All language subtitles for 4. The Greenland Vikings - Land of the Midnight Sun

Sometime around the year 1540, a ship
full of Norwegian sailors made the

dangerous voyage to Iceland, a frozen
island in the middle of the North

Atlantic. It was a notoriously dangerous
voyage and when they saw dark storm

clouds begin to brew on the horizon, they
knew they were in trouble. Their boat was

lashed by wind and rain and tossed
around like a cork on the towering waves.

The storm went on for days, blowing them
far off their course with no idea where

they were heading.
Finally, when all seemed lost, the storm

lessened a little and they sighted land
in the distance. They managed to beach

their boats through the rough waters in
a small cove choked with ice and there,

they waited for the remainder of the
storm to blow over. They didn't know it

then but the storm had blown them right
across the Atlantic Ocean, and the coast

they now sheltered on was in Greenland, a
bleak and icy waste on the north of the

American continent. In these days,
Greenland was an icy tundra where no

sensible European would ever think to
venture but as the men waited for the

storm to die down, they spotted something
not far from their boat. It was a man,

facedown,
dead in the snow. They saw his clothes

made from seal skins and the fur in his
hood and they thought that he must be an

Inuit, one of the indigenous inhabitants
of Greenland. But as they approached,

something didn't look right. They turned
the man over and saw with surprise that

he had red hair and pale skin. He was a
Norseman just like them, but he was

dressed in the clothes of an Inuit
hunter.

On his head was a hood, well-made, and
otherwise clothes of frieze cloth and of

seal skin. Near him was a sheath knife,
bent and much worn and eaten away. They

thought he must have wandered through
the wilderness in these clothes to the

coast, perhaps trying to find a ship to
carry him away, and then he died right

there on the beach, all alone at the edge
of the world. Moved by the sight of this

man,
the sailors took his knife. When the

weather cleared and they set sail back
to Iceland, they took the knife with them.

They must have rolled it around in their
hands and wondered to themselves

who was this Norseman so far from home?
Why was he dressed in the clothes of an

Inuit hunter? In this bleak and
uninhabited waste, where in all the world

had he come from?

My name's Paul Cooper and you're
listening to The Fall of Civilizations

Podcast. Every episode I look at a
civilization of the past that rose to

glory and then collapsed into the ashes
of history. I want to ask what did they

have in common? What led to their fall,
and what did it feel like to be a person

alive at the time who witnessed the end
of their world?

In this episode I want to look at one of
the most unlikely tales of a society's

fall; the incredible saga of the Vikings
of Greenland.

I want to show how these European
settlers built a society on the farthest

edge of their world and survived for
centuries among some of the harshest

conditions ever faced by man. I want to
explore how this civilization was able

to overcome the odds for so long and to
examine the evidence about what happened

to cause its final and mysterious
collapse. If I were to ask you who was

the first European to discover North
America, you might think of Christopher

Columbus landing on the sandy shores of
the Bahamas at the end of the 15th

century but actually, Columbus was far
from the first. In fact, Europeans had

made routine journeys to America for
more than five centuries before Columbus

was even born, and their story begins
over a thousand years ago in the 10th

century. The people who made this
dangerous journey were Norsemen,

otherwise known in the Middle Ages as
Vikings. They were sailors, soldiers, and

settlers from Norway and Denmark who had
a terrifying reputation in all the lands

they encountered. They were known as
raiders and pirates to their enemies, but

they were also expert sailors and
shipbuilders, marvelous writers of epic

poetry, and perhaps some of the hardiest
explorers in human history.

Half a millennium before Columbus,
the Vikings crossed the ocean and landed

on the icy coast of Greenland. They built
a permanent settlement there and the

Norse of Greenland didn't just survive
in this far-flung outpost; they built

manor houses and hundreds of farms where
they grew crops, imported steel, wine, and

stained glass. They raised sheep, cattle,
and goats, and they made voyages to

explore the North American mainland too,
making forays into Newfoundland and the

coast of Canada. They fought with Native
American tribes and returned with furs,

ivory, and hardwoods cut
from the American forests. In Greenland

they hunted walrus and even captured
live polar bears to send back home to

Norway. In this impossible landscape, they
grew and thrived. Then, after

centuries of survival at the edge of the
world, their civilization collapsed. The

Norse settlements in Greenland were
abandoned, left to crumble into the hard,

icy earth. Exactly what happened is
still one of our most chilling mysteries.

Our two main sources of information
about the Greenland Norse are two of the

great Icelandic sagas. These are pieces
of epic poetry passed on by word of

mouth that relate the great deeds of
Viking heroes and adventurers. They were

designed to be spoken out in mead halls
for celebration and feasts. This extract

of a piece of Viking poetry called the
Hofudlausen should give you a sense

of the sound and form of these great
poems.

West,
over the sea, I fared and mine shore,

I bare a across the sea so that it
might recall great deeds. The wave

oak I have drawn with the ice breaking
on, and loaded praises part in the mine

ships barred.
Later, these sagas were written

down and today they give us an
incredible insight into the lives that

these men and women lived as they
explored the icy lands of the North

Atlantic. Our story begins right
there on the snowy slopes and steaming

vents of Iceland. Iceland is a volcanic
island in the northern Atlantic, about a

third of the way between Europe and
North America, and until around the year

874, it was completely uninhabited. Only
flocks of seabirds and the reclusive

Arctic
Fox roamed its snowy hills. But then, the

Vikings arrived. From their homeland of
Norway, it was a journey of over 1,500

kilometres by sea through some of the
harshest weather on earth. But the

Vikings sailed in slender, wooden long-
ships that were the very height of

medieval technology. Their ships had
perfectly hydrodynamic hulls, and strong,

square sails that were perfectly adapted
for plying the freezing stormy waters of

the northern ocean. After the year
874, when the Vikings first landed, the

transformation of the land happened
quickly. Back home in Norway, land was

scarce and competition over farmland
meant that many people were eager to

start new lives in a completely
unexplored land. Within sixty years of

their first landing, the Vikings had
already built over 1,500 farms in Iceland

and the population rose to over three
and a half thousand people. But the

ambitions of the Vikings wouldn't end
here. By the Year 930 it seems, just about

all of the usable land in Iceland had
already been claimed, and already stories

were beginning to spread among the Norse
sailors; stories about a new land,

a land of blue ice and mists that lay
somewhere over the stormy sea. According

to the sagas, the first person to attempt
to find this new land was a man named

Erik Thorvaldsson and he would be known
to history as Erik the Red.

Erik the Red was born around the year
950 into a Norway that had only just

been unified into a single state. Norway
has a ragged, undulating coast broken by

wooded fjords, great mountainous inlets,
and dotted with rocky islands out to sea.

But Erik was born in the south of the
country where the flat land meant that

the sea always stretched out before his
eyes, calling to him with its inviting

horizon.
As a boy, he must have gazed out at the

ships sailing off in the direction of
the sunset; watched them sink below the

horizon, and he must have wondered what
lay beyond that tantalizing vanishing

point. Erik was about to find out.
That's because he was the son of an

outlaw named Thorvald
who had an explosive temper. This

temper would have dire consequences for
Thorvald's family. When his son Erik was

only ten years old,
Thorvald killed a man in a quarrel.

