Seeing Norseman’s Green Pastures at Eye Level

Thousands of people have seen the southern part of Greenland, for it lies beneath a main flight path used by transatlantic aircraft on their North America-Europe runs.

If cloud cover doesn’t interfere, these airborne sightseers press close to the cabin windows to catch a glimpse of the great white north, the famous ice cap with its curving furrows of snow, the confetti of ice afloat on the waters of the coastal fiords.

As a break in the flight tedium, it’s all a bit exciting. But the memory of such a view from 40,000 feet can be fleeting at best. What is it like down below, with your feet on the ground, with Greenland at eye level? Some travelers are finding out for themselves.

According to Scandinavian legend, Eric the Red had a sly scheme in mind when he gave Greenland its name. Banished from Iceland for his involvement in a series of blood feuds, Eric led a small fleet of longboats west, came to the gigantic island across the Denmark Strait and settled alongside a southwest fiord. Hoping to attract fellow Norsemen to the frigid place, he cleverly called it Greenland.

Real-Estate Promoter

Today, summer visitors discover that Eric might not have been such a false-promising real-estate promoter after all. From June through August, flights by Icelandair connect Iceland with Narssarssuaq, site of an airfield lying just across the fiord from what remains of Brattahlid, the settlement Eric founded in the year 985.

This is indeed a green part of Greenland in the summer, the season of Eric’s voyage, when daylight lingers for 20 hours. Sheep graze and ponies frolic on lush meadows that climb from the water’s edge up the flanks of snowless granite mountains. Delicate wildflowers and millions of tufts of Arctic cotton grass, the fifa that once was used as wicks for Viking lamps, speckle the landscape.

The air is crisp but gentle and immaculate, the sky a gloriously bright blue. Chunks of ice populate the fiord. As they shrink in summer’s warmth, they become iridescent ghosts. The real ice of Greenland, the cap covering 86% of the island, broods eastward beyond the coastal mountains.

That cap of eternal ice and snow amounts to 708,290 square miles, an expanse far larger than most nations. It’s nearly two miles thick in some places and, as just one measure of its enormity, every coastal city on earth would be flooded if it were to melt.

The ice-free coastal strip is just a tiny part of Greenland, but it’s equal to the combined land areas of England and Italy.

The bucolic atmosphere of the southern shore region makes it an appealing summer destination. Greenland has always attracted those who don’t demand pampered comfort. Today’s visitors are no exception. They welcome this striking change from the world’s well-trampled tourist circuits.

Danish Backpackers

SAS flights link Narssarssuaq with Copenhagen, so its passenger manifests invariably include robust Danish backpackers who regard Greenland as something of a limitless national park. Many Greenlander Eskimos also rely upon this air route for schooling and job training in Denmark.

Narssarssuaq is a focal point for such excursion activity, for two elemental reasons. It’s one of West Greenland’s two airfields serving commercial jet traffic (the other is Sondre Stromfjord, farther north alongside Disko Bay and used largely by SAS flights).

Second, it is the site of the Hotel Arctic, that can be headquarters for tours of at least four or five days. Icelandair flight time from Keflavik, Iceland, is only two hours.

Accommodations are merely basic. The 200-bed hotel is a spare, concrete structure that looks exactly like the barracks it once was. Narssarssuaq is on the map because it was built as the U.S. Air Force Blue West One convoy-escort base during World War II. Rooms are double-occupancy and baths are shared.

The hotel “lobby” is a modest reading room-lounge and the “front desk” is little more than a wooden counter. Yet many first-time guests are surprised that clean, heated lodging beneath a permanent roof exists here at the upper edge of the inhabited world.

Next door is a restaurant, a congenial bar and a gift shop well stocked with such Greenlandic mementos as seal skin purses and jackets, Eskimo beadwork, carvings made from walrus tusks, dolls and miniature kayaks.

Restaurant fare is predominantly Danish and therefore good, supplemented by local salmon and shrimp delicacies. Breakfast (included, along with dinner, in the room price) is served as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lunch is a special treat for those not out on tour, because you take what you wish from a typically prodigious Danish cold table.

Cheerful Young People

The whole Hotel Arctic operation, as with all traveler facilities along the Greenland coast, is run by cheerful young people who come over from Denmark for summer work. Greenland became a Danish colony in the 18th Century and since 1953 has been an integral part of the monarchy. Thus the 50,000 native-born people who speak the Greenlandic language are just as completely citizens of the commonwealth as any resident of Copenhagen or Aarhus.

Five primary excursions are available for Hotel Arctic guests, of which four are via hotel-owned boats, Polar Star and Polar Moon. While most travelers fly Icelandair to Narssarssuaq with the excursions prepaid as part of their package tours, each can be bought individually at the hotel.

Long summer days are usually radiant with warm sunshine, and temperatures in the 60s and even the 70s are not at all uncommon. The “white night” of the Midnight Sun brings a temperature dip, but generally it stays mild.

