Monastic orders in medieval Greenland

A history of myths, mysteries, and monasteries amidst Greenland’s fjords.

A view of Tasermiut fjord, where the possible site of the Augustinian monastery was identified. By Amanda Anderson, Wikimedia Commons.

This article is part of a series: Religion in Greenland

Deep in the southern fjords of fourteenth-century Greenland, two small communities of Augustinian monks and Benedictine nuns lived, worked, and prayed in the first Christian monastic houses ever established in the North American continent. Little is known about their formation and operation, and even less about their dissolution, but two contemporary texts and several archaeological discoveries attest that they existed, perhaps surviving until the very end of the Norse settlements in Greenland sometime in the fifteenth century.

Then, in the middle of the sixteenth century, rumours began to circulate among learned Europeans that a Dominican monastery still adorned the shores of the polar island; a mystical place sitting aside a volcano from whose hotsprings the monks drew boiling water through pipes to heat their rooms and cook their food. They purportedly maintained there a goodly garden, lived in elaborate stone houses, and even interacted with the indigenous ‘pygmies’. Such was the popularity of the myth that it outshone the real history of monasticism in Greenland well into the modern era.

Monasteries in medieval Greenland

The textual evidence concerning Greenland’s monastic houses is not extensive. No monasteries are listed among the churches in Greenland by the scribes of the Icelandic Flateyjarbók, written in 1387–96, but this could simply be because the information they used was derived from a much older source.¹

In 1308, bishop Árni Sigurdsson of Bergen sent a letter to bishop Þórður (Thordur) of the Garðar diocese in Greenland announcing a shipment of supplies to religious houses on the island. He wrote: ‘We also send some other things to the cloisters [klaustr], and which Olav Bonde [probably the ship captain] shall hand over to you. He will tell you how to distribute them.’² The gifts included a light blue gown and chaperon (an item of headwear), along with stocks of skins, and grapes for communion, the latter being in short supply in the harsh climes of the north.³

The second and last contemporary reference to these cloisters appears in Ivar Bårdsson’s ‘Description of Greenland’, a document written down around 1360 after an expedition led by Bårdsson and surviving in later copied versions. Bårdsson told the scribe that quite far into a place called Ketilsfjörður (now named Tasermiut fjord) on the southern tip of Greenland, there was a ‘large cloister’ dedicated to St. Óláfr (king of Norway, 1015–1028) and St. Augustine.

Bårdsson also related that deep in nearby ‘Rampnessfjord’, the precise location of which was long unknown, there was a convent/nunnery (søster closter) belonging to the Order of St. Benedict. This convent supposedly owned a large proportion of the surrounding farmland and islands. ‘In these islets’, Bårdsson claimed, ‘there is a lot of warm water; it is so hot during the winter that you must not touch it, but in the summer it is moderately hot, so that you can bathe in it, and many people are healed there and become whole and get relief from their ailments.’⁴

For the sake of clarity, what we have here is an Augustinian monastery and a Benedictine nunnery both located in the inner recesses of two nearby fjords in the far south of Greenland.

According to Icelandic archaeologist Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir, these monasteries may have been founded as part of the northward expansion of the monastic orders in the mid-to-late twelfth century. The Augustine order was at this time becoming especially popular in the sparsely-populated northern regions — including in Iceland, where five out of seven male cloisters were Augustinian — in part because it did not require a minimum of twelve monks at a monastery.⁵

Norwegian historian Arnved Nedkvitne argues that they were most likely founded sometime after the bishop of Garðar wrested control of the tithes from the secular leaders of Greenland in the 1260s as a consequence of the ecclesiastical reforms sweeping through the Norwegian realms.⁶ Either way, the monasteries were apparently under the direction of the diocese by the fourteenth century, as evidenced by the fact that bishop Þórður was tasked with distributing the goods from bishop Sigurdsson in 1308.