In Norway, murderers didn't only have the
law to fear. Viking honor meant that the

family of the dead man would soon be out
for blood

in revenge. Fearing reprisals, Erik's
family managed to gain passage across

the sea to Norway's newest settlement;
the freezing land of Iceland where smoke

was said to rise from the very earth. The
young Erik must have looked out from the

ship on that voyage and seen the seas
stretching out in all directions, gray,

and bleak, and forbidding. But it must
have been exciting for the young boy, too.

Here at last was the adventure that he
dreamed of. By this time, in the second

half of the 10th century, Iceland was
already well settled by Norway. The Norse

had brought large amounts of thralls, or
slaves, from Ireland and Scotland to help

them populate their new colony. They'd
introduced horses, cattle, and rabbits, and

Iceland's snow forests had been cut down
to clear farmland for the cultivation of

barley. Its people ate cod from the sea,
unsalted, but dried on wooden racks by

the wind and cold.
But this success story of a settlement

also meant that most of the best land
had already been taken. When Erik arrived

with his family, all that was left was a
plot of uninhabited wasteland in the

forbidding tundra of the Northwest. But
that was all the choice they had, and

Thorvald and his family settled down and
began to work their farm. We can imagine

that as a child in Iceland, the young
Erik must have listened to the stories

that the sailors told when they passed
through, when they stopped on shore to

repair their ships. Norsemen of this age
navigated the oceans with no compasses,

using the sun, moon, and stars to find
their way, as well as following natural

cues like the paths of seabirds and
whales. But although they were expert

navigators, it only took a strong storm
to sweep them far off course, as we'll

learn a few times throughout this
episode. The Vikings of Iceland believed

that they lived on the edge of the world
but already at this time, stories were

beginning to spread of sailors who had
been blown off-course and seen strange

things in the distance. They brought back
stories about mysterious islands they'd

seen drifting out of the sea mists,
faraway lands spied across the ocean,

tales of blue coasts in the West. When
Erik's father Thorvald died, Erik

inhabited their humble farm and he began
a family of his own. But as he grew into

a proud and pugnacious young man, it
became clear that Erik the Red had

inherited something of his father's
temper, and even more of his bad luck. One

day, a group of workers on Erik's farm
caused a landslide that tumbled into the

neighboring farm. This belonged to a
disagreeable neighbor known only as

Eyjolf the Foul. Eyjolf seems to have lived
up to his name. Enraged at the damage

caused to his farm, Eyjolf killed Erik's
workers. But Erik was his father's son,

and he
wasn't to take this insult lightly. He

chased after Eyjolf and the two of them
fought. In the brutal struggle that

ensued, Erik prevailed and Eyjolf the
Foul was killed. But once the heat of

battle had died down, Erik realized what
he had done. Just like his father, he

feared the beginning of a blood feud. In
the society of the medieval Norse, one

death could be like a spark in dry
heather, setting off a cycle of violence

and revenge that could last for
generations. So, it may have felt like

something of a relief for Erik when the
law and not Eyjolf the Foul's family

finally came down on him. For the killing,
the Lords of Iceland declared that Erik

the Red was banished for three years.
Soon, just like his father,

Erik would have to flee the land that he
had learned to call home. But Erik didn't

have many good options before him. His
family had many enemies now; in Norway,

the relatives of the man his father had
killed might still be looking for blood,

and it was clear he couldn't stay in
Iceland. For a Norseman in the 10th

century, that didn't leave many other
options.

Erik stayed in hiding while he put
together a boat and a crew. It must

have been during this time that those
stories came back to him, the stories

he'd once heard the sailors tell of the
islands in the mist and their blue

coasts half-seen beyond the horizon. In
the year 982, at around the age of 30,

Erik set sail once again with only one
goal in mind; he was going to reach the

mythical land that was said to lie on
the other side of the ocean. Many people

must have laughed at him, but that year
he set sail and his voyage would change

the map of the world forever.

Greenland is the world's largest island
that is not considered a continent. Over

80% of its land mass is covered in the
Greenland ice sheet, a plate of ice up to

three kilometers thick, behind only
Antarctica as the second largest body of

ice in the world. The ice that makes up
the sheet is as ancient as rock, some of

it over a million years old, and the
sheet is so heavy but the land beneath

it
has been crushed into the Earth's mantle

beneath its weight. Although he couldn't
know any of this at the time, this is the

land that Erik the Red set sail for at
the end of the 10th century. Against

all the odds, he would reach it. The
voyage was nearly 1,500 kilometers

through a deadly gauntlet of floating
ice and Atlantic storms. But despite the

dangers, Erik rounded the southern coast
of Greenland later that year and sailed

up its western coast, searching for
somewhere to land. For the most part, the

land he saw was covered with Arctic
tundra and the unending wall of that

enormous glacial ice sheet. But after
many weeks of sailing, Erik and his men

found a small, sheltered cove that seemed
relatively free of ice. When they

sailed into, it their hearts must have
filled with joy. They saw green slopes

where deciduous willows, alder, and
juniper trees grew, and low shrubs like

dwarf birch covered the sides of some
valleys. The landscape here was still

harsh.
It must have resembled the treeline

level of Norwegian mountains, right where
most forms of life stopped growing.

To most people it wouldn't have looked
like a promising location for a

settlement, but to the Norse of the time,
this small strip of land promised the

potential for future growth. Erik would
spend the next three years of his exile

exploring this new land, sailing up its
coast methodically, and taking careful

note of what he saw. When his
sentence of exile was over, he finally

returned to
Iceland with a plan in mind. He was going

to gather as many settlers as he could
and travel back to this new land to

settle it permanently. But he knew it was
going to be a hard sell;

how could he convince enough settlers to
risk that dangerous crossing, and all for

a land that was barely more than a
sliver of green on the edge of a barren

ice sheet? Well, it seems that Erik the
Red had something of a talent for

salesmanship, and one of the key ways he
tried to encourage people to follow him

was with the name that he gave to his
newly discovered land. The Icelandic saga

of the Greenlanders recalls this trick
with something of an ironic tone. There

was a man called Erik the Red who
traveled out from here and took land. He

gave a name to the land and called it
Greenland, and said that people would be

more eager to go there because the land
had a good name.

Perhaps imagining rolling green fields
and pastures, many Icelanders agreed to

follow Erik. When summer came back
around, he set sail once again for the

land beyond the ocean. But this time, he
wasn't going alone. Erik the Red

had amassed a great fleet of 25 ships
full of men, women, and children, along

with supplies, building materials, wood
and nails, as well as livestock including

cattle, chickens, and rabbits. It must have
been an incredible sight; all of those

colorful sails and dragon-headed prows
cleaving through the ocean waves. Of

these 25 ships, only 14 would reach
Greenland. 11 of them were lost at sea,

and for those that arrived, the trials
had only just begun. For the medieval

Norse of Europe, establishing a colony in
Greenland was about as difficult as we

today might find establishing a colony
on the moon.

