Norse Greenland

At a glance

Why did they go to Greenland?

Because a man with a murder charge needed somewhere to go, and because he was a good salesman. Eiríkr Þorvaldsson — Erik the Red — had already been outlawed once in Iceland when a quarrel over borrowed bench-posts ended in a fight at Drangar with two men dead. The Þórsnes assembly declared him outlawed, and he sailed west to look for a land another Icelander had sighted. He spent three winters probing the coast, then returned and began to settle it. Landnámabók gives the reason for the name bluntly: he called the country Greenland "because he said men would be much encouraged to go there if the land had a good name". Íslendingabók says the same: "He gave a name to the country and called it Greenland, and said that it would encourage people to go there that the country had a good name."

The date is usually given as 985. It should be "985 or 986". Íslendingabók says Eiríkr began to settle "fourteen or fifteen years before Christianity came here to Iceland", which gives 984–986; Landnámabók says fifteen winters before the law, giving 985; nineteenth-century scholarship noted that some texts read sixteen. The annals mostly favour 986. The sources are also later than they look: Ari Þorgilsson wrote Íslendingabók in the 1120s and names his informant, while Landnámabók survives in thirteenth-century recensions and seventeenth-century copies, and shapes its land-claims to the interests of later families. Use them for what medieval Icelanders believed, and the archaeology for what happened.

Landnámabók says that twenty-five ships set out from Breiðafjörðr and Borgarfjörðr that summer and that fourteen reached Greenland; the rest were driven back or lost. That is a tradition, not a shipping record, but it gives the shape of the thing: a single organised emigration of perhaps a few hundred people, taking land farm by farm up the fjords. The land-takers named their new homes after themselves — Herjólfsfjörðr, Ketilsfjörðr, Hrafnsfjörðr, Eiríksfjörðr — and Eiríkr took the best of it at Brattahlíð.

There were two main colonies, not one. The Eastern Settlement (Eystribyggð) lay in the fjords around modern Qaqortoq and Igaliku, with its core in Eiríksfjörðr and Einarsfjörðr, and has more than 500 recorded sites. The Western Settlement (Vestribyggð) lay about 500 km further north, near modern Nuuk, with 80 to 100 sites. A small Middle Settlement sat between them, perhaps ten farms. The names are misleading: the "Eastern" settlement is the southern one, and the "Western" is the northern.

What was Greenland actually like?

Better than the name suggests, and worse than the settlers hoped. The warm water that makes south-west Greenland farmable arrives with the Irminger Current, which meets the iceberg-laden East Greenland Current off Cape Farewell; the mixed West Greenland Current keeps the coast warmer than other places at the same latitude, such as Hudson Bay. During the settlement the climate was close to the modern baseline — mean annual temperature around 0.6 °C at Qaqortoq, with January at −5.5 °C and July at 7.2 °C — and the Norse arrived during the Medieval Warm Period, when conditions were similar to the 1961–1990 mean and storms were fewer.

Even so, this was a marginal farm economy. The settlers cleared dwarf birch and willow to make hay meadows, and introduced sheep's sorrel, whose pollen is the signature of Norse settlement. Each farm had its own homefield for hay, its own rough pasture, and rarely more than two neighbours. Unlike Iceland, Greenlandic homefields were usually not walled — labour was away hunting, and farming may not have been worth the upkeep. Drought was a real risk, hitting perhaps 11 to 16 per cent of years, and there is evidence of irrigation to buffer it; a modern dam at Igaliku was built in the same place as a Norse one. At Garðar the bishop's estate ran an integrated system of manuring and irrigation, creating a deep plaggen soil, and the midden shows the stored-hay insects that go with it. That manuring stops abruptly somewhere around AD 1290–1400.

Could they grow grain? This is a genuine open question, and the answer usually given is too confident. The thirteenth-century King's Mirror says Greenlanders "sow no grain", and that "the great majority in that country do not know what bread is, having never seen it". Barley macrofossils and barley-type pollen do occur, but the Kujataa nomination itself says that "although there is clear macrofossil evidence... for the presence of Hordeum (Barley), it is uncertain if it was grown in Greenland", noting that modern farmers sow barley for fodder and it seldom ripens. The safe line is that they grew hay, not bread, and that any barley was marginal, imported, or fodder.

