The Medieval Warm Period had started around A.D. 900 and began to wane around A.D. 1200, but it wasn’t until A.D. 1300 that the Little Ice Age set in with a vengeance. Over the first 50 years, Atlantic Europe suffered a series of cold, wet summers that caused devastating crop failures and mass starvation. “Urban food riots and rural farm abandonments were widespread, and it is now recognized that the contraction of an early medieval peak in settlement and population began well before the onset of the Black Death in 1348. … Increased disease, warfare, and religious intolerance throughout Europe both reflected and intensified the agony of a once-confident civilization entering a period of deep distress.”22
This distress, however, was nothing less than catastrophic in Greenland. High resolution isotopic data recorded by the GISP-2, the Greenland ice core, indicates that from 1343 to 1360 temperatures were much lower in southern Greenland.23 Their farms must have totally failed. The last record of the settlement began by Eirikr Raudi’s colonists, the Western Settlement, was chronicled by Norwegian cleric Ivar Bararson around A.D. 1364:
Skraeling have destroyed all the Western Settlement. There is an abundance of horses, goats, bulls, and sheep all wild, and no people neither Christian nor heathen.24
What happened to them? Well, that’s been a matter of discussion for over 600 years.
Gisli Oddsson of Skalhorlt, who wrote in the 1630s, stated that in the year 1342, “The inhabitants of Greenland of their own free will abandoned the true faith and the Christian religion, having already forsaken all good ways and true virtues, and joined themselves with the fold of America.”25
Christianity was on the rise around the world, including in Greenland. It’s possible that religious persecution drove the pagan believers in Thor, Odin, and other Norse gods and goddesses to abandon their settlements and seek religious freedom elsewhere. But “the fold of America”? Did Oddsson mean that the Greenlanders joined themselves with the aboriginal peoples? It’s an intriguing possibility.
By the time the Greenlanders disappeared, the Dorset had been gone for a century, and genetic evidence suggests that the Thule did not mate with the Norse (Raghavan and Willerslev, 2014). However, this study only examined mitochondrial DNA, the maternal line, so it does not necessarily mean there was no interbreeding, only that the female side of such a mating is not apparent.
Despite Oddsson’s date for the demise of the Greenlanders, the last written document from the Eastern Settlement dates to A.D. 1408, and records that a Christian marriage was performed at the place where, a few years before, a man named Kolbein had been burned to death as a witch.
The next written reference dates to 1721, when Hans Egede, a Norwegian Lutheran missionary, arrived in Greenland hoping to convert the popish idolaters, but found them completely gone. Their settlements were all abandoned. Only the Inuit lived there.
Some authors have suggested that the Norse Greenlanders failed because they “chose to avoid innovation, to emphasize and elaborate their traditions, and ultimately to die rather than abandon what they must have seen as core values. A common form of the feudal oath of fealty that would have been familiar to many medieval Greenlanders pledged a vassal’s service ‘until death takes me, or the world end.’”26
We disagree. We think it far more likely that when the climate turned against them, the Norse and Celtic Greenlanders did exactly what they did best. They took comfort in their stories.
Then they got in their ships and resumed their search for the mythical paradise of Hvitramannaland.
Archaeologists just haven’t found the evidence to prove it yet. But we believe they will.