If that seems like a far-fetched
comparison, consider that only 18

astronauts have ever been killed in the
history of space exploration. For

medieval Vikings crossing the Atlantic,
the casualties were enormous, and the

reasons for this aren't hard to imagine.
Firstly, the journey to Greenland took

several weeks by sea through freezing
arctic conditions. If you want to see a

good example of the kind of ship the
Norse used, there's no finer example than

the so-called Gokstad ship in the
Museum of Oslo. When you see this ship,

you're at once impressed by its slender,
organic shape which testifies to the

enormous skill of the shipbuilders. But
you're also struck by just how small and

exposed it is, how the Vikings who
huddled on board must have suffered on

those weeks-long voyages through storms
and waves that must have towered over

this tiny ship. Today, it seems incredible
that anyone survived these journeys at

all. Greenland is about as far from
Iceland as Iceland is from Norway; both

of them being journeys for about 1,500
kilometers. But although the distances

are similar, the voyage from Iceland to
Greenland was many times more dangerous.

Worse than anything else was the drift
ice. Greenland sat right on a powerful

current that flowed down from the Arctic
Ocean, and this current drew huge blocks

carved from glaciers and icebergs the
size of mountains. This freezing current

runs down the east coast of Greenland
and then back up the west coast,

effectively ringing the island in a
chainsaw blade of flowing ice. Today, this

flow causes just as much of a problem to
modern shipping as it did in the 10th

century, but the Vikings didn't have any
of the advantages of our technology.

One story shows just how deadly these
seas could be. A saga tells the story of

a Norse Icelander named Loden, who got
himself the nickname Lik-Loden, or Corpse

Loden, because he made his living
sailing up and down the east coast of

Greenland, exploring its caves and coves,
and gathering up the corpses of men

shipwrecked there. Ships were always
wrecked in this ice from the northern

bays. Lik-Loden would search the waves
to the north and bring back to church the

bodies he found in caves and on rock
ledges. They had come there from the

drift ice or wrecked ships, and near
them they often lay carved runes about

all the events of the misfortunes and
sufferings. But the skill of Norse

sailors meant that many did successfully
navigate this asteroid belt of ice. Still,

it couldn't hurt to pray. One surviving
document contains a prayer written by a

Greenland sailor who was about to
undertake this perilous voyage. God, the

sinless I pray, save my voyage from
danger. Lord of heaven on high, guard my

ways. But despite these immense obstacles,
Erik and his surviving 14 boats of

settlers did succeed. They landed in
Greenland and started one settlement on

the south tip of the island. This would
become known as Eystribyggð or the Eastern

Settlement, and it's where Erik built
himself an estate and began to farm the

land. Later, the Norse would sail up the
western coast of Greenland and found a

second settlement. This was called Vestri-
byggð or the Western Settlement.

Life in Greenland was hard. Greenland has
an Arctic climate, with average

temperatures that don't exceed 10
degrees centigrade or 50 degrees

Fahrenheit even in the warmest summer
months. Summer temperatures can drop

as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade, or
minus 27 degrees Fahrenheit. During

winter, the temperatures can reach minus
50 degrees centigrade or minus 58

degrees Fahrenheit. For two to three
months in summer, there is continuous

daylight, the so-called Midnight Sun.
During winter, the sun never quite rises;

with only three to four hours of
daylight peeking over the horizon. But

the Norse were expert settlers. There's
evidence that they adapted to the

difficult farming conditions of the
Greenland winters by aggressively

fertilizing the soils around their
farmsteads. While the men of the

settlements were out hunting, the women
would have spent the day improving the

soil, spreading it with manure to
increase its fertility. Studies of the

soil in early North settlements show a
dramatic increase in the thickness of

soil after the arrival of the Norse and
the establishment of their farms. Bone

samples suggest that at the height of
the settlements, even small farms kept a

cow or two which was a sign of great
status back in Norway. Written records

from Greenland mentioned dairy products
including cheese, milk, and yogurt as

important staple foods. But it soon
became clear that the Greenland settlers

wouldn't simply survive in this barren
land. In fact, they would thrive and

ultimately make themselves and their
home country very wealthy.

That's because Greenland had a plentiful
supply of one resource that was in

enormous demand in Europe at the time.
That thing was the walrus.

An adult bull walrus has tusks made of
ivory that can grow to be over a meter

long and can weigh as much as five and a
half kilos each. Ivory was hugely prized

by medieval people and many ivory
artifacts from the Middle Ages were

carved from walrus tusks. The most famous
of these artifacts are the Lewis

chessmen carved in Scotland in the 12th
century, with marvelously expressive eyes

and faces. It's hard to overstate
just how valuable ivory was at this time.

Every six years
the Norse in Greenland paid their taxes

to the Norwegian King, and a document
from 1327 shows that a shipment of a

single boatload of walrus tusks, hunted
from about 260 walruses, was worth more

than all the woolen cloth sent to the
king by nearly 4,000 Icelandic farms in

the same period.
This single boatload of tusks was equal

to the cost of nearly 800 cows. The
Vikings monopolized this high-value

commodity right across Northern Europe.
The few walrus there were in Iceland had

already been hunted to extinction for
their tusks,

but in Greenland, the Vikings came across
vast herds in a place called Disko Bay, an

ice fjord about 500 kilometres to the
north of the Western Settlement. It

seemed there were more than they could
ever hunt.

As well as the walrus, the Vikings also
hunted seal and salmon, and even the

elusive narwhal, the whale with a single
bony horn jutting from its head. Here

again, the Vikings showed they had a
flair for salesmanship. They sold the

horn of the narwhal to gullible
Europeans, claiming them to be the horns

of unicorns. Suddenly unicorn horn became
in great demand throughout medieval

Europe, with the powdered horn being used
to treat a variety of ailments. It was

believed that unicorn horns could detect
poison in food and drinks, and the horns

themselves were used to make the sceptre
and imperial crown of the Austrian Empire,

and the unicorn throne of the Danish
kings, among other artifacts across

Europe. This growing economy attracted
more people to Greenland and before long,

there may have been over 5,000
inhabitants spread over the fjords and

valleys of Greenland's coast. Most of
these would be in the Eastern Settlement

which was the closest to Europe and the
better connected of the two. In the

Eastern Settlement, at a place they
called Garda, the Norse built an ornate

Christian cathedral out of sandstone that
they quarried from the Greenland Hills,

probably using the skills of stonemasons
brought from Norway. This Cathedral was

complete with stained glass and a heavy
bronze bell shipped over from Europe.

It must have been quite a sight when the
eerie lights of the aurora borealis

flickered blue green and violet over
this church, streamers of charged

particles thrown out from solar flares,
impacting the Earth's atmosphere 100

kilometers overhead. But just as
impressive today is the remains of a

barn in Gardar, itself the size of a
cathedral. Its doorways are built of

enormous solid stone blocks that today
looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.