How did the colony make a living?

From animals, the sea and the hunt, in that order of self-image and the reverse order of calories. The settlers brought cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, dogs and cats. Every farm kept cattle, sheep and goats; larger farms had relatively more cattle, smaller ones more sheep and goats. The King's Mirror, a Norwegian clerical outsider writing around 1250, describes the economy: the Greenlanders "raise cattle and sheep in large numbers and make butter and cheese in great quantities. The people subsist chiefly on these foods and on beef; but they also eat the flesh of various kinds of game, such as reindeer, whales, seals and bears." Note the source: a Norwegian writing at second hand, not a Greenlander.

The cattle were small and hardy — "generally tiny animals whose endurance was probably as important as their milk yield" — and were byred through the winter, standing in a growing pile of their own dung, with milk production ceasing by midwinter. Sheep were kept mainly for wool: the flocks were just large enough that the colony "will only just have been able to produce enough wool to clothe the whole population". Goats and cattle supplied milk and hides.

Hunting filled the gap, and increasingly did the heavy lifting. Harp seals migrate from Newfoundland to south-west Greenland in early spring and were probably taken in communal drives — no harpoons or barbed spears have ever been found on a Norse site in Greenland. Even farms hours from the fjord produce bone samples that are 25–30 per cent seal; the small coastal farm V48 had midden layers 78 per cent seal. Caribou were hunted, probably in autumn drives; guillemots were taken in their flightless late-August phase and are the commonest bird remains; meat was air-dried in drystone stores. The diet tells the story of the colony's trajectory: from the settlement around AD 980 to the end around 1450, the average share of marine food rose from under 40 per cent to over 60 per cent, and for some individuals in the final period it reached about 80 per cent.

And fish? Strikingly little. Unlike Iceland, where fishing was important from the outset and became an export industry, Norse Greenlandic middens contain hardly any fish bones; the Kujataa nomination suggests a scheduling conflict with the seal hunt. Buckland and colleagues call it a "virtual absence of fish as part of their diet or economy". The careful wording is that fish bones are strikingly rare, not that they ate no fish.

What did they sell to Europe?

Walrus ivory, above all. The colony's exports were walrus tusks and hides, narwhal teeth sold as unicorn horns, live polar bears and, perhaps, gyrfalcons. The King's Mirror lists "walrus tusks, walrus robes, and sealskins", and the same list recurs in a papal letter of 1282 and in the Bergen tax records. In 1327 the Greenlanders paid an extraordinary papal tax "entirely in the form of walrus ivory it seems, a cargo of which was sold in Norway and the proceeds sent to Rome". The trade was not confined to magnate farms: walrus maxilla fragments are ubiquitous in Norse contexts, which means the whole society, small farms and large, was involved in processing ivory.

How much the ivory trade mattered to the colony's survival is the strongest economic argument and the weakest-documented one. Ancient DNA from walrus artefacts has shown that Greenland supplied a near-monopoly of the European market from the 1120s to the 1300s, and that the trade peaked with Romanesque art in the twelfth century and declined afterwards. But the same study says the idea that the colony was "founded for ivory" may need reconsideration. Thomas McGovern and Sophia Perdikaris have argued that the later collapse of the European price — undercut by African ivory carried by the Portuguese — was fatal; that argument is attributed to them by name, not demonstrated in any text I could open.

The institutional side is clearer. By the mid-fourteenth century a royal monopoly had been established over trade with Greenland, probably reaching back to the 1261 submission, and its administration was delegated to the bishops of Bergen. Bergen was the centre of North Atlantic trade. The Hansa set up its office there in the mid-fourteenth century and dominated Norway's external trade, but German merchants did not send their own ships into the North Atlantic until the mid- to late fifteenth century. The common claim that the Hansa traded directly with Greenland is wrong.

Who ruled, and who prayed?

