Was Vinland abandoned for lack of innovation or people?

The short answer

• Warm summers greened the southern fjords. The colony’s timing fits the Medieval Climate Anomaly, when midge remains from Scoop Lake near the Eastern Settlement indicate summers about 1.5 °C warmer than in the centuries before and after. Warmer, longer summers allowed enough hay to grow at the heads of the fjords to keep cattle alive through the winter. Erik the Red was exploiting a climatic window that he could not have understood in those terms but could see in the grass.
• Iceland was already full and divided. By the 980s Iceland’s best land had been claimed for two or three generations, and younger sons and newcomers found few opportunities. Feuds also drove men out, since Erik himself was outlawed twice for killings. Greenland offered empty grassland to people who had lost out in Iceland, and the 25 ships that sailed in 985 or 986, carrying perhaps several hundred people with their animals, show how many were willing to gamble.
• A name chosen to attract settlers. According to the Icelandic sources, Erik called the new land Greenland because people would be more willing to go there if it had an attractive name. The story shows that founding a colony required persuasion as well as seamanship, much as a modern developer markets a new town. Erik needed enough families to make the settlement viable, and the name was part of his recruitment, as were the best meadows he kept for himself at Brattahlíð.
• European demand for walrus ivory. Walrus ivory was valued in Europe for carving religious objects and games, especially when African elephant ivory was scarce. Greenland’s walrus grounds in Norðrseta offered a supply that no one else could reach, and ancient DNA shows that by the twelfth century almost all European walrus ivory came from there. This demand gave the colony a reason to exist beyond subsistence and paid for the imports its farms could not produce.

What it changed

A colony locked into hay and ivory. With Vinland abandoned, Greenland’s economy settled into its long pattern of cattle and sheep on the fjord meadows, seals and caribou for food, and walrus hunting in the north for export. That combination worked for about three centuries, but it depended on summers warm enough for hay and on European demand for ivory, and Chapter 5 shows both beginning to fail after 1250.

Timber trips to Markland continue. The Greenlanders kept sailing to Markland, probably the forested coast of Labrador, for the timber that their treeless land lacked. Icelandic annals for 1347 record a small Greenland ship, crewed by 17 or 18 men, that had been to Markland and was driven by storms to Iceland. The contact with America therefore did not end in 1021, though it never again became settlement.

Greenland enters the Church and the crown. The colony grew into a recognisable part of Christian Europe. It received its own bishop at Garðar in 1126 and built about fourteen to seventeen churches, and in 1261 it accepted the authority of the Norwegian king. These ties brought priests, ships and goods but also made the colony dependent on decisions taken in Bergen and Trondheim, as Chapter 6 explains.