Norse and Aztecs · CHAPTER 5 ·
Why the Norse abandoned Greenland
Chapter 5 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521: “Living with the Cold”
From about 1275–1300 the Little Ice Age brought drift ice along Greenland’s coasts and drier summers that cut the hay for cattle. The Norse adapted by eating far more seal, but the ivory market weakened, the Black Death struck Norway in 1349 and ships came less often; the Western Settlement was empty by about 1360.
Chapter 5 is included with every paid plan. WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
Free printable Norse and Aztecs study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Norse North Atlantic, 1408 — The last wedding at Hvalsey.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1400 · Europe in 1400.
Part of IB History: The Norse and the Aztecs →
SHORT EXPLANATION
For roughly two centuries the Greenland Norse adjusted to a colder North Atlantic. From about 1275–1300 the Little Ice Age followed the earlier warm spell: drift ice, sea ice carried south by currents like the pack ice that closes Arctic shipping lanes today, spread along Greenland’s coast, while drier summers in the south threatened the hay needed to feed cattle. People responded by eating more seal. Yet the market for walrus ivory weakened, the Black Death reached Norway in 1349, and ships from Bergen became scarce. On the map the ice band wraps around Cape Farewell; the Western Settlement, empty by about 1360, has become Inuit country, and blue Inuit zones step south along the coast. Each difficulty could be met, but together they reduced the choices available to a small colony.
The Thule Inuit, ancestors of today’s Greenlanders, reached Greenland’s far north from Arctic Canada in the thirteenth century. Kayaks and larger open boats called umiaks served seal and whale hunters; dog sledges carried people over ice, and blubber lamps lit their homes. As the Norse left the Western Settlement and, after 1408, the Eastern Settlement, Inuit communities remained and expanded south. Historians differ over the weight to give climate, failing trade and attachments to cattle and churches. The Inuit experience makes one point clear: people with equipment suited to sea ice could live in Greenland through these colder centuries.
The full story
A change in diet gives us a way to see the Norse response to cold. Isotopes are chemical signatures in bone that indicate whether a person’s dietary protein came from land or sea. Jette Arneborg’s team estimated that marine food supplied about 20 percent at settlement and about 80 percent near the end. A later study of 123 skeletons placed the early share between 15 and 50 percent and found that it passed 50 percent in the late thirteenth century.
Farm rubbish heaps make the change tangible. Seal bones account for 30 to over 80 percent of the animal remains, chiefly harp and hooded seals taken in communal hunts during their spring migration. Such hunts required organization, and the food they provided became central to the colony. The Norse were adjusting their way of life, not simply refusing to eat what the sea offered.
Keeping farms going remained difficult. Lake 578 near Brattahlíð records a drying trend that would have reduced the hay crop. If several poor summers followed one another, farmers had to slaughter animals they could not feed through winter; the herds then took time to rebuild. Meanwhile the goods that paid for imports were becoming harder to obtain. James Barrett’s study of walrus skulls found smaller animals, often females, taken from farther north, suggesting that nearer herds had been depleted.
The buyers and ships on which Greenland depended were changing too. Europeans were again obtaining elephant ivory, and the Black Death reached Norway in 1349, killing perhaps half or more of its people and shrinking the market. The royal ship serving Greenland sank in 1369 and was not replaced. A colony facing pressure on its farms thus had fewer resources and weaker connections with which to meet it.
The Thule Inuit arrived with equipment for a different use of the same environment. Moving east across Arctic Canada, they reached Smith Sound and Greenland’s far north in the thirteenth century, Disko Bay by the fourteenth, and the south later that century. A toggling harpoon head turned sideways inside a seal, allowing hunters to catch seals at breathing holes in winter ice, a technique the Norse never mastered. Contact could be violent: an Icelandic annal entry for 1379 says that Skrælings, the Norse name for Inuit, killed eighteen Greenlanders and enslaved two boys. The entry survives only in later copies.
The Western Settlement was found empty around 1360. In the Eastern Settlement the last written record is a wedding at Hvalsey in 1408; archaeology carries the account farther. Radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon in once-living material, and dates grave clothes to about 1430. By the late 1400s the Norse were gone, while the Inuit remained. Their knowledge and equipment allowed them to make a living from sea and ice through the colder centuries.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why the Norse left: three explanations and a fourth
The evidence has invited several explanations. Willi Dansgaard proposed a climatic account in 1975: fourteenth-century cooling and the drying recorded at Lake 578 support the case that farming became harder, although Zhao’s team found no large temperature change in the south. Kirsten Seaver and Christian Keller place greater weight on a failing economy: weaker demand for walrus ivory, plague in Norway and the loss of regular shipping threatened the exchanges that supplied Greenland. Jared Diamond’s cultural explanation, popularized in 2005, adds that the Norse clung to cattle, churches and a European identity and refused Inuit technology. Andrew Dugmore and colleagues replied in 2012 that seal eating and communal hunts show a capacity to adapt. Their account brings the pressures together: difficulties that might each have been survivable struck a small colony at once. Richard Jackson’s team argued in 2018 that settlers adjusted repeatedly, but within limits set by the landscape and the culture they had brought from Iceland. The question is not whether any one of these pressures existed; it is how their effects combined.
Abandonment or collapse?