Norse Greenland was Christian from the outset. No unequivocal pagan burials have been found, and some of the earliest radiocarbon dates come from late-tenth-century Christian cemeteries. The Saga of Eiríkr the Red has Þjóðhildr build a church "not very near the house" and refuse to live with Eiríkr after taking the faith; the church was called Þjóðhildarkirkja. In the 1960s Knud Krogh excavated a cemetery and small church at Qassiarsuk consistent with that account — a different building from the church excavated in 1932, which is a detail worth keeping.

The colony got its own bishop in the 1120s, when the chieftain at Brattahlíð lobbied for one and sent his son Einarr to Norway with walrus ivory to advance the case. Bishop Arnaldr was consecrated in 1124 and installed at Garðar, the see conventionally dated to 1126. Whether the earlier bishops ever went to Greenland is disputed: the first we are told actually travelled there was Bishop Helge, who arrived in 1212. The succession ran to Bishop Álfr, who died in 1378; after him every bishop was an absentee, and by 1408 a lay officialis was running the diocese.

Garðar was the largest settlement in the colony and the only medieval episcopal manor in the North Atlantic to survive comprehensively: cathedral, two great byres, storage buildings, a probable tithe barn. The cathedral was cruciform, the only cruciform church in Greenland, with an internal length of about 22.5 metres. It is the largest church in Norse Greenland; the nomination's claim that it is "among the largest in the North Atlantic" is overstated and should be dropped. The byre is usually described as built for close to 150 cattle, though McGovern put the stalls at about 100 — give the range.

There were also monasteries: Ívarr Bárðarson, steward at the cathedral in the 1340s–50s, reports "a great monastery dwelt in by regular canons" and "a cloister of nuns of Saint Benedict's Order" in the southern part of the Eastern Settlement, and modern survey counts two monastic houses, one a nunnery.

Law and politics are harder to recover than the buildings. The Greenlanders had their own laws and an assembly at Garðar, and a fourteenth-century text calls Brattahlíð the seat of the lawman. A letter of 1389 mentions an alþing, a general assembly, without further specification, and two assembly sites have been proposed, at Brattahlíð and Garðar, identified as booth sites in the early twentieth century. But the Kujataa nomination's own warning should discipline any account: "Norse Greenland was a separate jurisdiction, but to what extent it had separate laws and judicial institutions is unknown. All of the medieval [texts] which describe political conflict in Norse Greenland involve foreigners and are not considered reliable guides to its internal politics or judicial system." Do not invent a Greenlandic Althing with known procedures.

Literacy, by contrast, is well attested: more than 100 runic inscriptions, nearly 200 if every mark is counted, mostly on grave markers and objects of wood and stone, and mostly prayers. As a whole they "suggest active and widespread literacy in a conventionally Christian, high to late medieval society". That is a useful corrective to the picture of an illiterate fringe.

How many people lived there?

Two thousand to three thousand at the peak, with older estimates running up to five thousand. The Kujataa nomination gives both "2,000–3,000 at its peak" in one place and "estimates range from 2,000 to 5,000" in another, noting that most modern researchers opt for the lower end; independent work by Lynnerup and Madsen also gives 2,000–3,000.

The arithmetic explains the spread. There were about 350 farm units at the height, and probably always fewer; the Eastern Settlement has some 500 recorded sites, most of them farms, and the Western 80–100. If you multiply 350 farms by six people you get about 2,100; if you treat all 500 sites as simultaneously occupied and multiply by ten, you get 5,000. The gap is not a disagreement about evidence so much as a disagreement about assumptions — how many farms were occupied at once, and how big a household was. Say that, and the numbers stop looking like a contest.

Did they reach America?

Yes, and we can date it to the year. The documentary record is four witnesses, none contemporary: Ari Þorgilsson's Íslendingabók, Adam of Bremen writing around 1075, and the two Vinland sagas — the Greenlanders' Saga and Erik the Red's Saga — which disagree with each other on almost everything. One has Bjarni Herjólfsson sight the land by accident; the other does not. One has a single base at Leifsbúðir; the other has two, Straumfjörðr and Hóp. One has Þorvald killed by Skrælings; the other by a uniped. One has sixty men and five women; the other 160 men.