Danish archaeologist Christen Leif Vebæk believed that he had found the site of the Augustinian monastery in 1932 at a place called Taserminutsiaq in the Tasermiut fjord, but no extensive excavations have yet been conducted there. Vebæk also identified a ruin cluster at Narsarsuaq in the Uunartoq fjord (labelled Ø149) as the possible site of the Benedictine nunnery during an archaeological expedition in 1945–6. Excavations there uncovered a church building which was layered on top of an older structure, perhaps dating from the very earliest stages of Norse settlement in the region around 1000 CE.

A view of Narsarsuaq, Greenland. By Steve Giovinco. Wikimedia Commons.

Human bones found in the cemetery of the presumed monastery were radiocarbon dated to between 1322 and 1428, belonging to males as well as females and children as well as adults, suggesting that the convent doubled as a parish church for the surrounding farming community, and that it housed not just nuns but also male farmhands, stewards, and the convent’s priest. This would be consistent with findings at similar nunneries in Iceland.

The only artefact of a firmly ‘religious’ nature was a fragment of a church bell, but the large volume of textile working and food storage equipment on the site is, again, well in line with the profile of a medieval community of nuns. Such establishments often served ‘the needs of the surrounding society’, Kristjánsdóttir notes, and they produced valuable items like textiles and books for both the Church and for secular buyers.⁷

Other sources of income may have included ‘dowries’ from the families of the nuns, remuneration for work done as itinerant priests in the case of the Augustinian monks, and payments for intercessory prayers from wealthy households (if sufficient wealth was present in Norse Greenland).⁸

Assuming that the Narsarsuaq site truly is that of the Benedictine convent, it does not conform to the modern stereotype of a medieval monastery. There was no enclosed cloister — rather, the church building was a small, single-room structure surrounded by residential buildings, barns, stables, and farmhouses. In this regard it ‘does not differ significantly from other farms in the region’, according to T. D. Price and Jette Arneborg.⁹

Nedkvitne estimates based on sketches by the archaeologist Aage Roussell that the possible Augustinian church at Taserminutsiaq covered an area of 66 metres squared, making it only ‘slightly larger than an average Greenland parish church’. The nearby residential complexes were quite large and probably allowed for individual rooms for each monk, but the barns were small, reflecting the ‘poor’ pasture conditions in Greenland.¹⁰ Whether the monasteries actually owned all of the surrounding farms, received income from their produce, or simply ‘owned’ the right to the parish’s portion of the farmers’ tithes cannot be ascertained with certainty from the sources.

The Uunartoq ‘Sun-dial’

No artefact from the Narsarsuaq convent site has stoked as much intrigue as one small wooden fragment unearthed in 1948 by Vebæk. Made from spruce or larch wood from a conifer tree, the artefact represents one-half of a flat circular object with a hole in the centre. Measuring at just 7 centimetres in width and 1 centimetre in depth, it has irregular triangular carvings around the outer circumference, as well as line indentations in the inner part of the surface, some straight and some curved. Vebæk labelled it a ‘sun-ray disc — use unknown’ in a 1952 article in the Illustrated London News.

Captain Carl V. Sølver, a Danish mariner, argued in a 1953 article that the artefact was part of a portable bearing-dial (or ‘Sun compass’) used by Viking ship navigators, speculating that the hole in the centre of the disc once housed a vertical handle and an upward-facing pin that cast a shadow on the face of the dial. This instrument might be used by a competent navigator to identify the cardinal directions while far from land.¹¹

Sølver’s theory met with immediate resistance from academic archaeologists and historians who countered that the artefact could merely be part of a piece of furniture or a decorative household item, but in 1982 the Swedish astronomer Curt Roslund rejuvenated the Sun-dial interpretation with his assertion that the straight and curved lines etched into the top of the disc represented the location of the sun’s shadow at the equinoxes and the path around the summer solstice at 61° north, respectively. Practical testing by trained navigators proved that a dial modelled after the Uunartoq artefact functioned well.¹²

The Uunartoq disc/Sun-dial discovered by Christen Leif Vebæk at Narsarsuaq (Ø149) in 1948. Held by the National Museum of Denmark. Annotations by the author on the basis of a presumed navigational function.

A new theory was proposed in the 2010s. According to Balázs Bernáth and his colleagues at Eötvös University in Hungary, the disc was part of a ‘twilight board’, meaning it combined the functions of a ‘horizon board’ and ‘Sun compass’ in a single tool that would be most effective at twilight, i.e., as the sun was close to the horizon. When deployed in conjunction with a sunstone (another hotly debated navigation tool) and some basic knowledge of astronomy, the instrument might have helped the navigator identify true north and thus the proper course to their destination.¹³ Studies based on computational models suggest that, used in the right conditions, such a system of ‘sky-polarimetric’ navigation could ensure a high rate of success in voyages from Norway to Greenland.¹⁴

If correct, the Sun-dial or ‘twilight board’ scenarios would radically transform prior understandings of Viking navigation and could even help explain the vanishing of the Norse Greenlanders in the fifteenth century. The Uunartoq artefact forms part of historian Kirsten A. Seaver’s basis for believing that the Norse Greenlanders had far more advanced navigation skills than previously acknowledged — skills that would have enabled them to make regular trips to mainland North America and, being so familiar with the land, perhaps ultimately to migrate there.¹⁵

These theories are based almost entirely on conjectures as to how a Sun-dial might have been used (hypothesised and tested with the advantage of modern navigational knowledge), and there are no contemporary texts that directly corroborate the existence of comparable tools. There is some speculation that two disc-shaped wooden objects found in northern Poland had the same general purpose, but Polish archaeologist Wojciech Filipowiak concludes that the supposed ‘Sun-dial’ from Uunartoq may in fact be ‘a fragment of a furniture piece, a “butter-stamp”, the top of a small coppered keg, part of a fish trap, or a spindle whorl’, just as Sølver’s critics in the 1950s had insisted.¹⁶

Sun-dial theories also complicate the interpretation of similar objects found at Uunartoq, raising some incredible (or uncredible) possibilities. As Eötvös University researchers noted in a 2013 article: ‘A whole but unmarked wooden disc with identical diameter was found in the same locality [Narsarsuaq], denoting that possibly several similar instruments were created there.’¹⁷ This begs the question: Why might these precision instruments have been manufactured at a small convent situated on an island that relied on imports and beached debris for its wood supplies?

Without further information from excavations or newly discovered texts, the most likely answer is that they were not, and that the Uunartoq object was either left there after a life of navigational use or had no such function to begin with. A purely decorative purpose cannot be ruled out.

Monastic phantoms

Regular contact between the Norse settlers in Greenland and the people of mainland Europe was lost in the early fifteenth century. From 1410 to 1721, European knowledge of Greenland was updated only by occasional reports from ships blown off-course to the island’s shores and by the colourful imaginings of ambitious tale-spinners. Chronicles depicting a marvellous monastic sanctuary still operating in an almost Edenic pocket within Greenland’s labyrinthine fjords quickly became a favourite motif.

In 1558, a descendant of the Venetian brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno published a collection of letters supposedly penned by the pair. These letters, together with the accompanying maps, documented a series of fantastical, possibly fictional, and most certainly romanticised expeditions throughout the northern seas, including one in 1380 during which Nicolò was blown to the shores of Greenland. There, beside ‘a hill which vomited fire like Vesuvius and Etna’, he found a Dominican monastery dedicated to St. Thomas.

Nicolò told of boiling hot sulphurous water from the volcano’s hotsprings that was employed by the monks in heating the monastery and cooking food, abrogating the need for fire. The water was also used to irrigate the monastery’s garden all year round, enabling it to produce ‘flowers and fruits and herbs of different kinds, just as in other temperate countries in their seasons, so that the rude and savage people of those parts, seeing these supernatural effects, take those friars for Gods, and bring them many presents, such as chickens, meat, and other things’.

