Norse and Aztecs · CHAPTER 5 ·
Why the Norse abandoned Greenland
Chapter 5 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521: “Living with the Cold”
From about 1275–1300 the Little Ice Age brought drift ice along Greenland’s coasts and drier summers that cut the hay for cattle. The Norse adapted by eating far more seal, but the ivory market weakened, the Black Death struck Norway in 1349 and ships came less often; the Western Settlement was empty by about 1360.
Chapter 5 is part of membership. WW2 is free — every chapter. Try chapters 1–2 of any 2 other atlases (3 with a free account). Opening a new atlas uses one of them. Membership opens all 21 — Join.
Free printable Norse and Aztecs study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Norse North Atlantic, 1408 — The last wedding at Hvalsey.
Part of IB History: The Norse and the Aztecs →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Greenland Norse adapted to the cold for about two centuries before they left, and explaining why they finally went is the central debate of this case study. From about 1275–1300 the North Atlantic cooled into the Little Ice Age, the colder centuries that followed the warm spell. Drift ice, floating sea ice carried south by currents like the pack ice that closes Arctic shipping lanes today, spread further along Greenland’s coasts, and in the south the summers grew drier, which reduced the hay that kept cattle alive. The Norse responded by eating far more seal, as chemical traces in their bones show. At the same time the market for walrus ivory weakened, the Black Death, the plague pandemic that swept Europe, struck Norway in 1349, and ships from Bergen came less and less often. On the map, the ice band now wraps around Cape Farewell, the Western Settlement, empty by about 1360, has become Inuit country, and blue Inuit zones step down the coast. Each pressure alone was survivable, and together they wore the colony down.
The newcomers were the Thule Inuit, ancestors of today’s Greenlanders, who had crossed from Arctic Canada and reached Greenland’s far north in the thirteenth century. They lived by hunting seals and whales from kayaks and larger open boats called umiaks, travelled by dog sledge and lit their houses with lamps that burned blubber, a kit of tools made for sea ice. As the Norse withdrew, first from the Western Settlement and after 1408 from the Eastern, the Inuit stayed and spread south. Historians divide over whether the Norse failed through cold, through the collapse of trade, or through a way of life too tied to cattle and churches to change. The comparison with the Inuit shows that the cold was survivable, and that survival depended on the technology a society brought to it.
The full story
The Norse met the cold first by changing what they ate, which shows that they were adapting. Bones carry chemical signatures, called isotopes, that record whether a person’s protein came from land or sea, much as a till receipt records what a shopper bought, and Jette Arneborg’s team found that Norse diets shifted from about 20 percent marine food at settlement to about 80 percent by the end. A later study with 123 skeletons revised the early figure to 15–50 percent and showed the 50 percent mark being crossed in the late thirteenth century. Rubbish heaps tell the same story, since seal bones make up 30 to over 80 percent of the animal remains on Greenland farms, mostly harp and hooded seals caught in communal hunts on their spring migration. A people supposedly too proud to eat seafood was, in practice, living largely on seals.
The colony’s economy weakened at the same time as its climate. Lake 578 near Brattahlíð shows a drying trend that would have cut the hay crop, and closely spaced bad years forced farmers to slaughter animals they could not feed. James Barrett’s study of walrus skulls shows the hunters taking smaller animals, often females, from ever further north, a sign that the nearer herds had been depleted. Europe was also turning back to elephant ivory, and the plague pandemic called the Black Death, which reached Norway in 1349, killed perhaps half or more of its people, shrinking the market. The royal trading ship that served Greenland sank in 1369 and was not replaced, so the colony grew poorer and more isolated in the very decades when it most needed contact.
