Gunhild's Cross and the North Atlantic Trade Sphere Robyn Barrow The Medieval Globe, Volume 7, Number 1, 2021, pp. 53-75 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/805470 [ Access provided at 15 Oct 2021 11:10 GMT from University Of Pennsylvania Libraries ] GUNHILD’S CROSS AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC TRADE SPHERE ROBYN BARROW on a grassy sheep farm in Igaliku, a small settlement in southern Greenland, reclines a perimeter of red stones. These lichen-covered ruins huddle in view of an inlet of the North Atlantic and craggy, cloud-cloaked peaks. This is the footprint of Garðar Cathedral, the episcopal seat of Norse Greenland. It has been abandoned since the fifteenth century, when a colonial venture spanning five hundred years mysteriously ended. During a period of expansion and success in the settlement during the twelfth century, the older Garðar Cathedral was replaced with a new building, one with a much larger footprint, perhaps to welcome a new bishop and the growing congregation. This second Garðar Cathedral had a differentiated chancel and two chapels. The sandstone used in the church’s twelfth-century construction was quarried locally in the nearby mountains. Dedicated to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, it had a bell tower and Plate 4.1. Garðar Cathedral ruins, Igaliko, Greenland. Photo: Dr. Anna Bidgood, 2015. 54 robyn barroW windows of coloured glass.1 Though there were at least seventeen other small, privately owned churches in Norse Greenland, the cathedral marked the spiritual centre of the community and signalled the ambitions of the local elite. The Walruses at the Altar When Poul Nørland excavated the church in 1929, in addition to the human remains in the churchyard and those in the chapels, he discovered the remains of other Greenland inhabitants, their heads aligned on the East–West axis like all the people interred there. Buried in neat rows, twenty to thirty walrus skulls were discovered along the eastern gable of the cathedral chancel, all with their tusks removed.2 In addition, four to five Narwhal skulls were buried in the sanctified ground of the churchyard beside their settler neighbours.3 Initially, Nørland interpreted these rows of skulls as evidence of an earlier, pre-Christian site, and the team of researchers led by Karin Frei later suggested that these were incorporated into the cemetery when it expanded into nearby refuse heaps.4 However, the dating of these skulls to the late eleventh and early twelfth century, as well as their position in relationship to the church, aligned with the architecture, suggest that their interment was rather part of the ritual dimensions of the Christian site.5 This Arctic intervention within the footprint of the cathedral actualizes an encounter between the imported liturgical space and the nonhuman presence with which it shared the land.6 As these sedimented layers of religious practice and more-than-human remains aptly visualize, the walrus constituted a cornerstone of Norse Greenlandic society. These eloquent remains mark a starting point for my consideration of the roles performed by the walrus in North Atlantic trade systems, which played a part in the larger world economic system in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.7 Another site is located eleven hundred kilometres northwest of Garðar Cathedral, at the walrus hunting 1 Nørland, “Norse Ruins,” 37; Seaver, The Last Vikings, 83–84. A series of archaeological reports published in Meddelelser om Grönland, beginning in 1881, remain touchstone sources for what has been uncovered at Greenlandic sites: Brun, Meddelelser om Grönland; Larson, “The Church,” 179. 2 Nørland, “Norse Ruins,” 138. 3 Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 179. 4 Nørland, “Norse Ruins,” 138; Frei, “Was It for Walrus?” 442. 5 Frei, “Was It for Walrus?” 442; Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 179 6 In order to engage with both animals and the landscape as active shapers of belief, builders of relationships, and interlocutors with humanity—what European scholars have framed in terms of “agency”—it is essential to acknowledge the work already done in this arena by Indigenous scholars who have been thinking about animals and the environment in these terms for a long time. See Venne, Our Elders Understand; Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency”; Todd, “Fish Pluralities.” 7 See Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony. As noted in this issue’s introduction and elsewhere, the North Atlantic was not originally included in Abu-Lughod’s map of thirteenth-century global connections; I argue here for a reconsideration of the Arctic contribution to the medieval world economy. On the even earlier beginnings of this process, see the article by Karl-Johan Lindholm and colleagues in this issue. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 55 Map 4.1. Medieval Greenland and the Walrus Ivory Trade. Created by Gabriel Moss, 2020. grounds of Disko Bay, itself two hundred and fifty kilometres north of the Arctic Circle on the Greenland coast. The weeks-long Norse voyage by boat to Disko Bay was a transcultural navigation, putting Norse colonists in contact with the Indigenous communities of Arctic Canada, who were entering Greenland from the West, and who also relied upon the walrus populations for their survival. Such encounters played a key role in the acquisition and transportation of Arctic ivory across Greenland and then, over at least twelve hundred kilometres of sea, to Europe. In this article, I ground my investigation of these encounters in a single object that represents the endpoint of the journey made by two walrus tusks from Greenland: Gunhild’s cross, a twelfth-century carving likely made in the medieval kingdom of Denmark.8 The cross materializes the physical and geographical network sketched above 8 Atlantic walrus tusks can grow to great sizes, up to ninety centimetres in length. The average length for male tusks is fifty centimetres. Female tusks are slightly smaller and straighter. Medieval European carvers were often careful to work around (though also at times innovatively incorporate) the marbled secondary dentine layer in the interior of a walrus tusk, which restricted the amount of usable material per tusk. The long shaft of Gunhild’s cross has a noticeable bend that remembers the natural shape of the tusk from which it was carved. It seems most likely that the second piece used to make the cross piece came from a second tusk. 56 robyn barroW Plate 4.2. Gundhildskorset (Gunnhild’s Cross): walrus ivory, ca. 1110. CC–BY–SA Lennart Larsen, National Museum of Denmark. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 57 and further explored below. Like the walrus skulls buried along the chancel of Garðar Cathedral, Gunhild’s cross subsumes walrus tusks into Christian practice, expressing northern identities inflected by Arctic trade in a shifting political landscape. The Woman with Two Names In June 826, Harald Bluetooth, his family, and his retinue agreed to be baptized in Mainz in exchange for Carolingian intervention in Denmark, where the king’s power was under threat.9 The new faith had but a limited anchor for several generations, and only in the mid- to late-eleventh century did Christianity witness a true infiltration into the northlands.10 By the early twelfth century, Christianity was a political tool for Scandinavian nobility navigating their ever-broadening network of relationships with continental Europe. Like walrus ivory, religion in this context was imported into Scandinavia for its value in trade and diplomacy. Christianity was associated with powerful European neighbours and could be used to strengthen political bonds.11 It was in this period that Gunhild, also called Helena, an otherwise unremembered daughter of King Sven II of Denmark and descendant of Harald Bluetooth, commissioned a portable devotional cross made of walrus ivory.12 The front bore a separately-carved corpus, long lost. Four personifications occupy the cross’s terminating roundels: Life at top, Death at bottom, Ecclesia to Christ’s right and Synagoga to his left. On the back, Christ sits in judgment at the crossing, with the bosom of Abraham at the top, a demon dragging a lost soul into hell at bottom, the saved at right and the condemned at left. The cross’s extensive inscriptions reveal a kind of jostling of identities, the cross speaking in both Latin and Old Norse. The object proclaims its patron’s name a total of four times, in two different scripts. While the longest inscriptions, including two mentions of the patron, are carved in a confident Latin hand, Gunhild, Helena’s ver9 Lausten, Church History, 8. 10 Lausten, Church History, 8. 11 Winroth, Conversion of Scandinavia, 138. 12 The provenance of Gunhild’s cross can be traced to Sophie Brahe (b. 1578–1646), who married Holger Rosenkrantz, a Scandinavian nobleman, and spent her widowhood as a religious near Odense. It was included in John Beckwith’s 1972 Ivory Carvings in England, 700–1200, 44, in which the author makes a case for an English attribution, though evidence for this seems limited. Gunhild’s cross was also the subject of Harald Langberg’s 1982 monograph Gunhildskorset. Many of his arguments, including the casting of this Gunhild as King Sven III Grathe’s daughter Lutgard and pushing the date of the cross forward thirty years (after ca. 1140), have recently been reconsidered by T. A. Heslop in his 2020 article “Gunhild’s Cross.” Heslop situates the cross within its stylistic and historical context, connecting the object to the brief era of Danish ecclesiastical autonomy and Christian significance following King Cnut’s canonization. Through groundbreaking archival research and careful stylistic analysis, Heslop makes a strong argument for the artistic skill and continental awareness of the artist, Liutger, potentially an ecclesiastic in Lund as well as the carver of the Roskilde walrus ivory seal matrix. (For more on this object, see Andersen, “Archaeology and Sigillography,” 194, and the cover of Seals.) Heslop theorizes that Gunhild may have been a member of a religious community in or near Odense, the site of her brother Cnut’s martyrdom. 58 robyn barroW Figure 4.1. Profile view of Gunhild’s Cross with runes visible, Gundhildskorset, walrus ivory, ca. 1110. National Museum of Denmark. Photo: Robyn Barrow, 2019. nacular name, is carved in medieval runes at the cross base. These runes are positioned along the thick edge of the lower roundel. Shallow and willowy, they are less deeply incised than the Latin inscription, most likely by a different hand. Spatially, however, the runic inscription receives primacy of place and acts as a fulcrum between the two separate Latin inscriptions. One of these Latin phrases, running up the lower shaft of the cross, remembers Helena: “Qui me cernit pro Helena magni Sueonis regis filia Christum oret que me ad memoriam Dominice passionis parari fecerat” (He who sees me shall pray to Christ for Helena, daughter of King Sven the Great, who has had me made in remembrance of the Lord’s suffering). Opposite it, running up the lower shaft of the cross on the other side is the acknowledgement of the artist: “Qui in Christum crucifixum credunt Liutgeri memoriam orando faciant qui me sculpserat […]” (Those who trust in the crucified Christ, shall in their prayers remember Liutger who carved me at the behest of Helena, who is also called Gunnhildr).13 Because the inscriptions dedicated to the artist and patron respectively begin on the roundel bottom and process upwards, a reader must logically begin at the runes. The runes were therefore not an afterthought or an interruption, but integral to the program of inscriptions. How do the runes relate to the iconographic program? The roundel nearest Gunhild’s Old Norse name is also occupied by the personification of Death on the obverse and a damned soul being tormented by a demon on the verso: both figures participating in the 13 Translation from The Skaldic Project, edited by Tarrin Wills: https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/m. php?p=ms&i=19229. I thank Dr. Oliver Norris for his help with this inscription. This kind of interplay between Latin and runic scripts can be found in other early medieval examples. The most famous presence of runes on a whalebone object is the Northumbrian Franks Casket, ca. eighth century. In the case of the Franks Casket, the runes combined with Latin represent a playful display of linguistic virtuosity, echoing the mixture of Christian and pagan iconography. Another object featuring this kind of code switching is the Coffin of St. Cuthbert, ca. late seventh century, whose inscription includes both runes and Latin script. Both of these examples from the north of England are obviously much earlier than Gunhild’s cross but fall quite close to one another in time. And like Gunhild’s cross, these examples were made in an environment of exchange and cultural collision, in this case brought about by Viking invasion rather than Christian conversion. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 59 Figure 4.2. Engraving of the front of Gunhild’s Cross, ca. 1110, from Suhm, Historie af Danmark, ca. 1800. The corpus engraved on the cross here was an imagined replacement. Arrow illustrations meant to demonstrate the directionality of the inscriptions away from the runes at the base. act of judgment. The damned soul points to its tongue while grasping a scroll running up the back of the lower shaft: “pater Abraham miserere mei et mitte Lazarum ut intinguat extremum digiti sui in aqua ut refrigeret” (Father Abraham have pity on me and send Lazarus so that he may dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue). This inscription comes from Luke 16:24, a parable in which a rich man allows a beggar named Lazarus to suffer unaided at the gates of his home. After his death, the condemned rich man begs Abraham to send the beggar, Lazarus, who is now cared for in Paradise, to soothe the rich man’s burning tongue in Hell. In the parable, the condemned man is rebuffed, and the verse thus becomes a powerful warning to the wealthy. Gunhild’s name in runes lies alongside this blistering condemnation of worldly wealth withheld from the needy. The patron may have hoped to contrast her pious use of worldly riches, through her creation and gifting of this cross, with the actions of the selfish rich man from the parable. For many at or adjacent to the Danish court, Old Norse runes would have been their language and script of literacy, making Gunhild’s name the only accessible portion of the extensive inscription. Gunhild thus ensured that she would be remembered by those who experience this object, whether they read runes, Latin, or understood the complex dialogue played out between the two. Indeed, the cross itself is a bilingual agent, speaking in the first person.14 Gunhild is a traditional dithematic name popular among Scandinavian royalty, while the choice of Christian name, Helena, provides an important link between this Scandinavian noblewoman and the early Christian imperial family.15 In the fourth century CE, 14 Though the dating and identity of Gunhild and her cross have varied depending on scholars’ investments, see n. 12 above, I agree with Heslop’s dating of the cross to ca. 1110 and the identification of Gunhild as a daughter of King Sven II Estridsson. See Heslop, “Gunhild’s Cross,” 442. 15 The name Gunhild is comprised of two lexical elements, the prototheme Gunnr (Old Norse, “battle”) and deuterotheme Hildr (Old Norse, “battle”). There are a number of examples of royal Danish women bearing this name in both history and legend, including the wife of Harald Bluetooth. See Shaw, “Role of Gender,” 151–52. 60 robyn barroW Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As tradition has it, she was inspired by God to recover the True Cross and send it back to Constantinople for veneration. Ambrose of Milan interpreted this success in recovering the relic in his obituary for the Emperor Theodosius in 395: “You [the Devil] were vanquished by Mary who gave the Conqueror birth […]. Today, also, you shall be conquered when a woman [Helena] discovers your snares […]. Just as Mary was visited to liberate Eve, Helen was visited that emperors might be redeemed.”16 In this passage, Ambrose places Helena within a lineage of God’s chosen women, the successor to Mary as a paradigm of motherhood and piety. Helena’s inventio of the True Cross is an act of “unveiling,” a divine revelation made expressly and specifically to a woman of imperial blood. As mother of Constantine, Helena is also particularly associated with the redemption of emperors, and the spread of Christianity through earthly courts.17 In a transitional moment of conversion, then, the discovery of the True Cross by Helena was always enmeshed within very particular religious and political concerns. Helena’s act became emblematic of pilgrimage, imperial devotion, and feminine virtue. Eight centuries later, a second, Danish Helena commissioned a cross, one carved from walrus ivory, and thus inscribed herself as an inheritress of this powerful genealogy. This Helena too, although the daughter of a Danish king rather than the mother of an emperor, was enveloped in a moment of widespread cultural transformation as well as massive territorial expansion. The colonial power embodied in the availability of Greenland walrus ivory is paired with the carefully articulated Christian orthodoxy of a missionary period. On the cross’s surface, we see the overlap and tension between various identities tied up in the expansion of Christianity to the North. Though conversion within the Danish court was becoming more firmly entrenched by Helena’s lifetime, the early twelfth century was still a moment of oscillation between old and new traditions. Despite the 2700 kilometres that separated Gunhild from Greenland, she, like the Greenlanders, had a vested interest in the North Atlantic trading sphere, which provided walrus ivory for art production. For Greenlanders, the network provided subsistence necessities for inhabitants of a land inhospitable for farming. The unbroken thread of the walrus can be useful in teasing out some of the significances embodied by its long journey from Disko Bay to European centres of craft and trade. The Hunting Ground Norse sources for walrus ivory existed prior to the settlement of Greenland, both in northern Norway, where trade developed with the Sámi people, and later in Iceland. At the ninth-century Aðalstræti hall, a site excavated in the downtown core of modern Reykjavik, three expertly extracted walrus tusks were discovered within the hall, perhaps representing unused craft material or stand-alone prestige objects.18 Due to over16 Ambrose, De Obitu Theodosii, col. 1400; Ambrose, Oratio, trans. Mannix. 17 See Baert, Heritage of Holy Wood. 18 McGovern, “The Walrus Tusks,” 106; Frei, “Was It for Walrus?” 443; Harrison, “The Zooarchaeology,” gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 61 hunting coupled with a warming climate, the walrus population dwindled in the waters around Iceland, and by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries walrus sightings were unusual enough to be worth noting in texts.19 Recent research conducted by Karin Frei and a team of archaeologists persuasively demonstrates that the demand for ivory in continental Europe was substantial enough to propel Norse expansion to unknown lands, in search of fresh resources, in the tenth century.20 But their expansion to Greenland meant, for the settlers, vast separation from the rest of Scandinavian society. This isolation from exterior authority would persist for the settlement’s duration, making the export of Arctic goods the primary mechanism of European connection. Over the next five hundred years, the Norse established the Eastern, Western, and Middle settlements on Greenland. Much smaller than the Eastern Settlement, the Western Settlement was a convenient outpost for the long trek north to the walrus hunting grounds on Greenland’s west coast. Scholars estimate that the entire Norse population of Greenland in the five hundred years of colonization was a total of twenty-six