Inuits by Halldor Laxness

Now something must be said of the race called the Inuits, who make their abodes at the heads of Greenland’s  northernmost fjords, as well as on headlands, skerries, and islands. In Greenland, the land rises to from the sea only to be covered by high glaciers –all the way north to Scythia the Cold, some say- where there is no human life. It is also said that the name of this race has given itself means the same as or word for “men”.

 The Inuits are some of the most peaceable and prosperous people ever described in books. They have no herds, and use the land for neither hay nor other crops, but are such great hunters that their shots never go astray. They catch polar bears in stone traps, and drive reindeer either into pinfolds, where they fell them, or else into the sea, where they harpoon them from boats. These beasts they take mainly for their hides, as well as their tongues and loins. They hunt seabirds with darts, and drive fish onto shoals to spear them. Much of their time is spent on sleds, driving their dog-teams over sea ice – when they encounter an opening in the ice, they lay putrid swim bladders and seal livers at its rim, and when a shark comes to investigate they stab it with salmon spears.

They fit themselves out in skins, which the Norsemen find a contemptible habit, worthy of trolls, and wear undergarments made of bird skin. They use one-man boats, called kayaks, or “keiplar” in Norse, made with such ancient sorcery that no storm, skerry, or other dangerous obstacle can damage them. They have a second kind of boat, the umaik, made of skins and crewed by women in breeches, and none has ever been reported to have run aground or sunk. These things have given rise to the saying that the Inuit are ignorant of the art of drowning at sea.

It is also said that although the weather is harsher in that land than anywhere else in the world, the Inuits call all weather good, and are fully content with the weather as it is at any given moment. The cold in that land can be most piercing, yet no one freezes to death. Blizzards there blow long and hard, burying the earthy in snow and ice and preventing any vegetation from growing, yet we have never heard tell of an Inuit succumbing to the elements. Nor do the Inuit consider Earth to be one of the elements – yet they call fire their truest friend, second only to the gods in whom they put most faith, namely the man who rules the moon, the one-handed woman whose realm is the sea, mother of the monsters of the deep.

Reliable sources say that although the Inuit are great hunters, fowlers, and fishermen, expert with spear and bow, the sight of human blood can bring them to tears. They scarcely understand the forces and instincts that drive other peoples to manslaughter, and have no knowledge of the tools of the trade used by murderous folks in other land. The Inuit have thick black hair and rather large mouths. When some who had been hunting in the south brought tales of the manners of the Norsemen settled there and when the Norsemen slew their first Inuit, these people were so utterly baffled by the newcomers’ bizarre, depraved behavior that they named the Norsemen after this characteristic occupation of theirs, calling them “killermen” or “mankillers” to distinguish them from men- genuine men – the Inuit. Just as the Inuit are completely ignorant of warfare, so too are they ignorant of vengeance and other practices pertaining to justice.

The Inuit do not live separately, but in hunting bands. These hunting bands travel south to the same hunting and fishing grounds each spring, pitching their tents in temporary camps and seldom linger long in any one place, before returning north at the close of summer.

The Norsemen made a point of attacking the Inuit wherever they found them, whether in groups of whose movements they had gotten news, or as isolated individuals. If they came across their huts or skin tents on an island or a headland, they set those abodes aflame or destroyed them in some other way and slaughtered every person they found. Due to the Norsemen’s having far skin, colorless hair, and bright eyes, the Inuits lengthened the names they had given them to white or wan killermen, or pale mankillers.

It so happened that after a group of Norsemen reduced one of the Inuit hunting camps to cold embers, killing anyone who had not hidden in clefts in the rocks, and wrecking their gear as best they could, they were hit by a fierce storm, so that their boat capsized off a headland – something that would never happen to an Inuit. As the Norsemen in Greenland were unable to swim and thereby save their lives, all on board perished except one man who had come from Iceland - the skald Pormoour Bessason. He happened to be a good swimmer, and managed to say afloat until a wave washed him onto a bank  of seaweed, where he had no recourse but to shout for help.

A short time later, the storm abated. The remainder of the hunting band that the Norsemen had raided now fled northward with some of their dogs to safer haunts, using boats of theirs the Norsemen had overlooked when they burned the camp. As the woman rowed by the headland, they heard shouting from the bank of seaweed. There the Inuits found Skald Pormoour more dead than alive, freezing cold, drenched, bedraggled, with his good leg now broken too. Since the Inuits have no sense of retribution, they rescued their enemy, Skald Pormoour, from death and set his leg, singing all the while. They gave him warm seal’s blood to drink, and to eat, fermented seabird, still feathered and had their dogs sleep curled up against him.

A number of corpses had been washed onto the seaweed – Pormoour’s fellows – so the Inuits put seal-blubber into their mouths and carried the bodies up onto the rocks. Although the kind-heartedness of these people outweighed their wisdom or learning, they were well aware of the danger they faced having a pale mankiller in the midst of men, and despite his being sick and spent, they were fairly certain that as soon as he recovered, he would leap up and kill them. Every place they stopped for the night, they had him lie down with the dogs, and those in charge of the these animals watched over him. When night fell, however, the dogs barked noisily, and some bit fiercely – hardly pleasant company in those cheerless places.

Pormoour realized that he had little choice but to go along with his hosts no matter how far astray they led him, rather than be left behind, alone, a helpless man more dead than alive in the middle of a wasteland. Summer was drawing to a close. The Inuits broke camp, loading all their belongings onto the woman’s boats, including newborn infants and dogs, while any man capable of doing so paddled his own kayak. Quite often, the men rolled their kayaks over as a gesture of affection for the women, keeping them keel-up for long spells in a display of gallantry.

