Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Origins of Greenland About this episode With Greenland in the news, you may be wondering how and why Greenland became inhabited in the first place. Like all great stories, it is a medieval one! Matt Lewis retells the fascinating tale of Norse Greenland, from the arrival of Norse explorers over a thousand years ago to the mysterious disappearance of their settlements and the myths and legends surrounding the Viking presence in Greenland.
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Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.
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0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:42 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
1:18 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
2:01 Matt Lewis? Greenland is making the news at the moment with discussions around who should own it and why it's currently part of the Kingdom of Denmark. The answer to this question, like all the best answers, is medieval. How Norse explorers first arrived at Greenland over a thousand years ago is quite a tale. The course of their settlement during the rest of the medieval period is an equally intriguing story that's given rise to myths, legends, and lingering questions ever since. If you've been wondering about the origins of the presence of Europeans in Greenland and how they fared as they tried to settle one of the most inhospitable places on earth, then Gone Medieval has got you covered. A little later, we'll hear from Robert Ricks about the fate of the Norse settlers.
2:45 Matt Lewis? First, we'll revisit an episode originally telling the story of Leif Eriksson, who sailed from Greenland to North America around the turn of the first millennium. As part of this tale, Eleanor Baraklough explains how the Norse first came to be in Greenland. We've been talking about the various sagas that constitute the body of evidence for Leif's life and exploits. Let's jump into the conversation.
3:12 Matt Lewis? Is that the main way in which we know about Leif and his life? Is that the main evidence for him?
3:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. It is exactly that. And it's really interesting there because the sagas come from these sort of much longer oral traditions, these storytelling and information traditions, genealogical traditions that are passed down the generations. And it's probably worth situating him in time. So he's born in the last decades, you know, maybe, I don't know, 975, that sort of time, something like that. So the last decade of the 10th century. And he's born in Iceland. And of course, that's the place that the sagas are written down in. But very soon... He ends up moving to Greenland for reasons we can get into.
3:55 Speaker 02 And so we've got to think, okay, that's where the saga, that's where the, the stories are sort of coalescing in a way. But the two Vinland sagas, Grannig Saga of the Greenlanders, and Saga of the Red. They don't look like they've drawn directly on each other. One of them's not copying the other one's homework, essentially. So what that means is they have shared oral traditions. And that means it's really interesting because sometimes the information in both these sagas is pretty much the same. Because they sometimes agree with each other and sometimes they have different ways of describing stuff, different characterizations of, of the main people featured in the stories.
4:36 Speaker 02 It's really hard to know exactly what is, what we would think of as history. I think, you know, because what history is also up for debate. But certainly when it comes to what Leif got up to in North America and also elsewhere. We're relying on these traditions that it's not that there isn't truth in them. It's just, it's really hard to pinpoint which bit is truthful, which is what makes them exciting. It's why I love the sagas. They're just, just when you think you've got a handle on them, like, yeah, I'm just going to pull that rug from underneath you. And let's see, let's introduce a zombie or dragon. And then you see how you get on as a historian with that.
5:13 Matt Lewis? As a body of evidence, what are the Icelandic sagas and why are they important?
5:18 Speaker 02 So the Icelandic sagas are not saga comes from to say or to tell, seja in, in Old Norse. And again, that kind of tells us something about these oral origins of the sagas. In that they've been sort of passed down, they've been, the stories told around the fire, the winter fires in Iceland. Very long, cold winter nights, you know, not very much to do. So it's this idea, they called it the kvöldvaka, like the evening wake, where essentially everyone's sitting around the fire, hearing these stories. And when we're talking about sagas as sources, and it's not just the Two Vinland Sagas, but when we're talking about sagas as sources for Leif Eriksson and Norse Greenland and,
6:01 Speaker 02 you know, the voyages to the edge of North America, we are really predominantly talking about a group of sagas that we call the East Lendinga Söger, the sagas of Icelanders. And those sagas are very much based in those early centuries of sort of like the Norse diaspora, the Viking Age, we might say, the settlement of Iceland, which begins in the second half of the ninth century. So those are the ones that are in some ways easiest to work with from a historical perspective. I say that with many, many caveats in my... But and there are other types of sagas as well. So there are the king sagas, the kuningas söger, which
6:42 Speaker 02 are predominantly about Scandinavian monarchs. But these monarchs go very, very far back in time to the point where they become semi-mythical or like downright legendary. And then they also, we have sagas of people we know very well to be historically accurate, or at least historically real, of people like Harald Harada and Olaf Trigvisen, you know, the big kings of Norway. Then we either have other kinds of sagas that are much more rooted in that sort of misty mythical past of the Nordic world and the sort of Germanic world, going back to the Migration Age. And those are called the Fornaldas söger, you know, the kind of sagas of ancient times. So it's a real body of source material and
7:24 Speaker 02 it's a body of source material that has a lot of kind of native sort of influences, obviously coming from Iceland itself and the Nordic world, the diaspora more generally. But we've also got to remember that these sagas are written in a context that speaks to sort of continental learning and medieval Europe. And there's also romance sagas, Arthurian sagas, you know, they're called ridderas söger, like the sagas of riders, the chivalric sagas. So there's all body of evidence, but luckily we have other sorts of evidence as well for people like Leif the Lucky, or at least the things that he was said to get up to. And that's where archaeology comes in.
