I've suddenly come to realize how old some of you people on the list are.
You mostly speak as if you were there. Funny that you didn't see it all the
same way. :)
Tom C.
From: Bob W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Some really neat northern lights photos
Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 00:20:47 +0000
Hi,
Friday, December 3, 2004, 3:37:24 PM, Daniel wrote:
> I heayrd a much different story.
> Eric the Red was forced to leave Iceland, apparently after killing a few
> people. He found Greenland and established the first colony there about
> 982, naming it Greenland to make it sound more attractive. His son,
> Lief Ericson, brought Christianity to Greenland and explored the coast
> of North America.
> The Greenland colony was abandoned, largely because the Inuit natives
> were even better warriors than the Vikings, and made the intruders quite
> unwelcome. It was later resettled by Norwegians and Danes.
> Greenland is mostly ice, while Iceland is mostly green, and much
> warmer. It's all in the language chosen by the listing real estate
agent.
Greenland was colonised during the Mediaeval Warm Period, when it was
green. This is not inconsistent with the idea that he sexed it up a
bit for the people back home - if you find a nice place and want
people to move there, you're going to tell them it's nice.
I saw an interesting documentary about this some years ago. As far as I
remember there were no other people there at the time - the Inuit having
abandoned it before. When the warm period gave way to the Little Ice Age
the
Viking settlers didn't have the skills to deal with the new type of
climate.
The Inuit, who started to return during the colder weather, knew how to
survive,
but - rather like early European settlers of Virginia - the Norse didn't
know how to ask for help, or their religious and other cultural prejudices
prevented them from asking, and their fortunes declined. I have a book
called
"Floods, Famines and Emperors" by Brian Fagan in which he describes the
effect
of climate change on various cultures worldwide over the last few thousand
years. He goes into more detail than I can repeat here about the history of
the Norse settlements in Greenland, but as far as I can tell, during
the 500 or so years that the Norse were in Greenland there was little
contact with the Inuit except at the very end, when the Inuit may have
attacked the settlements.
--
Cheers,
Bob
