Greenland seeks to safeguard 1,000-year-old church

IQALUIT — A Greenland-based group wants to preserve and protect the first Christian church in North America.

Built in 1000 AD, the modest sod and log structure is located near Qassiarsuk, Greenland. It’s known as Thjodhilde’s church after Tjodhilde, the wife of Greenland’s Viking pioneer, Erik the Red.

“This little church was the first church on the North American continent,” said Jonathan Motzfeldt, the premier of Greenland, during a millennium celebration held at the church last July.

“So, despite its lack of impressiveness and its size of merely seven square metres, it can be said to be the mother of all later churches on this continent.”

According to the ancient Norse sagas which were passed from generation to generation, Thjodhilde coerced her husband into building the church because she was one of the first baptized Christians in Greenland and needed a place to pray.

The sagas say Thjodhilde wanted the church built some distance away from her home, where it would be out of sight of Erik the Red, a firm believer in the old gods.

The church is located near the southern Greenland village of Qassiarsuk, now a centre for sheep farming. There are many other Norse ruins in the vicinity, including Brattahlid, the ruins of Erik the Red’s farm.

It was from there that the son of Erik and Thjodhilde, Leif Eriksson, set out 1,000 years ago on a voyage which took him to Baffin Island, Labrador and what the sagas called Vinland, on the north coast of Newfoundland.

“It is my hope that Thjodhilde’s church will be a symbol of unity, fellowship and peace throughout the entire Christian world.”

— Jonathan Motzfeldt, premier of Greenland

The first Greenlandic “ting,” or outdoor parliament, was also held in the early settlement of Qassiarsuk around the same time.

The Vikings, originally from today’s Scandinavia, maintained active settlements in Greenland until around 1450 AD, after which they disappeared mysteriously.

The ruins of Thjodhilde’s church were first uncovered during the early 1960s as researchers and archeologists tried to link up the various places mentioned in the Norse sagas with physical locations in Greenland.

“How can we be sure it was Thjodhilde’s church? They [the archeologists] can’t be 100 per cent sure, but they feel pretty certain,” said Finn Lynge, a senior consultant with Greenland’s home-rule government.

“Around the little chapel they found an awful lot of skeletons. They had their feet to the East and their heads to the West. That’s because they believed when Christ would come in all his glory, he would come from the East.”

The graves, the oldest Norse ones found to date in Greenland, were clustered around the ruined foundation of an apparent chapel. Studies of these graves showed them to be 1,000 years old.

As part of Iceland’s millennium gift to Greenland, architectural archeologists reconstructed Erik the Red’s longhouse and Thjodhilde’s church. Iceland and Greenland covered most of the project’s reconstruction cost of about $1 million.

“The question then came up, should this be a real church? The decision was no, it should rather serve as a pilgrimage focus for all Christians in the North, and be a spiritual meeting point,” Lynge said.

Though most Greenlanders are now Lutherans, Lynge said Thjodhilde was a member of the early “universal church” — the only Christian faith of the day.

“It is a matter which concerns Christian society over the whole of the northwest Atlantic, from Greenland to North America,” Motzfeldt said. “It is my hope that Thjodhilde’s church will be a symbol of unity, fellowship and peace throughout the entire Christian world.”

Last year, those concerned with the ongoing maintenance and conservation of this unique historical monument created the Gardar Foundation. This foundation is an international, interdenominational religious organization based in Greenland. Its members include bishops from Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and the U.S.

They’re meeting this summer in Qassiarsuk to plan for the church’s future.

Thjodhilde’s church is located across the fiord from Narsarsuaq, which means “great plain” in English. Narsarsuaq, the site of one of Greenland’s largest airports, can be reached from Iqaluit by air via Kangerlussuaq.