There appears to have been a similar end to the Ancestral Puebloans (commonly refered as Anasazi). It appears they were hit by a climatic shift and had several years of very extreme drought (to the point no rain fell at all), and other enviromental factors, perhaps related to overexploitation of trees, leading to erosion of watersheds and topsoil.
It seems that in the end, they just gave up and moved away south rather than dying out. The modern Hopi, aswell as other groups claim them as their direct ancestors. Hopi beleifs about sustainability, and "living close to nature" are pretty interesting in such a light. According to the Hopi, living a false, artifical life is a path to disaster and death, and destruction of the whole world.
It seems that in the end, they just gave up and moved away south rather than dying out.
There may be a bit more to it than that. The better known cliff dwellings have unfinished meals and chores that were simply abandoned midway. I stayed at a B&B which had an archaeological dig on the grounds, and read the report about the dig, which was on the coffee table. There was evidence of cannibalism. The diet the Ancestral Puebloans ate was prone to certain deficiencies which could be overcome by supplementation with meat. A climactic shift could have caused difficulty in obtaining game. The archaeological report made references to a theory about a secret society/cannibal cult, whose members became more powerful in part because they were the only ones around who weren't undernourished.
So it's not just that they gave up and left. Life might have become weird and crappy in some frightening ways before they managed to leave.
The difference here is that we are talking about registered tax paying catholics vanishing without leaving corpses over a period of maybe 10 years. I.E. the record suggest that the last holdouts did not die on Greenland but boarded a ship that never got recorded back in Europe.(though that don't mean they never made it back)
The Kensington rune stone with dated in a system common to the Christian viking age around the time when one of the expedition launched from Norway to find the missing tax payers adds to the mystery presuming that the Kensington runestone is genuine.
They where clearly Norwegians. The Kalmar Union was in effect in 1450, and the kingdoms had been formed for long. There were at least two Universities in Scandinavia, etc.
Are you saying we shouldn't call them Vikings because they weren't engaged in raiding and piracy, or we shouldn't call them Vikings because they were Norwegian?
I am not sure what constitutes 'vikingness', but the government, culture and economy was nothing like what I think comes to mind when thinking of vikings.
The viking era ended 400 years before, because of Christianity and the rise of strong kings and kingdoms. (Working together)
They certainly did not call themselves vikings, if some ever did.
The problem here is that the arguments against it being fake rest on the same shaky ground of potentially obsolete science as the argument for it being genuine. see http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/kens/kens.htm
There was a huge shift in the academic literature on the medieval Norsemen and how the runic language changed doing the middle ages, doing the 60ies and 70ies when old monastic scripture gave way to tax records, archeology and "/experimental archeology/". that renders a lot of what still in the textbooks on who the Norsemen were kind of obsolete.
There's only one very slight mention of the lack of fish in their diet in this article, which I think does injustice to a component that (I feel) is exceptionally important to understanding why the colony failed:
They did not eat fish.
Greenland has something like a 3-month harvest period, which is very, very little. Supplementation with seals only gets you so far, especially when the Greenlanders were also focused on trophy hunting to offer tithes to the church back in Europe. A single hiccup in their harvest could lead to an irrecoverable overharvesting of seals and then the eventual starvation (or almost-starvation/exodus). Not eating fish!
This is also particularly weird since mainland Norwegians do eat a lot of fish.
Jared Diamond's Collapse goes into more detail about the Norse social hierarchy: apparently the upper classes ate a lot of beef, and seal etc was for the common man.
Incidentally, similar themes repeat elsewhere: the First Fleet that founded Sydney had no fishermen at all on board, and for a long time respectable people aspired to eat beef imported from England while lobster and other seafood was only for convicts.
I love the Norse-in-Greenland story because it's only just barely out of reach. It's only 600 years ago, they're Europeans, they had writing, correspondence, regular trade. I mean they were part of the Church! And then they just sort of disappeared and there's no contemporary record of why.
If anyone is interested in a good analysis of this plus the Maya and Easter Islanders (among some others), there's a book by Jared Diamond called "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed":
The article calls out Collapse as having been influenced by outdated ideas about why the Greenland settlement failed. For instance, rather than depleting the soil, it turns out that they worked to enrich it.
Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for a more up to date work.
That story was super interesting. I have always been fascinated by what has driven humans to explore. Human history as we know it seems punctuated by these inflection points of expansion. Post-expansion, we look back on how much progress was made, and yet expansions seem to only happen sporadically. I guess we might be able to conclude that expansion may be more common than what gets recorded, but only becomes sustained when it results in some type of major opportunity for the pioneers.
And even then, it seems as though expansion is a skill that gets honed by a society. I think of the Polynesians, the Vikings, and the Portuguese.
The value of ivory as a commodity makes a lot more sense out of why Vikings would have bothered with Greenland. It has always seemed weird to me that the Vikings made it past all of these hazardous lands to Newfoundland, but didn't really bother to do much in North America.
It's interesting that the article concludes in a rather off-handed way that Greenlanders didn't go native. I don't see why we shouldn't expect a few of them to have done so? I'm reminded a bit of Peter Heywood, from the Mutiny on the Bounty [1]. Although, I would suppose Tahitian life would probably be rather more enticing than Inuit life.
