Original subtitles

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

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