The Greenlandic adventure of the Scandinavians while introducing us to the Vikings in their facet of skillful navigators, discoverers and colonizers of new lands, also showed us their more human, more familiar face, since after all what they were looking for were lands to establish farms and be able to prosper together with their families, far from the problems of the European world such as political rivalries, land grabbing by the aristocracy or the demographic boom (see The causes of the Viking expansion in Ancient and Medieval No. 26:The Vikings).
Today we know, however, according to recent research[1], that their main occupation consisted of activities related to hunting, which would provide the ivory and furs that the people of Europe they claimed. They therefore satisfied a demand of highly valued products on the continent, while its farming activity, in the harsh climatic conditions offered by Greenland, would come to be just a complement to an economy that had its main reason for being in trade with Iceland and Europe.
The purpose of this short essay is to reverse, as far as possible, the image we all have of the Greenlandic Viking as a hard-working settler-farmer who in the long run was unable to survive there due to the gradual worsening of the climatic conditions, among other factors. Without disdaining the worsening climate or the clashes with native arctic peoples, we will analyze other causes that could be decisive in the abandonment of the island, fundamentally economic and commercial that negatively affected the eminently hunting activity of the settlers.
We know that the Norwegians were settled in Iceland from the end of the 9th century, and we also know that they were aware of the existence of lands further west at least since the year 900, date in how true Gunnbjorn , diverted from his usual route, he ended up in the Greenlandic Islands, although he did not land. It took 80 years for the famous Erick el Rojo , well-known explorer and protagonist of several Nordic sagas[2], landed and settled on the shores of that great island.
Erick the Red, Norwegian by birth, arrived in Iceland probably when he was a child, at the hands of his father who, accused of some murders, had to go into exile. The saga of the Greenlanders tells us how Erick gets married there and has a son named Leif – the future explorer of Vinland –. After different land disputes, Erick is accused of murder, so the Icelandic Althing, the assembly, condemns our man to exile.
Erick then goes west with his family, with a clear purpose of finding a habitable country, where to settle. The first thing he found was the inhospitable eastern coast of Greenland, then round the southern tip of the big island, where he found an area of fjords. After wintering there he went up the western coast, with a somewhat more benign climate, where he fulfilled his exile looking for the ideal location for a possible colony. He later returned to Iceland and began recruiting ships and people for a new voyage. This time his objective was to settle down there definitively . With the promise of abundant land and the attractive name with which he gave the island – “green land”, although everyone knows that agriculture there is almost impossible – he had no problem leaving Iceland with no less than 25 ships and almost a thousand people counting women and children, as well as cattle. A full-fledged colonization that also indicates Iceland's inability to support a high population density.
It seems that only 14 ships arrived, settling in the fjord that today bears their name – Eirík Fjord – near the southern tip. Although perhaps 500 or 600 people must have arrived, the land that could be settled was soon exhausted, so some of them left for the northwest and founded Vesterbygden , or western settlement, near present-day Nuuk .
The purpose of this first expedition was clearly to search for land to settle and establish a farm-based economy. This period also corresponds to the so-called “optimal medieval climate ”[3], which lasted at least until the fourteenth century, which favored a certain development of these settlements, and also allowed fluid communication by sea with Iceland, from where they had to import a large part of the products they consumed (wood, iron and grain fundamentally).
It was this relative ease of navigation that allowed Greenlandic settlers to develop an export and trade activity with Iceland and the mainland that soon proved more profitable than farming, especially especially when in Europe there was a great demand for oil and hides, and especially for skins and ivory.
The climatic optimum likewise not only allows commercial contacts, but also fishing and hunting activities, especially when seals and walruses (already very scarce in Iceland) populated a large part of the northern parts of Greenland. And that is why, during the arctic summer, the Viking colonist-hunters organized great expeditions in search of furs and ivory. And the best place to hunt was Disko Bay , located about 500 kilometers north of the western settlement.
A place rich in fishing and hunting, although the Greenlanders found competition there in the figure of the Dorset, Amerindian peoples. that although they were based beyond the Arctic Circle, they also went down to Disko Bay in search of furs, oil and ivory. They are called skraelingar by the Vikings, and with whom they will have intense relations, not always hostile, throughout the centuries.
Be that as it may, the struggle between man and nature was always titanic on the part of the Greenlanders, and so much so that some sensitive climatic and economic changes that occurred in the fourteenth century , were enough to accelerate the decline of the settlements on the island, which did not survive beyond the fifteenth century.
We proceed to briefly describe these changes, which we have summarized in three:
The first of them strictly climatic. The climatic optimum ends and what some historians have called “little ice age begins. ”, which made contacts between Greenland and Europe difficult, making the routes impassable and relegating the Scandinavians to isolation, thus a letter addressed to the Holy See in 1492[4] speaks of the poverty and isolation of the Greenlandic community.
A second change is strictly economic. To the damage to trade caused by the harsh climate we must add the arrival of African ivory to Europe since the 14th century as well as the disinterest of the Baltic merchants of the Hansa for establishing trade ties with Greenland. That island was too far away and its routes had become dangerous.
A final cause has to do with difficult relations with the skraelingar. Since the 13th century the Inuits appear in Greenland , displacing the Dorset peoples. The Inuits descended from the Arctic Circle pressed by the rigors of the "little ice age" and on their routes south they had innumerable clashes with the Scandinavians.
Therefore nothing remains of these ivory and fur-seeking settlers in the 16th century. Forced into a colossal struggle against the elements practically from the beginning, they proudly held their precarious position on the island for 5 centuries, while the demand for ivory and the favorable climate lasted. But they could not do anything against the ice and against the new trade routes opened in Africa by the Portuguese.
Physical isolation and commercial competition, aggravated by the Columbian discovery, already relegated the exploits of these Vikings, wizards of navigation and expert hunters, to oblivion from which they emerged alone in 1721, when the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede He landed there establishing contacts with the Inuit, and discovering to his amazement how the natives, centuries later, still remembered the existence of white hunters in their old stories.
Notes
[1] Highly recommended the thesis Pastoral Settlement, Farming, and Hierarchy in Norse Vatnahverfi, South Greenland, by Christian Koch Madsen 2014; as well as the article by Andrew Dugmore and Thomas Howatt McGovern Norse Greenland Settlement and Limits to Adaptation .
[2] We refer to the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erick the Red
[3] On medieval climate warming it is worth reading the article by Raymond S. Bradley, Climate of the Last Millenium 2003
[4] Letter addressed to Pope Alexander VI. It can be read on the website of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.