264. Viking Greenland: Mysteries of the Lost Norse Settlers (Ep 2)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Empire Club - Episode 264. Viking Greenland: Mysteries of the Lost Norse Settlers (Ep 2)
Release Date: June 16, 2025
Hosts: William Durample and Anita Anand
Guest: Eleanor Barraclough, Author of Beyond the Northlands Viking Voyages and The Old Norse Sagas

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Introduction

In the second part of the "Viking Greenland: Mysteries of the Lost Norse Settlers" episode, hosts William Durample and Anita Anand, together with guest Eleanor Barraclough, delve deeper into the enigmatic history of the Norse settlements in Greenland. They explore the interplay of mythology and historical facts, the archaeological evidence supporting the Norse presence in North America, and the multifaceted reasons behind the eventual decline of these settlements.

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The Worldview of Norse Greenlanders

[02:24] William Durample:
"We have a very clear image of these guys hunting walruses, seals, eating fish and seabirds and so on. But it's their mental World that's going on in these long dark nights..."

The discussion begins by painting a vivid picture of the day-to-day life of Norse settlers in Greenland. Beyond their physical endeavors, the conversation shifts to their rich mental and cultural life, heavily influenced by sagas, supernatural beliefs, and a blend of pagan and Christian religious practices.

[03:42] Eleanor Barraclough:
"Eleanor Barraclough, who is a serious academic in fucking history."

Eleanor introduces the audience to the multifaceted aspects of Norse sagas, emphasizing their blend of reality and myth, which provides a window into the settlers' worldview.

---

Exploring the Vinland Sagas

[06:36] Eleanor Barraclough:
"The Saga of Erik the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders... together they're called the Vinland sagas."

Eleanor explains the two primary sagas that document the Norse exploration of North America. These sagas, though not extensive in their coverage, offer invaluable insights into the Norse expeditions to what is now Canada.

Notable Quote:
[09:20] William Durample:
"She converts to Christianity and refuses to sleep with him again."

The hosts discuss the personal dynamics within the sagas, highlighting how conversions to Christianity affected interpersonal relationships among the settlers.

---

Archaeological Insights: L'Anse aux Meadows and Butternuts

[11:02] Eleanor Barraclough:
"It is not butternut squash. These are berries, aren't they? Butternuts."

The conversation shifts to the archaeological findings at L'Anse aux Meadows, revealing the presence of butternuts—an indication that Norse explorers ventured further south than previously thought, possibly reaching areas around the St. Lawrence River.

[13:06] Eleanor Barraclough:
"So the butternuts. This comes back to what we just slid in there as a little teaser..."

Eleanor elaborates on the significance of butternuts in the archaeological record, challenging the traditional interpretation of "Vinland" as a region abundant in grapevines.

[18:08] William Durample:
"Can I read at this point a description that you have in one of your books of Thorberg, the pagan seeress?"

A vivid description of Thorberg, a pagan seeress, showcases the blend of material culture and spiritual beliefs among the settlers.

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Interactions with Indigenous Peoples: The Skraelings

[20:10] Eleanor Barraclough:
"And we're talking about the indigenous people of those lands. And again, just to remind people if they didn't listen to the last episode, the Skraeling word is a pejorative."

The hosts address the Norse encounters with the indigenous peoples, referred to derogatorily as "Skraelings" in the sagas. They draw parallels between these early interactions and later European colonial encounters, highlighting themes of misunderstanding and conflict.

[21:16] William Durample:
"In the end, a large army, a large indigenous army turn up shooting arrows."

This segment underscores the tragic and often violent outcomes of these early contacts, echoing subsequent colonial histories.

---

The Decline of Norse Settlements in Greenland

[25:20] Eleanor Barraclough:
"Well, let's talk about the decline of the Vikings in Greenland. And it starts, I mean it's climate change, isn't it that..."

The discussion turns to the factors contributing to the decline of the Norse Greenland settlements. Climate change, particularly the onset of the Little Ice Age, severely impacted the already fragile agricultural and hunting practices of the settlers.

[26:08] William Durample:
"That's the distance between Henry VIII and us."