8:04 Matt Lewis? So valuable but tricky.
8:06 Speaker 02 Exactly that, valuable but tricky.
8:07 Matt Lewis? Valuable but tricky. And what do the sagas tell us about Leif in terms of his character, his appearance? What do we actually know about him personally?
8:16 Speaker 02 So both Erik saga and the saga of Greenlanders, they like him. They describe him as promising. They say, I think it's Glanin saga says he was tall, he was strong, he was impressive, he was shrewd. This is a very, not a characteristic you would necessarily associate with high praise in this period. But it was just as he was very moderate in his behaviour. And that's important, you know, he was a good guy. He was someone you could rely on. And this becomes important later on. We know about his early life. So he was probably, as I say, was probably born in Iceland. But there is a good reason he ends up settling in Greenland. And that's because of what his dad gets up to. So should we talk a little bit about Erik the Red?
8:59 Matt Lewis? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. What can we know about him?
9:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. Erik the Red, as fiery as his nickname suggests, I think we might say. So Erik is in Norway. We're talking, yeah, sort of second half of the 10th century. Erik and I think his dad possibly didn't quite mean that. I can't quite remember, but Erik gets outlawed from Norway because of some killings. And this becomes something of a pattern because then they move to Iceland, they settle in Iceland. And then low and behold, he gets outlawed from there because of some killings. This time it's something called lesser outlawery, which is kind of outlawery light, where you basically have to leave the country for three years. And if you behave yourself, you're then allowed to return. So this is around the year 985.
9:45 Speaker 02 Erik is outlawed and he decides, possibly because he's already been outlawed from Norway. So there's no point in heading east. He decides to head west from Iceland.
9:55 Matt Lewis? He's outlawed everywhere in the east. So just keep going west until he finds somewhere that'll cope with him.
9:59 Speaker 02 He's like, well, I'll take my chances. I mean, this is it. Greenland, the settlement of Greenland by the Norse is a really interesting one because it's sort of the Wild West. You know, these are sort of, not all, but there is a sort of roguish quality to the Norse Greenlandic settlement, which kind of makes sense because this is a place which is sort of quite hard to survive and you have to build everything up from scratch. It can be quite dangerous. So it is these sort of slightly renegade characters that end up there initially. So Eric goes off to Greenland and it's worth saying, and this is always like slightly annoying. It's easier to sort of picture on a map. We end up with the Norse settlement is on the west coast of Greenland.
10:44 Speaker 02 And there are two main areas they settle in that they call annoyingly, the eastern settlement, which is actually further south than the western coast, right? Got to picture that. And the western settlement, which is a few hundred miles further up the coast. Thanks for that, Norse Greenlanders.
11:01 Matt Lewis? So the western settlement is north of the eastern settlement, which is to the south, west, east.
11:05 Speaker 02 That's ridiculous, isn't it? So the way I think about it, I just imagine Greenland as a big triangle. Okay. Don't ask me what sort of triangle. There's a reason I didn't do maths. Big pointed triangle. And on the right hand side of the triangle, that's the east coast. That's really icy. Lots of polar bears. You don't really want to be there. Occasionally the sargas say that explorers get sort of washed up there, shipwrecked there, and it's never brilliant because it is just like incredibly cold. There's a type of wind that comes down from, you know, the ice sheets onto the east coast, which today's Greenlanders, they call, I'm not going to pronounce it in Greenlandic, but they call it that which attacks you, which just about sums it up, right? So you forget that part of the triangle. We want to go to the sort of left hand
11:50 Speaker 02 length of the triangle. That's the west coast. And then you've just got to imagine two blobs. And one's the smaller western settlement, which is further north toward the Arctic Circle. It's around Nuk, modern day Greenlandic capital. And then the eastern settlement, which is further down that triangle. Let's go back to Eric the Red. Eric the Red goes off, he basically explores that western coast. And he finds, you know, there's good hunting grounds. There's actually a lot of good land to settle and farm on that sort of the lower part of the western coastline. And it's absolutely true. I've done lots of research out there. Everyone always says, oh, He names it, and actually the sagas say this too, he named it Greenland so people would be encouraged to settle there.