Channels were dug underneath the cloister to direct this miraculous liquid wherever the monks most needed it. Their buildings, both the monastery itself and their rounded, cone-shaped houses, were made from ‘the burning stones that are cast out like cinders from the fiery mouth of the hill’, a material that neither decayed nor ran short. Availing themselves of the means bestowed by their volcanic neighbour, ‘these good friars have constructed so many buildings and walls that it is a curiosity to witness’.

Food supplies were never in peril, as the heat radiating from the springs ensured that the bay beside the monastery was never frozen, even in the dead of winter. Temperate conditions in this microclimate provided ‘such an attraction for sea-fowl and fish that they are caught in unlimited quantity, and prove the support of a large population in the neighbourhood, which thus finds abundant occupation in building and in catching birds and fish, and in a thousand other necessary occupations about the monastery’. Fishing boats were made in abundance from skins and bones.

So great was the stock of fish and skins from game that, ‘without any trouble or expense’, the monks could acquire by trade all they needed from the many ships visiting their harbour every summer. In these ways they could ‘derive from the hill [volcano] every comfort that can be desired’.

Most of the monks spoke Latin and came from the Shetland Islands, but some hailed from Norway and Sweden. Meanwhile, ‘workmen and masters in different handicrafts’ went there in droves for the ‘handsome pay and good living’ stemming from the endless building projects.¹⁸

One of the Zeno maps of the North Atlantic published in 1558. Greenland (Engroneland) is shown here as a peninsula, as it was widely believed to be at the time. ‘Frisland’, shown here in the bottom left of the picture, appears in many contemporary maps. Wikimedia Commons.

The German writer Dithmari Blefkenii claimed in his 1607 Latin book Islandia to have met a blind Greenlandic monk in Iceland in the winter of 1563 who told him tales about this same Dominican monastery, St. Thomas. Blefkenii’s new acquaintance had been pushed into the monastic life by his parents while still a youth, but he was granted permission by the bishop of Greenland to travel with him to Niðarós (Trondheim) in Norway. On the return journey he was left in Iceland.

Like the Zeno brothers in their letters, the monk spoke of ‘burning and flaming water’ from hotsprings in the vicinity of the Greenland monastery, being ‘led through stone channels to the clay cells of the monks’ and used for both heating and cooking. This particular monk had only a loose grasp on Latin. Of the ‘pygmies’ native to Greenland’s fjords, he said that they were of a ‘human form’ but hairy and ‘persecuted’ in appearance. The abbot of the monastery had tried to raise some of them, with little success. Contra Nicolò Zeno, this monk said the land was ‘not populous’.¹⁹

Blefkenii’s book was soon translated into Dutch and German, and the story concerning the phantom monastery in Greenland started to appear in other works by members of the European intelligentsia, including in Rudolph Capel’s Norden (1678).²⁰ Before too long, it would have been easier to find texts retelling the fable of St. Thomas than texts discussing the actual monasteries of medieval Greenland.

In the eighteenth century, the improbable story of the St. Thomas monastery still captured European imaginations despite missionaries who went to the island finding nothing of the sort. Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary who arrived in 1721, quoted both the Zeno and Blefkenii accounts in his Description of Greenland (1729). He also cited an account from Erasmus Franciscus of an English captain of a Danish ship, Jacob Hall, who, like Blefkenii, is said to have met a Greenlandic monk in Iceland who explained the idyllic conditions at the St. Thomas monastery, complete with its ‘well of burning hot water, which, through pipes, was conveyed into all the rooms and cells of the convent to warm them’.²¹

Moravian Brethren missionary David Crantz collated the same sources in The History of Greenland (1765) but expressed doubts as to their veracity, pointing out that the ‘oldest Icelandic authorities’ passed over St. Thomas ‘in utter silence’.²² Indeed, no artefacts or contemporary texts support the existence of the Dominican monastery, with or without the exotic embellishments evident in these accounts.