The Thule Inuit, ancestors of today’s Greenlanders, arrived with a different solution to the same environment. Moving east across Arctic Canada in the thirteenth century, they reached Smith Sound and Greenland’s far north, Disko Bay by the fourteenth century and the south by the later fourteenth. Their toggling harpoon, whose head twisted sideways inside a seal, let them hunt at breathing holes in winter ice, which the Norse never mastered. The Icelandic annals record for 1379 that Skrælings, the Norse name for the Inuit, killed eighteen Greenlanders and enslaved two boys, though the entry survives only in later copies. The Western Settlement was found empty around 1360, and the last written record of the Eastern Settlement is a wedding at Hvalsey church in 1408. Radiocarbon dates, which measure the slow decay of carbon in once-living material like a clock that starts at death, keep the Norse there until about 1430 on the evidence of grave clothes, and they were gone by the late 1400s, while the Inuit remained. The people who brought tools for sea ice outlasted the people who brought cattle.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why the Norse left: three explanations and a fourth
Historians have offered three main explanations, and the strongest current work combines them. The climatic explanation began with Willi Dansgaard in 1975 and draws support from the cooling of the fourteenth century and the drying at Lake 578, although Zhao’s team found no large temperature change in the south. The economic explanation, developed by Kirsten Seaver and Christian Keller, stresses the fall in walrus-ivory demand, the plague in Norway and the end of regular shipping. The cultural explanation, popularised by Jared Diamond in 2005, argues that the Norse clung to cattle, churches and a European identity and refused to adopt Inuit technology. Andrew Dugmore and his colleagues answered in 2012 that the Norse were flexible, since they ate seals and organised communal hunts, and that the colony fell through a conjuncture in which several pressures, each survivable alone, struck at once. Richard Jackson’s team argued in 2018 that the settlers adjusted repeatedly but within limits set by the landscape and culture they had carried from Iceland. Each explanation names a real pressure, and the debate now concerns how they combined.
Abandonment or collapse?
The word historians choose shapes the story, and the archaeology increasingly favours abandonment over collapse. At the Farm Beneath the Sand in the Western Settlement, excavated between 1991 and 1996 under 1.5 metres of windblown sand, insect remains studied by Eva Panagiotakopulu suggest that the farm was left in an orderly way, with no sign of a final winter of starvation. Ívar Bárðarson, a Norwegian church official in Greenland from about 1341 to 1364, reported finding the Western Settlement empty of people, with only cattle and sheep running wild, which also suggests departure. The Hvalsey wedding party sailed for Iceland in 1410 and settled there, and others may have followed in the fifteenth century without leaving a record. No mass graves or signs of a final struggle have been found. Most specialists now describe a dwindling population that drifted away to Iceland and Norway as life in Greenland ceased to be worth its costs. A society can end without its people dying, and that distinction matters for any comparison with the siege that ended Tenochtitlan.
The Inuit as the people who solved the problem
For a long time the Thule Inuit appeared in European histories only as Skrælings, a threat or an obstacle, and recent scholarship has restored them as the decisive actors of late medieval Greenland. Archaeologists such as Hans Christian Gulløv trace their arrival in the Smith Sound region by about 1200–1300 and their movement down the west coast into Norse territory, where Inuit summer dwellings at Herjólfsnes date to the late fourteenth century. Norse objects in Inuit sites, including iron, cloth and fragments of chain mail on Ruin Island and in Arctic Canada, show trade and scavenging as well as conflict. Inuit oral tradition, collected by Hinrich Rink in the nineteenth century, preserves stories of the Kavdlunait, the Norse, at Kakortok near Hvalsey. The Inuit expansion during the colder centuries proves that Greenland could support a growing society, provided that society lived from the sea and the ice. Telling the story from the Inuit side turns a tale of European failure into one of Indigenous success.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Cooler and drier summers cut the hay. The Little Ice Age began abruptly between about 1275 and 1300 and intensified again between 1430 and 1455, according to Gifford Miller’s team. In south Greenland the clearest signal at Lake 578 is drying, which would have reduced the hay harvest even without much cooling. Because cattle needed stored hay for eight months, a few bad summers in a row forced culls that took years to rebuild, and the farms’ margin of safety shrank.
Drift ice lengthened and endangered voyages. More summer drift ice along east and south Greenland made the passage from Iceland and Norway slower and more dangerous, and a late-medieval sailing guide claims the old route had been abandoned because of ice, though that sentence may be a later addition. Fewer ships meant less iron, timber and grain, and fewer chances for young people to leave or for new settlers to arrive, so isolation compounded every other pressure.
