Legacies of a Medieval Walrus Hunt: The Settler-Bishop’s Benediction

Robyn Barrow

Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Brown University

Thursday September 17, 2026  5:30 pm  Andrews House 110

In the year 1280, Bishop Olav of Garðar, the most remote Christian bishop in the world, died in Southern Greenland. He was buried in the north chapel of his modest episcopal seat along with a small crozier of walrus ivory. Anchored by this object from Greenland’s medieval cathedral, this talk probes an early instance of Arctic resource exploitation. I trace the development and scope of the walrus ivory trade of medieval Greenland, following the export of walrus tusks from the hunting ground shared with the Inuit to Norse settlements, to European markets. Contextualizing the crozier within the wider history of exchange demonstrates the amplified wealth and prestige afforded by this luxury arctic material in Scandinavia and Europe against the backdrop of diminishing returns for the impoverished Norse Greenland settlers in this emerging, and, in the end, terminal, system of extraction in the Far North.

About Robyn Barrow

Robyn Barrow is an art historian of medieval Europe in a connected world. She specializes in art, cultural exchange and environmental histories of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Her region of study encounters the sovereign homelands of the Inuit and Sámi, and she has traveled extensively in the Arctic. Her manuscript, Tracking North: Art, Ecology and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World explores cultural systems extending across the vast spaces of the north. The project illuminates the ways that systems of secular and religious power were creatively negotiated by communities across the wide Norse-settled region in the Middle Ages, from Gotland to Greenland. Her second project, Thaw: Revelation and Erasure in the Medieval North, considers the relationship between medieval art and the temporalities of contemporary environmental crisis.

This lecture is organized by the Program in Medieval Studies