Memories of Inuit and Norse Contact in Greenland
- EPOCH
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Brandon M. Bender
The Norse Greenlanders and Inuit may not appear to have much in common at first glance, but they have a fascinating shared history. Each had moved into Greenland from elsewhere and shared it from roughly the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. These two very different cultures – one from Europe and one from North America – produced stories and legends about their encounters. They broadly agree that the Norse and Inuit sometimes interacted with each other on friendly terms, but there are also grisly tales of bloody feuds.
Three Peoples of Medieval Greenland: Norse, Dorset, and Inuit.
When the Norse began their westward exploration around 985, they found Greenland empty except for the artifacts of a mysterious prior culture: twelfth-century Icelandic chronicler Ari Thorgilsson says that the settlers found skin boats but no people. This almost certainly references an arctic-dwelling culture known as the Dorset. The warming medieval climate had driven the Dorset away, and they went extinct within a few centuries, although Norse artifacts have been found in Dorset sites and vice versa.
As the Dorset culture died out, the ancestors of today’s Inuit (genetically unrelated to the Dorset) made their way south toward the Norse settlements. This proto-Inuit group is sometimes referred to as the Thule culture. However, I will use ‘Inuit’ for the purposes of this piece, given that modern Inuit (and their cultural memories) descend from the Thule. The Norse referred to all indigenous peoples as Skrælingjar, including those they met on their Vinland voyages to mainland North America. The exact meaning of Skrælingjar is debated, although it is generally agreed to be derogatory. For their part, Inuit called the Dorset people Tuniit, while the Norse were given the name Kavdlunait, which has entered modern usage as Qallunaaq or Qallunaat, a general term for ‘white person’.
Today, Greenland’s population is nearly ninety percent Inuit, while the Norse Greenlanders disappeared sometime in the fifteenth century. However, stories passed down by Europeans and Inuit alike still survive.
Inuit Stories: Friends and Feuds.
When Europeans recolonised Greenland in the 1700s, some (such as Hans and Poul Edege) collected Inuit stories about the vanished Norse Greenlanders. The best attested ones, written down several times in the 1700s and 1800s, contain similar themes and characters. In one tale, a Norseman repeatedly dares an Inuk to shoot him with an arrow. In another, a Norseman and an Inuk are best friends, and the Norseman challenges the Inuk to a shooting contest – the winner must push the loser off a cliff. In each of these stories, the Inuk initially declines, citing their good relations. But in both cases, he eventually relents, resulting in the Norseman’s death.
Another tale involves an Inuk working as a maid in a Norse household who starts spreading rumours that each side wants to destroy the other. Inuit do not believe her, regarding the Norse as friendly, but the Norse do. Inuit tales of ‘the maid dividing two cultures’ are common and are not always about the Norse.
These stories all progress into feuds that often involve the same themes and characters: a Norse chieftain, Ongortok, and the lying maid, Navaranak, are named in multiple stories. The resulting feuds also contain similar details, usually of Inuit disguising their approaching kayaks as an iceberg before setting a Norse hall on fire. The Norseman Ongortok flees from Inuit attackers in multiple stories, throwing his infant son into the water to run faster, and the tales often end with a lone Norseman escaping by sea. Interestingly, some versions incorporate specific places in southwest Greenland with Norse ruins, such as Igaliku (the seat of the Norse bishopric of Garðar) and Qaqortoq (near Hvalsey Church).
In these tales, the Norse are repeatedly the cause of their own demise: asking to be shot, believing the lying maid, and proposing that the loser of a contest must be pushed off a cliff. Although there are variations, these were core elements in Inuit stories about the Norse.
Some variants explain where the Norse came from and why they eventually disappeared: the Norse were the descendants of humans and dogs, who eventually disappeared when they sailed away in the sole of a boot. However, they were destined to return with valuable trade goods. An alternate ending says that Inuit extinguished the Norse in violent conflict. This may be the influence of later missionaries who were sure the Norse had been violently wiped out. Inuit storytellers may have incorporated this ‘violent ending’ into existing tales of feuds and the dog people.
However, modern historians and archaeologists are sceptical that there was widespread conflict between the Norse and Inuit. Although some Norse farms seem to have burned down and many Norse skeletons show evidence of violent deaths, there is no easy way to link these findings with Inuit conflict. Accidental fires are possible, and Norse Greenlanders were perfectly capable of feuding amongst themselves.
Similarly, many Inuit tales imply the two cultures sometimes got along. Multiple stories specifically describe the Norse as a ‘friendly’ people, who are portrayed differently than the shy and evasive Tuniit (Dorset people). Even the stories of violence start with everyone on good terms.
One particularly interesting account says that Inuit assisted the Norse after an attack by pirates from outside Greenland. Two papal letters from the 1400s also mention pirate attacks on Greenland. However, historians generally regard them as so ill-informed about the faraway arctic that they are of little historical value. Leaving the papal letters aside, English sailors from Bristol were known to sail near Greenland in the 1400s, and explorer João Fernandes Lavrador was close to Greenland’s shores around 1500.
However, not all information gathered from Inuit was dramatic. In 1721, Danish missionary Hans Egede asked about some Norse ruins, and the response was simply that the Norse themselves had dismantled the site and left Greenland. This fits with archaeological findings; many Norse farms were abandoned in a seemingly calm, organised fashion, with only the valuables missing. Maybe Inuit preserved a cultural memory of the final Norse Greenlanders closing down their farms and sailing off, never to return. Notably, even some of the most violent Inuit stories do not end with total Norse extermination, but with an escape by sea.
