(ad 976 ± 50 years). Radiocarbon dating of the oldest relics in the Western Settlement,
most recently from the ‘Farm under the Sand’, shows that people settled there during
the first decades of the eleventh century.
All the graves found in Greenland are Christian ones and there is no evidence of
heathen burial customs. In Brattahlíð, however, a whetstone has been found with a
Þórr’s hammer carved on it, which is the only evidence of the Viking paganism in
Greenland.
Studies of core samples drilled from the Greenland icecap have provided important
information about the climate on Earth and climatic fluctuations in the past. The
successive strata of the Greenland icecap can be read year by year for indications about
temperature, precipitation, volcanic eruptions in Iceland, etc., like a kind of natural
chronicle.
Before the settlement of Iceland in 874 the climate was cold. When Raven-Flóki
visited Iceland and supposedly coined its chilly name, he probably encountered a harsh
winter with heavy sea ice off the West Fjords. It would have been about as cold then as
at the end of the seventeenth century when Iceland was completely surrounded by sea
ice, which stretched as far south as the Faroe Islands. From 860 onwards the temperature
began to rise and in the tenth century it was somewhat warmer than today.
When Eiríkr the Red settled in Greenland in 985 , a continuous period of favourable
weather had prevailed for a whole century and vegetation there was at a historical peak.
By the middle of the thirteenth century the climate had turned much colder, and there is
a clear correspondence with the abandonment of the Western Settlement around 1350.
Archaeological evidence in Greenland clearly shows that people were able to live
well there and did not lack food or suffer from any particular ailments. Clothes from
Herjólfsnes cemetery testify to direct trading with Europe at a time when contact with
Iceland had begun to dwindle sharply, and there are several indications of contact with
the English in the fifteenth century.
Hypotheses have been put forward that the last Icelandic Greenlanders simply moved
out of the country, perhaps returning to Iceland where there was plenty of land after the
plague, or heading west to the North American mainland and Newfoundland where
the English were fishing by then, or even that they were captured by the Portuguese
and sold into slavery to work on sugar plantations in the Canary Islands – possible
evidence of which is a Portuguese map from 1502 , named after Alberto Cantino, with a
Portuguese flag in Greenland’s Eastern Settlement. The only written account of the end
of the Scandinavian settlement in Greenland was recorded around 1750 by the son of
missionary Hans Egede. A sorcerer from Siglufjo ̨rðr in the Eastern Settlement told him
how the Scandinavians had been taken away by pirates while some had sailed southwards
themselves and several women and children fled to join the Inuit. The time that elapsed
between these events and their being written down was similar to that from the settle-
ment of Iceland to Ari the Learned’s Book of the Icelanders.
THE SAGAS AND THE VINLAND VOYAGESThe Vinland sagas contain the oldest written descriptions of the North American con-
tinent and tell the story of several voyages undertaken by people from Iceland and
Greenland to North America around the year 1000 : the first authentically documented
voyages across the Atlantic Ocean in which the peoples of America and Europe met for
–– chapter 41 : The North Atlantic expansion––