Here, the prized animals of the Greenland
Vikings, perhaps as many as a hundred

cows, would shelter through the bitter winters,
protected from the biting wind and snow

by thick walls covered in banks of earth.
Viking chronicles record that in spring,

the Vikings would often have to carry
their cows out of these sheds since the

animals legs grew so weak from inaction
through the long dark winter months. But

despite their impressive advancements,
the colonies of Greenland never became

truly self-sufficient. We can see this
demonstrated in the story of one Green-

lander named Asmund Kastanrassi. In 1189,
Kastanrassi built his own ship in

Greenland which is quite an achievement
considering the lack of timber, steel, and

other building materials in the
environment. Kastanrassi's ship was held

together with wooden pegs and lashings
made of walrus sinew and amazingly, he

sailed it successfully back to Iceland.
Although we don't know exactly what this

craft looked like, we can tell it was a
strange sight by the way people reacted.

When he landed, the Icelanders on the
shore gathered around to marvel at his

strange Frankenstein's monster of a ship
returned from beyond the edge of the

world. But Kastanrassi's inventiveness
could only take him so far. Somewhere on

the next leg of his voyage to Norway, the
tendons and wooden bolts that held the

craft together gave way. The ship came
apart and Kastanrassi went down with

his ship somewhere in the North Sea.
This story gives you some sense of just

how difficult life would be for the
Greenlanders if their connection to

Europe was somehow severed.

The harsh weather conditions of
Greenland weren't the only opponents

that the Greenlanders faced. When the
Vikings first arrived in this new land,

they began to find clues that told them
that they weren't the only people to

have set foot there.
In fact, the sagas recall how the Vikings

stumbled upon the ruins of a previous
inhabitation. They found their people's

habitations both to the east and the
west on the land. Pieces of skin boats

and worked stones from which one could
tell that a people were already there

whom the Greenlanders call skrælings.
The word skræling is the only word from

the old dialect of Greenlandic Norse
that has survived into modern Icelandic.

In the modern language it means
something like barbarian, and in the

Middle Ages, the Greenland Vikings used
it to describe all the various tribes

and peoples they encountered during
their exploration of the new world. In

Viking folklore, the indigenous peoples
of North America are often referred to

as semi-mythical creatures and less than
human. In the stories, they transform into

witches, pygmies, and trolls. The first
people that the Norse encountered in

Greenland were called the Dorset but
their contact was fleeting. The Dorset

were later supplanted by a people known
as the Thuli, who are the ancestors of

all modern Inuit peoples and were at
this time spreading their influence

across Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. In
the vast expanse of Greenland, it took

the Thuli and the Norse a long time to
come into contact, but by the end of the

12th century at least, it seems they had
encountered each other. One explorer

known as Thorfinn Karlsenfi, wrote
down an account of these peoples. They

were short in height, with threatening
features and tangled hair on their heads.

Their eyes were large and their cheeks
broad. We don't just have the Norse

side of this story. Today, tales of the
arrival of the Vikings still survive in

Inuit folklore and it's fair to say that
at times, relations between these two

cultures were not always friendly. In the
Inuit folktales,

the Vikings are sometimes referred to
simply as the enemy. In their stories,

encounters between the Inuit and the
Norse are often violent; for instance, in

this ancient Inuit tale. It once happened
that a kayaker from Arpat-sivik came

rowing up the river, trying his new bird
javelin. On approaching Kak-ortok,

where the first Norseman had taken up
their abode, he saw one of them gathering

shells on the beach. Presently, the
Norseman called out to him; let's see

whether you can hit me with your lance.
The kayaker would not, but the other kept

shouting at him to throw. At last, however,
the kayaker lost patience. He threw his

spear and killed the Norseman on the
spot. When winter came, all feared that

the Norsemen would come and avenge the
death of their countryman. In this piece

of folklore, this one act of violence
begins a cycle of revenge that leads to

a war between the Inuit and the Norsemen.
Norse accounts also seemed to

indicate that battles between the two
cultures did take place. Other Inuit

stories cast the Norsemen as mysterious
and slightly ridiculous creatures, ill-

suited to the harsh environment but who
nevertheless have power over strange

magic. A kayaker one day went to the bay
of Iminguit to catch fish. He found

there a tent belonging to some Norsemen
and heard them joking and talking inside.

He was curious and he thought he might
play a joke on the Norsemen, so he left

his kayak, went up to the place, and began
to strike on the sides of the tent.

Inside they fell quiet, and so
he struck harder on the tent. Then he took

a peep inside and a lot of them shrieked
with fear. There were four fathers and

their children, and they fled in fear
across the ice. But the ice was thin and

broke through with them, so that all were
drowned. He said that some nights they

can still be seen through the ice and
when they are visible, it is an omen that

someone will soon die. By the 14th century,
the Thuli peoples had moved south

towards the settled areas of the Vikings.
At some sites, they even occupied the

same fjords, although at different sides
of the water. It's worth pointing out

that the images of friendly Eskimos you
may have seen in children's books

shouldn't fool you into thinking that
the Inuit were a meek or pacifist people.

Although they were not a particularly
warlike society, they were more than

capable of defending themselves when
challenged, and they frequently defended

their southern borderlands against other
Native American tribes like the Cree.

Their warriors wore armor made of
hardened walrus hide and sinew, and

they carried bone harpoons and knives
with stone blades. Their bows were

particularly powerful weapons, as the
Inuit enhanced their tensile strength by

coiling them with dried sinew. This all
meant they could be a serious threat to

the Norse settlements. In 1379 for
instance, Viking chronicles record that

the Thuli attacked the Eastern
Settlement, killing 18 men, and capturing

two boys and a woman. This isn't to say
that contact between these two cultures

was always violent. In fact, it seems a
rich tradition of trade went on between

them. Items such as comb fragments, pieces
of iron, cooking utensils, and chisels,

chess pieces, ship rivets, carpenters
planes, and oaken ship fragments have

been found in several Inuit sites far
beyond the traditional range of Norse

colonization. A small ivory statue that
appears to represent a European

has also been found among the ruins of
one Inuit house, and it's clear that

there was more than just goods being
exchanged. Today, we can trace some words

in modern Inuit languages back to their
Viking origins, borrowed nearly a

thousand years ago from their Norse
neighbors. But while there were periods

of peace between these two cultures, they
were often at odds, and the Vikings'

inability to make a lasting peace with
their new neighbors would certainly not

help matters when their luck took a turn
for the worse.

The Vikings' difficulty in making friends
in the new world would extend beyond

Greenland, too. This can be seen more
than anything when they made their

famous voyages over to the mainland of
North America, five centuries before

Christopher Columbus was born. The
Icelandic sagas vary on their accounts

of who was the first Norseman to
discover America, but many believe that

the most plausible account gives the
honour to a man called Leif Erikson. In

Norse naming conventions, the name
Erikson means literally that he was the

son of Erik, and the Erik in question was
the one we've already spent some time

with, Erik the Red.
Born the son of this high chief of

greenland, Leif Erikson shared some of
his father's adventurous spirit, and a

little of his appetite for trouble. In
the year 999, Leif travelled back to

Norway as a young man in his 20s and he
swore to serve under the Norwegian King

Olaf the first. Olaf was the first
Norwegian king to convert to

Christianity and to turn his back on the
old gods of his ancestors Thor, and Odin,

and Loki. While serving under King Olaf,
the young Leif also converted to

Christianity and soon the new king had a
mission for him; he was to return to his

home of Greenland and convert the people
there to Christianity, too.

