Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? (2017)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/

by spatten • 7 years ago

60 33 7 years ago

tga• 7 years ago

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-...

50ckpuppet• 7 years ago

or just turn on the TV ;)

InterestBazinga• 7 years ago

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?

red-indian• 7 years ago

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.

hinkley3• 7 years ago

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.

jacoblsievers• 7 years ago

Are you implying something?

btilly• 7 years ago

The translator actually had been enslaved by Europeans twice and knew English on account of having lived in England.

See https://www.biography.com/political-figure/squanto for verification.

detritus• 7 years ago

How old ARE you?

ahi• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Banks_of_Newfoundland

I am imagining all these old salts in the pub rolling their eyes at the aristocratic "explorers"

japaget• 7 years ago

There is a book called "1491" by Charles C. Mann which the parent commenter is probably referring to.

sambroner• 7 years ago

It's amazing that people in Iceland knew people in Greenland and people in Greenland almost definitely knew about North America, but somehow most people in Europe had no idea that North America existed.

People must have been so much more comfortable feeling vaguely curious, but not ever satisfying that curiousity.

mc32• 7 years ago

Even if they were curious his would that be realized?

You couldn’t just book a ticket and hotel room.

It cost a lot of money so the only way to do it was via setting up a company to try and make profit on the endeavor. Only few people could manage that.

It’d be like asking years hence, the Americans had been to the moon, why wasn’t anyone else curious about the moon, why hadn’t others put people on the moon?

dantillberg• 7 years ago

You can imagine that there were likely many curious people that died pursuing their curiosity.

runarberg2• 7 years ago

I suspect the knowledge was restricted to the working classes. I suspect that the noble classes didn’t really care about how Norese Greenlanders got their lumber, or how North Europeans got the fish they traded with. They’d much rather know where the Chinese get their silk, where the South Asians get their spices, or where the West Africans get their gold from.

Since the resources coming from the North Atlantic were not that valuable, the knowledge of the lands and culture there stayed with the people who worked it.

spanxx• 7 years ago

Interesting tale about a Columbus voyage to Ireland. Have any info on that?

VHRanger• 7 years ago

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

interfixus• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

war1025• 7 years ago

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.

ro-_-b• 7 years ago

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.

goodcanadian2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

Bouncingsoul1• 7 years ago

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

goodcanadian2• 7 years ago

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.

chewz• 7 years ago

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...

OliverJones• 7 years ago

_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.

CryptoPunk• 7 years ago

They actually did change their diet to fish. Toward the end of the colony, the diet was predominantly seafood, and dramatically different from the diet of the early colonists:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e392/f5fc6683acf7c1f05df7b3...

Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? (2017)

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