Erik the Red sold a frozen island with a green name
Greenland is Denmark’s vast autonomous territory—largest of the kingdom’s three parts—yet only about 56,583 people lived there in the cited count, mostly Inuit along the milder southwest coast. Saga tradition says Erik the Red coined the cheerful name to lure settlers.
From 986 Icelanders and Norwegians, arriving in 14 boats under Erik the Red, founded the Eastern, Western, and Middle settlements on southwestern fjords. Farms such as Brattahlíð lasted for centuries, but the colonies vanished in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; the Western Settlement’s end coincides with falling summer and winter temperatures at the start of the Little Ice Age.
Explanations vary. Bones excavated at Herjolfsnes in the 1920s suggest malnutrition, perhaps from soil erosion caused by Norse farming. Others blame raiding Basque, English, or German pirates, a rigid society run by the church and big landowners that refused Inuit clothing and hunting methods, or assimilation of those who did adopt Inuit ways. Surviving evidence is thin, since sagas about Greenland were written in Iceland from the thirteenth century on.
Today’s Greenlanders descend from the Thule people, who migrated east from Alaska; no genes from the earlier Dorset culture survive in the population. Before them came Palaeo-Inuit groups from about 2500 BCE, with Independence I in the far north between 2400 and 1300 BCE and the Saqqaq fading around 800 BCE.
Politically the island belonged to Norway from the late tenth century into the 1400s, then to Denmark–Norway, and fell fully to the Danish crown in 1814. The 1953 Danish constitution ended its colonial status, Home Rule came in 1979, and a later Self-Government arrangement widened local powers, though residents remain Danish citizens.
Source: Greenland
