Why was Greenland ‘lost’?

Abstract

For long the fate of the medieval Nordic settlement on Greenland has aroused interest. Most of scholars concerned with the problem have focussed on what happened to the ‘old Greenlsnders’, while less attention has been given to why medieval Iceland and Norway lost contact with Greenland. This article argues that along with the general decline of the Norwegian North Atlantic empire of the Middle Ages, the deteriorating climate in Greenland and a decline in the supply of Greenland products were the main reasons why the contact between Norway and Greenland was broken. Contacts between Iceland and Greenland apparently lasted somewhat longer and, to some extent, may have been based on trade between Greenland and the Orkneys in which the Icelanders acted as middlemen. The diminishing supply of valuable Greenland products during the fourteenth century, however, made the trade with the Nordic settlement in Greenland less viable, and as the fisheries and the export of dried fish grew in importance in Iceland, the Icelanders had neither the ships nor the manpower to maintain the connection with Greenland. Changes in the North Atlantic economy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thus mainly explain why Greenland was ‘lost’.