Eleanor emphasizes the longevity of the Norse presence in Greenland, noting that their settlements endured for nearly 500 years before disappearing.

[29:06] William Durample:
"This is the Farm Beneath the Sand."

Eleanor introduces a case study of an archaeological site known as the "Farm Beneath the Sand," where evidence of sudden abandonment and possible violent conflict provides clues to the broader societal collapse.

Notable Quote:
[30:42] Eleanor Barraclough:
"Butchered dogs, I mean, that tells you a huge story."

This grim finding highlights the desperation and breakdown of societal norms during the settlement's final years.

---

External and Internal Pressures Leading to Decline

[31:24] Eleanor Barraclough:
"And this is traveling around on their own ship, I guess, on Norse ships."

Participants discuss how external factors like the Black Death in Europe and internal issues such as dwindling populations and disrupted trade networks eroded the sustainability of the Greenland settlements.

[32:54] Eleanor Barraclough:
"But it is."

The hosts reflect on the cumulative impact of these pressures, leading to the eventual abandonment of Greenland by the Norse.

---

Legacy and Historical Significance

[36:14] Eleanor Barraclough:
"It just drips away."

Eleanor poignantly summarizes the gradual disappearance of the Norse presence in Greenland, likening it to a slow, inevitable retreat rather than a sudden catastrophe.

[37:16] Unnamed Guest:
"They are looking back to a high point."

The conversation concludes with reflections on how the sagas serve as a nostalgic recounting of a once-thriving community, immortalizing their achievements despite their eventual decline.

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Conclusion and Teaser for Next Episode

The episode wraps up with a humorous exchange, juxtaposing the serious historical discussion with light-hearted banter about the colorful tales from the sagas. The hosts tease the next episode, which will explore Danish colonization efforts in the 1700s aimed at rediscovering the lost Norse settlements.

[38:57] Eleanor Barraclough:
"Yeah, it's going to be a good one."

[39:44] Unnamed Guest:
"I feel you're both bad influences. I don't usually. I'm usually a very serious historian."

The episode ends on a light note, appreciating Eleanor's contributions and setting the stage for future explorations into the mysteries of lost empires.

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Key Takeaways

• Cultural Fusion and Beliefs: The Norse settlers in Greenland maintained a complex blend of pagan and Christian beliefs, deeply influencing their societal norms and interactions.

• Archaeological Evidence: Findings like butternuts at L'Anse aux Meadows challenge traditional interpretations of Norse explorations, suggesting a more extensive reach into North America.

• Interplay with Indigenous Peoples: Early contacts with indigenous populations were fraught with misunderstanding and conflict, mirroring later colonial encounters.

• Multiple Factors in Decline: The abandonment of Norse Greenland was due to a combination of climate change, disease, depleted resources, and disrupted trade networks.

• Legacy Through Sagas: The Vinland sagas serve as both historical records and mythologized accounts, preserving the legacy of the Norse ventures despite their disappearance.

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For more insights and detailed explorations of empires throughout history, visit www.goalhanger.com and consider joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com for exclusive content and community benefits.

Transcript

[William Durample]

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire [e-mail].

[Anita Arnand]

This message is brought to you by Abercrombie and Fitch I've been ready for summer for a while and now it's finally time for summer outfits. With a trip coming up, the A and F Vacation Shop has me covered. Abercrombie really knows how to do a lightweight outfit. Their tees, sweater, polos and linen blend shorts never miss. I wear Abercrombie denim year round. Their shorts are no different and have the comfort I need for summer. Prep for your next trip with the A and F Vacation Shop. Get their newest arrivals in store, online and in the app Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? It if this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn [e-mail] credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy strips at McDonald's.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand and me, William Durumle. And we have with us the wonderful Eleanor Barraclough, the author of beyond the Northlands Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. And boy, did we have some sagas for you last time.

[William Durample]

We mustn't forget Embers of the Hand.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Listen all round. An excellent person, but also filthy, it turns out. Filthy. Have you heard the last episode of this?

