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By Root 2113 0

bound them to Norway, just as those shared attributes bound Americans and Australians to Britain for centuries. All of Greenland’s bishops were Norwegians sent out to Greenland, rather than Norse who had grown up in Greenland. Without those shared Norwegian values, the Norse could not have cooperated to survive in Greenland. In that light their investments in cows, the Nordrseta hunt, and churches are understandable, even though on purely economic grounds those may not have been the best use of Norse energy. The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties. That proves to be a common theme throughout history and also in the modern world, as we already saw in connection with Montana (Chapter 1): the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity. We shall return to this dilemma in Chapters 14 and 16, when we consider societies that succeeded by figuring out which of their core values they could hold on to.

Third, the Norse, like other medieval European Christians, scorned pagan non-European peoples and lacked experience of how best to deal with them. Only after the age of exploration that began with Columbus’s voyage in 1492 did Europeans learn Machiavellian ways of exploiting native peoples to their own advantage, even while continuing to despise them. Hence the Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and probably behaved towards them in ways ensuring their enmity. Many later groups of Europeans in the Arctic similarly perished as a result of ignoring or antagonizing the Inuit, most notably the 138 British members of the well-financed 1845 Franklin Expedition, every single one of whom died while trying to cross areas of the Canadian Arctic populated by Inuit. The European explorers and settlers who succeeded best in the Arctic were those most extensively adopting Inuit ways, like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.

Finally, power in Norse Greenland was concentrated at the top, in the hands of the chiefs and clergy. They owned most of the land (including all the best farms), owned the boats, and controlled the trade with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade to importing goods that brought prestige to them: luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments and jewelry for the clergy, and bells and stained glass for the churches. Among the uses to which they allocated their few boats were the Nordrseta hunt, in order to acquire the luxury exports (such as ivory and polar bear hides) with which to pay for those imports. Chiefs had two motives for running large sheep herds that could damage the land by overgrazing: wool was Greenland’s other principal export with which to pay for imports; and independent farmers on overgrazed land were more likely to be forced into tenancy, and thereby to become a chief’s followers in his competition with other chiefs. There were many innovations that might have improved the material conditions of the Norse, such as importing more iron and fewer luxuries, allocating more boat time to Markland journeys for obtaining iron and timber, and copying (from the Inuit) or inventing different boats and different hunting techniques. But those innovations could have threatened the power, prestige, and narrow interests of the chiefs. In the tightly controlled, interdependent society of Norse Greenland, the chiefs were in a position to prevent others from trying out such innovations.

Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when