Europeans who wrote down Inuit stories sometimes guided them to fit what they wanted to hear. A particularly egregious example occurred when Danish missionary Poul Egede told an Inuk that Inuit had destroyed the Norse, the prevailing European view in Egede’s time. The Inuk insisted this must have been the doing of his wicked ancestors, not the current people, who were gentle.
The European Stories: Exotic and Mysterious Greenland
Many European accounts of Inuit in Greenland were written down fairly early, with some even coming while the Norse Greenlanders were still living. Even these early accounts can be quite fantastical, though. The History of Norway (Historia Norwegiæ), thought to originate in the twelfth or thirteenth century, says that Skrælingjar near Greenland lacked iron tools, so they worked stone and whale teeth – nothing too unbelievable. But it also says that non-fatal wounds inflicted on Skrælingjar would turn white without bleeding, while mortal wounds never stopped bleeding. Whether these details are intended to describe Inuit, the Dorset, or a group in mainland North America is not certain.
Another early source is a Norwegian church official, Ívar Bárðarson, whose account is more straightforward yet still mysterious. Ívar lived in Norse Greenland for over twenty years in the mid-fourteenth century, and his surviving report gives a detailed description of the prospering Eastern Settlement. However, Ívar also heard that Inuit had taken over the smaller, more vulnerable Western Settlement. When Ívar arrived in the Western Settlement to investigate, he saw abandoned farms and livestock, but no people, not even Inuit. Still, Ívar’s initial intelligence that Inuit had overrun the Western Settlement was influential among historians for centuries.
Other European accounts of Norse-Inuit interaction in the late 1300s are a mixture of violence, affection, and tragedy. The Icelandic Annals report an Inuit raid in 1379 that killed eighteen Norse Greenlanders. A few years later, a well-travelled Icelander, Björn Jórsalfari, ‘the Jerusalem-farer’, visited Greenland. On the way, he rescued two Inuit children, a boy and a girl, who were stranded at sea. The children grew close to Björn and his family, with the girl becoming particularly fond of Björn’s young son. This heartwarming scene took a tragic turn, though; when Björn sailed away from Greenland two years later, he did not take the Inuit children with him, and they were so distraught that they jumped off a cliff to their deaths – coincidentally, our second story about falling off a cliff.
As Greenland faded from Europe’s memory during the Age of Discovery, information about its inhabitants grew more fanciful. Two similar stories, from 1558 and 1607, tell of a Dominican monastery in Greenland called St. Thomas that was warmed by geothermal springs, which were piped into the building. Inuit are depicted as ‘pygmies’ who are small and hairy. There had indeed been a monastery near Uunartoq hot springs, but it was neither Dominican nor called St. Thomas (and unsurprisingly, excavations found no elaborate piping). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, knowledge of Greenland’s inhabitants, both Norse and Inuit, was becoming highly exaggerated.
But a couple of later tales were more mundane. Sometime between 1522 and 1540, Icelandic bishop Amand of Skaholt drifted off course to Greenland. He did not go ashore but got close enough to see people herding sheep. This pastoral scene fits much better with the Norse than Inuit way of life at that time, although 1522 is outside even the most generous estimates for the Norse colony’s end.
Another Icelandic bishop, Björn Jónsson (1574-1655), relayed a tale about the final Norse Greenlanders. He retold a story from an Icelandic sailor who had been blown off course to Greenland three times. Once, the sailor and his companions discovered fish drying racks and huts just like the ones they knew from Iceland. Nearby, they found a dead man lying face down, dressed partly in cloth, like a European would be, and partly in sealskin. Curiously, many nearby islands were inhabited, so the sailors decided to avoid them – the implication is that the sites were Inuit. The dramatic pull of the story is hard to ignore. It paints a bleak picture of Norse Greenland in its terminal phase, where a man in hybrid European-Inuit clothing was left precisely where he died, amid his European artifacts, because no one was left to bury him. All the while, presumably, Inuit communities around him were thriving.
Coming Full Circle?
While many of the stories from Europeans and Inuit are likely just that – stories – sometimes these old tales have a way of coming full circle: for instance, Inuit have long told stories about the aforementioned Dorset people (Tuniit), but historians and archaeologists were not sure they had really met each other. However, in 2010, archaeologists found evidence that the Dorset and Inuit had indeed occupied the same areas of northern Canada at the same time, vindicating stories that may be nearly a thousand years old. Perhaps similar discoveries are yet to be made about medieval Greenland.
Leaving history and archaeology aside, these stories are valuable simply for the wonder of it all: they provide a view into how two very different cultures, from different sides of the Atlantic, passed down distant memories of their shared history on the foreboding shores of Greenland.
Further Reading:
Aron of Kangeq and Hinrich Rink, The Native Greenlander (IPI Press, 2019).
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Robert W. Rix, The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (Stanford University Press, 1996).
Birgitte Sonne, Worldviews of the Greenlanders: An Inuit Arctic Perspective (University of Alaska Press, 2018).
Brandon M. Bender's medieval history writing has appeared in peer-reviewed publications (The Year’s Work in Medievalism and Rounded Globe) and publications for wider audiences (World History Encyclopedia, Medieval World, and others). He lives near Kansas City, Missouri, in the United States of America.
BlueSky: @brandonmbender.bsky.social.
Website: brandonmichaelbender.com