The Old Norse Predicament

The European settlement of Greenland may sound like a minor folly by some ancient Vikings irrelevant to modern times.  But a generation of anthropologists and climate scientists has put a different face on what really happened there 1,000 years ago -- and why.
 
In the medieval world, there was nothing minor about it. For the better part of 500 years, in fact, in a world torn by war and famine, Old Norse Greenland stood out as a bastion of conservative stability, its Scandinavian livestock and dairy farmers adhering to uncompromising European ways, and to strictures and structures of a new Christian faith -- a cathedral, churches, a nunnery. They sent the King of Norway a polar bear and he sent them a bishop of their own. (These are the ruins of a church at Hvalsey, Greenland.)

So what happened to these strong, hearty, determined, devout people?  What really caused the extinction of European civilization in Greenland by the end of the 15th Century?  The old question, and the new answer, seems to haunt our present circumstance in a way. To be sure, as a medieval writer put it, "It got cold, and they died."  But researchers in a variety of fields have come to agree that there was more to it than that.

The latest climate research, reported in Discovery News/Archaeology by Alexandra Witze of Science News, uses oxygen isotope analyses of the shells of certain marine clams in the sediment of the far North Atlantic to develop detailed profiles of year-to-year gyrations in temperatures, especially from one winter to another, and a overall decline in summer temperatures from roughly the time of settlement to about the time the Greenland colonies were lost. The figures depict a long-term trend of shortened seasons for growing livestock fodder and shortened seasons for hunting.

But more than a deteriorating climate was at work, because anthropologists have observed that while the Greenland Norse settlements were failing, the native Inuit populations were doing fine. The Norse farmers were locked in a rigid social structure that had long since displaced the renegade Viking ways. The Inuit were nomadic hunters, employing a lighter and more adaptable way of living.

Apportioning "causes" of this calamity between a physically changing climate and a cultural "failure to adapt" is ultimately an unrewarding exercise.  By what units does one measure complex human events?  The Norse farmers probably saw themselves as unlucky victims of bad weather, and in a way, of course, they were right. But ask yourself this: If the Norse had the benefit of modern science, would they have taken advantage of their ability to see climate change coming?

IMAGE: Wikipedia Commons