[William Durample]

So I got rather excited the last episode because we had horny zombies, which is new to this podcast.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

We had horny zombies, which William cannot let go of at all.

[William Durample]

But I want to pursue this.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

You do. Of course you do. Why wouldn't you?

[William Durample]

Not the horny zombies. We've exhausted that. But that world. So we have a very clear image of these guys hunting walruses, seals, eating fish and seabirds and so on. But it's their mental World that's going on in these long dark nights, in these long houses by the fire, the stories they're telling, the sagas they're recording. And although these are written down in Iceland, they quite often deal with the people in Greenland. So we have a real, an unexpectedly rich window into the supernatural and the mythological and the religious world that's somewhere between pagan and Christian. And in your book there's all these fantastic. We've done the horny zombies, but we haven't done the nymphomaniac Snow queen.

[Unnamed Guest]

Oh, no, I should say this is nearly 20.

[William Durample]

Have we done trolls spirit worship? And we haven't done uncanny tales of murdered men who sing in their burial mounds. Witches who bring about death by carving bloody runes into driftwood. Curses made by dead men who return to plague the living. And ill fated weapons that cast long shadows over several generations. Eleanor Barraclough. Go for it.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Eleanor Barraclough, who is a serious academic in fucking history.

[William Durample]

Okay, let's start. Let's start with nymphomaniac snow queens.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Go on.

[Unnamed Guest]

Right, Okay. I feel quite honestly ambushed here. I thought this was going to be a serious podcast.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

That's what I thought too. You and me both, baby.

[William Durample]

Sorry to disappoint you, babe.

[Unnamed Guest]

Oh, God. All right, well, look, we're nowhere near Greenland for this. You want nymphomaniac snow queens, we're heading over to essentially what is sort of Russian.

[William Durample]

Let's just do, therefore, a very brief nymphomaniac snow queen.

[Unnamed Guest]

Right. Queen Eagle Beak, skinless nymphomaniac. Right. Former lover apparently of both Thor and Odin.

[William Durample]

That is quite a superhero. Double to me.

[Unnamed Guest]

Right. I mean, at the same time we will never know. But. But she's an unconventional queen of Jotunheimr, sort of the world of giants. The giant lands and she's in this really crazy saga. It's called Eil saga Einhender on Ausmunder Besekjabane. It's like the saga of Eil the one Handed and Aus Mundur, who's the killer of berserkers. And these two heroes, they're on the hunt. They're going to rescue a princess. And then they're taken in by Queen Eagle Beak. And she lives in a cave and she rules over this giant land. She cooks them porridge for dinner. She tells them stories of berserkers and zombies. Don't ask me if they're horny. I have no idea if these zombies are horny. And then essentially she says she's one of I think it's eight giant daughters. They all sleep with the pagan God Thor. And she says, ever since I've done that, I've now been plagued by such lustfulness that I can't live without a man.

[William Durample]

So all those sort of Viking Netflix series it's all based on, I mean, that's the one you go, thor.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

You just want more. I mean, I'm just doing the strap lines for this. They just write themselves, to be honest.

[William Durample]

And this is going on in Greenland, too. I mean, Queen Eagle Beacon and her nymphomaniac ways are more towards Norway. But this whole sort of mental world is travels, first to Iceland and then on to Greenland.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

So it's a world of magic, it's a world of folklore. It's a world, you know, where the, you know, the veil between the spiritual and the corporeal are very blended, shall we say? Yeah, yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, exactly, exactly. But it depends on what sort of sagas we're talking about. So those sagas, very much legendary fairy tale sagas. All right, when we're looking at the two main sources for Norse Greenland in terms of textual material, these sagas, and as we said, sort of, we've talking about a bit sagas in the last episode, they're transmitted orally down the generations, then they're written down. So we're not talking about history as we think of history, but we're talking exactly, as you said, sort of worldview. And that, in a way, makes it more interesting because you see all the different layers of what that worldview looks like.