The ivory economy weakened. Walrus ivory paid for the colony’s imports, but by the fourteenth century the hunters were taking smaller animals from further away, and Europe was again importing elephant ivory from Africa. In 1327 a cargo of about 520 tusks, paid as church dues, was still worth roughly as much as 780 cows, so the trade remained valuable while becoming less reliable. A colony with one export was exposed to every change in its buyers’ tastes.
Plague and isolation in Norway. The Black Death reached Norway in 1349 and killed perhaps half or more of the population, shrinking the market for luxuries and the shipping that served the colonies. Bergen’s merchants turned to the profitable trade in dried cod, and the royal trading ship to Greenland was not replaced after it sank in 1369. Greenland’s link to Europe thinned just as its own economy weakened, and a colony that could no longer trade could no longer replace its iron tools.
THE TURNING POINT
Hvalsey church, 16 September 1408. On this day Þorsteinn Ólafsson and Sigríður Björnsdóttir were married in the stone church at Hvalsey, an event recorded because the couple later needed proof of the marriage in Iceland. It is the hinge of the chapter because it is the last written evidence of Norse Greenland, and after it the story can be told only through archaeology. The wedding also shows a community still functioning, with priests, a church and legal documents, only a generation before the end. That combination, normal life followed by silence, is why historians now speak of departure more often than of catastrophe.
What it changed
Greenland becomes Inuit land. By about 1500 the Inuit lived along most of Greenland’s west and south coasts, including the old Norse districts, and their descendants make up most of Greenland’s population today. On the map, the blue zones that step down the coast after 1300 represent this expansion. The Norse experiment had been replaced by a society far better equipped for the Arctic.
A debate that shaped modern environmental history. The fate of Norse Greenland became a classic case study for arguments about climate change and collapse, most famously in Jared Diamond’s book of 2005. The archaeological response has made the colony an example of adaptation under compounding pressures, a model now applied to many societies facing climate change, including the Mexica in the second half of this atlas, whose lake city faced flood, frost and drought.
Europe forgets and then searches. Norway lost contact with Greenland in the fifteenth century, and Europeans gradually forgot where the colony had been. When Danish and Norwegian rulers took renewed interest, they assumed the Norse descendants might still survive, which led to new voyages in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and eventually to the Danish colonisation of Greenland from 1721, discussed in the epilogue. The Skálholt map, drawn in Iceland around 1570, shows how much of that geography survived only in written memory.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent were the Greenland Norse victims of the Little Ice Age?
The cold was a real pressure, but the evidence suggests it was decisive only in combination with economic decline and isolation. Cooling and drying reduced the hay harvest, and more drift ice made voyages harder, so the climate narrowed the colony’s margin. Yet the Norse adapted, eating mostly seal by the end, and the Inuit expanded into Greenland during the same cold centuries, which shows that the environment could support people with the right technology. The collapse of the ivory trade, the plague in Norway and the end of regular shipping removed the income and contact that had made a small European colony viable. Most scholars, following Dugmore and colleagues, therefore describe a conjuncture of pressures acting on a society too small to absorb them. The orderly abandonment of farms suggests that many people chose to leave. The transferable insight is that climate change often works slowly, exhausting a society’s alternatives one by one until leaving becomes the sensible choice.
An interesting fact
One of the most famous garments from Norse Greenland was misdated by two centuries. In 1921 the archaeologist Poul Nørlund excavated the churchyard at Herjólfsnes, where the permafrost had preserved woollen gowns, hoods and caps. One tall cap, cut in a style resembling fashions at the fifteenth-century Burgundian court, was taken as proof that Greenlanders were still following European fashion after 1500. Radiocarbon dating later placed it between about 1280 and 1380, while other grave clothes from the same churchyard dated to about 1430, which is the latest firm evidence of Norse people in Greenland.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Join the Dispatch — a short welcome series, then a letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for Climate and Innovation is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME