History of Greenland

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of Greenland begins with ice. About eighty percent of the island is buried under an ice sheet, pushing every human story onto a narrow coastal rim. And yet people have been arriving here, dying here, and starting over here for more than four thousand years. The first known settlers reached the island around 2500 BC. Their descendants most likely died out. Others came, and they died out too. Norse adventurers built farms. Inuit hunters outlasted them. A colonial power arrived looking for descendants of Christian settlers and found none. That pattern, of arrival, endurance, and loss, runs through every chapter of Greenland's story. How did a farming culture from Scandinavia survive for nearly five centuries on an Arctic island and then vanish without a single recorded witness to their end? Why did Denmark claim sovereignty over a place it had not visited in generations? And what does it mean for a place to be rediscovered, again and again, by people who never stopped to ask who was already there? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. First Arrivals

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  The Saqqaq culture reached Greenland around 2500 BC, making them the earliest known inhabitants of the island. Roughly a century later, the Independence I culture took hold in the north, their descendants tracing back to groups who had crossed into North America from Siberia via Beringia thousands of years before. Both cultures came from nearby Nunavut, and both are thought to have arrived as separate migrations.

  Around 800 BC, a new group known as the Independence II culture arose in the same northern regions where Independence I had existed. For a long time scholars assumed it gave way to the early Dorset culture, dated from around 700 BC to AD 1. But some Independence II artefacts date as recently as the 1st century BC, and recent studies suggest the Dorset culture in Greenland may actually be a continuation of Independence II rather than a replacement. Researchers have since grouped them together as "Greenlandic Dorset". Artefacts from this early Dorset period have been found as far north as Inglefield Land on the west coast and the Dove Bay area in the east.

  After the Early Dorset culture disappeared around AD 1, Greenland appears to have been entirely uninhabited for several centuries. Late Dorset people eventually settled on the Greenlandic side of the Nares Strait around 700 AD, and their culture persisted in the north of the island until about 1300. By then, the Norse had already arrived and were farming the south of the island, and a new group, the Thule, were moving in from the west. Greenland was entering its most densely layered period of overlapping cultures.

• 3. Erik the Red's Gamble

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  Gunnbjörn Ulfsson was the first European to sight the island, blown off course by a storm while sailing from Norway to Iceland sometime in the late 9th century. His accidental glimpse set the stage for what came next. During the 980s, explorers led by Erik the Red set out from Iceland and reached the southwest coast. Erik gave the island the name "Greenland", recorded in Old Norse as Grœnland, and according to both the Book of Icelanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, he said that calling it by a good name would encourage people to go there.

  The sagas also record that the Icelanders had exiled Erik for three years for committing murder, around 982. He used that exile to explore the coastline. When he returned to Iceland to recruit settlers, 25 ships departed with him in 985. Only 14 arrived safely. Radiocarbon dating of remains at Brattahlíð, now called Qassiarsuk, has approximately confirmed the timeline the sagas describe, placing the first settlement at around 1000. In that same year, according to the sagas, Erik's son Leif Erikson left for the regions around Vinland, which historians generally place in present-day Newfoundland.

  The Norse ultimately established three settlements along Greenland's south-western fjords: the larger Eastern Settlement, the smaller Western Settlement, and the still smaller Middle Settlement. At their height, estimates put the combined population somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000, with more recent estimates leaning toward the lower end. Archaeologists have identified the ruins of approximately 620 farms spread across the three settlements, with about 500 of them in the Eastern Settlement alone. In 1126, the Roman Catholic Church founded a diocese at Garðar, now known as Igaliku, and at least five churches have since been confirmed through archaeological remains.

• 4. Economy of Ivory and Ice

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  Walrus tusks were the economic engine of Norse Greenland. Farmers kept cattle, sheep, and goats for dairy products, but most of the meat they ate came from hunted caribou and seals. For exports, though, walrus ivory was the prize. Both individual farmers and groups would organise summer trips to the Disko Bay area to hunt walrus, narwhals, and polar bears for their skins, hides, and tusks. A 13th-century account records that the settlements also exported rope, sheep, seals, wool, and cattle hides.

  The ivory filled a specific gap in European markets. Trade with the Islamic world had blocked the flow of African elephant ivory into Europe, and walrus tusk served as a substitute, used primarily in art and decoration. One scholar, Professor Gudmundsson, has suggested that narwhal tusks were smuggled through western Iceland to the Orkney islands as part of a valuable side trade. This commerce mattered enormously to the Greenlanders, who depended on Iceland and Norway for iron tools, wood for boat building, supplemental food, and religious contact.

  For a time, trade ships from Iceland and Norway visited Greenland every year, sometimes wintering there. Beginning in the late 13th century, laws required all ships from Greenland to sail directly to Norway. Settlement chieftains controlled trade with the foreign ships and then distributed goods to surrounding farmers. This arrangement left the settlers vulnerable in ways that would become clear only later. The Roman Catholic Church excused the Greenlanders from paying their tithes in 1345, citing the colony's poverty, a detail that suggests the economic situation had already begun to deteriorate decades before the settlements vanished.

• 5. Disappearance and Theory

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  The last written record of a Norse Greenlander is a marriage documented in 1408 at Hvalsey Church, whose ruins remain the best-preserved Norse structure from that period. After that, the record goes nearly silent. A European ship that arrived in the former Eastern Settlement in the 1540s found the corpse of a Norse man lying face downwards. An Icelandic crew member wrote of him: "He had a hood on his head, well sewn, and clothes from both homespun and sealskin. At his side lay a carving knife bent and worn down by whetting."