thousand people, with no more than two thousand resident at a time.21 Though the Greenlanders farmed and kept animals, they depended heavily upon marine food sources to survive in the harsh climate.22 The colony had a strict socioeconomic hierarchy, with a few key families controlling the community’s few short-range sea-faring vessels, and thus controlling the wealth.23 The majority of the population lived at or near subsistence levels. Though no technical testing has been performed on Gunhild’s cross, it is nearly certain that the tusks used to make it came from walruses living in the ice fields and bays around Greenland. In a joint effort between Cambridge University and the University of Oslo, scientific analysis of the mitogenomes of twenty-four archaeological walrus rostra and three tusk offcuts from western Europe, all dated to between 900–1400 CE, has provided substantial evidence that, by the twelfth century, Greenland was very nearly the exclusive source of walrus ivory.24 Within its three Norse colonies, the walrus provided the means for maintaining a strong tie between often-distant neighbours. As with the Indigenous peoples of Greenland, the Tuniit and Early Kalaalit, walrus hunting and processing for the Norse settlers was a community-wide summer affair.25 Norse hunts were generally performed in the midst of walrus summer migrations, when walruses travel in small groups. Single males could also be cornered during the colder months, which is 4. Each of these tusks were upper left canines, meaning that they must have come from three different walruses that, in the Viking Period, likely inhabited the waters of southwest Iceland. 19 A walrus surfacing off the coast of Iceland is mentioned in a passage from Kormàks Saga: Dectot, “When Ivory Came,” 6. 20 Frei, “Was It for Walrus?” 443. 21 Imer, Peasants and Prayers, 17. 22 Arneborg, “Norse Greenland,” 1–39. 23 Imer, Peasants and Prayers, 21. 24 Star et al., “Ancient DNA of Walrus Ivory,” 5. 25 Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 172. 62 robyn barroW the walrus’ breeding season.26 Hunters, whether armed with blades or projectiles, such as a crossbow or bow and arrow, had to be close enough to these formidable animals for their weapons to drive through their tough hides; the skin and blubber of a male walrus is around ten centimetres thick around its neck, their tusks are fifty cm long on average and slightly shorter and straighter in females, and the average weight of a male Atlantic walrus is 900 kg or 2000 lbs.27 After a season of seven to ten weeks, the Norse hunters could transport dozens, even hundreds, of decapitated heads back to the Norse settlements, likely leaving the rest of these hefty beasts behind.28 Arctic Neighbours To reach Disko Bay, the Norse would have interacted with other cultures also relying upon the same walrus colonies. A Norse storehouse for ivory found at the Nuussuaq Peninsula, about one hundred kilometres farther north than Disko Bay, indicates that Scandinavian settlers likely ventured beyond even this popular hunting ground.29 By at least the early thirteenth century, and perhaps earlier, some branches of the Early Kalaalit people were entering the same area, moving eastward from Arctic North America, thus joining the Norse and the earlier Tuniit populations of Greenland who inhabited this land.30 The Tuniit and Early Kalaalit may have also brought tusks from farther north or farther west to trade. Three Indigenous sites contemporary with the Norse colonial period have been found in Disko Bay itself.31 Relationships in a shared hunting ground would likely have been mediated by trade and gifts, including tusks.32 It is clearly outside of my own situated positionality to comprehend or convey the richness and complexity of relationships in the more-than-human world among Arctic communities either in the past or today, and the topic is best explored elsewhere by Indigenous scholars.33 But briefly, it is important to stress that walruses are, for many 26 Houmard, “The modus operandi,” 22. 27 Houmard “The modus operandi,” 25. 28 Dectot, “When Ivory Came” 6. 29 Dectot, “When Ivory Came,” 21. 30 I make reference to two separate Indigenous groups here, the Tuniit (otherwise known as the Dorset by anthropologists) and the Early Kalaalit (also Thule or Historic Inuit in the archaeological sources). Dorset and Thule were the names applied to these cultures by white ethnographers in the early twentieth century. Though no term can fully liberate onoing research from Eurocentric academic categories, I have chosen to use Early Kalaalit to refer to the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Greenlanders, and Tuniit as the name given to this group of Paleo-Eskimos in Inuit oral histories. For the earliest anthropological consideration of these cultures, see Matthiason, “Norse Ruins”; Jenness, “A New Eskimo Culture”; Rowley, “The Dorset Culture.” For further reading on these Indigenous cultures present in Greenland by the thirteenth century, see McGhee, Ancient Peoples; Whitridge, “Classic Thule”; Odess, “Archaeology of Interaction.” For Indigenous accounts of the Tuniit in oral histories, see Qitsualik-Tinsley, Tuniit; Laugrand and Oosten, The Sea Woman, 42–44. 31 Gulløv, “The Nature of Contact,” 18. 32 Zságer, “Miniature Carvings,” 22. 33 Todd, “Fish Pluralities,” 221; see also note 6 above. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 63 Northern communities, sentient and powerful beings in a shared and highly relational environment, rather than “resources” to be exploited; demonstrations of respect play an essential part in Indigenous hunting practices. Arctic cosmology, tied deeply to the land itself, makes this significance plain.34 According to this cosmology, the Sea Woman is the protector and mother of marine animals. A strong-willed woman, she was banished from her home on land to live beneath the sea. It is only by her permission that seals, walruses, and whales appear for hunters, and disrespecting the prey risks her anger. Breaches of the social contract held between Arctic peoples and their animal neighbours could harm the community if the animals removed themselves or were unwilling to be hunted. In times of scarcity, the spirit of the anggakuk, the spiritual leader of the community, would travel under the water to plead with the Sea Woman to return the walruses.35 A key feature of the history shared across Inuit Nunaat (the homeland of the Inuit) and documented since the earliest days of contact with Europeans, the Sea Woman remains a cornerstone of Inuit cosmology.36 For Artic Indigenous communities, walruses were important neighbours. Their tough hides were used in making such indispensable items as tents, snow shoes, and bootsoles. Like that of seals, walrus meat was a key part of Arctic diets. A 675 kg walrus could provide 275 kg of usable meat. And, as in Norse contexts, walrus bone and ivory were significant materials for ceremonial and hunting objects like harpoon heads, masks, and amulets.37 For hundreds of years before the arrival of Norse settlers in Greenland, Tuniit artisans and spiritual leaders made not only an ingenious and complex array of tools from their tusks, but also splendidly carved figurines, maskettes (miniature masks), and other objects of personal and communal enjoyment as well as spiritual power. Discovered in North Baffin Island, a small ivory object now in the Canadian Museum of History reveals the virtuosity of these artisans as well as a complex belief system in which walruses and their tusks played an important part. Only 4.6 cm long, this piece of tusk has been expertly hollowed, one flat side carved with a geometric pattern that might be interpreted as a human face. The minute object is crowned by two naturalistic walrus heads, their extraordinarily delicate tusks joined at the midpoint. Several 34 As has been explained by Indigenous scholars such as Zoe Todd and Vanessa Watts, the careless reproduction of Indigenous histories within European scholarship can often lead to a reinscription of colonial violence. I want to acknowledge here, with deepest respect, the contemporary Inuit communities who are the bearers of this history and emphasize that the Sea Woman cannot be decontextualized from the contemporary international struggles of Inuit for land sovereignty, political autonomy, and justice. I do not evoke the Sea Woman here as a theoretical jumping-off point that merely filters Indigenous cosmology through the Eurocentric nature–culture divide, but rather in the hopes of decentring European perspectives. 35 Laugrand and Oosten, The Sea Woman, 57–74. 36 European accounts of the Sea Woman extend as far back in Greenland as the eighteenth century, when the Danish missionary Hans Egede was told the of Arnarwuashsaaq, one of the names by which she is known: Laugrand and Oosten, The Sea Woman, 34n2. She is known in contemporary accounts as Sedna, which Inuk writer Rachel Attituq Qitsualik has argued is a derivation of the Inuktut word sanna, meaning “down there”: Qitsualik-Tensley, “The Problem with Sedna,” 12. 37 Houmard, “The modus operandi,” 25. 64 robyn barroW Plate 4.3. “Shaman’s tube,” Tuniit: walrus ivory, ca. 500 CE, 45.9 mm × 33 mm × 17.1 mm. Canadian Museum of History, SiHw– 1:453, S90–2991. other such objects have been discovered elsewhere in areas of Tuniit occupation, demonstrating a belief system, or at least shared aesthetic practices, that spanned many kilometres and several centuries. Walrus ivory tusks, carvings, and tools were given as gifts among Tuniit groups who relied on continuing long-distance relationships for marriages, trade, and community.38 There is archaeological evidence that the walrus baculum, or penis bone, was often used by Indigenous peoples in the fashioning of weapons.39 Forming harpoons and other blades from both the baculum and the tusk of the walrus would serve to redirect the impressive strength of the animal, adapting its potency for the use of the community. The same pattern is found in Norse sites on Greenland, where the baculum was used particularly in knife handles, wall hooks, and trophies.40 Indeed, this may have been a practice transmitted across cultures. In both Tuniit and Early Kalaalit artistic production, amulets were worn on the bodies of hunters and spiritual leaders.41 Amulets of this type, featuring polar bears and walruses, have also been found at Norse sites.42 We must therefore imagine that the Norse who attended services in Garðar cathedral and nearly two dozen other Christian churches in their settlements, were also invested in the spiritual powers of the Arctic. The walrus, as both a neighbour and a mutually essential resource, was the active instigator of these relationships. Gunhild’s cross, destined for a courtly afterlife in Denmark, emerged from this context. Journeys and Exchange Removing walrus tusks from the skull without losing any precious material was a specialized skill. The Norse, like their Indigenous neighbours, learned to leave the skulls for some time before carefully dislodging the tusks with micro-blades. Some walrus ivory was used locally. Excavations at Sandnes, the chief farm of the Western Settlement, have 38 McGhee, Ancient Peoples, 138, 140, 148. 39 Houmard, “The modus operandi,” 21. 40 Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 172. 41 Carpenter, Upside Down, 59. 42 Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 179. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 65 Figures 4.3a-b. Walrus and polar bear amulets from Norse Greenland, CC–BY–SA Rikke Margrethe Mølvig Sekkelund, The National Museum of Denmark. Polar Bear, L. 2.4 cm, Farm W51, Sandaaes, Kilaarsarfik, found in dwelling, walrus ivory; Walrus, L. 3.8 cm, Farm W52a, Umiviarsuk, walrus molar. revealed many small walrus ivory objects. Among them, belt buckles carved from walrus ivory bear striking resemblance to similar buckles in Gunhild’s Danish homeland.43 A twelfth-century crozier buried with a bishop in the North chapel of Garðar Cathedral presents the finest extant example of carving discovered in the Greenland. Because it was constructed of materials all available in Greenland, with a walrus ivory crook and an ashwood staff, this symbol of episcopal power could have been carved in the colony itself, though there are no other examples of such large-scale ivory carving in the settlement. The sale of walrus ivory from Greenland brought in needed goods such as wine, grains, metals (including gold), and stained glass for the Garðar cathedral windows.44 In the period around 1100, when Gunhild’s Cross was commissioned in Denmark, Scandinavians’ trade economy with western Europe was in a period of rapid growth in the wake of Christian conversion. With expanding relationships with European neighbours, Scandinavian ports began to distribute a wide array of specialized marine commodities, particularly stockfish, herring, and cod.45 This growth in markets, demonstrated through the increased number of extant walrus ivory objects found in western Europe, as well as the developing system of tribute and taxation, would have increased demand upon Greenland walrus populations.46 43 Pierce, “Walrus Hunting,” 178. 44 Fragments of stained glass were discovered in the archaeological record of Garðar Cathedral, representing the only evidence of glass windows discovered in the Norse Greenland colony: Nørland, “Norse Ruins,” 37. 45 Perdikaris and McGovern, “Codfish, Walrus,” 85; Nedkvitne, Social Consequences, 6. 