12:32 Speaker 02 Yes, the sagas do tell us that, but actually there was a lot of good farming lands. The problem is that the winters are very, very long, very harsh. And the connections to sort of that wider Norse diaspora are, you know, further away essentially, you know. So it's harder to get the things you need.
12:52 Matt Lewis? Which sort of suited Eric, I guess, in his circumstances, but it must be quite isolating. So.
12:56 Speaker 02 Exactly that. And so this sort of explains why after three years, when his lesser outlaw is up, he comes back to Iceland. He basically gathers up all his followers and his family and he says, right, off we go, we're going to settle Greenland. And the later texts tell us that of the sort of, I don't know, 24, I think it is ships that set off. About half of them get to Greenland and the other half are either lost in the ocean or driven back to Iceland. Again, that's important. That tells us something about just the sheer distances and the danger in which I think is often quite easy to forget. Eric and his wife, Hjul Hildur, and his children settle in a place called Brathelyth, which sort of means like steep slopes.
13:37 Speaker 02 It's a very nice place. There's a lot of farming land. There's still a farming community there today. And that is essentially where Leif is situated. That's where he grows up. And yeah, he has two brothers called Thorsten and Thorvald, and he has a sister, possibly a half sister called Freddis. So this is sort of Greenland, Norse Greenland in its infancy, just before the year 1000 or so.
14:06 Matt Lewis? Having established settlements in Greenland, the Norse people trying to make it their home next had to survive the harsh conditions. Robert Ricks visited Gone Medieval to discuss his book about the fate of the Norse settlements in Greenland. What do we know about their contact with the Inuit people? What happened to the Vikings? And what did people think for centuries afterwards had been the fate of the lost settlers of Greenland? Robert helps us get to the bottom of these stories.
14:37 Matt Lewis? So I guess to kick us off with, who were the settlers that reached Greenland?
14:42 Speaker 03 To begin with, I think we need to talk about one of the more colourful people of Viking history, that's Erik Torvaldsen, or the name as Erik the Red. During his time of exile, he explored the seas beyond Iceland and defound Greenland. He was not the first Icelander to do so, there are records of a previous sighting by one at least a century before. Erik was the first who discovered land in Greenland, at least from a Western perspective. Obviously, the Paleoeskimos had discovered Greenland long before, but from a Western perspective, he was the first. The settlers in Greenland were primarily farmers. In the saga records, they're called landmansmen, which means land takers. So this kind of discovery was facilitated
15:25 Speaker 03 by an apex in maritime technology, and they were able to reach Greenland at the time. So they made that 900 mile journey from Iceland to what became the eastern and western settlements within a couple of weeks. It's said that 25 ships left for Iceland around 985, and 14 ships reached the coast. So they would set up their farms near the sheltered fjord system in the south-west of Greenland. So farmers and also walrus hunters, that we may come back to, because that becomes a very important part of the Greenland economy.
15:58 Matt Lewis? And why did they decide to go to Greenland? Why are they going west? You know, part of it is that Erik has been exiled. Exiled from the place that you get exiled to seems quite daunting, but why go west? Was it because there were stories of a land out there? Were they just hopeful of finding something?
16:16 Speaker 03 Presumably. I mean, he couldn't stay in Iceland, so the kind of Western movement and previous sightings may have led him to go there. And the reason why others went, I mean, the story in the saga material is that Erik was basically a very good estate agent. So he created a kind of buzz around Greenland. So it's said that he called it Greenland because it sounded good. This was a good name to sort of sell it to other people. And this seaman's ship proved successful. As many people, primarily those living on poor land, or those who had suffered a downturn in farming fortunes, they came convinced that Greenland held great opportunity. There's also a 13th century treatise from Norway called The King's Mirror, where it is a kind of conversation between a father and a son. And the father gives three reasons why you want to go to Greenland.
17:01 Speaker 03 He says it's fame and rivalry, it's curiosity, you want to explore things you've heard about. And then there's a desire for walrus hide rope and also the teeth of walrus. And this really becomes very important. And I think over the past decades, we realised that the selling and exporting of walrus bone became extremely important. So Greenland became a trade-dependent economy. They became commodity exporters. Many of the walrus tusks were made into ivory products. So we know this from sword hilt, from gaming pieces. Some of the listeners may recognise the loose chess pieces, late 12th century, and sacramental objects like the crooks on bishops' crochets.
17:44 Speaker 03 So this became a high-value commodity. And Greenland became a major supply of ivory, at least from the beginning of the 12th century. So we might also talk about not just farming, which was obviously one way to sustain yourself, but also there's a sort of gold rush. The Greenland economy was a boom and bust economy. So as soon as the walrus trades got underway, there's a reason for going there. And when it faded, they probably left.