So, Leif was soon back on the sea, but
whether by divine intervention or by the

fickle nature of fate, Leif was blown
off-course like so many Vikings before

him. After many weeks of sailing
through open ocean, he landed on the

coast of a strange land he had never
seen before.

Wild grapes were growing here, fields of
wild wheat, and even butter nuts that he

and his men gathered for food. They also
found two shipwrecked Norsemen who had

been blown off course like them. They
rescued the men and took them on board,

and if Leif's story is to be believed,
these shipwrecked sailors were actually

the first Europeans to ever discover
America, and

we will never know their names. When
he returned to Greenland, Leif was

determined to put together an expedition
to explore this new land. He gathered as

many men as he could and got back on the
sea as soon as possible.

They crossed the choppy waters and soon
landed in a desolate and rocky place

that he called Helluland, or the land of
flat rocks. From there they sailed south

to a place he called Markland,
or forest land, and finally they returned

to the land that he called Vinland after
the grapevines that he once again found

growing there. Here there was a mild
climate and bountiful supplies of salmon.

This was most likely the coast of what
we today would call Canada, where you can

still find this particular species of
frost grape growing wild. Leif and his

men spent the winter on the North
American coast in a small settlement

they called Leafsbudir. When
spring came,

they sailed back to Greenland with a
cargo of timber and grapes. Leif's journey

and the stories he brought back would
encourage other Norsemen to make the

same journey. Not to be outdone, Leif's
brother Thorvald, named after his

hot-blooded grandfather, made the journey
in the year 1004, but he was to have

far worse luck than his brother. At first,
the journey seemed to be going well.

Thorvald landed at Leif's abandoned camp
and spent the winter there without

incident. But in the spring, they sailed
south and came across a strange sight on

one of the beaches. They saw nine people
sleeping under three skin-covered

canoes. They were indigenous Americans, or
what the Norsemen would have called

skrælings. Thorvald attacked these
sleeping men and killed eight of them,

but among them, one managed to get away
and flee through the forests that

fringed the beach.
The Norsemen celebrated their victory

and set up camp, but their celebration
wasn't to last long. Soon, they heard the

noise of an approaching force and
shouting voices coming through the trees.

They realized too late that the man who
had escaped had come back, and this time

with reinforcements. Arrows began
whizzing out of the forest, and the

Norsemen fled back to their boats in
disarray, hastily throwing up a barricade

while they prepared to set sail. During
the flight, Thorvald was struck by an

arrow and it pinned him to the wooden
hull of his ship. As he died, he is

supposed to have shouted out a final
bellowing proclamation. what a fat joke;

we found a land of fine resources but
we will hardly enjoy any of them. The group

retreated back along the coast and
without a leader, they fell to in-

fighting and bickering. They only just
managed to make it back to Greenland

alive. We may never know how things might
have gone had history been just a little

different, but it's possible that this
fierce reaction by the indigenous

inhabitants of Vinland may have
prevented the colonization of America

for another 500 years.
Partly because of their unwillingness to

coexist with native peoples, the Vikings
were never able to establish a permanent

settlement in North America. The Norse-
men did set up a number of temporary

camps in Canada; often places where they
would spend the winter before abandoning

them and returning to Greenland. Today,
only one confirmed Norse site has been

discovered in North America, at a place
called L'anse aux Meadows, or the Bay of

Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. In 1960, a
man called George Decker who lived in a

small fishing village nearby, led
archaeologists to what he called the old

Indian camp. But when the archaeologists
began to excavate, they realized that

these ruined buildings didn't match the
profile of any Native American building

methods. In fact, the only thing they
resembled were the Viking buildings in

Iceland and Greenland; rough stone walls
covered over with turf to keep in the

warm. Eight buildings were discovered in
total, which could have held up to 150

people, and Viking artifacts were
uncovered at the site, too; a stone oil lamp,

a whetstone, a bronze fastening pin, a
bone knitting needle, and part of a

spindle. But it seems that this too was a
temporary settlement. There were no

findings of burials here, or tools,
agriculture, or animal pens, but

archaeologists did find a carpentry
workshop and an iron forge, suggesting

that L'anse aux Meadows was used as a way
station to repair boats damaged on the

violent seas. Partly helped by repair
stations like this, the Vikings made

routine voyages to North America to
collect wood to build their ships, and

probably to collect the furs of foxes,
bears, and lynx, too. But Greenlanders

simply never had the resources to
establish a permanent settlement in

America. Their links back to Europe were
just too fragile to support anything

other than a temporary
base and for a number of reasons, these

links were about to weaken. In fact,
events would soon occur that would

threaten the very survival of the Green-
land settlements themselves.

Greenland's Western Settlement, the more
remote of the two and the furthest from

Europe, was the first to fall.
Strangely, nobody at the time seems to

have known what happened. The last person
to set eyes on the Western Settlement

was a man named Ivar Bardason, who
sailed to Greenland in the year 1341. For

more than a decade, no one had heard any
news from the Western Settlement. For

centuries, it had sent taxes to the
Norwegian king and although these

shipments were often many years apart,
they had never failed to pay what they

owed to their distant homeland. But the
last payment to arrive from the Western

Settlement had been in the year 1327.
That's fourteen years

earlier. Ivar Bardason was given one
task; to make the terrifying voyage

across the North Atlantic,
to find the Western Settlement, and to

demand to know why their taxes were so
late. It was a long and dangerous voyage

through icy waters. We can imagine the
eerie lights of the aurora borealis

flickering far overhead as Bardason
made the journey, but he survived the

trip. He arrived in the Eastern
Settlement in Greenland and began asking

around, seeing if anyone knew what had
happened in the West. But no one could

tell him anything. There, too, no one had
heard anything from the Western

Settlement for years. So, Bardason
set out on the next leg of his voyage

with a growing sense of foreboding.
When he finally arrived at the Western

Settlement he saw why; the entire place
was in ruins.

I saw nobody, neither Christians nor
heathen, only some wild cattle and sheep

all running free. Bardason explored the
ruined settlement but he could find no

sign of the settlers, and he couldn't
find any clue about where they might

have gone. Since the domestic animals
were still there, wandering free among

the crumbling buildings, it can't have
been long since they left. The animals

wouldn't have survived long without
shelter. Bardason wandered around the

surrounding area and found four more
farms in similar condition. He and the

men with him knew that the farm animals
wouldn't survive the winter, so they

slaughtered them and took as much meat
as they could carry back to their ships.

Bardason felt sure that he knew
what had happened. He reported back to

Norway that the Greenland settlers had
been killed by skrælings, by the

indigenous people of Greenland. But to
the end of his life, he must have

wondered why were there no signs of
bloodshed at the Western Settlement? Why

no signs of battle or the burning of
buildings? If the skrælings had done

this, then what had they done with the
bodies?

