The Vikings settled Greenland around 1000 A.D. and lived there for centuries before vanishing. It has been thought that they died out around 1430 A.D. as the climate changed and brought
seriously colder winters. Interestingly, there's a new hypothesis:
they left:
In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in
particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The
excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from
the late period.
"The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when
young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener
pastures in areas that are more promising economically," Lynnerup says.
"It's always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind."
In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries
at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland,
Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and
estates for returnees from Greenland.
However, the Greenlanders didn't leave their houses in a precipitous
fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop,
valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been
discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a
sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner,
and that the residents took any valuable objects along. "If they had
died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would
certainly have found such precious items long ago," says Lynnerup.
However, a new book suggests that they didn't return to Scandanavia, but rather tried to settle Labrador or Newfoundland, under the auspices of English and Portuguese explorers in the
post Columbus era:
That
would still have left the problem of persuading the Norse
Greenlanders to join such an overseas scheme willingly. T he
Greenlanders would have known about Vínland, Markland and Helluland,
but in order to pull up stakes and move westwards they would have had
to be persuaded by someone with the leadership and organisational
abilities of Eirik the Red – qualities that had also enabled John
Cabot, the Corte Real brothers and João Fernandes to arrange their
enterprises.
In
addition,the Greenlanders would have had to be convinced that
they were going to something better than what they would leave
behind. If the Norse Greenlanders had adjusted both their domestic
and export economy to English demands for stockfish and other fish
products that had now dwindled to the point where the Greenlanders
were facing complete isolation, they would primarily have required
assurance abouttransportation and help to get started with a new
life, just as theirancestors had done when opportunity called.
Conditions in the Eastern Settlement would not have had to be
unspeakable for a new colonising venture to appeal; the first
Greenland colonisers had certainly not beenthe most desperate people
in Iceland.
Those
who probed the Labrador coast for new economic opportunities could
not foresee the disasters that became the invariable lot of Europeans
when first trying to settle year-round on shores they had experienced
only during non-winter conditions. They did not know that the
isotherm dips way south in that region, with winter temperatures
substantially lowert han at a corresponding latitude in Greenland. If
the Norse Greenlanders migrated west to a stretch of Labrador chosen
by others, as it appears likely that they did, they may have ended up
on the bottom of the Davis Strait before ever reaching the other
shore, or they may have perished during their first winter in the new
land from new diseases, from starvation or simply from the bitter
cold. For them and for any who had stayed behind in Greenland, it
would have been the beginning of a rapid decline – and of the end.
The Last Vikings by Kristin A. Seaver is an exhaustive, 250 page history of the Greenland Norse. It's entirely thought provoking, and on the Internet for your reading and learning pleasure.
1 comment:
"They did not know that the isotherm dips way south in that region, with winter temperatures substantially lower than at a corresponding latitude in Greenland."
I did not know that, either.
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