Hi, Friday, December 3, 2004, 3:37:24 PM, Daniel wrote:
> I heayrd a much different story. > Eric the Red was forced to leave Iceland, apparently after killing a few > people. He found Greenland and established the first colony there about > 982, naming it Greenland to make it sound more attractive. His son, > Lief Ericson, brought Christianity to Greenland and explored the coast > of North America. > The Greenland colony was abandoned, largely because the Inuit natives > were even better warriors than the Vikings, and made the intruders quite > unwelcome. It was later resettled by Norwegians and Danes. > Greenland is mostly ice, while Iceland is mostly green, and much > warmer. It's all in the language chosen by the listing real estate agent. Greenland was colonised during the Mediaeval Warm Period, when it was green. This is not inconsistent with the idea that he sexed it up a bit for the people back home - if you find a nice place and want people to move there, you're going to tell them it's nice. I saw an interesting documentary about this some years ago. As far as I remember there were no other people there at the time - the Inuit having abandoned it before. When the warm period gave way to the Little Ice Age the Viking settlers didn't have the skills to deal with the new type of climate. The Inuit, who started to return during the colder weather, knew how to survive, but - rather like early European settlers of Virginia - the Norse didn't know how to ask for help, or their religious and other cultural prejudices prevented them from asking, and their fortunes declined. I have a book called "Floods, Famines and Emperors" by Brian Fagan in which he describes the effect of climate change on various cultures worldwide over the last few thousand years. He goes into more detail than I can repeat here about the history of the Norse settlements in Greenland, but as far as I can tell, during the 500 or so years that the Norse were in Greenland there was little contact with the Inuit except at the very end, when the Inuit may have attacked the settlements. -- Cheers, Bob