As we've already seen in a number of
different collapses over the course of

this series, for much of history
humankind has been at the mercy of the

global climate. Even small variations in
weather systems can have utterly

devastating consequences for human
societies, and those that are already

pushing the boundaries of habitability
are particularly vulnerable.

The first Norseman to discover Greenland
did so during a time that we know today

as the Medieval Warm Period. This began
around the Year 900 and lasted for about

four centuries, ending around the year
1300. During this period of warmth, sea

ice decreased in the North Atlantic,
so sailing from Scandinavia to Greenland

became less dangerous. The longer
summers meant that cattle, sheep, and

goats could graze in the meadows along
Greenland's sheltered fjords on the

southwest coast, and the growing seasons
allowed European crops to be cultivated

in this northern land. This relatively
mild climate meant that in the early

days of their settlement, the Vikings
were able to more or less transplant

their medieval European lifestyle to
this new land. During the summer, some

might even have been able to imagine
that they were back home in the quiet

fjords of Norway, but this warm period
wouldn't last forever.

Soon, the Norsemen of Greenland would
realize that they were actually very far

from home. The Medieval Warm Period was
followed by a period that today we call

the Little Ice Age. This describes a
period that began in the late 13th

century, when summer temperatures around
the world underwent a dramatic drop.

There are many theories about what
caused this dramatic climate shift. Some

scientists have suggested astronomical
causes, including a fall in solar

radiation or even changes in the earth's
tilt and orbit. Others have pointed to a

heightened volcanic activity around the
world, including the eruption

of the Indonesian island of Lombok in
1257, one of the most powerful eruptions

of the last seven thousand years, that
reduced the penetration of sunlight all

around the world. Others have even
suggested that the drop in temperature

resulted from the reduction in the
overall human population caused by the

Black Death, which caused the death of as
many as 200 million people across

Eurasia, reducing the population by as
much as 60%. Whatever the cause, an icy

veil began to descend over the whole
world. Radiocarbon dating of plant

material in Iceland shows that summers
began to get abruptly colder between

1275 and 1300, and sea ice expanded. This
was followed by yet another dramatic

drop from 1430 to 1455. The lowest winter
temperatures of the last 2,000 years

occurred right around this time, during
the 14th and 15th centuries. In London,

people would soon skate on the River
Thames and hold frost fairs out on the

ice while in Rotterdam, people would
skate on the city's Grand Canal. Painters

like Pieter Brueghel the Elder would
depict winter scenes of enormous scale,

while crop failures and epidemics led to
a dramatic increase in a number of

executions for witchcraft across Europe.
Through all of this chaos,

the Greenland settlers were all but
forgotten. But for them, the results of

this changing climate would be the most
devastating of all.

The Greenland Norse settlements were
already built on the edge of the Earth's

habitable zone. Only 300 kilometers to
the north lay the Arctic Circle, beyond

which the sun didn't show in winter.
Just over the hills to the north of the

Viking settlements, the vast expanse of
the Greenland ice sheet stretched. In

Greenland, temperatures would now plummet
to as much as six to eight degrees lower

than summer temperatures today. Soon, sea
ice would choke up the fjords and

prevent ships from landing. The ice would
crush the ship's hulls in a vice-like

grip and freeze the ground to stone so
that nothing would grow. The number of

storms coming in from the sea also
increased dramatically during this time.

Studies of ice cores show that around
this time, the Greenland ice contained a

greater amount of salt, since the harsh
ocean winds were blowing sea mist across

it with greatest strength and ferocity.
As the weather got worse, the

Greenland Vikings had a simple choice;
they could continue living their

essentially European lives, the lives of
growing crops and grazing livestock, or

they could adapt. They could learn from
their Inuit neighbors and change their

lifestyles to that of subsistence
hunter-gatherers, relying on hunting and

fishing instead. For a long time,
historians have assumed that the

Greenland Norse didn't adapt when the
harsh winters arrived. It was thought

that they must have stuck to their crops
and livestock, and when these died, so did

they. One archeologist, Thomas McGovern,
has summarized this theory in blunt

terms. Dumb Norsemen go into the north
outside the range of their economy,

mess up the environment, and then
they all die when it gets cold. To

some extent, it's true that the Vikings
clung to their European culture even

when conditions worsened. Archeologists
have recovered clothing left behind by

the Greenland Norse, perfectly preserved
in the ice.

Some even have the brilliant red dyes
still on their fabrics, as bright today

as the day their owners left them.
From these clothes, we can see that well

into the 15th century, the Greenland
Vikings still wore woollen clothing and

even kept up with the latest European
fashions; hooded clothing with long capes.

Meanwhile, their Inuit neighbors knew
that seal skins and furs provided the

best protection against the cold.
The Norse also seemed to have clung

largely to their European eating habits.
They never copied the Inuit in learning

to cut holes in the ice and fish the
waters underneath. They never carved fish

hooks out of bone the way the Inuit did,
and some writers like Jared Diamond have

seized on a lack of fish bones found in
the settlements of the Norse. They argue

that this shows a cultural aversion to
eating fish, that the the Norse thought

themselves simply too good for this
lowly food. But I think the numerous

references to salmon that we find in
Icelandic sagas seems to refute this, and

it's worth remembering the fish bones
are very delicate and fragile. In the

harsh environment of Greenland, they may
be simply more prone to breaking down or

being blown away. Still, we can see some
stubbornness in the Vikings' refusal to

adopt the ways of the Inuit entirely.
After all, they were Norsemen and if

they began wearing seal skins and
carving boned fish hooks, what would that

make them? To the Vikings of the time,
perhaps this was considered behavior

suited only to the skrælings.
Perhaps to them, adopting these methods

of survival would have looked something
like a cultural suicide.

Some commentators have also focused on
the damage that they claim the Norse did

to their environment. They observed that
the Vikings imported farming methods

that were successful in Europe but were
less well-suited to the thin soils and

short grazing seasons of Greenland. Over
the centuries, the Norse also cut down

the low trees and vegetation that grew
in the Greenland landscape, partly to

create pastures for their farm animals.
While the Inuit burned seal blubber

to heat and light their homes,
the Norse continued to burn wood in

their stoves and hearths just as they
would have in Europe. This deforestation

gradually exposed the land to the brutal
icy winds, and soon

the topsoil was blown away, and covered
in sand and ice. In one settlement known

as Vatnahverfi, the ruin of one Norse
house has been found completely buried

in sand dunes up to ten feet deep, and
surrounded by barren plains that were

once fertile farmland. So, some of the
collapse can be attributed to these

factors, that the Greenlanders didn't
sufficiently adapt and that they caused

some damage to the environment. But new
evidence has shown but this might not be

a complete picture. New excavations of
Norse settlements have shown that around

this time, the Norse did undergo a
dramatic shift in their diet. Like the

Inuit, they began to hunt seals, and the
amount of seal bones found in the

rubbish heaps of their settlements
increases dramatically around this time.