What the sagas agree on is that the Norse reached a land with self-sown wheat, grapes and timber, and that the first killings were theirs: eight sleeping men in the Greenlanders' Saga, five in Erik's. That is worth stating plainly, because the popular version has hostile natives driving peaceful explorers away.

The archaeology is firmer. L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, was excavated from 1960 by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and later by Parks Canada. It is a camp of eight turf-walled buildings with a smithy where iron was worked. In 2021 a team led by Margot Kuitems dated three pieces of wood modified by metal tools, each with its waney edge preserved, from three different trees; the felling year converged on AD 1021. The growth ring evidence shows one tree felled in spring and another in summer or autumn, so Norse workers were on site in at least two seasons of that year. It is the only secure calendar date for a European presence across the Atlantic before Columbus.

What the site does not prove is just as important. It does not prove that this was Leif's camp: nothing names an owner, and scholars differ — Wallace reads it as Straumfjörðr, the Ingstads as Leifsbúðir, others doubt it appears in the sagas at all. It does not prove a colony or a long occupation; the Nature paper says the records are "consistent with a very brief occupation". And it does not prove that the Norse met anyone there. Parks Canada is explicit: Dorset camps on the bay shore were "more than two hundred years before the Norse", and "curiously enough, none were there during the century of the Viking explorations." A soapstone lamp of Dorset type was found in one of the Norse buildings, but it is most readily explained as an object the Norse had obtained elsewhere, not as evidence of a meeting at the site.

Two disputed finds deserve their labels. The Maine penny is a genuine eleventh-century Norwegian coin of Olaf the Peaceful, but how it reached Maine is contested; the best reading is Indigenous down-the-line trade, not a Norse visit. The Kensington Runestone, with its 1362 date, is rejected by runologists on linguistic and historical grounds and belongs to nineteenth-century American romanticism, not to medieval Minnesota.

Whom did they meet?

Two peoples, at different times. The Dorset culture had been in the eastern Arctic for centuries before the Norse arrived, and late Dorset groups survived in the High Arctic into the medieval period; Inuit oral tradition calls them Tunit. The Thule — the direct ancestors of modern Inuit — expanded east from Alaska and reached Greenland in the twelfth or thirteenth century, with winter bases in the Disko Bay area in the fourteenth. Late Dorset withdrew from the High Arctic around 1250. Do not write "the Thule arrived in 1200": the date depends on the study and the region.

The archaeological evidence of contact is real but one-sided. Norse goods turn up in Inuit and Dorset contexts: boat rivets, barrel pieces, an oak box, a carpenter's plane, chain mail, woollen cloth and smelted metal from thirteenth-century Thule winter villages on Ellesmere Island; a bronze trade balance from a Thule site, the sort of instrument you carry if you are weighing ivory; a carved figurine in European dress from a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century site on Baffin Island; and a three-metre length of plied yarn from a Late Dorset feature at Nunguvik that is comparable to Norse textile yarns. Norse objects in Indigenous contexts are common; Indigenous objects in Norse contexts are not.

The sagas' Skrælings are harder to identify, and the encounters they describe are ambiguous: trade, a bull that frightens the visitors, and a fight that the Norse lose. The one dated incident comes from the Icelandic annals for 1379: "Skrælingjar herjubu á Grænlendinga ok drápu af heim XVIII menn, ok toku tvo sveina ok þrælkubu" — the Skrælings attacked the Greenlanders, killed eighteen men and took two boys as slaves. Dugmore and colleagues have calculated that eighteen dead plus two captives could represent three or four sealing boats and as much as 5 per cent of the colony's active adult hunters. For a shrinking society, a raid like that could be serious. It is not evidence of a war of extermination, and the old theory that the Inuit wiped out the Norse has long been rejected.

When did the Western Settlement die?

In the later fourteenth century — traditionally around 1350, more recently placed in the late 14th century — and the difference matters, because it decides whether the settlement died before or after the 1379 raid and the 1378 death of the last resident bishop.

