Ivar Bårdsson

Ívar Bárðarson (also known as Ivar Bardarson) was a fourteenth-century Norwegian clergyman. After the death of the Gardar bishop, he became the Catholic Church's official representative in Greenland. He is known primarily for his reports on the medieval Norse colonies. The reports covered the Eastern Settlement, church property, daily life, and perilous sailing routes. On an expedition to the more remote Western Settlement, Bárðarson found the colony abandoned, inhabited only by feral livestock. No original written reports have survived, but a sixteenth-century Danish translation has been preserved. Little is known about his background or personal life. He is best known for his detailed first-hand account of the Eastern Settlement in Medieval Greenland. Bishop Hakon appointed Bárðarson an official representative of the Catholic Diocese of Bergen on 8 August 1341. At the time, the church owned about a third of the developed land in the colony. Until a new bishop was ordained, Bárðarson filled the vacancy at Garðar Cathedral as an official representative of the Catholic Church.

Bárðarson returned to Bergen, Norway, in the 1360s with information on Scandinavian Greenland. He wrote that Gunnbjörn's skerries, a group of rocky islands along the eastern coast of Greenland, had once been the halfway point on voyages to the colonies, "but now ice has come down from the northeast out of the gulf of the sea so near to the aforesaid skerries, that no one without extreme peril can sail the old course, and be heard of again..." In 1364, he was appointed canon of Bergen Cathedral. Several manuscript copies of this Danish translation still exist. The best-preserved is the 17th-century manuscript "AM 777 a 4to" in the collection Safn Árna Magnússonar at the Arnamagnæan Institute. An early English translation was done by Samuel Purchas in 1625. It likely includes some interpolations, especially near the end, where exotic fruits are mentioned growing in Greenland.

The report has four sections: sailing from Norway to Greenland, an overview of fjords and church property, a description of a trip to the Western Settlement, and the overall living conditions in Greenland. The Eastern Settlement had not heard from the more remote colony, and when Bárðarson sought out colonists in the north, he found only abandoned farms. Feral sheep, goats, and cows descended from the Greenland livestock wandered the area. Later excavations at Gård Under Sandet (Farm Beneath the Sand) corroborated these observations. Inside an abandoned Norse home, archaeologists found one of the colony's last feral domesticated goats preserved in permafrost. The removal of furniture indicated that the residents had intentionally abandoned the farm, and the layer of feces on the floor showed that the goat had lived in the empty home until a wall collapsed onto it.