18:10 Matt Lewis? Such an interesting sales trick to call it Greenland as a way to appeal to everyone who's living in Iceland, because what sounds better than Iceland? Well, somewhere that's green and lush and you know the promise of farmland and everything else. It's such a, it's a con trick really, isn't it? But it's a good one.
18:26 Speaker 03 Absolutely, absolutely. And that's at least what the saga material says. But surely that kind of promotional value of having Greenland. But there were green spots, obviously, near the fjords. But yeah, as compared to Iceland, I mean, this is probably a better name.
18:38 Matt Lewis? Whereabouts on Greenland do we think that they settled? Because I think from the book, there's some confusion over it being called an eastern settlement that may have caused problems later on.
18:49 Speaker 03 Yes, so the Greenlanders settled on what was basically the southwestern tip of Greenland, and they were only on the west coast. So there were basically two main settlements, the eastern settlement and the western settlement. Eastern settlement was around the 61st parallel north, the western settlement about the 64th parallel north. But the reason why it was called the eastern settlement is because the Greenland's west coast, they're as east as it runs south. So when you looked at the two settlements in comparison, one was more eastern, more to the east than the western settlement. But this kind of misapprehension persisted for centuries because it was believed that the eastern settlement
19:34 Speaker 03 was really on the east coast, which is difficult to access because of sea ice. So no one could get there for many centuries. So there was this rumor or myth, legend, that there was still a standing settlement on the east coast, which was never the case. The eastern settlement perished at the same time as the western settlement. So there's a lot of confusion about this, but we know that the Norse Greenland has only settled on that southern tip of the west coast.
20:02 Matt Lewis? So eastern settlement was only eastern in relation to the western settlement, but it created an idea that they were on the east coast. And I suppose when you try and get to that and it's enclosed by pack ice, that just doubles down on this idea that there's perhaps this trapped community in this historical bubble who haven't been keeping up with the modern world perhaps, who might still be living there utterly inaccessible to everybody.
20:26 Speaker 03 Precisely. And there were so many myths at the time. There's books published from the 1560s where someone meets someone who had been trained in a monastery in Greenland at the time, when certainly the colony there would not have existed. Also, people who sort of drifted at sea and then they came near the coast and they could sort of spot in the distance, they could see that Greenland are still tilling their fields. And these sort of rumours persisted for a long time. And then there were also rumours, as soon as the Danes re-colonized Greenland, there are still rumours that somewhere beyond the mountains, there was still this sort of... Colony that existed and what had become of them. So this sort of interest in finding these Norse green letters was strong. And one of the reasons why the Danes wanted to
21:08 Speaker 03 re-colonise, so Hans I who was the missionary who first suggested that that the greeners should be re-colonised, he was interested in finding these colonies primarily because from a Christian point of view, the connection had been cut off before the Reformation. So he thought it was sort of incumbent upon the Danes and the Danish church to reconvert the Norse settlers. And it was believed there on the east coast. So even when they arrived on the west coast, which was where they could get to, they still believed that there is something to be found on the east coast. And well into the 1830s, well into the 19th century, this was still the belief that there would be a functioning eastern settlement.
21:45 Matt Lewis? It's incredible how some of these stories can endure. So we've talked before on the podcast about Prester John, which is a similar thing. People believe he exists in a place and the more you explore, the more you just move him somewhere else. He must be a little bit further away. And eventually he moves from kind of Eastern Asia down to Africa. And it's still that idea that even when you start exploring bits of Greenland, well, they must just be somewhere else, a little bit further in, we can still find them.
22:06 Speaker 03 It's very interesting because when Hans I arrives in Greenland, he's been reared on this diet of rumours about Greenland. And there were so, so many rumours about the gold that could be found there, the silver ore, about the fertility of Greenland and these big forests. And it's quite interesting to read the book he writes about Greenland in 1741, his description of Greenland, because he constantly sort of comes up against things that don't really match up with what he's read in the books. So he has this sort of view beyond the horizon. He says, unless it directly contradicts what he can see with his own eyes, he has this idea that beyond the horizon, it may still be there. So maybe on the east coast, we still have these big forests, we have the eastern settlement, there
22:47 Speaker 03 is a fertile land to be found somewhere. So though he failed in all his attempts to grow barley and other things on the west coast, he still believed that they would be there and there was an eastern settlement which had all this fertility and gold and ample supply of resources. So it's very much the kind of the same idea that beyond the horizon, it must be there.
23:08 Matt Lewis? It's a fascinating thing for us to think about today. I think when we consider ourselves to have mapped, you know, the entire surface of the planet, we know everything about everything that is everywhere, that we've lost that kind of idea that what is just beyond the horizon, what can we hope is out there, what can we imagine? We don't have to do that anymore. And perhaps we've lost something in, in no longer being able to do that. So what do we know about the disappearance of this settlement? Do we know when this colony is last heard from?
23:36 Speaker 03 The last little information we have about Norse Greenland is a wedding, which takes place in 1408. And there's a ship that leaves Greenland in 1410. And that's really the last communication with the Norse Greenlanders. So that's on record. And the wedding is still described until, let us, until the 1420s. But after that, there's no communication with the Greenlanders. And that is really the last information. And beyond that, there's no information about the whereabouts of the Greenlanders or what happened to them. So obviously, over the centuries, a number of myths developed about how they may have perished or how they may have still continued to live in Greenland. So we know very little about their disappearance.
24:18 Speaker 03 And even to this day, it's not been settled exactly what happened to the Greenlanders. And that's part of the mystery of Norse Greenland. And I guess why it's such an intriguing mystery today.
24:45 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
25:20 Speaker 04 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
26:03 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so, but I mean, the colony obviously lasted for, if they set out around 985 and they disappeared, or they were last heard from around kind of 1410, they've been there for sort of 400 years, which suggests that they were able to make a fairly good living there, they were thriving perhaps under the walrus ivory trade in particular. And then something happens and they completely vanished from the record. So are there competing theories of what happened to them? Do people have ideas of what may have occurred?
26:30 Speaker 03 Well, there are several competing theories about the disappearance. So one theory concerns Eurocentrism, that the fact was that in 1985, when they first arrived, this was during the hot period, the warm period of the medieval times. And towards the end, we came into what's known as the Little Ice Age. So there would have been less opportunity for them to farm the land. And even though we do know they adjusted to subarctic conditions through adopting a marine-based diet, there's still indication that it was just a tough life to live in Greenland. When we talk about the walrus trade, and I think that's really the most important thing here to mention, we know that after 1350, there's an increase
27:13 Speaker 03 of elephant ivory coming out of Asia and East Africa, and maybe also competition from Russia, where walrus ivory is also produced. So this indication, at least in terms of a fine commodity, as soon as you have elephant ivory, which is considered to be a better quality, it's whiter, then they might have been outcompeted. There's also the indication that they may have been overhunting, because towards the end of the period, as I understand it, more female walruses were caught, which means that they have smaller tusks. So that might have been kind of in desperation to source ivory. So the ivory trade may have been part of determining why the colony couldn't persist.
27:55 Speaker 03 Then there's some more colourful theories, which I think we might mention here because they're part of kind of the medieval stories. There are stories of pirate raids. So when the colonists, the Danish colonists came in the 18th century, they heard stories about pirate raids in Greenland. There's a very interesting story from 1769, when Nils Il, one of the colonists, he interviews a shaman who keeps these stories alive, the tradition alive, and he tells of a ship that came and burned down the villages, kidnapped many of the Norse Greenlanders. Not quite a credible story because there's no archaeological evidence that the villages were burned down. But we do know that these ships, especially English ships, may have visited Greenland.
28:39 Speaker 03 We know from 1425, there's a record of the governor of Iceland, Hannes Palsen, who was carried to England. And from prison, he writes this letter to the King of England, listing all the crimes that have been committed by English fishermen over the prior five years. And this includes raiding of farms, the murder of farmers, looting of churches, and not least kidnappings. And we also know that Icelandic children were for sailor slaves in Norfolk in 1429. So there is indication that there could have been a security problem in Greenland. That everyone was carried away by pirates seems unlikely, but there might have been
29:19 Speaker 03 a concern there because with no protection in such a far-flung place, it might have been so that pirates did come and kidnapped and burned and looted, and for that reason it became less, you didn't want to stay in a place such as Greenland, which had no protection. So certainly we're in the realm of possibility that we did see pirate raids, but that as the only reason, probably not. Then another theory is conflict with the Inuits, and that is a theory that has been taken up recently. We know that the Inuits encountered the Norse people sometime in the 14th century, so they moved down from Canada. And first of all, they would have met them in the hunting grounds near the disco bay.
30:02 Speaker 03 And they came into conflict and sometimes it came to blows. So in Historia Novia from the 12th century, there's an encounter where an Inuit is hit by a Norse weapon. And his wounds sort of gush out some white blood and the bleeding wouldn't stop. So this is a kind of medieval account of what happened, kind of monsterisation of the Inuits. But also the Icelandic animals, still have incidents where two boys were captured and eighteen Norsemen were killed. So there's some indication that there were skirmishes with the Inuits. And finally, the church official, Eva Bardason, who was sort of a tax collector. He describes the abandonment of the Western settlement. So there's an account, an oral account, which was written down sometime later.