The traditional date rests on Ívarr Bárðarson, a steward at the cathedral who was licensed to sail to Greenland in 1341 and brought the tithe to Bergen in 1364. His account, which survives only in later copies, says that the party sent to the Western Settlement against the Skrælings "found no man, either Christian or heathen, except some wild cattle and sheep", and that "now the Skrælings have occupied all the Western Settlement; there are horses, goats, cattle, sheep, all wild, and no people, Christian or heathen". The 1349 date often printed with this story is a nineteenth-century editor's inference, not something Ívarr says.

The archaeology is thinner than the textbooks imply. Buckland and colleagues found that "radiocarbon assay supports this date range for desertion" but noted that "the number of available dates remains small" and that some dates are on turf growing over the ruins. Dugmore and colleagues put the failure of the Western Settlement, with a maximum population of six to eight hundred, in the late fourteenth century.

And the absence of bodies cuts both ways. No excavated farm has produced a destruction layer full of unburied dead, and Lynnerup's analysis found no evidence of starvation in the skeletal remains. But as specialists themselves point out in a 2025 interview study: Christian burial was a duty and people would go to great lengths to bury their dead; preservation and sampling are patchy, and there are very few late-period excavations; and a boatload of people caught in a storm leaves no archaeology at all. The empty farms show that the last generation left, or died where no trace survived. They do not show a massacre, and they do not show an orderly emigration either.

When did the Eastern Settlement end?

The documentary sequence is short and precise, and each document says something slightly different.

• 1388–89: a Bergen court record acquits men who traded "in Greenland without the crown's leave" on grounds of necessity — the best evidence that ships were still arriving.
• 1408: a wedding at Hvalsey, recorded in attestations of 1409, 1414 and 1424, with a functioning church, priest and officialis. The 1409 document is about the banns; the wedding year comes from later witness statements.
• 1448: a letter of Nicholas V to the bishops of Skálholt and Hólar, describing a Christian community that had "gathered together again" after thirty years without a bishop or priest, and nine churches left standing.
• 1492: a letter of Alexander VI saying that for eighty years no ship had reached Greenland and no resident clergy had served there, and that the faith had been forgotten.

The arithmetic of those two papal letters brackets the end: thirty years before 1448 is about 1418, eighty years before 1492 is about 1412, and the last consecration mentioned in 1492 was a century earlier. The archaeological default is about 1450, and UNESCO and ICOMOS both say "mid-15th century". The Eastern Settlement was gone by about 1450 on the archaeological reckoning, and certainly by 1500. The case for a later date — Kirsten Seaver's argument that the colony lasted longer than usually assigned — rests on the 1492 letter describing people still in the diocese; but that is the same letter that says no ship had reached them in eighty years.

The colony had also been shrinking long before it stopped. Smaller farms on the outer coast and inland were established later and abandoned earlier than the farms in the inner fjords, and church building contracted into the best land after about 1250. There was no single day when Norse Greenland ended.

Why did it end?

Not because of one thing, and not because the Norse were too stupid to eat fish. The old monocausal stories — climate killed them, the Inuit killed them, they destroyed their land — are all dead in the specialist literature, and the current answer is a conjunction of stresses that a small, isolated, prestige-goods economy could not absorb.

Climate came first, but as a pressure rather than a hammer. Cooling from the beginning of the fourteenth century is well documented, with increased summer sea ice around the Eastern Settlement, impacts on navigation and pasture, and increased storminess, especially after 1425. The 1257–59 volcanic eruption — Samalas, in Lombok — perturbed the global climate at exactly the wrong moment. Yet the sharpest cold snap came in the early fifteenth century, after the Western Settlement was already empty. And cooling had a counter-intuitive side: more drift ice brought more harp seals to the outer coasts, which may have improved food security even as it made farming harder.

The ivory economy is the strongest economic argument and the weakest documented. The colony sold walrus tusks into a market that boomed in the twelfth century and declined later; aDNA shows Greenland's share of that market was near-total from the 1120s to the 1300s. When the market changed and North Atlantic navigation became more dangerous, Arneborg argues, the combination "must have been fatal". The specific mechanism — African ivory undercutting the price — is McGovern and Perdikaris's argument and should be attributed to them, not stated as fact.

