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By Root 2111 0

problems by cultivating that whole range of options and choosing whichever option worked best under the particular circumstances, depending on whether the Europeans were or were not outnumbered, whether the European colonist men did or did not have enough European women along as wives, whether the native people had trade goods coveted in Europe, and whether the natives’ land was attractive to Europeans to settle. But the medieval Norse had not developed that range of options. Refusing or unable to learn from the Inuit, and lacking any military advantage over them, the Norse rather than the Inuit became the ones who eventually disappeared.

The end of the Greenland Norse colony is often described as a “mystery.” That’s true, but only partly so, because we need to distinguish ultimate reasons (i.e., underlying long-term factors behind the slow decline of Greenland Norse society) from proximate reasons (i.e., the final blow to the weakened society, killing the last individuals or forcing them to abandon their settlements). Only the proximate reasons remain partly mysterious; the ultimate reasons are clear. They consist of the five sets of factors that we have already discussed in detail: Norse impact on the environment, climate change, decline in friendly contact with Norway, increase in hostile contact with the Inuit, and the conservative outlook of the Norse.

Briefly, the Norse inadvertently depleted the environmental resources on which they depended, by cutting trees, stripping turf, overgrazing, and causing soil erosion. Already at the outset of Norse settlement, Greenland’s natural resources were only marginally sufficient to support a European pastoral society of viable size, but hay production in Greenland fluctuates markedly from year to year. Hence that depletion of environmental resources threatened the society’s survival in poor years. Second, calculations of climate from Greenland ice cores show that it was relatively mild (i.e., as “mild” as it is today) when the Norse arrived, went through several runs of cold years in the 1300s, and then plunged in the early 1400s into the cold period called the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 1800s. That lowered hay production further, as well as clogging the ship lanes between Greenland and Norway with sea ice. Third, those obstacles to shipping were only one reason for the decline and eventual end of trade with Norway on which the Greenlanders depended for their iron, some timber, and their cultural identity. About half of Norway’s population died when the Black Death (a plague epidemic) struck in 1349-1350. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark became joined in 1397 under one king, who proceeded to neglect Norway as the poorest of his three provinces. The demand by European carvers for walrus ivory, Greenland’s principal export, declined when the Crusades gave Christian Europe access again to Asia’s and East Africa’s elephant ivory, whose deliveries to Europe had been cut off by the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean shores. By the 1400s, carving with ivory of any sort, whether from walruses or elephants, was out of fashion in Europe. All those changes undermined Norway’s resources and motivation for sending ships to Greenland. Other peoples besides the Greenland Norse have similarly discovered their economies (or even their survival) to be at risk when their major trading partners encountered problems; they include us oil-importing Americans at the time of the 1973 Gulf oil embargo, Pitcairn and Henderson Islanders at the time of Mangareva’s deforestation, and many others. Modern globalization will surely multiply the examples. Finally, the arrival of the Inuit, and the inability or unwillingness of the Norse to make drastic changes, completed the quintet of ultimate factors behind the Greenland colony’s demise.

These five factors all developed gradually or operated over long times. Hence we should not be surprised to discover that various Norse farms were abandoned at different times before the final catastrophes. On the floor of a large house on the largest farm of the