30:46 Speaker 03 We don't know exactly when he visited the Western settlement, but towards the end of the 14th century. And he says, the Western settlement was abandoned. You only saw cattle in the streets and no people there at all. So there might have been some, certainly not genocide, but there might have been skirmishes with the Inuit, which may have troubled the Norse people. I guess if we should have put it all together, perhaps the real reason why they left, or why they couldn't sustain a living in Greenland, is really the kind of perfect storm of calamities at this time. As it was a globalised economy, there was some of the irony, and that became increasingly more difficult. There's also the plague. The plague had hit Iceland and also Norway sometime before the 15th century.
31:29 Speaker 03 So the communication there would have been more difficult and ships wouldn't have visited Greenland with quite the same frequency. Then there's the colder sort of chill at the time, the Little Ice Age. And a number of factors may have convinced the people who were left that this may not be a good place to stay. So they might have hitched a ride with some of the fishing ships that came to Greenland and gone back to arable land in Norway or other places.
31:55 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's interesting to think the mistake may be looking for one single reason that caused them to to leave or abandon the settlement or disappear, when it could just be, as you say, a perfect storm of of lots of different factors coming together to mean that it's no longer viable to stay here. What do we know that contemporaries made of the loss of contact with Greenland? Was there any concern about the fact that no one was hearing from these people anymore?
32:19 Speaker 03 Initially, no. Well, it was, Normans Greenland was Christian, so they were under the supervision of Rome. And we know that Greenland continued to be what you might call a ghost sea for quite a number of years after the colony was no longer in existence. So at least until 1537, bishops were still appointed to Greenland, to Garda in the Eastern Settlement, but they would never intend to travel there. So the last resident bishop in Greenland was Alpha, who died in 1378. And it may say something about the infrequent communication, that the news of his death didn't reach Norway until six years later. So there was very little communication, partly because of the plague and partly because
33:00 Speaker 03 maybe the Irish trade had discontinued to some extent. So there's no sort of focus on Greenland. So very little was made of the loss of Greenland to begin with. There are some papal letters. There's a letter written at the behest of Pope Nicholas V, around 1448, which talks about a pirate raid, again. There are other letters. There's a letter from 1492, I think, by Pope Alexander, who talks about Greenland as being at the world's end. So at least from the kind of Roman perspective, there was some prestige in having Greenland as the most northerly outpost of Christianity. So this was where, as far as the Christian
33:44 Speaker 03 light expanded, and beyond that was just pagan darkness. So this idea almost goes back to Matthew, chapter 28, where you have this idea that Christianity should spread as far as possible. There's this idea that Greenland was a kind of favoured outpost of Christianity. So there's a little bit of concern about that. A lot of it would have been to do with, I guess, political savvy, that depicting Greenland as suffering or still existing, or the colony needed help, might have been a way to appeal to Rome for increased funding. So some of these Icelandic bishops might have painted a picture of Greenland as needing help without having any real communication with Greenland. So there's a little bit of concern there. And obviously, the Christian Church, and after the Reformation in Denmark and Norway...
34:28 Speaker 03 There was a concern for the countrymen that they should be helped and certainly reconverted. And this is also described in some of these papal letters. They are falling away from faith. They're renouncing the Holy Sacrament of Baptism and so forth. So there was a need for help. But most of the time, if you read the records, for instance, the Bishop of Trondheim, Archbishop Ira Galkendorf, in the 1510s, he collected all information that was to be had on Greenland. And he talks about ivory, thurs, hides, what could be caught in the sea. So he talks about it as a very resource-rich country. So the interest is also for monetary gain. So the reason why you want to reconnect with Greenland
35:11 Speaker 03 is not just because of the lost Christian souls, but also because there's rumors of gold, silver, and resources, basically.
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36:10 Speaker 04 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
36:56 Matt Lewis? It's fascinating that amongst all of that, I don't know whether there was a lack of concern for the actual people there and the physical plight that they may be in. There seems to be concern for economic impacts, the reach of Roman Christianity, and after that, the fact that these people may be lingering as Roman Catholics when they should be Protestants, but very little concern that there might be actual people suffering. There's lots of reasons to go there, but maybe missing one of the better ones. You mentioned before that there was no archaeological evidence for the burning of villages, but does archaeology tell us anything about the settlements, the eastern-west settlement?
37:30 Speaker 03 Yes, the eastern settlement has ruins of approximately 500 farms. So this was quite a substantive colony. Probably at its peak, it may have had up towards 5,000 inhabitants, about 100 farm ruins in the western settlement, the smaller settlement. So we do have a record of quite a number of farms existing there. If we look at the waste mittens beside the farms, they're very rich in walrus debris. So this also indicates that walrus hunting was very much part of the economy there. There are also indications of them, of the Greenlanders growing barley, and they may have done so to a limited extent, but primarily farming would have been concerned with the hay, so basically animal feed.
38:13 Speaker 03 There are some interesting finds in terms of Norse objects, which are found in remains of Inuit settlements and Inuit artefacts found in Norse ruins. So whether this indicates some kind of collaboration or trade, we don't know. It could have been raids, it could have been looting, we don't know, but there certainly was some kind of connection between the Inuit and the Norse settlers. So there are some interesting archaeological evidence there of what the culture would have been like and how open it would have been to other cultures.
38:46 Matt Lewis? Yeah.
38:48 Matt Lewis? And the book kind of talks an awful lot about how the stories, myths, legends of these Viking settlers persist over the centuries that follow their disappearance, right up, I think, till the early 20th century. Why do those stories linger so much? What does that lost settlement come to represent to people who are looking for it?
39:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think at the heart of it, there's really the mystery that we were talking about. And I think I begin the book by making a comparison to one of the other great mysteries of vanished settlers, and that's the Roanoke colony that Sir Walter Raleigh established in 1585 in North America, which also disappeared without an explanation. And I think a number of books have been written about this and what happened to them and whether they were sort of assimilated with the Native Americans and conspiracy theories and political intrigue and all of this. So I think the mystery in itself of simply these vanished settlers is in itself enough to carry that sort of mystery throughout time. But I think there's also a fundamental mystery about how civilizations collapse. So this goes back to the Mayan, the
39:55 Speaker 03 Roman Empire. There's kind of apocalyptic stories about the end of society, which in some ways also speak to the idea that our own civilization may end at some time. So there's a kind of mirror in this. And certainly, when we talk about environmentalists who predict a kind of ecosystem wipeout that will plunge mankind into deadly peril, that has a parallel with the Greenlanders and what they may have suffered. Another reason I think why this is important is also the kind of human endeavor to conquer new areas. So this idea of colonizing the Arctic and human endurance, certainly Western endurance, would sort of go hand in hand with this idea of almost domesticating the Arctic, the hunt for the northwestern passage,
40:40 Speaker 03 where you could easily access eastern markets, that you could navigate the Arctic. And the Greenlanders also symbolized this idea of being able to colonize and to master the Arctic. So that's also a reason why this myth lingers, I think.
40:55 Matt Lewis? It's an interesting idea that people could believe they could tame the Arctic environment because someone has done it before. We're just following in the footsteps of someone else. If they can do it, we can do it too. You know, nothing is unconquerable for a human who's determined enough to do it. Do people during this period, or for how long, do people actually believe there might be an isolated Viking outpost still on Greenland, sort of trapped in this time bubble?
41:22 Speaker 03 Absolutely. So at least until the 1830s, when the eastern coast was explored by the English whaler and explorer William Scorsby Jr. and also by a Dane, a Danish explorer called William August Gruel, there was still the belief that the eastern settlement would be on the east coast, this kind of mistake that was made. Even though towards the end of the 18th century, it was established that the eastern settlement was actually on the west coast. So at least until the 1830s, the eastern settlement on the east coast was still believable legend. And even after that, still people thought, well, maybe Scorsby and Gruel didn't go far enough. If they go a little more inland, they may have found
42:03 Speaker 03 the settlements. But what changes after that time throughout the 19th century is that there's this idea of an open polar sea, that behind the ice rim, the ice wall, there's an open polar sea. And there are kind of geothermally heated places, islands, land masses, that where these Norse Greenlanders may have migrated to. So this becomes the new legend, which takes over. And this is something that is, at least until the 1920s, still believed. Perhaps towards the end, more in kind of popular science articles. So real sort of scientists would not believe this anymore. But at least in the popular science world, these are still promulgated, these theories, that you should explore the Arctic and maybe
42:46 Speaker 03 on some unknown coast in the open polar sea, you still see the Vikings fighting and grousing and tilling the fields. So it's only when the Arctic is truly explored that it comes home to everyone. But maybe that is not the case. But certainly, in terms of a kind of cultural myth, this still Continues in a number of literary works, many of them pop fiction or sort of cheap literature, which is, it has these adventure stories of the kind of Henry Rider Haggard ilk. These adventure stories where you find an isolated Viking community. So that continues even longer, even after the 1920s. But in terms of science, I think that is the end of that myth. But there's a shift from being on the East Coast to, well, there must be somewhere else.
43:29 Speaker 03 They migrated. That's what the Vikings did. So it makes sense that you could find them somewhere else.