An empty settlement does not by itself tell us how its inhabitants left. At the Farm Beneath the Sand, excavated in the Western Settlement in 1991–96 under 1.5 meters of windblown sand, Eva Panagiotakopulu studied insect remains. They suggest an orderly departure rather than a final winter of starvation. Ívar Bárðarson, a Norwegian church official in Greenland from about 1341 to 1364, reported finding the Western Settlement empty of people, with cattle and sheep running wild; his account survives through later copies. The Hvalsey couple sailed to Iceland in 1410 and settled there. Others may have left in the fifteenth century without leaving a record. No mass graves or signs of a final struggle have been found. Most specialists favor a dwindling population departing for Iceland and Norway as the costs of Greenland life grew, though the circumstances of every departure are unknown. The distinction matters when Greenland is compared with the siege that ended Tenochtitlan: a settlement can disappear without its people all dying there.
The Inuit as the people who solved the problem
The Inuit have often appeared in European accounts only as Skrælings, a threat or obstacle to the Norse. Their own movement tells another story. Hans Christian Gulløv and other archaeologists trace their arrival in the Smith Sound region to about 1200–1300 and their movement down the west coast into Norse territory. Inuit summer dwellings at Herjólfsnes date to the late fourteenth century. Norse iron, cloth and fragments of chain mail found at Inuit sites, including Ruin Island and sites in Arctic Canada, are evidence of contact. Trade, scavenging and conflict are possibilities, though an object alone cannot tell us which brought it there. Oral traditions collected by Hinrich Rink in the nineteenth century preserve stories of the Kavdlunait, the Norse, near Kakortok and Hvalsey. Inuit communities expanded during the colder centuries, using knowledge and equipment suited to sea and ice. Their history is one of Indigenous growth as well as a setting for the end of the Norse settlements.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Cooler and drier summers cut the hay. Gifford Miller’s team dates the abrupt beginning of the Little Ice Age to about 1275–1300 and another intensification to 1430–1455. At Lake 578 in south Greenland, the clearer signal is drying rather than cooling. This mattered to farmers because cattle needed stored hay for eight months. Several bad summers could force a cull; rebuilding the herd would take years, leaving less in reserve when the next poor harvest came.
Drift ice lengthened and endangered voyages. A voyage from Iceland or Norway became longer and more dangerous as summer drift ice spread along eastern and southern Greenland. A late-medieval sailing guide says the old route was abandoned because of ice, although that sentence may be a later addition. With fewer ships came less iron, timber and grain, less news, and fewer opportunities for people to leave or new settlers to arrive. The colony had less contact through which to address its other problems.
The ivory economy weakened. Greenland used walrus ivory to pay for imports. The trade could still be valuable: about 520 tusks sent as church dues in 1327 were worth roughly 780 cows. But hunters later sought smaller animals farther away, and European buyers were again obtaining elephant ivory from Africa. Greenland was relying on a product that was becoming harder to secure while its market was changing.
Plague and isolation in Norway. Norway’s own crisis weakened its connection with Greenland. The Black Death arrived in 1349 and killed perhaps half or more of the population, reducing the market and shipping. Bergen merchants turned to the profitable dried-cod trade; after the royal Greenland ship sank in 1369, it was not replaced. Thinner contact made iron and timber harder to obtain, and worn iron tools could not be replaced without trade.
THE TURNING POINT
Hvalsey church, 16 September 1408. Þorsteinn Ólafsson and Sigríður Björnsdóttir married in Hvalsey’s stone church on 16 September 1408. Their record survived because they later needed proof of the marriage in Iceland. It is the last written evidence from Norse Greenland, and it shows a community still maintaining a church, priests and legal documents. Within roughly a generation the remaining evidence is archaeological. The ordinary wedding followed by silence fits the question historians now ask about departure as well as catastrophe.
What it changed
Greenland becomes Inuit land. By about 1500 Inuit communities occupied much of Greenland’s west and south coasts, including the former Norse districts. The map’s blue zones trace their movement south. Their descendants make up most of Greenland’s population today. The Norse settlements had given way to a society equipped to live in Arctic conditions.
A debate that shaped modern environmental history. Norse Greenland became a famous example in arguments about climate and collapse, especially through Jared Diamond’s 2005 book. Archaeological responses have emphasized adaptation under several converging pressures. That approach also helps frame the Mexica case later in this atlas, where a lake city faced flood, frost and drought.
Europe forgets and then searches. Norway lost contact with Greenland in the fifteenth century, and Europeans gradually forgot where the colony lay. Danish and Norwegian rulers later renewed the search, sometimes expecting to find Norse descendants. Voyages from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries eventually led to Danish colonization from 1721, discussed in the epilogue. The Skálholt map, drawn in Iceland around 1570, shows geography preserved through written memory.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent were the Greenland Norse victims of the Little Ice Age?
The Little Ice Age made life harder, but it did not act alone. Cooling and drying narrowed the margin for producing hay, and drift ice made voyages more difficult. The Norse responded by obtaining much of their food from the sea, especially seals; Inuit expansion in the same centuries shows that people using different technology could live in Greenland. At the same time, weaker ivory trade, plague in Norway and the loss of regular shipping reduced the income and contact on which the colony depended. Following Dugmore and colleagues, most scholars describe a convergence of pressures on a community too small to absorb them all. Evidence for orderly farm departures suggests that many people chose to leave. Climate could work slowly, narrowing alternatives until departure became sensible.
An interesting fact
In 1921 Poul Nørlund excavated the churchyard at Herjólfsnes, where permafrost had preserved woolen gowns, hoods and caps. One tall cap resembled fashion at the fifteenth-century Burgundian court and was taken as evidence that Greenlanders followed European fashion after 1500. Radiocarbon dating placed it instead around 1280–1380, about two centuries earlier than that interpretation suggested. Other grave clothes from the churchyard date to about 1430, the latest firm evidence of Norse people in Greenland.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Get the printable study guide for Climate and Innovation free. I’ll send you a few short letters, then one when a new atlas opens. That’s all. — Paul
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME