ON THIS DAY ·
Hvalsey Church wedding in Norse Greenland
A wedding at Hvalsey church in Greenland: the last written record of the Norse colony that had farmed its fjords for four centuries.
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The moment in context
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.
From Why the Norse abandoned Greenland, chapter 5 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521 (1408).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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…
- 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…
Then ask the room: To what extent were the Greenland Norse victims of the Little Ice Age? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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