Hvalsey Church

OVERVIEW

Hvalseyjarfjord — Whale Island fjord, Greenlandic Qaqortukulooq — lies behind Qaqortoq in southern Greenland and holds the largest and best-preserved Norse ruins in the Eastern Settlement, the Eystribyggð. The church stands almost to its gable ends. In 2017 the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of Kujataa Greenland.

HISTORY

Two documents from this one small church close out the Norse record in Greenland. In 1407 a man named Kolgrímur was tried at Hvalsey and burned at the stake for sorcery and adultery: his accuser Torgrímur alleged that Kolgrímur had drawn Torgrímur's wife Steinunn to him by magic, reciting chants and galdr until she came. Witnesses were called, the Norwegian law against sorcery was invoked, he was found guilty and burned. It is the only recorded witch-burning in Greenland's history, and Steinunn is said to have lost her reason and died. The following year, on 16 September 1408, Sigríður Björnsdóttir and Þorsteinn Ólafsson were married in this church — the last written record of any event in Norse Greenland. Within a generation or two the settlements were gone.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Greenlandic Inuit oral tradition gives its own account of why the Norse ended, told of this place: a feud between a Norse chieftain called Ungortoq and a young Inuit warrior, K'aissape, whose younger brother Ungortoq had killed. In revenge, K'aissape's men came to Hvalsey by sea in kayaks lashed together and disguised as an iceberg, and burned the Norse in their houses. Ungortoq escaped with his family and was hunted down afterwards. The entry records a site holding a witchcraft execution, a wedding that is the last thing anyone wrote down, and an Inuit memory of how it ended — three quite different kinds of record about one ruin.

VISITING

Reached by boat from Qaqortoq, about twenty kilometres; local operators run trips in season. The ruins are unenclosed and unstaffed. A World Heritage Site — take nothing and disturb nothing.