How Viking-Age Hunters Took Down the Biggest Animal on Earth | Hakai Magazine

In the fall of 1385, according to a 17th-century Icelandic text, a man named Ólafur went fishing off the northwestern coast of Iceland. In the cold seas cradled by the region’s labyrinthine fjords, Ólafur reportedly came across an animal that would have dwarfed his open wooden boat—a blue whale, the largest animal on record, known in the Icelandic language as steypireyður.

Jón Guðmundsson, or Jón the Learned, the poet and scholar who recorded Ólafur’s story, called blue whales the “best and holiest of all whales.” For sailors who were in danger from other, more “evil” whales, Guðmundsson wrote, “it is good to seek shelter with the blue whale, if it is close at hand, and to stay as close to it as possible.” He went on to explain that blue whales were typically calm animals whose size alone intimidated more dangerous sea creatures.

Blue whales weren’t just mythic protectors of medieval Icelanders, though—increasing evidence suggests that they were also an important food source. When the massive whale surfaced next to Ólafur’s boat, the man thrust his homemade spear into the flesh of the whale. The spear would have been marked with Ólafur’s signature emblem, and if all went well, Ólafur would wound the whale badly enough that it would wash up dead on a nearby shore. Whoever found it would know Ólafur had dealt the deadly blow by the markings on the spear tip, and he could stake his claim on the whale’s bounty. In an era when most Icelanders survived predominantly by raising sheep, a blue whale—which can reach more than 30 meters long and weigh as much as 150 tonnes—was a caloric windfall. One animal could yield 60 tonnes of meat—the equivalent of 3,000 lambs—and, according to a 13th-century Norse text, was reportedly “better for eating and smells better than any of the other fishes.”

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