46 By the thirteenth century, Greenland was increasingly regulated by both the kings of Norway and the Roman Church, which exacted large payments in walrus materials. On March 4, 1282, a letter from Pope Martin IV confirms that the Norse Greenlanders had paid their crusade tithes using walrus tusks, skins, and ropes; after sale of these confounding items, it orders that, in future, the 66 robyn barroW Figure 4.4. Crozier and ring, Garðar Cathedral, Greenland: walrus ivory, wood, and gold, ca. twelfth century. CC–BY–SA Lennart Larsen, National Museum of Denmark. Due to limited timber for shipbuilding, Norse Greenlanders were essentially moored on their outpost by the twelfth century. As a result, Norwegian merchants made the long voyage to Greenland and ferried wares back and forth across the North Atlantic.47 Walrus skins were the Norwegian material of choice in constructing ropes and sails. Due to the network of thickly bundled collagen fibrils in the reticular layer of the dermis layer of the skin, walrus hides are exceptionally strong and durable. 48 The first known written reference to walruses is recorded in the account of the adventurer Ohthere, who told King Alfred of his voyages around 890: “His main reason for going there, apart from exploring the land, was for the walruses, because they have very fine ivory in their tusks […] and their hide is very good for shipropes.”49 A thirteenth-century Norwegian account, Konungs skuggsjá, notes that walrus hide rope is “of such strength that sixty men may pull at one rope without breaking it.”50 Walrus hides were thus a preferred material for Scandinavian sailors making the long and treacherous journey to and from Greenland to obtain walrus tusks. Though, in much of medieval Europe, walruses were largely unknown and the origins of their ivory mysterious, the Arctic mammals were probably better understood in Scandinavia. Local ruling families were tightly intertwined, with Danish and Norwegian relations centrally important to leadership in both lands. Loosely organized governance payments should be made in gold and silver. See Olivier-Martin, Les registres, 44–45: “Subjunxisti quoque quod Gronlandie decima non percipitur nisi in bovinis et focarum coriis ac dentibus et funibus balenarum que, sicut asseris, vix ad competens pretium vendi possunt.” In 1327, a large shipment of walrus tusks helped to fund a Norwegian crusade against Novgorod: Keller, “Furs, Fish, and Ivory,” 3; Christiansen, Northern Crusades, 189–95. The ecclesiastical organization and government of medieval Norway and Iceland has also been explored extensively by historian Joel Anderson: see his articles “Bishop Guðmundr” and “Ecclesiastical Government.” 47 Imer, Peasants and Prayers, 22. 48 Berta et al., Marine Mammals, 134. 49 Two Voyagers, ed. Lund, 19–20: “Swipost he for dider, toeacan pæs lands sceawunge, for pæm horshwæleum, for dæm hie habbad swipe æpele ban on hiore topum […] hiora hyd bid swide god to sciprapum.” This account is part of an Old English translation of the Latin Historiae adversus paganis by Paulus Orosius (fl. ca. 400) in London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.I., fol. 13v. 50 Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen MS Arní� Magnússon 243, fol. B.; Konungs skuggsjá, ed. Larson, 140. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 67 and intermittent Danish occupation in Norway led to unstable alliances and unification, later broken by conflict. Danish nobility would have been explicitly aware of what walrus ivory was and where it came from. It is unlikely that the tusks used in Gunhild’s cross were shipped directly to their final destination in Denmark from Greenland. More likely, the material passed through ports in Iceland or the Norwegian port of Nidaros, modern Trondheim, along the way.51 In these ports, walrus ivory was quite special, but still recognizable.52 The Old Danish word for walrus is hvalros, derived (like the Old English horshwaleum or horse-whale) from the Old Norse hrosshalvr.53 The tusks were highly desirable for luxury carving. In an Anglo-French chronicle of the life of St. Alban, dating from around 1230, the author describes a plain cross that “was not adorned with gold or other metal, or ivory or rohal [walrus ivory]. Nor were there any applied gems or crystal on it.”54 The author of this passage identifies walrus and elephant ivory as distinct materials from one another, though both appropriate for the decoration of crosses. For northern traders and elite patrons, walrus ivory, as a luxury good exclusively sourced from the Nordic world, was considered an apt gift for kings. Orosius’ chronicle mentions that Ohthere gifted King Alfred a tribute of walrus ivory upon arrival in English port.55 A walrus ivory oliphant of Norwegian provenance from the treasure of SaintChapelle was likely a gift from King Magnus VI of Norway to French king Philip III in exchange for a thorn from the Crown of Thorns.56 To commemorate the reunification of 51 Due to the limitations of tusk size, walrus ivory carvings are the epitome of portable objects, and scholars have historically disputed the provenance of Gunhild’s cross. As Peter Lasko asserts, “Not only are ivories always likely to have travelled easily, but skilled craftsmen also must often have worked both in Britain and on the Continent […] as well as in Scandinavia.” In 1646, Sophie Brahe, a widow in the same Danish noble family to which Helena belonged, owned the cross (see above, note 12). Despite this remarkably stable provenance, a 1974 exhibition on Early English art at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London exhibited the cross as English in origin, arguing that it had been looted from the Abbey of Peterborough or Ely. To support an alleged English provenance, Gunhild’s Cross has also been cited as a forerunner to the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters Cross, an object with its own mysterious and problematic history. However, apart from the fact that both crosses were carved in walrus ivory, very little about their iconographies, styles, or even constructions bear out this comparison. 52 It is difficult to say how much the different people handling walrus ivory in various parts of Europe would have known about the material. The etymology of the modern English word “walrus” is not totally clear, and the French morse did not come into usage until the sixteenth century. Medieval French and later English sources use derivations of the Norman derivative rohal. In Middle French literature, rohal was a stone akin to amber that came from the sea, and could refer to either walrus tusk or narwhal horn. Often it was associated with courtly contexts and luxurious inlay. In these continental sources, the association with animal teeth is lost. The hairy whales (hirsutus cetus) that Albertus Magnus speculated about in the thirteenth century would remain shrouded in mystery in most of Europe well into the early modern period. See Sayers, “Lexical and Literary Evidence”; Guérin, “Tears of Compunction,” 52–56; Gilman, “Tale of Two Ivories.” 