Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish?
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It seems that in the end, they just gave up and moved away south rather than dying out. The modern Hopi, aswell as other groups claim them as their direct ancestors. Hopi beleifs about sustainability, and "living close to nature" are pretty interesting in such a light. According to the Hopi, living a false, artifical life is a path to disaster and death, and destruction of the whole world.
Current thought is that through deforestation they created an arid zone.
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/0...
Then drought and social collapse. There are a number of stories like this in the pacific as well, like Easter Island:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island
For everyone who disagrees about climate change, it's hard to argue that on local levels humans can cause severe changes to the local environment.
Jared Diamond's, 'Collapse' is a great read on this stuff.
There may be a bit more to it than that. The better known cliff dwellings have unfinished meals and chores that were simply abandoned midway. I stayed at a B&B which had an archaeological dig on the grounds, and read the report about the dig, which was on the coffee table. There was evidence of cannibalism. The diet the Ancestral Puebloans ate was prone to certain deficiencies which could be overcome by supplementation with meat. A climactic shift could have caused difficulty in obtaining game. The archaeological report made references to a theory about a secret society/cannibal cult, whose members became more powerful in part because they were the only ones around who weren't undernourished.
So it's not just that they gave up and left. Life might have become weird and crappy in some frightening ways before they managed to leave.
The Kensington rune stone with dated in a system common to the Christian viking age around the time when one of the expedition launched from Norway to find the missing tax payers adds to the mystery presuming that the Kensington runestone is genuine.
They where clearly Norwegians. The Kalmar Union was in effect in 1450, and the kingdoms had been formed for long. There were at least two Universities in Scandinavia, etc.
Are you saying we shouldn't call them Vikings because they weren't engaged in raiding and piracy, or we shouldn't call them Vikings because they were Norwegian?
The viking era ended 400 years before, because of Christianity and the rise of strong kings and kingdoms. (Working together)
They certainly did not call themselves vikings, if some ever did.
There was a huge shift in the academic literature on the medieval Norsemen and how the runic language changed doing the middle ages, doing the 60ies and 70ies when old monastic scripture gave way to tax records, archeology and "/experimental archeology/". that renders a lot of what still in the textbooks on who the Norsemen were kind of obsolete.
They did not eat fish.
Greenland has something like a 3-month harvest period, which is very, very little. Supplementation with seals only gets you so far, especially when the Greenlanders were also focused on trophy hunting to offer tithes to the church back in Europe. A single hiccup in their harvest could lead to an irrecoverable overharvesting of seals and then the eventual starvation (or almost-starvation/exodus). Not eating fish!
Jared Diamond's Collapse goes into more detail about the Norse social hierarchy: apparently the upper classes ate a lot of beef, and seal etc was for the common man.
Incidentally, similar themes repeat elsewhere: the First Fleet that founded Sydney had no fishermen at all on board, and for a long time respectable people aspired to eat beef imported from England while lobster and other seafood was only for convicts.
1) Earth cooled from Indonesian volcano eruption
2) greater competition from Africa for their chief export: ivory
3) Norway, their main sponsor, hit with plague
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...
And even then, it seems as though expansion is a skill that gets honed by a society. I think of the Polynesians, the Vikings, and the Portuguese.
The value of ivory as a commodity makes a lot more sense out of why Vikings would have bothered with Greenland. It has always seemed weird to me that the Vikings made it past all of these hazardous lands to Newfoundland, but didn't really bother to do much in North America.
It's interesting that the article concludes in a rather off-handed way that Greenlanders didn't go native. I don't see why we shouldn't expect a few of them to have done so? I'm reminded a bit of Peter Heywood, from the Mutiny on the Bounty [1]. Although, I would suppose Tahitian life would probably be rather more enticing than Inuit life.
Consumers aren't the only people who must live in reality -- advertisers must live there too.
Is this a correct translation? I thought fjord meant inlet.
You may note that England have been invaded by the French, which caused them to forget how to spell.
[1] Wikipedia.
Ey, a variant of Øy = island.
Annecdote: Aliens v Predators storyline was about 'Bouvetoya Island'. As in Bouvet Island island.
Fixed misspelling of strait.
It was spelled Firþ in old English. Not sure what's going on with the 'o'. It turned into Fjärd in Swedish. At least on the east coast.
"Once, in very early winter, when Margret was in the hills above Vatna Hverfi laying partridge snares, a man came upon her suddenly, and gave her a fright. He was wearing a shirt and hood of very thick sheepskin that fell forward over his face, so that she didn't know him, and when he stepped out from a willow cleft, where he had been doing something, she jumped back and gave a cry. As she stepped back, her foot rolled with a loose stone, so that she would have fallen, except that the man caught her elbow and held her up.
There was a man at this time living above Vatna Hverfi district, who had committed the crime of killing his cousin over a horse fight, and had been outlawed for three years by the Thing, although in Greenland outlaws were allowed to live at the fringes of the settlement, sometimes among the skraelings and sometimes not, since there was no going abroad as there had been in the old days. This man was named Thorir the Black-browed, and so, when Margret regained her balance, she said, “Thank you, Thorir Sigmundsson,” and backed away from him, for it was not known how he had been enduring his time of outlawry. Nonetheless, although she was afraid, she took three fat ptarmigan from her pouch and laid them side by side on a flat rock at her feet, saying, “You would do me a great favor by accepting these poor birds, Thorir Sigmundsson." Then she backed away, slowly, not taking her eyes off the outlaw and feeling her way with her feet. The man neither looked at her, nor picked up the birds, and after a while she was out of his sight and she ran the rest of the way to Gunnars Stead. The next evening, when she came into the farmhouse from the dairy, the three birds, all neatly plucked, were lying on the bench beside the fire. Margret went at once to the door and surveyed the homefield for signs of the outlawed man, for there were many reasons why such visits were not a little to be feared, and the fact tthat they were contrary to the law was not the least of these. Vigdis, the wife of Erlend , for one, would be glad of something new to bring against the Gunnars Stead folk. Aside from this, an outlawed man living above Isafjord had gained entrance to an isolated farmstead and stolen a great deal of food from both the kitchen and the storehouse, althouh the tale that he had killed a member of the family had turned out to be false. But there were no signs of anyone except Olaf and Skuli, who were standing near the cowbyre. Margret took the birds outside around the house and buried them in the midden with a spade."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14305.The_Greenlanders https://www.amazon.com/Greenlanders-Jane-Smiley/dp/140009546... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley
> Amid that calamity, so the story goes, Greenland’s Vikings—numbering 5,000 at their peak
I'm not sure how to resolve this contradiction. I wonder which number is correct?
For hundreds of years, Viking real estate agents had a field day thanks to the name, I suspect. Every minute a new sucker is born, among Viking's too.
Also, the Vikings wanting to get the hell out of Greenland would continue to have an incentive to lie to the ones who had never been there: like to be able to sell them their assets that are fixed or that they don't intend to take.
Had Erik called it "Frozen Wasteland", that would have been it. No hundreds of years of settlement, nothing. The few lunatics would continue to have a hard time convincing anyone else to join them.
On a similar vein, Iceland was also named from a first impression, having been initially reached at a colder time of year.
Thos are the explanations that I have heard. There is no way to know if they hold any truth.