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relations with Native Americans. If it had not been for Native Americans, the Greenlanders might have survived their ecological problems, and the Vinland settlers might have persisted. In that case, Vinland might have undergone a population explosion, the Norse might have spread over North America after A.D. 1000, and I as a twentieth-century American might now be writing this book in an Old Norse-based language like modern Icelandic or Faeroese, rather than in English.

CHAPTER 7

Norse Greenland’s Flowering

Europe’s outpost ■ Greenland’s climate today ■ Climate in the past ■ Native plants and animals ■ Norse settlement ■ Farming ■ Hunting and fishing ■ An integrated economy ■ Society ■ Trade with Europe ■ Self-image ■

My initial impression of Greenland was that its name was a cruel misnomer, because I saw only a three-colored landscape: white, black, and blue, with white overwhelmingly predominant. Some historians think that the name really was coined with deceitful intent by Erik the Red, founder of Greenland’s Viking settlement, so as to induce other Vikings to join him. As my airplane from Copenhagen approached Greenland’s east coast, the first thing visible after the dark blue ocean was a vast area of brilliant white stretching out of sight, the world’s largest ice cap outside Antarctica. Greenland’s shores rise steeply to an ice-covered high plateau covering most of the island and drained by enormous glaciers flowing into the sea. For hundreds of miles our plane flew over this white expanse, where the sole other color visible was the black of bare stone mountains rising out of that ocean of ice, and scattered over it like black islands. Only as our plane descended from the plateau towards the west coast did I spot two other colors in a thin border outlining the ice sheet, combining brown areas of bare gravel with faint green areas of moss or lichens.

But when I landed at southern Greenland’s main airport of Narsarsuaq and crossed the iceberg-strewn fjord to Brattahlid, the site that Erik the Red chose for his own farm, I discovered to my surprise that the name Greenland might have been bestowed honestly, not as false PR. Exhausted by my long plane flight from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and back to Greenland, involving shifts of 13 time zones, I set out to stroll among the Norse ruins but was soon ready for a nap, too sleepy even to return the few hundred yards to the youth hostel where I had left my rucksack. Fortunately, the ruins lay amidst lush meadows of soft grass over a foot high, growing up out of thick moss and dotted with abundant yellow buttercups, yellow dandelions, blue bluebells, white asters, and pink willow-herbs. There was no need for an air mattress or pillow here: I fell into a deep sleep in the softest and most beautiful natural bed imaginable.

As my Norwegian archaeologist friend Christian Keller expressed it, “Life in Greenland is all about finding the good patches of useful resources.” While 99% of the island is indeed uninhabitable white or black, there are green areas deep inside two fjord systems on the southwest coast. There, long narrow fjords penetrate far inland, such that their heads are remote from the cold ocean currents, icebergs, salt spray, and wind that suppress growth of vegetation along Greenland’s outer coast. Here and there along the mostly steep-sided fjords are patches of flatter terrain with luxuriant pastures, including the one in which I took a nap, and good for maintaining livestock (Plate 17). For nearly 500 years between A.D. 984 and sometime in the 1400s, those two fjord systems supported European civilization’s most remote outpost, where Scandinavians 1,500 miles from Norway built a cathedral and churches, wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European fashions in clothing—and finally vanished.

The mystery of their disappearance is symbolized by the stone church at Hvalsey, Norse Greenland’s most famous building, whose photograph will be found in any travel brochure promoting Greenland tourism. Lying