53 Sayers, “Lexical and Literary Evidence,” 101, 110. 54 Dublin, Trinity College MS 177; La Vie de Seint Auban, vv. 2–6. 55 Two Voyagers, ed. Lund, 19–20. 56 Seaver, “Desirable Teeth,” 277; Gaborit-Chopin, “L’Oliphant.” 68 robyn barroW Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in the 1397 Kalmar Union, a carved walrus tusk bearing the insignia of Christian I and his Queen Dorothea, the rulers who had last maintained kingship over the three kingdoms, was gifted to the new ruler, Eric of Pomerania.57 As an emblem of Scandinavian power and luxury, this tusk, inherited by one rule from another, symbolized the kingship of the three unified Nordic realms.58 Just as tusks passed between Indigenous and Greenland Norse groups to solidify trading bonds and mediate shared spaces, Arctic ivory had the potential to signal similar interactions among Scandinavian powers and between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. As a rare and exceptional commodity, and one on which Scandinavia held an exclusive monopoly, walrus ivory as gift embodied northern prestige. Material and Meaning With the provenance, marine crossing, and value of its uncarved tusks mapped, we can now return to the iconography of the cross itself.59 Constructed from two solid pieces of walrus ivory, Gunhild’s cross is held together by a cross half lap joint, meaning a flat “cheek cut” was made halfway through the thicknesses of the two interlocking pieces of planed ivory, so that they securely lock together.60 The long vertical member reveals the natural narrowing of the walrus tusk from proximate to distal end. Traces of red, green, and gold pigments survive, and it is possible that the cross was even more extensively gilded. Examination of the eyes of the surviving figures reveals traces of jet. The corpus of Christ that once hung on the cross face has disappeared.61 It is now known only through the marks of its significant absence: the large vacancy in the cross composition, two of the three ivory pegs that once affixed Christ to the cross, and colour variation where the back of the sculpture once rested. (This figure was approximately 14 cm long and later metal nails recall the position of his open palms.) Today, the only remaining bodily “relic” of Christ is the painted blood that trickles over the ivory from his missing wounds. While this absence is regrettable, what remains is the intersection of other bodily relics, the tusks, and their meaningful conjunction at the crossroads of cultures and of animal-human relations. Though the corpus of Christ is now lost, his sacrificial body was probably also carved from the tooth of a walrus that had had a spear thrust into its side far across the ocean. The red trickle of painted blood that ran from the wounds in Christ’s palms and remains on the 57 Seaver, “Desirable Teeth,” 277. 58 In a similar vein, Mariam Rosser-Owens has elucidated the ways in which elephant ivory oliphants were often given as symbolic objects, or “horns of tenure,” in the transfer or gifting of land: “The Oliphant,” 44–47. 59 I do not extensively address its liturgical or devotional use in this article, but Gunhild’s cross must have been used as a personal cross, a processional cross, and/or an altar cross, and probably functioned in multiple ways through the centuries. There are signs of wear from touching, as well as a large fissure at the cross’s base likely due to internal pressure. The evidence of damage to the lower roundel indicates that Gunhild’s cross was repeatedly inserted into a support—either as an altar cross or as a processional cross. 60 Rogowski, Complete Illustrated Guide to Joinery, 231. 61 Beckwith, Ivory Carvings, 44. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 69 cross remembers the violent end of the animal the material came from, a mnemonic for the hunting ground where the ivory’s journey began.62 When viewing the cross exclusively from the front, as one would if it sat on an altar, only a limited portion of the carving is visible. From this perspective, the cross functions first as an image, devoid of evident textual intervention. It is only in the perusal of the cross from every angle that the extensive inscriptions reveal themselves along the sides and back. In this way, the apprehension of the text and its iconographic context is bound to the haptic pleasure of feeling its heft, turning the smooth ivory over in the hands. This brings much of the carving into a secondary activation, a drama played out only in relationship to the viewer’s own body. Seen from afar, as it would have been if displayed on a stand, the cross works differently, mysteries of text and image veiled by distance. In this way, it is similar to a seal matrix, an amulet, a knife handle, a chess piece, or a crozier: in each of these cases, the walrus ivory was carved with the expectation of movement and touch. Gunhild’s cross was crafted to require close, physical association with a person to be fully apprehended; even if this kind of interaction was not available to anyone who encountered it, the cross cultivates a desire for a multisensory experience of itself and, through that relationship, an intimate encounter with the worldview it embodies. The patron’s insistence upon naming herself demonstrates the expectation that she would be remembered through prayer by those who saw and experienced this artifact. Whether held in the hand in an intimate encounter or held aloft on a support for the spectatorship of a community, the cross projects a set of beliefs, values, and relationships. Gunhild’s cross was likely commissioned as a donation to a religious community, one for which she held a particular affection or was perhaps even herself a part.63 Gifts of this kind could be appropriate displays of power and wealth for royal women, useful both in creating a material legacy for themselves and in securing their afterlife via prayer.64 Details in the iconography also prompt a viewer to remember the woman who had the cross made: among the redeemed souls to the right of Christ in Judgment is a crowned woman. The female personification of Ecclesia holds a staff topped by a cross, replicating the shape of Gunhild’s cross in another woman’s grip. At the top, the personification of Life (VITA) achieves the same effect with the cruciform branch from the Tree of Life in her hand. In each of these small figures, Gunhild and her gift are remembered. Though each roundel can operate, to an extent, on its own, the full resonance of the cross’s iconography functions through the web of relationships between the carvings across the object’s front and back.65 On the two sides of Gunhild’s cross there is a quadripartite division of space: four satellite images, separated by their roundels and placement, surround the central crossing like spokes on a wheel. Ideological antonyms sit in 62 Examples of such ivory corpora still attached to their crosses include the Crucifix of Ferdinand and Sancha, ca. 1063, in the National Archeological Museum of Spain, Madrid. Like Gunhild’s cross, this object also incorporates jet in the decoration of eyes. 63 Heslop, “Gunhild’s Cross,” 455. 