CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

THE NORSE SETTLEMENTS

IN GREENLAND

Jette Arneborg

I

n the late tenth century Viking settlers moved further west into the North Atlantic.
According to early Icelandic history-writing, settlers from Iceland colonised the
southern part of the Greenland west coast in the late 980 s:

The land which is called Greenland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Eirik

the Red was the name of a Breidafjord man who went out there from here and took

land in settlement... When he began to settle the land, that was fourteen or fifteen

years before Christianity came to Iceland.

(The Book of the Icelanders by Arí Fróði Þorgilsson ( 1067 – 1148 ),

trans. Jones 1986 : 148 )

Greenland is the world’s largest island. However, more than 75 per cent is covered by
ice and only the narrow rim between the massive Inland Ice and the sea is inhabitable.
The south-west Greenland landscape is mountainous with deep fjords, valleys and
rivers draining the water from the Inland Ice into the sea. In general the climate of
Greenland is Arctic (the mean temperature of the warmest month of the year is below

• 10 ° C): in the protected inner parts of the south-west Greenland fjords (around 60 ° to
  61 ° N) and the Nuuk hinterland (around 64 °N) temperatures in the warmest month
  crawl up above + 10 ° C. It was here – in subarctic Greenland – that the Icelandic Norse
  immigrants settled. In the Middle Ages the southernmost settlement area was called
  the Eastern Settlement and the settlement area around Nuuk the Western Settlement
  (Figure 43. 1 ).
  Contacts with the Norse Greenland settlements broke off during the fifteenth
  century and almost ever since the fate of the Norse has been discussed in Iceland and in
  Scandinavia. At the beginning of the eighteenth century contacts with Greenland were
  re-established and the deserted and collapsed farms spoke for themselves. The last
  evidence of life in the settlements is the letter written by a Greenland priest testifying a
  wedding in the Hvalsey fjord church in the Eastern Settlement in 1408.