Greenland grew a range of crops, and while the failure of one crop through pestilence is possible, the failure of all, and in all locations, is most unlikely. As with plague, the distance between farms provided a barrier for the spread of pestilence. Plague and pestilence, like climate change, cannot explain the disappearance of the Greenland colony after over 400 years. At the most these factors somewhat weakened the population, though even this is speculation.
The idea that the Greenland Vikings were swamped by the Inuit is again problematic. Greenland had a mixed population. In their west-coast settlements the Viking population numbered in the region of 5,000; the Inuit population for the whole of Greenland was in the region of 5,000, but distributed throughout the ice-free areas of Greenland, including a population on the north-west and north coasts. In south-west Greenland theInuit were a minority. Perhaps intermarriage between the two groups occurred, but the balance in numbers between the two groups is such that the result would not be that the ethnic Norse would vanish, subsumed within an Inuit population. Later Europeans visiting Greenland discerned no trace of European characteristics in the Inuit they encountered there. This supposed process, which has been termed âEskimo-isationâ, cannot explain the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings. Indeed, were the process to have happened at all it can even be suggested that the direction would have been for the Inuit to be swamped by the Vikings, for relative numbers in the areas of Greenland that both Vikings and Inuit inhabited were such that the Inuit were in the minority.
The idea that the Inuit carried out genocide against the Greenland Vikings has to be considered as there is at least some evidence to support the idea. The Icelandic sagas make it clear that the writers believed the Western Settlement was destroyed by people. The term that is used is âskraelingsâ, a term certainly sometimes applied to the Inuit. However âskraelingâ is not a racial description, but rather a term of contempt, meaning something like âwretchesâ, applied to many different races, and the sagas cannot be taken as stating specifically the Inuit killed the Vikings â rather that a people the saga writer held in contempt killed them. Notwithstanding this, Hans Egede, 9 the first missionary to Inuit Greenland, believed on the basis of the Icelandic sagas that the Inuit had killed the Vikings. He asked the Inuit about this, and believed that he gained confirmation from their answers. A researcher today would say that his methodology was suspect in that he asked leading questions; additionally, he was struggling to communicate in a language he understood imperfectly. The Inuit in recent years have been observed to have a cultural tendency to give answers they feel are those wanted by the person they are speaking to, irrespective of whether they are correct. Whatever the Inuit may have told Hans Egede cannot be regarded as safe evidence. It is also doubtful how much Inuit oral history could be expected to remember of events that took place hundreds of years previously. There have been claims for long folk memories among the Inuit, and some of their stories do seem to be centuries old. Yet there must be doubts as to the validity of claims that folk history extends over many hundreds of years, and it is hard to prove that the Inuit of the eighteenth century would have known anything about events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Greenland Vikings and the Inuit had coexisted for perhaps 400 years. Their lifestyles were complementary. The Vikings were farmers,seeking land at the head of fjords, while the Inuit were hunters, making their settlements by open water, frequently close to headlands. The two groups were not in direct competition for the same resources. There was no inevitability of conflict, but rather a history of centuries of
The idea that the Greenland Vikings were swamped by the Inuit is again problematic. Greenland had a mixed population. In their west-coast settlements the Viking population numbered in the region of 5,000; the Inuit population for the whole of Greenland was in the region of 5,000, but distributed throughout the ice-free areas of Greenland, including a population on the north-west and north coasts. In south-west Greenland theInuit were a minority. Perhaps intermarriage between the two groups occurred, but the balance in numbers between the two groups is such that the result would not be that the ethnic Norse would vanish, subsumed within an Inuit population. Later Europeans visiting Greenland discerned no trace of European characteristics in the Inuit they encountered there. This supposed process, which has been termed âEskimo-isationâ, cannot explain the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings. Indeed, were the process to have happened at all it can even be suggested that the direction would have been for the Inuit to be swamped by the Vikings, for relative numbers in the areas of Greenland that both Vikings and Inuit inhabited were such that the Inuit were in the minority.
The idea that the Inuit carried out genocide against the Greenland Vikings has to be considered as there is at least some evidence to support the idea. The Icelandic sagas make it clear that the writers believed the Western Settlement was destroyed by people. The term that is used is âskraelingsâ, a term certainly sometimes applied to the Inuit. However âskraelingâ is not a racial description, but rather a term of contempt, meaning something like âwretchesâ, applied to many different races, and the sagas cannot be taken as stating specifically the Inuit killed the Vikings â rather that a people the saga writer held in contempt killed them. Notwithstanding this, Hans Egede, 9 the first missionary to Inuit Greenland, believed on the basis of the Icelandic sagas that the Inuit had killed the Vikings. He asked the Inuit about this, and believed that he gained confirmation from their answers. A researcher today would say that his methodology was suspect in that he asked leading questions; additionally, he was struggling to communicate in a language he understood imperfectly. The Inuit in recent years have been observed to have a cultural tendency to give answers they feel are those wanted by the person they are speaking to, irrespective of whether they are correct. Whatever the Inuit may have told Hans Egede cannot be regarded as safe evidence. It is also doubtful how much Inuit oral history could be expected to remember of events that took place hundreds of years previously. There have been claims for long folk memories among the Inuit, and some of their stories do seem to be centuries old. Yet there must be doubts as to the validity of claims that folk history extends over many hundreds of years, and it is hard to prove that the Inuit of the eighteenth century would have known anything about events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The Greenland Vikings and the Inuit had coexisted for perhaps 400 years. Their lifestyles were complementary. The Vikings were farmers,seeking land at the head of fjords, while the Inuit were hunters, making their settlements by open water, frequently close to headlands. The two groups were not in direct competition for the same resources. There was no inevitability of conflict, but rather a history of centuries of
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