In short, the Vikings simply transplanted their medieval European lifestyle to an uninhabited new land, theirs for the taking.īut eventually, the conventional narrative continues, they had problems. Longer growing seasons made it feasible to graze cattle, sheep and goats in the meadows along sheltered fjords on Greenland’s southwest coast. Sea ice decreased during those centuries, so sailing from Scandinavia to Greenland became less hazardous. Thomas McGovern (with Viking-era animal bones): The Greenlanders’ end was “grim.”Īccordingly, the Vikings were not just dumb, they also had dumb luck: They discovered Greenland during a time known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 900 to 1300. Over Skype, here’s how he summarized what had until recently been the consensus view, which he helped establish: “Dumb Norsemen go into the north outside the range of their economy, mess up the environment and then they all die when it gets cold.” With his heavy white beard and thick build, he could pass for a Viking chieftain, albeit a bespectacled one. An archaeologist at Hunter College of the City University of New York, McGovern has spent more than 40 years piecing together the history of the Norse settlements in Greenland. They’re there for generations-for centuries.” “These guys were really out on the frontier,” says Andrew Dugmore, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh. And they didn’t just get by: They built manor houses and hundreds of farms they imported stained glass they raised sheep, goats and cattle they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe.
Those tough seafaring warriors came to one of the world’s most formidable environments and made it their home.
The fate of Greenland’s Vikings-who never numbered more than 2,500-has intrigued and confounded generations of archaeologists. When they did, they found the ruins of the Viking settlements but no trace of the inhabitants. But according to the letters, he says, “it was just an ordinary wedding in an orderly community.”Įuropeans didn’t return to Greenland until the early 18th century. “If there was trouble, we might reasonably have thought that there would be some mention of it,” says Ian Simpson, an archaeologist at the University of Stirling, in Scotland. This article is a selection from the March issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 For those letters were the last anyone ever heard from the Norse Greenlanders. Another record from the period noted that one person had been burned at the stake at Hvalsey for witchcraft.īut the documents are most remarkable-and baffling-for what they don’t contain: any hint of hardship or imminent catastrophe for the Viking settlers in Greenland, who’d been living at the very edge of the known world ever since a renegade Icelander named Erik the Red arrived in a fleet of 14 longships in 985.
Their marriage was mentioned in three letters written between 14, and was then recorded for posterity by medieval Icelandic scribes.
The couple had been sailing from Norway to Iceland when they were blown off course they ended up settling in Greenland, which by then had been a Viking colony for some 400 years. It was here that Sigrid Bjornsdottir wed Thorstein Olafsson on Sunday, September 16, 1408. The Vikings called this fjord Hvalsey, which means “Whale Island” in Old Norse. Now sheep come and go at will, munching wild thyme where devout Norse Christian converts once knelt in prayer. The wooden roof, rafters and doors collapsed and rotted away long ago. The thick granite-block walls remain intact, as do the 20-foot-high gables. On the grassy slope of a fjord near the southernmost tip of Greenland stand the ruins of a church built by Viking settlers more than a century before Columbus sailed to the Americas.
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