When a page takes up 1/3 of the display playing an obnoxious advertising video with sound that can be neither minimized or dismissed, they lose the right to complain about ad blockers.
You're missing the point -- it's not an objection to advertising, it's an objection to advertising that cannot possibly work, that alienates consumers.
Consumers aren't the only people who must live in reality -- advertisers must live there too.
The fjord was called "Hvalseyjarfjörðr" [1], the fjord of Hvalsey. The area is searchable in Google Maps, and in the middle of the fjord there is a characteristic island, perhaps Hvalsey itself. It is broad at one end and narrow at the other, like a whale.
The idea that the Greenland Vikings would assemble to hunt down sea mammals and that they would rely upon a partial diet of seafood is a compelling idea. After all, fish has always been an important staple of food along the Norwegian coast. Also, to this day, the inhabitants of the Faroe Island conduct annual, communal whale hunts (or "whale killings" as they call the tradition; there is a fair amount of blood involved). The Vikings knew farming but they certainly knew fishing as well.
Jared Diamond devotes a whole chapter of his book Collapse to this question. The one cause that struck me the most (Diamond only mentions it in passing) is that they apparently didn't eat the fish.
For a novel set in Norse 14th century Greenland read: "The Greenlanders", it was written in the style of epic sagas.
"Once, in very early winter, when Margret was in the hills above Vatna Hverfi laying partridge snares, a man came upon her suddenly, and gave her a fright. He was wearing a shirt and hood of very thick sheepskin that fell forward over his face, so that she didn't know him, and when he stepped out from a willow cleft, where he had been doing something, she jumped back and gave a cry. As she stepped back, her foot rolled with a loose stone, so that she would have fallen, except that the man caught her elbow and held her up.
There was a man at this time living above Vatna Hverfi district, who had committed the crime of killing his cousin over a horse fight, and had been outlawed for three years by the Thing, although in Greenland outlaws were allowed to live at the fringes of the settlement, sometimes among the skraelings and sometimes not, since there was no going abroad as there had been in the old days. This man was named Thorir the Black-browed, and so, when Margret regained her balance, she said, “Thank you, Thorir Sigmundsson,” and backed away from him, for it was not known how he had been enduring his time of outlawry. Nonetheless, although she was afraid, she took three fat ptarmigan from her pouch and laid them side by side on a flat rock at her feet, saying, “You would do me a great favor by accepting these poor birds, Thorir Sigmundsson." Then she backed away, slowly, not taking her eyes off the outlaw and feeling her way with her feet. The man neither looked at her, nor picked up the birds, and after a while she was out of his sight and she ran the rest of the way to Gunnars Stead.
The next evening, when she came into the farmhouse from the dairy, the three birds, all neatly plucked, were lying on the bench beside the fire. Margret went at once to the door and surveyed the homefield for signs of the outlawed man, for there were many reasons why such visits were not a little to be feared, and the fact tthat they were contrary to the law was not the least of these. Vigdis, the wife of Erlend , for one, would be glad of something new to bring against the Gunnars Stead folk. Aside from this, an outlawed man living above Isafjord had gained entrance to an isolated farmstead and stolen a great deal of food from both the kitchen and the storehouse, althouh the tale that he had killed a member of the family had turned out to be false. But there were no signs of anyone except Olaf and Skuli, who were standing near the cowbyre. Margret took the birds outside around the house and buried them in the midden with a spade."
Tempting, thanks. Wasn't one of the original Norse sagas about Greenland? I haven't read it either, but I can say that Njal's Saga (mainly on Iceland) is very good.
Legend has it that Erik the Red basically named Greenland deceptively to attract people to go there. Why the Vikings might have vanished from there could be traced back to this bait and switch naming: expecting something green, and finding most of it rather white most of the time.
Still, the place name could well have retained its deceptive power for hundreds of years, coloring people's expectations.
For hundreds of years, Viking real estate agents had a field day thanks to the name, I suspect. Every minute a new sucker is born, among Viking's too.
Also, the Vikings wanting to get the hell out of Greenland would continue to have an incentive to lie to the ones who had never been there: like to be able to sell them their assets that are fixed or that they don't intend to take.
Had Erik called it "Frozen Wasteland", that would have been it. No hundreds of years of settlement, nothing. The few lunatics would continue to have a hard time convincing anyone else to join them.
If you read the article, you'd see the colony survived for a few hundred years even after trade with the mainland stopped. This is not a reasonable theory. Greenland was not peopled by clickbait marketing.
An alternate explanation was that when it was reached for the first time, in the summer, during a period of warm climate, it really was a green and lush land. Sure, there was some ice going uphill and inland but I don't think the Vikings had any idea just how much ice.
On a similar vein, Iceland was also named from a first impression, having been initially reached at a colder time of year.
Thos are the explanations that I have heard. There is no way to know if they hold any truth.
It seems that in the end, they just gave up and moved away south rather than dying out. The modern Hopi, aswell as other groups claim them as their direct ancestors. Hopi beleifs about sustainability, and "living close to nature" are pretty interesting in such a light. According to the Hopi, living a false, artifical life is a path to disaster and death, and destruction of the whole world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology