Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 15:34:24 08/18/05
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On August 18, 2005 at 16:31:30, Eelco de Groot wrote: >The real "Ice"land is of course be "Green"land and vice versa. This is getting alarmingly off-topic, but it's fun. :-) The name "Greenland" was actually a deliberate propaganda attempt by my compatriot Eric the Red, who started the Nordic colonisation of Greenland near the end of the tenth century. Eric came from a rather bad-tempered family. When the boy was ten years old, his family had to flee Norway and settle in the Norwegian colony of Iceland because of some murders commited by his father. Eric's nature wasn't more peaceful than that of his father, and when he was about thirty years old he killed two of his neighbour's sons, apparently after an argument about some trivial household tools his neighbour had borrowed and failed to give back (if I recall correctly). As a punishment for this crime, he was sentenced to a few years of excile from Iceland. Because he couldn't return to Norway, he saw no other choice than settling on the big island further to the west which was accidentally discovered by Icelandic sailors about a century earlier. For some bizzarre reason, Eric seems to have taken a fancy to the place, and when he returned to Iceland after his exile, he immediately started trying to convince Icelanders to move west to the bigger island. In an attempt to make it sound more enticing than Iceland, he invented the name "Greenland". Eric's propaganda was spectacularly successful. The next year, he returned to Greenland with a big number of colonists. The Nordic settlements on Greenland never grew very big, but they survived for several centuries. Some time during the 15th century they all died, apparently within a short period of time. The reason remains a mystery. Greenland had no contact with Europe at the time, and nobody survived to tell the tale of what had happened. The most popular theories are that the climate suddenly got worse, or that they were killed by some epidemic. It is also possible that they were killed in fights with the inuitic population on the island, but this seems less likely. The full tale about the first years of Nordic settlements in Greenland and North America (Erik's son Leif was the first European known to have discovered America, almost 500 years before Columbus) can be read in the "Saga of Eric the Red" and the "Saga of the Greenlanders". Both are highly recommended reading (as are the rest of the Icelandic sagas), the first one in particular. Tord
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