
Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? - hunglee2
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
======
throwaway2048
There appears to have been a similar end to the Ancestral Puebloans (commonly
refered as Anasazi). It appears they were hit by a climatic shift and had
several years of very extreme drought (to the point no rain fell at all), and
other enviromental factors, perhaps related to overexploitation of trees,
leading to erosion of watersheds and topsoil.

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology)

~~~
bluejekyll
And the Maya of the Yucatán and Central America.

Current thought is that through deforestation they created an arid zone.

[https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2009/0...](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2009/06oct_maya)

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](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.

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mmanfrin
There's only one very slight mention of the lack of fish in their diet in this
article, which I think does injustice to a component that (I feel) is
exceptionally important to understanding why the colony failed:

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!

~~~
jpatokal
This is also particularly weird since mainland Norwegians _do_ eat a lot of
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.

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libria
tl,dr; simultaneously:

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

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NelsonMinar
I love the Norse-in-Greenland story because it's only just barely out of
reach. It's only 600 years ago, they're Europeans, they had writing,
correspondence, regular trade. I mean they were part of the Church! And then
they just sort of disappeared and there's no contemporary record of why.

------
fiiv
If anyone is interested in a good analysis of this plus the Maya and Easter
Islanders (among some others), there's a book by Jared Diamond called
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)

~~~
sevensor
The article calls out Collapse as having been influenced by outdated ideas
about why the Greenland settlement failed. For instance, rather than depleting
the soil, it turns out that they worked to enrich it.

~~~
aomurphy
Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably
did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were
devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That
Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for
a more up to date work.

------
acjohnson55
That story was super interesting. I have always been fascinated by what has
driven humans to explore. Human history as we know it seems punctuated by
these inflection points of expansion. Post-expansion, we look back on how much
progress was made, and yet expansions seem to only happen sporadically. I
guess we might be able to conclude that expansion may be more common than what
gets recorded, but only becomes sustained when it results in some type of
major opportunity for the pioneers.

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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Heywood#In_Tahiti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Heywood#In_Tahiti)

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lutusp
When a page takes up 1/3 of the display playing an obnoxious advertising video
with sound that can be neither minimized or dismissed, they lose the right to
complain about ad blockers.

~~~
umanwizard
"When a restaurant charges more than I want to pay for their food, they lose
the right to complain about me leaving without paying"

~~~
lutusp
You're missing the point -- it's not an objection to advertising, it's an
objection to advertising that cannot possibly work, that alienates consumers.

Consumers aren't the only people who must live in reality -- advertisers must
live there too.

~~~
stcredzero
Ever since the influence of Edward Bernays, advertisers and consumers don't
live in reality, and big companies make more money than before.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self)

------
ch4s3
> fjord Hvalsey, which means “Whale Island”

Is this a correct translation? I thought fjord meant inlet.

~~~
pizzetta
Fjiord means firth (sea bay, strait, inlet, maybe even sound, etc.)

Fixed misspelling of strait.

~~~
kpil
Fjord or Fiord is more or less the same word as Firth.

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.

~~~
haukur
In Icelandic (which hasn't changed much since the settlement of Iceland) it's
"fjörður". In Old Norse it would've been "fjörðr".

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splawn
Here is a fun little boardgame that models this interesting chunk of history.

[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156501/greenland](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156501/greenland)

~~~
fsiefken
Yes, i have it, it's a very nice game. There is a Vassal module as well.
[http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Greenland](http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Greenland)
For a more conventional board game on Greenland, Vlaada Chvatil made
Graenaland
[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24843/graenaland](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24843/graenaland)

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mvindahl
The idea that the Greenland Vikings would assemble to hunt down sea mammals
and that they would rely upon a partial diet of seafood is a compelling idea.
After all, fish has always been an important staple of food along the
Norwegian coast. Also, to this day, the inhabitants of the Faroe Island
conduct annual, communal whale hunts (or "whale killings" as they call the
tradition; there is a fair amount of blood involved). The Vikings knew farming
but they certainly knew fishing as well.

------
castle-bravo
Jared Diamond devotes a whole chapter of his book Collapse to this question.
The one cause that struck me the most (Diamond only mentions it in passing) is
that they apparently didn't eat the fish.

------
fsiefken
For a novel set in Norse 14th century Greenland read: "The Greenlanders", it
was written in the style of epic sagas.

"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.goodreads.com/book/show/14305.The_Greenlanders)
[https://www.amazon.com/Greenlanders-Jane-
Smiley/dp/140009546...](https://www.amazon.com/Greenlanders-Jane-
Smiley/dp/1400095468)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley)

~~~
abecedarius
Tempting, thanks. Wasn't one of the original Norse sagas about Greenland? I
haven't read it either, but I can say that Njal's Saga (mainly on Iceland) is
very good.

~~~
haukur
Indeed, you're thinking about this one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_saga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_saga)

~~~
abecedarius
D'oh! Thanks.

------
khedoros1
> The fate of Greenland’s Vikings—who never numbered more than 2,500

> 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?

~~~
lutorm
The article says 2500 is the new number, 5000 the "old story".

~~~
khedoros1
Ah, makes sense. I didn't catch the distinction that they were making. Thank
you!

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kazinator
Legend has it that Erik the Red basically named Greenland deceptively to
attract people to go there. Why the Vikings might have vanished from there
could be traced back to this bait and switch naming: expecting something
green, and finding most of it rather white most of the time.

~~~
bpodgursky
Vikings colonies survived on Greenland for hundreds of years, so while
chuckle-worthy I don't think this is a reasonable explanation.

~~~
kazinator
Still, the place name could well have retained its deceptive power for
hundreds of years, coloring people's expectations.

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.

~~~
bpodgursky
If you read the article, you'd see the colony survived for a few hundred years
even after trade with the mainland stopped. This is not a reasonable theory.
Greenland was not peopled by clickbait marketing.