43:34 Matt Lewis? It's interesting to wonder if they were something of a lure to explorers. You know, if you just go a little bit further, you might find these people and the way that they've survived in this region. And every, every time you go a little bit further, there's still another horizon to be crossed. There's still a little bit further to go until there isn't anymore. And all of a sudden, the myth has to end because there's simply nowhere for them left to be hiding. Talked a little bit about what Inuit memories tell us about the settlers as well. So they're pretty clear that the settlers were there, that there was contact. We don't know whether, as you say, that was trade contact or whether that was hostile. How do we come to know those Inuit memories? How much later do they arrive? And do they tell us anything about the settlers that we didn't already know?
44:15 Speaker 03 So the Inuit legends about the Norse settlers are collected by the missionaries. So primarily the Danish missionaries and also the German Moravians who also established a colony on the West Coast. So they collect the myths and legends from the Inuits, from oral records about the Norse people. So there's, there's one story collected by Paul Ilde, an indigenous legend about a skirmish, which resulted from the fact that a Norse colonist passed through the land and he saw an Inuit who shot a dart at a sea fowl and missed. And then taunted him, said, well, I'm sure you can't hit me, which he then did.
44:59 Speaker 03 And the Norse man was killed. And after that, some kind of fracas evolved. And the legend says that the Inuit exterminated all the Norse people. What's interesting about these myths is that the colonists were interested in finding out what had happened to their ancestors. And this legend of violence, of genocide, was very much on their mind. So if you look at the evidence or how they write these stories, they often would use terms like the Inuit confirmed that this was so and so. So there's the indication that a lot of this was planted by the colonists and the Inuits simply just responded by giving them what they wanted.
45:42 Speaker 03 Many of these stories about the Norse settlers and how they came into contact with the Norse or going into contact with the Inuits are really, you can tell, are kind of traditional stories, which were also told about skirmishes with other people, so other indigenous people. So they're simply just transferred. So these were pliable legends that could be adapted to new situations. So when the colonists asked for stories of violence in the past, the Inuit responded by giving them stories that were traditional and could be Norse settlers or someone else. But there's a drive to find these stories. One of the main informants is a storyteller called Aaron, who was brought up in Kangek in one of the German missionary stations.
46:26 Speaker 03 He was a learned Greenlander at the time, and he provided no less than 56 stories and numerous drawings. And his artwork is absolutely fantastic. In the book, there's also one of his illustrations. But even he expresses doubt about these stories. So he had an inkling that these were stories adopted from somewhere else. So in fact, the Inuit stories tell us very little that we didn't know, or they tell us a lot we didn't know, but really they are kind of folklore, traditional stories, which may not be about the Norse settlers at all.
46:58 Matt Lewis? Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Robert. I mean, the idea of this colony, you know, someone setting out in 985 to establish this colony, surviving for 400 years, based on this economy that it developed for itself, but then to vanish is an incredible story in itself. And then, as the book explores, the whole afterlife of this colony in myth and legend that persists for centuries more is another fascinating element of the story. So thank you very much for sharing a little bit of that with us today.
47:29 Matt Lewis? I hope you found this exploration of the origins of the presence of Europeans in Greenland interesting. It's a connection that goes back over a thousand years. In the 18th century, King Frederick IV of Denmark sponsored a religious mission to Greenland. There was still a belief that Vikings, isolated for centuries, lived there. If so, they would still be Catholic, whereas Denmark was now Protestant. They might even have reverted to paganism. The mission found no Vikings and struggled to convert the Inuit population they encountered. However, they began to re-establish settlements along the southwest coast and to operate trading posts. In 1776, the Danish government claimed a complete monopoly on trade with Denmark,
48:12 Matt Lewis? and the island became a colony of the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland was closed to all foreign traders, and this restriction and monopoly would only be lifted in 1950. In 1905, Norway laid claim to Greenland on the basis that it had been a Norwegian possession prior to 1815. The dispute resulted from the breakup of the Union of the Crowns of Denmark and Norway that lasted from 1537 until 1814 and rumbled on for many years afterwards. A Norwegian meteorologist named Halvar Devold occupied part of the uninhabited east coast of Greenland of his own accord in 1931. The Norwegian government then backed Devold's move and formally claimed Greenland.
48:56 Matt Lewis? After two years, the Permanent Court of International Justice decided the case in Denmark's favour, and the Norwegian occupation ended. And so, today, Greenland is essentially an overseas county of Denmark. It has home rule, a parliament, and elections that have become increasingly influenced by the debate over full independence. When you see Greenland on the news, you can now regale your friends with the story of its discovery and settlement by Vikings, because, of course, like all the best stories, this is a medieval one.
49:34 Matt Lewis? You can hear more from Eleanor Baraklough in our series on Norse mythology, following the Viking story of creation through the gods to Ragnarok. You'll find links to that series in the show notes. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
50:38 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
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