[William Durample]

Now we're going to move on to one of the more historical sagas, the Vinland saga, by far the most famous because it talks about the Norse discovery of North America. But in actual fact, it's quite a small passage, isn't it, in the whole width of Atlantic saga, it's almost a footnote. We know it now because it's America, but just before we go there, I want a little bit more of idea of this sort of half pagan, half Christian world of the settlements in Greenland. They have a bishop, they've got cathedrals. But a lot of them are still absorbed in their old pagan ways. They expose children they don't want. They're getting up to all sorts of magic. The Sami, the northern hunts people up in the north who they're bumping into, they fear. But their magic, because they think their magic is even darker and richer.

[Unnamed Guest]

It's various layers we can sort of unpick there. So when we're talking about the Sami, we're talking particularly about the semi nomadic peoples of Scandinavia and going over that whole area and definitely there. So kind of Arctic Norway, Arctic Sweden, coming further south as well. They are very much associated, both in the sagas and more generally throughout sort of the centuries, with magic. Absolutely. When we're looking at Greenland, what we have is it's really interesting. So Greenland gets settled around. Yeah, 985. This is when Christianity is making its way into Norse culture in a more sort of muscular form, in a way. So the.

[William Durample]

These are muscular missionaries.

[Unnamed Guest]

Oh, there's a lot of muscular missionaries, yes. And they definitely do that in Iceland. And Iceland gets officially converted around the year 1000 and you have sort of a series of missionaries going in, creating all sorts of difficulties, killing a few people. You know, the Icelanders make up some scurrilous verses about one of them and it all gets a bit nasty and eventually the Icelanders say, look, look, we're just going to convert. This is, you know, we've all got to be on the same page here. But. So it's around that time that we see the settlement of Greenland. What's interesting is in these two sagas. So they're actually two separate sagas, the Saga of Erik the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders. But together they're called the Vinland sagas. Exactly. As you say, because they also look further west, to Vinland, which we'll talk about. But what we see in these sagas is Greenland, and we've got to think they're written from an Icelandic point of view. Greenland is very much this world just on the cusp of conversion. And so there's a couple of really interesting examples of that. One of which is, as is so often the case, women seem to convert earlier. And one example of that is Eric the Red's wife.

[William Durample]

She converts Cristianity and refuses to sleep with him again.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. She puts him on a sex ban and he's very cross about it, according to speakers. Yeah, but it's because he won't convert. And she's having a dirty pagan in my bed. Thank you very much.

[William Durample]

So this is the same. Just to clarify, this is the. Eric the Red is the key figure, the. The psycho killer. How does the song go?

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Psycho killer is what my, My friend is trying to say.

[William Durample]

For those younger than us, this is. This is talking heads circa 1977. Anyway, so Eric the Red is the serial killer who is expelled from Norway, goes to Iceland, kills some more people, gets to Greenland, then his wife converts to Christianity, won't sleep with him anymore. There may have been more behind this than just the fact that he converted to Christianity.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Can I just say, while they were sleeping together, Leif Erikson is born. And Leif Erikson is going to be pivotal. And when you say America, William, I mean, I think we should say Canada now, because it is actually sort of the Canadian coast that Leif Erikson is meant to be, but the North American coast. Right, but it's sort of Newfoundland and places like that where the whole sort of entry into what is now Canada, what is North America by Leif Erikson takes place. Erik's son.

[William Durample]

But, but, but the Vinland sagas are about vin, which is wine, which comes from grapes. Absolutely. You can't grow grapes in Canada, can you?

[Eleanor Barraclough]

So I've done a deep dive on this because, as you know, I've been doing a Canada series which is coming up.

[William Durample]

Coming up.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

It is not Eleanor grapes, is it? It is something called the butternut, which sent me down a rabbit hole I definitely didn't need in my life. It is not butternut squash. These are berries, aren't they? Butternuts.

[Unnamed Guest]

You're both right.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

How can we both be right? I can be right. How is this possible?

[William Durample]

You're always right.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Go on, Eleanor.

[Unnamed Guest]

So you're both right in that Eric has several children, all of whom seem to be involved in these expeditions to the edge of the North American continent, which is indeed sort of. They end up. They go first up to what's now Baffin island, they call Hetleyland, Stone Slab Island. This is around the year 1000. So again, when Christianity is sort of taking root. Leif Eriksen traditionally very much has sort of Christian conversion figure as well. So important to say that. Then they come down the coast, they pass what they call Markland, which means forest land, it's probably Labrador. And then they end up sort of around Newfoundland. And there we have the only archaeological evidence of essentially Norse buildings that they didn't sort of live in.

[William Durample]

We're going to go there in. In some detail in a bit. L' Anse Meadow.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. So we have. We have sort of our points that we know they hit according to these two sagas. It's when they get to this area that, yeah, they call Vinland, which is an area. It's not a specific location that they find self sowing wheat and wild grapes, as they call them, and wild vines and sort of salmon.

[William Durample]

And more importantly, it's not the Norwegians that discover the grapes, it's two Scotsmen. This is an important national pride point.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

For My proud people, and hardly surprising at all.

[Unnamed Guest]

But you're gonna have to include the Germans in there as well, because according to one of the site sagas, possibly.

[William Durample]

A German in a different account, but two Scotsmen by name.

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, so there's. There's Haki and there's Hekja. So woman and a man. But they're two. Two enslaved people who are on the. On the journey with them, and they're sent in land and they come back with all this bounty. According to the other of those sagas.

[William Durample]

They come back with grapes.

[Unnamed Guest]

They come back with grapes. So, right, where the butternuts come in?

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Yes, please.

[William Durample]

Where's Lita's butternuts?

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Could he stop shouting grapes at you in that intimidating manner? It is all about the butternut, not squash.

[Unnamed Guest]

Start to feel a bit faint here.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Push through. Eleanor, tell us about the butternut.

[Unnamed Guest]

So the butternuts. This comes back to what we just slid in there as a little teaser, which is this archaeological site, Lansomeadows, where we have evidence that the Norse were around the year 1000. In fact, up to around 1000. And it's either 22 or 23. Some, like, exciting new stuff has happened with dendrochronology, but around the turn of the millennium, we know they're there. And one of the things that archaeologists found in those layers, those archaeological layers, were butternuts. Now, butternuts do not grow on Newfoundland. You have to go further south. You have to go to. Around the St. Lawrence River. And so that tells us that in all likelihood, the Norse went further south than Newfoundland. They're not just there and they bring these back.

[William Durample]

Being a persistent co presenter here, I do want to just, though, press this point. The Vinland saga. The vin is vines.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Is it vines? Is he right? I mean, you can side with him. I just won't speak to you again. I mean, so there is a slight.

[Unnamed Guest]

Argument here, if it helps, which is if it's a long I. So an I with an accent that would be like wine, you know, grapes. And if it's a short I, then it could be something like fields or meadows. It's probably a long I, but if.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

That helps, it's bloody butternuts.

[Unnamed Guest]

I think we should collaborate. We should write an academic paper on this and set the academic world on fire.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

On fire. Okay. All right. But look, they're settling in in Finland. So what does happen after Leif Eriksen, who is a very Christian fellow, comes? Does he come, land and leave? Does he come, land, stay? What is it? What is it? What are his plans for this.

[Unnamed Guest]

So someone sees it and I think actually this is the one where they don't land and they get into trouble for. I can't remember which one it is, but people say, oh, again, we are talking about the sagas here, so we can't be absolutely certain. However, it is interesting that when in the 60s, archaeologists first found, you know, this. This site. Yeah, exactly. They partly found that because the sagas essentially told them where to go. And then the people living locally said, well, there's some interesting humps over there you can go and look at. That could well be it. So it's not that the sagas are. It comes back to what we were saying at the beginning. They're not fiction, but they're not fact historically, as we would think of it. And they tell us slightly different versions, these two sagas that together we call the Vinland sagas. The reason for that seems to be because they're both based on this oral pool of knowledge, not because they're copying from each other. So that makes it sort of a little bit tricky. In one of them, I think there's three voyages and the other, there's six voyages, different people are doing different things. So we can't say for sure that we know the historical truth behind that. But Leif is definitely set up as sort of the first. The first one to go over there with his crew and he goes on this adventure and he names all the lands and he ends up in this place, Vinland, where he builds what are called Leifsbudr, so his huts, essentially. There's a good chance that those are what were found archaeologically, or at least that's where he first built them and maybe built a few more after that.