Bone analysis shows that food from the
sea would increase as a proportion of

the Norse diet until it made up about
80% in the final days of the settlements.

Far from committing the
irresponsible environmental damage, it

seems the Norse were careful to manage
their scarce resources. For instance, they

show that efforts to fertilize the harsh
soil actually increased during the

Little Ice Age, and another example is
how the Norse conducted their seal

hunting.
There are two kinds of seals that live

in the fjords of Greenland; the first is
the harbour seal, and today this species

is critically endangered. It's not hard
to see why. Harbour seals are so called

because they raise their young on the
beaches, making them easy prey for

hunters. But despite their desperation,
the Greenland Norse seemed to have

limited their hunting of this species,
being careful not to drive them to

extinction. Instead, they went after the
more abundant but more difficult-to-

catch harp seal, which migrates every
year up the west coast of Greenland on

their way from Canada. But despite their
efforts to adapt, studies on human

remains found in the Norse settlements
show that the population began to become

severely malnourished around this time.
Skeletons buried in the late period of

the settlements are stunted in growth
and the teeth are worn down from eating

poor quality food. But in all of this,
perhaps the Greenland Norse might still

have survived. Despite all these
pressures, it's worth noting that these

settlements continued for over a century,
even after the climate of the Little Ice

Age reached its coldest point. Part
of this reason is that their connection

to Europe allowed them to continue
getting supplies and food to the hardy

settlers. Perhaps if this connection had
remained, the Greenland settlements

might not have fallen. But for a number
of reasons, as the 14th century drew on,

that connection was going to be put
under increasing strain.

In the year 1349, a ship arrived in
Norway from England and docked at the

port town of Bergen. This ship would
cause the death of as many as half of

the people of Norway. That's because like
all ships at the time, it carried black

rats that fed on its grain cargo. The
rats carried fleas that fed on the rat's

blood, and the fleas carried the
bacterium Yersinia pestis, known commonly

as the bubonic plague or Black Death.
Days after the ships arrival in Bergen,

familiar symptoms exploded among the
population. People's skin turned black,

they coughed blood, and their lymph nodes
swelled to enormous size. From Bergen, the

plague spread rapidly along the coast
and over land, ravaging Norway for

approximately six months. The annals say
that roughly two-thirds of Norway's

population died, and while this may be an
exaggeration, mortality may have reached

as much as 40 or 50 percent. Able-bodied
men were now dying in Norway's streets.

Every major industry, including those
involved in shipbuilding and maintenance,

would have suffered while some may have
collapsed completely. While there's

no evidence that the Black Death ever
crossed the sea to Greenland, this

epidemic would still be utterly
devastating for the Greenland Vikings.

Bergen was the port from which all
voyages to Iceland and Greenland would

have departed. As Norway reeled from the
disaster and tried to pick up the pieces,

it seems supply missions to the distant
outpost slowed to a trickle.

The last Bishop of Greenland died around
the year 1378, and no

new Bishop was ever sent from Norway to
replace him. Matters would only get

worse.
In the year 1393, a band of German

pirates known as the victual brothers
attacked the city of Bergen. They raided

the port, pillaged and looted the town,
killed the garrison, and finally burnt it

to the ground. The link from Greenland to
mainland Europe was now all but severed.

Imports of grain from Norway to
Greenland virtually stopped, and this

happened right as the cold weather swept
in on the Greenlanders, and their crops

and cattle began to die. They became
increasingly short on iron, too. We can see

this from the lack of any nails or iron
objects in the top layer of their

habitation. The Greenlanders now had to
constantly reuse the same iron tools, and

archaeologists have found the tragic
artifacts of knives worn down almost to

stubs by use, but still too precious for
the Greenlanders to throw away. With

food dwindling, the Norse in Greenland
would have had little choice. They would

now have to hunt even more seals and
walrus in order to feed themselves.

To make this possible,
they couldn't spare a single man. Now,

every able-bodied hunter in the
settlements would have to sail farther

and farther up the Greenland coasts,
sometimes traveling as much as 1,500

kilometers on their hunts, often rowing
large portions of the journey when the

weather was too bad to sail. Their
ships in this era might have begun to

resemble something closer to Kastan-
rassi's Frankenstein's monster of a

craft, rather than the sleek longboats
sent from Norway. Virtually all the men

of these settlements would have left on
these long trips. As the climate

worsened, the ice spread, and storms on
the sea increased, it's not hard to

imagine what could go wrong. For a
historical parallel, we might look at

another set of islands in the North Sea;
the Shetlands to the north of Scotland.

On the 16th of July, 1832, a freak storm
hit the Shetland Islands completely by

surprise. On that day, the whole fishing
fleet of the islands was out at sea. 16

boats were sunk and over a hundred men
were killed. In some of these small

Shetland communities, this meant that
over 80% of the male population was

wiped out in a single day. Many of these
communities never recovered, and as the

Greenland Vikings were driven ever
further from their homes seeking food,

it's not hard to imagine something like
this catastrophe swooping down on them.

After that, the death of these
communities would have been assured.

The 15th century marked the end of the
Norse presence in Greenland. The last

written record of the Greenland Vikings
documents a marriage in the year 1408 at

Hvalsey Church, part of the surviving
Eastern Settlement. This took place

around 70 years after Ivar Bardason dis-
covered the ruins of the Western Settlement.

The ruins of Hvalsey Church can still be seen today,
a rough construction of granite field

stones crumbling into the grassy banks
of the fjord. It almost looks like part

of the landscape. Hvalsey Church is
the best preserved Norse building in

Greenland, and today when you walk
through the ruins, you can almost imagine

the atmosphere of that day in 1408, the
wedding of Thorstein Olafsson and

Sigrid Bjornsdottir. As the fires burned
and the seal meat crackled in

celebration, Thorstein and Sigrid would
soon leave Greenland, back to Thor-

tein's native Iceland. After this,
barely any written records mention the

Greenland settlers. By the year 1435, less
than three decades later, archaeological

evidence suggests that all of the
Greenland Vikings had disappeared.

It's as if they simply vanished from the
earth. At least some of this decline

seems to have been economic. Evidence
suggests that walrus ivory, the most

valuable export from Greenland, simply
began to lose its value towards the end

of the Norse period. This was the
beginning of the age of European empire,

and around this time, Portugal and other
Mediterranean countries were beginning

to open up their trade routes with
sub-saharan Africa.

This meant that high-quality elephant
ivory began to enter the European market.

Elephant tusks yield an ivory of higher
quality and size than the walrus hunted

by the Norse, and so with the climate
worsening, with the cold winters falling

on them harder and
harder, some of the Greenland Vikings may

simply have drifted back to Iceland or
Norway and never seen any point in

returning. As with any tale of economic
downturn, this certainly seems to have

been the case with the younger
generations. In the later stages of Norse

settlement, most of the human remains
found are of older people. All of the

youngsters seem to have left for
somewhere else. But this emigration

doesn't seem to have happened en masse.
There's no mention in the Icelandic

Chronicles of any kind of exodus or
evacuation from Greenland, and if

thousands of people had started arriving
on Iceland's shores looking for food and

farmland, wouldn't there be some mention
of this in the histories? At other sites

around Greenland, the situation looks to
have been pretty bleak. Studies have

shown that the remains of blowflies have
been found in the living areas of some

Norse ruins, suggesting that at some
point the bedrooms and living areas were

home to rotting carcasses, and of course,
that no one was around to bury the dead.

The silted-up ruins of one Norse
farmhouse tells another chilling story.

Here, archaeologists have found the
remains of two animals; one a newborn

calf and the other a Norwegian elk hound,
a large hunting dog. Both sets of bones

were covered in knife marks, meaning that
these animals had been butchered and

eaten. It's fair to say that no
family would have killed and eaten this

dog unless they were on the edge of
starvation. Hunting dogs were useful; they

helped the Vikings to catch animals like
caribou in the spring, and so they were

vital to survival on the settlements.
We can imagine that the Norse were

probably no more inclined to kill their
four-legged companions than we might be

today, but at this point they may have
had little choice. Remains also show that

the Vikings around this time began
eating the hooves of cows and hunting

small animals like birds and rabbits, that
up until that point they wouldn't have

considered worth hunting. So, this is the
most pessimistic theory. But as the

climate worsened and ships from Europe
stopped coming, all the Greenland Vikings

who remained simply starved and froze
to death in their homes. But there's one

final theory that I think is worth
mentioning, and this theory changes the

outcome of this story completely. Could
it be that the Greenland Vikings didn't

simply freeze and starve as we might
have thought? In fact, might they have

left for somewhere else? In 1723, a
Norwegian explorer named Hans Egede

visited Greenland with the intention of
finding the Norsemen who he believed

still lived there. Like Bardason before
him, he was disappointed to find only

rubble and ruins left behind. But while
he was there, he spent time among the

Inuit people of Greenland and tried to
see if they knew anything about what had

happened to the Vikings who once lived
here.

The Inuit had no clear answers for him,
but they showed him the ruins of a stone

church where once the Greenland settlers
had worshiped. I inquired of the savages

whether they had destroyed the stone
building, but they replied that the

Norwegians did it when they left this
country. But if they left this country,

where did they go to? It's true that at
some settlements, it seems the Norse did

depart in an orderly and planned fashion.
They took all their valuables with them

and in some places even closed the doors
behind them. But where did they go? Why

did no one back in Europe know what had
happened to them? Why did Hans Egede

think he might find Norsemen still
living there? Could it be that when the

climate became impossible in Greenland,
the Vikings did what they had always

done? That's set sail and find a new land
to call home.

The land that the Vikings called Vinland
and we today call Canada, was unknown

territory for the Norse. But it's worth
remembering that it was a much shorter

journey than the voyage back to Norway
or Iceland. With Arctic ice floes and the

activity of pirates worsening, this might
have been a major factor in their

decision. For a race of settlers and
explorers, they might have found the

distant shore a more tempting prospect
than struggling to survive in the

already well-settled land that their
ancestors had left behind. Some

corroboration for this theory comes from
the annals of the Bishop Oddsson, writing

in the 17th century. He tells a
remarkable story about where the

Greenland Vikings might have gone. The
settlers of Greenland lapsed of their

own free will from the true faith and
the Christian religion. Having abandoned

all good conduct and true virtues, they
turned to the people of America.

There is some more evidence that at
least some of the Greenland Vikings may

have actually departed for America. At
around the period of the decline of the

Greenland settlements, in the year 1347,
the Icelandic Chronicles mention a

curious incident. A ship arrived on the
shore of Iceland after apparently being

blown off-course, and the crew claimed
that their destination had been Vinland.

Some have argued that this could have
been one of a number of ships full of

Norse immigrants trying to start a new
life on the coast of North America once

life in Greenland had become impossible.
What happened to these settlers? If they

existed, we may never know. Did they meet
a violent end like Thorvald Ericksson,

under a hail of native arrows? Or did
they learn the lessons of their

ancestors? Did they learn to adapt to
their new environment, to make friends

with the people who already lived in
that land? Did they take up their ways

and customs and
embrace their new adopted country? Until

any archaeological evidence is uncovered
to support this theory, it will remain

just a theory. But I'd like to remind you
of the story that we opened the episode

with, of that Norseman lying face-down
in the snow, dressed in the seal skins of

an Inuit. Does this show that some of
these Vikings actually did take that

final step and blend in with the people
of the new world? Did they learn their

language and adopt their customs? While
I'm suspicious of this story as a

historian, as a storyteller I do like to
imagine that this is a possibility, that

at least some of the Vikings of
Greenland may have swallowed their

European pride and put on the seal skins
that would keep them warm through the

increasingly darkening winters. I like to
imagine that they once again set sail

for a new horizon and lost themselves
somewhere on the shores of a new world.

I want to end the episode by reading a
piece of ancient Norse poetry called the

Voluspa. It comes from the era before the
introduction of Christianity to Norway,

when the Vikings worshiped the old gods
of ancient times. It tells the story of

how the world was created and how it
will soon come to an end. This passage

tells of the coming end of the world, an
event known as Ragnarok. As you listen,

try to imagine what it must have felt
like to live right at the end of the

known world, surrounded by the dark and
wild oceans on every side. Imagine how it

must have felt to have your contact with
the rest of the world slowly fade and

then die altogether, how it must have
felt to feel all alone on that narrow

strip of land between the blue-white
glacial walls and the roaring Black Sea

as the Northern Lights flicker in the
sky overhead and all around you, the

ruins of your houses and fields, your
farms and your churches, crumble

unstoppably into the earth.

Black become the sun's beams
in the summers that follow, weathers

all treacherous. Brothers
will find and kill each other, sisters'

children will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world,

infidelity rife, an axe age,
a sword age.

Shields are riven. A wind age,
a wolf age, before the world goes

headlong. No man will have
mercy on another.

Thank you once again for
listening to The Fall of Civilizations

Podcast. I'd like to thank my voice
actors for this episode;

Jacob Rowlinson, Jake Barrett-Mills, and
Sebastian Garbacz. Special thanks go

to Jordan Ashley Moore for letting us
hear these poems in their original Old

Norse. Do check out his YouTube channel
Ancient Literature Dude for more

readings from ancient and medieval
languages. I love to hear your thoughts

and responses on Twitter, so please come
and tell me what you thought. You can

follow me @PaulMMCooper, and if
you'd like updates about the podcast,

announcements about new episodes, as well
as images, maps, and reading suggestions,

you can follow the podcast @Fall_of_
Civ_Pod with underscores separating the

words. This podcast can only keep going
with the support of our generous

subscribers on Patreon. You keep me
running, you help me cover my costs, and

you also let me dedicate more time to
researching, writing, recording, and

editing to get the episodes out to you
faster and bring as much life and detail

to them as possible. I want to thank all
my subscribers for making this happen. If

you enjoyed this episode, please consider
heading to patreon.com/fallof

civilizations_podcast.
If you can spare anything,

please help keep this podcast running.
For now, goodbye, and thanks for listening.