dinnin 1998 ).
Onto this backdrop, Norse farmers placed a farming system which relied heavily
upon secondary products: milk and cheese from sheep, goats and cattle, supplemented
by some meat and cereals in the Faroes and Iceland, where cultivation and sporadic
imports of grain were possible; as the author of the thirteenth-century Konungs Skuggsjá
remarks, the Greenlanders did not know of bread. McGovern and others ( 2001 ) have
noted how the domestic herbivore package was tailored to each environment – more
goats in Greenland, and a higher frequency of pigs in early deposits, until they effec-
tively destroyed their wooded and scrubland landscapes. In the absence of land-based
mammals in Iceland, with the exception of the arctic fox, marine resources were early