  Scholars have proposed many explanations for why settlements that had survived for roughly 450-500 years collapsed. Cumulative environmental damage, declining walrus ivory prices, cultural conservatism, loss of contact with Europe, and conflicts with Inuit have all been advanced as factors. Else Roesdahl has argued that the influx of Russian and African ivory undercut the market for Greenlandic walrus tusks, striking at the colony's core export. Ice core samples drilled from the Greenland ice cap support the idea that a Medieval Warm Period ran from roughly 800 to 1200, followed by cooling that intensified from 1300 onward. By 1420, what scholars call the Little Ice Age had reached serious levels on the island.

  Bone evidence from Norse cemeteries tracks a dramatic shift in diet. By the 14th century, the typical Greenlander was getting between 50 and 80 percent of their food from marine sources, up from around 20 percent earlier. Middens show the bones of cows and pigs giving way to those of sheep and goats as winters lengthened. A chieftain's farm from the mid-14th century showed large numbers of cattle and caribou remains; a poorer farm just a few kilometres away had no domestic animal remains at all, only seal.

  Kirsten Seaver, in her book The Frozen Echo, contests some of the accepted theories and argues the colony was healthier toward its end than scholars had assumed. She suggests the inhabitants may have been wiped out by unrecorded attacks or may have relocated to Iceland or Vinland. Historian Arnved Nedkvitne has argued that ethnic confrontation with Inuit is better supported than the ecological crisis hypothesis. But Danielle Kurin and others find no convincing evidence of violence, and physical evidence from the farm sites shows no signs of attack or fire. The paucity of personal belongings at abandoned sites is consistent with an orderly departure, with useful items deliberately carried away. Norwegian archbishop Erik Valkendorf was still planning an expedition to Greenland around 1514, fully expecting a Norse population to be living there, suggesting that even officials with access to the best archives had no idea the colony had ceased to exist.

• 6. Danish Return and Colonial Rule

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  Most of the old Norse records concerning Greenland were removed from Trondheim to Copenhagen in 1664 and then lost, probably in the Copenhagen Fire of 1728. When Denmark-Norway finally sent people back to Greenland in 1721, the stated purpose was to find descendants of the Norse settlers and reinstate Christianity among any who might have lapsed back into paganism. When the missionaries found no Norse descendants at all, they baptised the Inuit they found instead.

  The cleric Hans Egede had spent the years from 1711 to 1721 petitioning King Frederick IV for funding to reach Greenland. Frederick allowed Egede and Norwegian merchants to establish the Bergen Greenland Company but refused to grant a monopoly, fearing conflict with Dutch whalers. Egede found the ruins of the Norse colony, misidentified them, went bankrupt, and struggled to convert the Kalaallit. The colonial venture began with a string of disasters. An attempt to establish the settlement of Nuuk, then called Godthåb, in 1728 under Major Claus Paarss ended in mutiny and settler deaths from scurvy. Two Greenlandic children sent to Copenhagen for the coronation of Christian VI returned in 1733 carrying smallpox, which devastated the island.

  The same ship that returned those children also brought the first Moravian missionaries, who would eventually convert a former Inuit shaman and establish a series of mission houses along the southwest coast. The merchant Jacob Severin later secured a full royal monopoly and repulsed Dutch traders in a series of skirmishes at the Battle of Jacobshavn in 1738 and 1739. Egede left the colony after his wife died, passing the Lutheran mission to his son Poul. Both had studied the Kalaallisut language extensively and published works on it. In 1861, the first journal in the Greenlandic language was founded, marking the beginning of a slow shift toward Greenlandic self-expression within the colonial structure.

• 7. War, Cold War, and Home Rule

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  When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Greenland was cut off from Danish control. Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish Minister to the United States, signed a treaty with the Americans on the 9th of April 1941 without the knowledge of his own government, granting permission to establish military stations on the island. The Danish government accused him of high treason and ordered him home; he ignored them. A series of 14 American bases were built on the island's west and east coasts. Greenland established the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol in 1941 to locate and attack German weather stations in the east. In the fighting that followed, one Dane and one German were killed before the Germans were forced to abandon their weather stations by 1944.

  The Cold War gave Greenland a second strategic role, sitting between the Arctic harbours of the Soviet Union and the Atlantic Ocean. The United States offered to buy Greenland for $100,000,000; Denmark declined. The Thule Air Base in the northwest became permanent. In 1953, some Inuit families were forcibly relocated to make room for a base expansion. On the 21st of January 1968, a B-52 crash at Thule contaminated the area with four hydrogen bombs' worth of radioactive debris. Most of the contaminated ice was cleaned up, but one bomb was never recovered and remained missing as of 2022. A 1995 parliamentary scandal, called Thulegate, revealed that nuclear weapons had routinely been present in Greenland's airspace before the accident, in violation of Denmark's official nuclear-free policy.

  At home, Denmark subsidised Greenland with more than $100 million annually and pushed a programme of rapid urbanisation. Eighty percent of the island's 800 teachers were Danish. The Blok P housing project became notorious; Inuit residents reportedly could not fit through the doors in their winter clothing. The collapse of cod fisheries and mines in the late 1980s and early 1990s hit the economy hard. Greenland had already voted by 70.3 percent against joining the European Economic Community in 1973, but was pulled in along with Denmark. On the 23rd of February 1982, a bare majority of 53 percent voted to leave, a process completed in 1985. Home rule had been enacted in 1979. In 2008, a successful referendum expanded the local parliament's powers further, and in 2009 Danish was removed as an official language. In January 2025, a poll found that 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed leaving Denmark to join the United States, following pressure from the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump.