
Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? (2017) - spatten
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
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red-indian
I've always found it interesting that there was mail service between Greenland
and Iceland at least up until 1424.

Not too long after that, in 1477, Columbus went to Galway Ireland to ask
fishermen about routes across the northern sea. These fishermen routinely
visited Iceland, and knew about Greenland. Columbus also inspected a boat on
which a couple had arrived in Galway from beyond Iceland, likely Greenland,
and either viewed the bodies of the couple or met with them depending on how
you read his Latin.

~~~
hinkley
As I recall from 1491, the fisherman had enough trade as far as New England
(by the 1600's) that the Pilgrims found a translator who _already_ spoke
English.

They didn't dwell on that in American History class.

~~~
detritus
How old ARE you?

~~~
hinkley
I would love to have you come visit my castle in beautiful Eastern Europe. The
vistas are wonderful, as are the tapestries.

We're having a bit of a wolf problem but as long as you travel during the day
you should be fine.

Seriously though, it's a book.

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tga
If you’re into this kind of thing, check out The Fall Of Civilizations podcast
— it’s great and also has an episode on this topic.

[https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/03/26/episode-4-...](https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/03/26/episode-4-of-
fall-of-civilizations-is-now-live/)

~~~
50ckpuppet
or just turn on the TV ;)

~~~
InterestBazinga
That is such a narrow reply. What channel? Is that channel being shown in my
current TV cable package? What country? How accurate is the show?

~~~
usepgp
I think it was a joke about the name of the podcast

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war1025
My reading of the article is that it happened, as they say, "slowly and then
all at once."

Not dissimilar from the hollowing out of rural America today. People keep on
going, assuming that things will either stay stable or turn around at some
point. Meanwhile everything keeps on at roughly the same trajectory of the
people hanging on getting older and older, and the young people moving on to
greener pastures.

And then one day you realize that there isn't really anything left.

------
chewz
This subject is discussed in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond.[1]

Some topics that the article didn't mention is that:

a) Norse in Greenland continued internal infighting losing (in such a small
population) able men due to duels and revenge killing

b) They had been spending much of the efforts during short summer on costly
expeditions to aquire walrus-tusk ivory instead of obtaining timber and other
necessities.

c) The upper class had been directing most resources into vanity projects like
large cathedral and exchanging walrus-tusk ivory for luxury imports like wine,
fine clothes etc..

It is still beyond me why living in Greenland by the sea they had refused to
eat fish.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)

~~~
OliverJones
_Collapse_ and its author Jared Diamond get a mention in the article. This
article adds a couple of factors to Diamond's. In 21st-century lingo the added
factors were

\-- Globalization: Elephant ivory from Africa, newly available, crowded out
walrus-tusk ivory from the market. And Greenland's ivory sales were reduced in
the wake of the plague. (Ivory was their foreign-exchange product.)

\--Climate fluctuations, decades-long.

It's cool to learn a little more above the lived experience of those people. I
imagine they argued with each other all the time about whether to spend their
efforts getting stuff they could SELL or stuff they could USE. Figuring that
out is hard enough for us, and we have perfect information about markets
compared to them. Imagine how hard it must have been for them.

According to Diamond the Norse outposts in Greenland lasted five hundred
years. That's a hundred years longer ago than the first English settlers
clawed a foothold around Massachusetts Bay. A lot can happen in five hundred
years! I suspect saying "it was this - " or "it was that - made them collapse"
leads to gross oversimplification.

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interfixus
It's quite a bit of a stretch to call anyone from after the 11th century a
viking. But for some reason the epithet often gets bandied about when talking
of the Norse in Greenland.

~~~
Polyisoprene
Sexier name for sure. We do still call the age before the current Nordic
states were established the age of Vikings in Sweden.

The whole notion of Vikings being stupid and naive sounds very old fashioned.
The whole idea that short seasons and snow would scare off any people from the
Nordic countries is bullshit. Nuuk is at 64 degrees north, roughly similar to
Reykjavík, Trondheim or the southern point of the northern third of Sweden.
Which had been inhabited for much longer. The climate is slightly better in
Scandinavia that far north, but Greenland would surely have been similar.

------
ro-_-b
I wonder how the Vikings kept warm during winter. It's mentioned in the
article that there almost weren't any trees in Greenland and it must have been
extremely cold there in winter.

~~~
goodcanadian
There are other things you can burn: peat (probably not plentiful in
Greenland), dried cow manure. Also, you wear furs and sleep under furs. Even
my grandparents, living in a place with far more plentiful wood at a much
later time in history, had stories of breaking the ice on the wash basin in
the morning.

~~~
Cougher
I lived in a place where I had to break the ice in the toilet in the morning.
And that was in England.

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Bouncingsoul1
I don't get it, they bash on diamonds book and then are making the same points
as he did

~~~
goodcanadian
I don't see that they bashed on his book. They said that he followed the
narrative accepted at the time which has since been disproven (or modified,
anyway). Saying that he wrote approximately what historians at the time
believed seems to be far from a harsh criticism. It may, perhaps, be a warning
that the information has been superseded.

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VHRanger
This website is utterly unreadable on mobile without an adblocker.

I thought something named the Smithsonian magazine would be better than this
yet here we are