Soil and sea are real but no longer sufficient explanations. Erosion was a genuine problem for Vatnahverfi farmers, and sea-level rise destroyed lowland pasture and boat houses. But the revisionist case is that the Norse did not simply degrade their environment; they were invested in a "domesticated landscape" transported from Scandinavia, and that investment limited their capacity to adapt.

Isolation is the structural killer. Norse Greenland was never self-sufficient: iron for tools had to be imported. Regular sailings from Norway ended after the 1370s, and the Black Death cut Norway's population and shipping capacity. The crown's monopoly, the Bergen bishops, and the Hansa's shift to bulk fish all made the colony's exports less relevant. The Thule Inuit were a stress factor — a raid that killed eighteen men matters in a colony of two thousand — but not an exterminating army.

The best summary is Dugmore and colleagues': Norse Greenland has been seen as "a classic case of maladaptation by an inflexible temperate zone society", but the evidence shows "a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to major environmental challenges" and fell victim to "conjunctures of large-scale historic processes". That is less quotable than "they refused to eat fish", and much closer to the truth.

What became of it?

The colony vanished from European knowledge, not from the island. In 1721 Hans Egede sailed to Greenland to find the Norse and convert them; he landed on the outer coast of the Nuuk region on 3 July, and found no Norse at all. His mission reoriented towards the Kalaallit, and his arrival is the conventional start of modern Greenland.

Farming came back in 1780, when Anders Olsen and his Inuit wife Tuperna began the first farming since the Norse at Upernaviarsuk, before moving to Igaliku. Their descendants are the modern sheep farmers of south Greenland: most of the 50 farming families in Kujataa trace their ancestry to that couple and identify as Inuit. The landscape now produces 61 per cent of Greenland's sheep, 31 per cent of its cattle and 77 per cent of its horses, and about 75 per cent of the mutton eaten in Greenland.

In 2017 UNESCO inscribed "Kujataa Greenland: Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap" as a cultural landscape under criterion (v) alone — an outstanding example of traditional land use vulnerable to irreversible change. The property has five components, Qassiarsuk, Igaliku, Sissarluttoq, Tasikuluulik and Qaqortukulooq, and covers 373.5 hectares with a 57.2 hectare buffer. Its justification frames the Norse and the Inuit as "two diachronic farming cultures", tied together by "the enterprise of the Norse pioneers literally laying the cultural and physical foundations for Inuit renewal of farming in Greenland". ICOMOS, unusually, said that continuity framing was unnecessary: what gives the landscape its value is the use by different cultures at different times, not a claim of symbiosis.

Every ancient monument has a 20-metre protection zone, and visitors may not approach ruins closer than two metres. The threats are mining and infrastructure, agricultural intensification, coastal erosion and sea-level rise; a rare-earth and uranium project was proposed 15–20 km from three components. The Norse ruins are protected, but the landscape around them is not quiet.

The colony is also used, constantly, as a moral about climate change — usually in Jared Diamond's version, in which rigid conservatives refused to adapt and starved. Specialists now spend much of their time explaining that this is not what the evidence shows. Dugmore and colleagues put it sharply: conceiving the end of Norse Greenland as "a case of maladaptation by an inflexible society in the face of climate change allows neither justice to their innovation nor appropriate lessons to be drawn from that completed experiment."

Common myths about Norse Greenland

Timeline of Norse Greenland

What the map shows next

At 1001 on the map the Norse colony is young and the Chaco regional system is at its height in the American Southwest — two entirely separate worlds on the same continent, one farming the Arctic edge and one building great houses in the desert.

At 1228 on the map the Thule have arrived, the Aztec regional system has replaced Chaco, and the Norse settlements are entering their long decline.

At 1616 on the map Norse Greenland is three centuries gone, the Haudenosaunee confederacy dominates the north-east, and European ships are returning to the north Atlantic in a different form.