Some elements of the story are plausible. We know that Greenland did have monasteries, and we know that one of them was known in part for its close proximity to hotsprings. It is conceivable that the Benedictine nuns and others in the area took water from these hotsprings in vessels, while representatives of the monasteries could very well have had contact with the Inuit people whom the texts derogatively call ‘pygmies’.

However, there is no volcanic activity to match the description of these texts anywhere in the vicinity; nor has so elaborate a monastery complex been found by archaeologists. St. Thomas is at best a warped, ornamented reconstruction of real information about the two medieval cloisters relayed through several sets of hands, and at worst a wholesale contrivance of adventurous minds.

Notes

1. O. Vésteinsson, ‘Parishes and communities in Norse Greenland’, Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 2, 2009, pp. 140–1. https://doi.org/10.3721/037.002.s215
2. A. Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland: Viking peasants in the Arctic (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 128.
3. S. Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Medieval monasticism in Iceland and Norse Greenland’, Religions, vol. 12, no. 6, 2021, p. 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060374
4. I. Bårdsson Det gamle Grønlands beskrivelse. Translated by F. Jónsson. (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard Forlag, 1930), p. 43.
5. Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Medieval monasticism’, pp. 4–5.
6. Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, p. 131.
7. Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Medieval monasticism’, pp. 8–10.
8. Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp. 130–1.
9. T. D. Price and J. Arneborg, ‘The peopling of the North Atlantic: Isotopic results from Greenland’, Journal of the North Atlantic , Special Volume 7, 2018, p. 175. https://doi.org/10.3721/037.002.0sp713
10. Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, p. 129.
11. S. Thirslund, ‘The discovery of an early bearing-dial — further investigations’, The Journal of Navigation, vol. 36, no. 1, 1993, pp. 33–4. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0373463300011292
12. Ibid., pp. 35–40.
13. B. Bernáth et al, ‘How could the Viking Sun compass be used with sunstones before and after sunset? Twilight board as a new interpretation of the Uunartoq artefact fragment’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 470, no. 2166, 2014, pp. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2013.0787
14. D. Száz and G. Horváth, ‘Success of sky-polarimetric Viking navigation: Revealing the chance Viking sailors could reach Greenland from Norway’, Royal Society Open Science, vol. 5, no. 4, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172187 ; P Takács et al, ‘Sensitivity and robustness of sky-polarimetric Viking navigation: Sailing success is most sensitive to night sailing, navigation periodicity and sailing date, but robust against weather conditions’, PLoS One, vol. 17, no. 2, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0262762
15. K. A. Seaver, The frozen echo: Greenland and the exploration of North America ca A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 17.
16. W. Filipowiak, ‘How Vikings crossed the North Atlantic? The reinterpretation of ‘sun compasses’ — Narsarsuaq, Wolin, Truso’, The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, vol. 49, no. 2, 2022, p. 326. https://doi.org/10.1111/1095-9270.12426
17. B. Bernáth, ‘An alternative interpretation of the Viking sundial artefact: an instrument to determine latitude and local noon’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 469, no. 2154, 2013, p. 2. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2013.0021
18. R. H. Major (ed.), The voyages of the Venetian brothers, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, to the northern seas, in the XIVth century (New York: Burt Franklin, 1873), pp. 12–18.
19. D. Blefkenii, Islandia, sive populorum & mirabilium quæ in ea insula reperiuntur accuratior descriptio: cui de Gronlandia sub finem quædam adjecta (Lugduni Batavorum: Henrici ab Haestens, 1607), pp. 58–61.
20. R. W. Rix, The vanished settlers of Greenland: In search of a legend and its legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 79.
21. H. Egede, A description of Greenland (London: T. and J. Allman, 1818), pp. 17–22.
22. D. Crantz, The history of Greenland, including an account of the mission carried out by the United Brethren in that country, volume 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), p. 245.