Pormoour was astonished at the sluggish pace of these people on their long journey. They paid no heed to the hours, but just trundled aliong, like folk that sometimes appear in dreams: no one was in a hurry; nothing spurred them on. Pormoour’s spirit grew numb watching people drift along without any urgency, as if playing children’s games rather than attending to their needs. It was often neat evening when they finally launched their boats and started out. They did, however, inch their way farther northward each day, putting even more distance between themselves and the Norsemen. Yet their day’s navigation often amounted to no more than paddling round the tip of a headland to the next fjord – that was far enough – where the women would paddle to land and unload their belongings, along with their children, dogs, and Pormoour Kolbrunarskald.. They would then drag their boats ashore, pitch their tents, and prepare and eat supper with great fuss, before lying down to sleep for the night. Or they would paddle up a fjord, close to shore, aiming for its heads, but then land and settle down for the night after only and short distance. They always hugged the coastline, never venturing out into the straits between headlands: and sailing was unknown to them.

Upon reaching the head of a fjord after several days padding, the od start paddling down the shore on the other side. If there was a promise of good prey, they would remain encamped for several days. At times they would drag or carry their boats and all their belongings over an isthmus behind a peak to the next fjord. Women would pitch the tents in the camps, using their paddles as tent poles, while some of the men would go hunting foxes and hares in the surrounding area, or try to track down musk-oxen; others would keep watch for sea-dwelling creatures: seals, whales, walruses, and bears. They stored food in various places, and always left behind whale meat and seal meat in their camps as provisions for when they returned, or for other hunting bands, but took tusks and hides with them, as well as large amounts of blubber. Whenever they crossed paths with other hunting bands, they celebrated merrily, staying together for several days, boiling seal-blubber, feasting, and singing “ay” and “ee.”

The news that one group that had gone south and returned with Pormoour Kolbrunarskald among their belongings aroused a great deal of curiosity in the hunting bands. Most men had never set eyes on a pale mankiller. Some asked what creature it was, and why it was being kept with the dogs. The others explained that Skald Pormoour belonged to a race of colorless Inuit who acknowledge no virtue but murder, and that pale killermen had come to their fishing grounds in the south and slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on, among them several men exceptionally skilled at driving their dogs and women expert at rendering blubber. All now praised their great fortune that the Moon Man and Mother of Sea Creatures had spared them from the acquaintance with these pallid folk, apart from what what their wise men might have related to them in song.

Pormoour now lay by night with the dogs, here and there near the northern boundary of the world, where death dwells. His life was quite dismal, and the killers of the warrior Porgeir Havarsson were as far away from his weapons as ever. Again and again, his heart ached with a single longing: to survive until the day, which now seemed so far away, when he could stand before the mighty king whom Porgeir had served and who now ruled the kingdom of Norway so honorably. Even if the vengeance that would make him worthy of coming before the king eluded him, he still yearned to extoll such a king in verses that would recall throughout the ages. And although he might never wreak his revenge, the skald hoped that in the eyes of the king, his journeying so far and so long to hunt down the warrior’s  slayers might be sufficient redress for this failure.

He tried to shut his ears to the relentless barking of dogs during the night by exalting King Olaf in his mind, lauding him for his champions, and envisioning in his mind’s eye the moment when he, a skald, would arrive at the king’s hall and enter and bow his head to his lord. As he pondered these things, timed passed and his broken leg healed, yet it was crooked and hardly fit for walking on, while the other one had been lame ever since the rocks had rained down on him  on the mountainside at Ogur.

After travelling northeastward for several weeks, the hunting band came to confined regions where glaciers descended to the sea between bare mountaintops. The weather worsened considerably and the group was often forced to wait for days, hindered by snowstorms, yet eventually they reached their home and dwellings: stone huts on promontories, some dome-shaped, others formed of whalebones with hides stretched over them. Awaiting then here were the stay-at-homes: old folks and children and a swarm of dogs. When they arrived, they hauled their boat ashore, greased them carefully and hung them on tall frames to keep the dogs from gnawing on them. Then they worked on patching up their dwellings and tents and sleds and other gear for the winter. It is the Inuit’s custom in winter, when the weather allows, to drive their dogs in the moonlight over ice-covered fjords, far out to sea, to hunt seals – and here more than elsewhere, they feasted on seal and walrus. Some of them worked on covering the huts with seaweed, then with snow, while others hung their insides with hides and arranged coking utensils and oil lamps in them, for there was no lack of fuel in blubber and oil.

In that land the moon shines in winter, but not the sun, which is why the Inuits honor the Moon Man above all. Little by little, the light of the sun vanished, until finally, folk could see only a faint outline of their hands before their faces for an hour at midday. By that time Pormoour Kolbrunarskald had earned the dogs trust, and those that had been fiercest toward him a first no longer seemed likely to tear him apart. At the same time, his esteem rose among men. They made him foremost among those creatures, just one rank below the dogs respected keepers. They dressed him  in good tunics and hose of sealskin and gave him hides to sleep on, and housed him in a shed reserved for pregnant bitches and sick old dogs that were so smarty and loyal that no one had the heart to kill them.

Snow shelters were built for healthy, vigorous dogs, or else they were left outside to be snowed over. The creatures were tied together with ropes of seaweed, these being the only ropes that they did not gnaw off. After snowstorms lasting several days, folk would have to dig their dogs out of the snow to feed them. The noble skald Pormoour, however, found his life tedious in the extreme, hearing nothing but the whine of the wind and the howling of dogs and hardly ever seeing any daylight. He felt that he would have died and descended to Niflheimur had he not kept the glorious image of King Olaf Haraldsson,  Porgir’s lord and that of both the sworn brothers, steadily in his mind’s eye, as well as his hope and dream of some day truly becoming one of the king’s men.