Yet weather shifts here in the Arctic are sudden. A blissful morning can turn quickly into a raw, bone-chilling afternoon of rain and fog. Several of the excursions combine chilly air aboard the fiord boat, the heated exertion of an overland hike, then a chilly return. The only wardrobe remedy is versatility, with sturdy footwear an absolute must. A backpack is handy to stow a woolen sweater for just-in-case extra clothing.

The cruise across Eriksfjord to Brattahlid takes 20 minutes. Disembarkation is at a village founded in 1924 and named Kagssairssuq. For those on the excursion there’s nothing so fancy as a pier, only steppingstone rocks.

At Kagssairssuq, codfish hang from wooden racks to dry in the sun. Greenlander Eskimos--shy but amiable, in shirt-sleeves and humble cloth dresses--shop for groceries and tobacco. A tractor laden with hay and black-haired children clatters down a dirt road. Denmark’s red-and-white flag flaps in the incredibly clean wind.

A brief northward stroll through the village takes the visitor to the site of Brattahlid. There isn’t much left except for turf-covered ruins. Archeological discoveries of this century leave no doubt that this peaceful slope beneath the big Arctic sky was indeed Eric’s homestead.

A mound, shaped like a horseshoe, marks the place where Eric’s Christian wife Thjodhild had the first church in the Western Hemisphere erected. Skulls found in the adjacent graveyard in 1961 may have included those of Eric and Thjodhild. Grass pushes up around the foundation stones of the exiled Icelander’s house and farm buildings. Floor plans he laid out 10 centuries ago are easily defined.

Reached America

The slope ends at a small curve of beach. Here Eric’s son, Leif the Lucky, launched the longboats that dared unknown seas and reached America.

The boat trip to Qoroq Fiord has none of the historical impact of Brattahlid. It is purely scenic. It is, in fact, an essential part of the tour experience here because it puts the deep-freeze image of Greenland into close perspective. A southeast adjunct of Eriksfjord, Qoroq is much more ice-clogged because it’s closer to polar currents of Davis Strait and is fed by tumbling chunks of a glacier.

As the boat carves its way down the fiord the ice field grows increasingly dense. Cautiously, the boat crunches on right through the thick of the glittering field, probing close enough to the glacier for marvelous views of its silent, slowly creeping immensity.

The air is so utterly clear that distances are deceiving. Mountain peaks on the horizon seem to be 10 miles from the bow of the boats, but they’re 60 and 70 miles distant.

The two other excursions from Narssarssuaq focus on Eskimo communities. With 15,000 inhabitants, Narssaq is big by Greenland standards. On an edge of land far down the fiord, it began in 1880 as a seal-hunting station and today is a prosperous shrimp-canning and fishing center. It features a movie house, two schools, a bank, firefighting apparatus and medical facilities, one of the largest stores in all of Greenland and even a five-story apartment block atop a hill.

Main Attractions

Narssaq’s main tourist attractions, however, include the fish market and the landing stage of the villagers’ kayaks--the handmade, beautifully sleek one-man fishing craft of the Greenlanders since Stone Age times. Tour participants also can visit a craft shop where Greenlandic rocks are fashioned into attractive items of jewelry.

Itivdleq, by contrast, is the tiniest of hamlets, really just a beach, a rocky horse pasture and a handful of hillside dwellings. Passengers leave the hotel’s excursion boat there and walk for an hour through a valley to reach Igaliko, a village where 100 or so citizens raise sheep, grow vegetables in little gardens and catch fish in their branch of the fiord.

In the gentle season of summer, this timeless, sheltered place is something of a polar Shangri-La. In the Viking era Igaliko was the Norse village of Gardar, home of Greenland’s medieval bishops. Today’s visitors can poke through that epoch’s remnants--sandstone ruins of the 12th-Century cathedral and a Norse bishop’s banqueting hall.

Narssarssuaq’s only boatless excursion relies upon foot power. It’s really just a long nature walk through a valley, six hours round trip, but it’s worthwhile because it takes the hiking group right onto the edge of a glacier that licks the valley floor like a monstrous white tongue. The walking route follows a river bed and passes stands of willow and birch and idyllic grassy glens, filled with fifa puffs and lavender flowers.

After all of this summer splendor en route, the two contrasting worlds of Greenland become clear. The larger world is frozen white; the much smaller world is green just for a while, but time enough for the summer visitor to enjoy it.

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Icelandair operates nonstop flights to Keflavik, Iceland’s international airport, from five U.S. cities, including New York, Orlando, Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore/Washington. Icelandair has daily Keflavik-Greenland service. The normal (non-excursion) fare is $309 one way.

At the Hotel Arctic in Narssarssuaq, a shared room (with shared bath) costs $50 a night, breakfast and dinner included. There are no single-room accommodations.

Per-person costs of the tours described in this article: Brattahlid, $9.50; Qoroq Fiord, $22; Narssaq, $32; Igaliko, $27; Glacier Walk, $8.50. The price of each tour includes lunch.

These and extended Greenland tour packages can be bought from Icelandair offices in the United States and Iceland or through travel agents in either country. A 1986 summer-tour brochure can be obtained from Icelandair’s New York office, 21 Penn Plaza, New York 10001. For telephone information, call (800) 223-5500 and ask for the Icelandair tour desk.