64 Anderson, “Sign of the Cross”; Cohen, “Abbess Uta.” 65 Wolfgang Kemp has considered the symbolic potential of pictorial fields, using cross axes and maps to examine how narrative systems might also contain geographic and cosmological meaning: see his “Medieval Pictorial Systems,” 121–38. 70 robyn barroW spatial opposition. Paradise and Hell on one side, and Life and Death on the other, mark the top and bottom of the object like the opposing poles of the globe. In the parable from Luke 16, which is referenced through the pleas of the condemned soul in the lower roundel, the separation between “Abraham’s bosom” (salvation) and Hell is visualized through the distance between the top and bottom roundels of Gunhild’s cross: “Between us and you, there is fixed a great chaos: so that they who would pass from hence to you cannot, nor from thence come hither.”66 Ecclesia sits across from Synagogua, and the redeemed across from the unredeemed. In this sense, Gunhild’s cross can be seen as a map encompassing the Christian cosmos. Iconographically, this program of paired opposites on front and back of the cross is unique, as noted by Sandy Heslop.67 Temporally, the front and back also mirror the moment of Judgment and the moment of Crucifixion. Through all these juxtapositions, there is an elision between temporal, geographic, and eschatological space, the cross arms acting as the sinew connecting these extremes. Everything between these ultimate states of being is held in the dialogic space of the ivory arms, the crossing where the corpus of Christ once hung. Paradise and Hell, life and death, the redeemed and the unredeemed: these outer roundels of the cross visualize the four peripheries, or endpoints, of the Christian worldview. All that lies between, all the living world, is contained on the ivory surface between them. The zone once demarcated by the arms of the crucified Christ represents the distance between these greatest extremes of divine judgment. As a material brought from the very edge of the world, walrus ivory itself performed travel and embodied great distance, making its use yet another articulation of vast conceptual spaces. The space between the left and right roundels of Gunhild’s cross is an ideogram, an image of, to quote Psalm 103, “how far the East lies from the West.”68 It is a spiritual system, a mythography adopted by Gunhild and mapped onto the economic system of the Arctic ivory trade. Crossroads Gunhild’s cross, through the combination of its material, form, iconography, and numerous inscriptions, is a unique object in the context of twelfth-century Denmark, where it was probably made. And with the exception of a few comparanda found either far away or in the medium metalwork, it is also unique in twelfth-century Scandinavia and in Europe, writ large. To find cruciform equivalents for the inscription hhonouring its patron, we must retrace the journey of its ivory’s Arctic crossing, back along the marine trades routes to Greenland. Buried in the grassy sheep farm near Garðar Cathedral, a number of wooden crosses bearing runic and Latin inscriptions were discovered in Nørland’s excavations of Greenland churchyards. Made of local juniper and pinewood, probably imported, these humbler portable crosses harmonize with the one commissioned by Gunhild thousands of kilometres away. The 66 Luke 16:26. 67 Heslop, “Gunhild’s Cross,” 441. 68 Psalm 103:12. gunhiLd’s Cross and the north atLantiC trade sphere 71 Figure 4.5. Cemetery cross, Herjolfnes, Greenland: wood, ca. early thirteenth century. Herjolfsnes-trækors 8. CC–BY–SA Arnold Mikkelsen, National Museum of Denmark runes on two examples read: “Almighty God, protect Gudleifr well”69 and “Pórleifr made this cross to praise and worship almighty God.”70 Though significantly simpler than the inscriptions honouring Gunhild and Liutger on Gunhild’s cross, the parallels between these incised prayers is striking. These are all speaking objects, memorializing their owners and requesting divine protection. Like Gunhild’s cross, and unlike other known comparable objects (such as the Cloisters Cross or the metalwork portable crosses in Denmark), these Greenland crosses are constructed in two pieces, the crossbar and vertical assembled with the same half lap joint. Blown across windy seas by sails and rope made from walrus skins, concepts of both religion and craft circulated through the North Atlantic trade sphere. Gunhild’s cross is an object with a long and complex memory. Embedded in the Arctic ivory, and the journeys that ivory undertook before it was carved, are far more extensive histories than those immediately visible in its courtly European provenance. To fully understand the Nordic medieval world, material witnesses such as this cross must be encountered with full appreciation for the vibrancy and scope of long-distance Nordic trade in the period. 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Abstract The walrus ivory trade constituted a cornerstone of Norse Greenlandic society, its exchange providing goods essential for the isolated settlement’s survival until the fifteenth century. The journey to the walrus hunting grounds at Disko Bay drew European settlers into encounters with their Indigenous neighbours the and morethan-human world of Greenland. As walrus tusks moved through the North Atlantic trade sphere, from Disko Bay to the Scandinavian Greenland settlements and on over the North Atlantic to Europe, it materialized a particular kind of Nordic prestige, was a gift between traders and kings, and was carved into objects of devotion as Scandinavia converted to Christianity. Tracing the journey of tusks along these trade routes through the case study of Gunhild’s cross, a devotional cross likely carved in Denmark in the early twelfth century, reveals both the depth and complexity of object memory and the vibrancy and scope of Nordic trade in the medieval period. Keywords Arctic, walrus ivory, Gunhild’s Cross, Scandinavia, North Atlantic trade sphere, global North, Tuniit, Kalaalit Nunaat, Greenland, medieval women patrons, ivory carving, conversion