[William Durample]

There's another theory, though, isn't there, that what was discovered at l' Anse aux Meadot is in fact a sort of staging post on the way to something else. That it's not the settlement.

[Unnamed Guest]

There is no settlement, as far as we know. There is no settlement.

[William Durample]

There's no graves, for example.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. There's no middens full of rubbish. You know, people are not living here.

[William Durample]

When I was a student archaeologist, all I ever seemed to be digging was graves and middens, and neither of these were there.

[Unnamed Guest]

No. Well, this is exactly it. And so again, if we look at the sagas, that sort of confirms that what we have is a series of trips, first maybe by Leif and then by. So you've got to think, oh, going back to the horny zombies. I don't Want to bring up the horny zombies and get you started again. But the horny zombie, potentially the Druiger, who is not in the Hoygr. So her, you've got to remember, Thorsten complains because she's trying to get in bed with him. He then dies. So Gudridr, his wife, then marries again. She marries Thorsten Karlsefni and he's again one of these. So Gudriddur and Thorsten go over to Vinland and actually it's the same.

[William Durample]

It's related to the horny zombie story.

[Unnamed Guest]

Tangentially, but it is. But that Guddriddr who was with the farmer's wife, the lugubrious farmer's wife, right, she then, according to the sagas, goes on one of these voyages to the edge of the North American continent and there she gives birth. She gives birth to a child called Snorri. And so. And actually quite a lot of the saga of Eric the Red, one of these Vinland sagas, is actually about her. She's a much more interesting in some ways character. There's a story about her helping a little Osiris called Thorbjerg, how to do sort of magic spells to try and ward away a famine in the winter. So she's really cool.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

But this is somebody who can. Has. Can read the runes and can tell the future and can tell you what you know befalls you at the time of your death. That's what we're talking about.

[Unnamed Guest]

So that sort of thing. We don't know exactly what they did. The idea is that they may have practiced a type of magic that they called Seidr, which is also sort of. It's a very. It's really tricky because it's like, how do we actually know what that looks like?

[William Durample]

Can I read at this point a description that you have in one of your books of Thorberg, the pagan seeress? Here she is Ella's own translation of the saga. And this is what this is. This woman, the seeress, she wore about herself a blue black mantle which was covered in precious stones all the way down the hem. Around her neck she wore glass beads. And on her head a black lambskin lined inside with white cat skin. In her hands she carried a staff with a knob on the top, coated in brass and set with precious stones. She wore a belt around her waist with a large purse attached in which she kept the charms that she needed for her prophecies. On her feet she wore furry calf skin boots tied with long laces that had big pewter knobs on the end, on her hands, she wore cat skin gloves which were white and furry. I love that.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

So powerful women figured in their own right in these stories.

[Unnamed Guest]

Oh, very much, yeah.

[William Durample]

So, Eleanor, there's a landing of the Vikings. They've gone from Greenland. They've gone past the Labrador coast where they're getting wood. They've gone to l' Anse aux Meadow or to the staging post in the north. Is it on Labrador? Where is it?

[Unnamed Guest]

The St. The staging post is Lansdom Meadows. It's on the tip of Newfoundland.

[William Durample]

Newfoundland. And then they're heading further south to an area where both Anita's squash or whatever it is, butternuts. Her butternuts and Anita's butternuts, and my wine and my lovely wine grapes all grow. But in the middle of all this, they begin to run into the people they again call the Skraelings, the scrawny people who are the Native American.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

And we're talking about the indigenous people of those lands. And again, just to remind people if they didn't listen to the last episode, the Skraeling word is a pejorative. I mean, it's as close to having a racist term as you can get in those days, which just means weak, small, half man. It's just a horrible, insulting word.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, exactly. And actually what happens there is very similar to what happens in later encounters as well.

[William Durample]

It reads like Captain Cook.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. I mean, honestly. Yeah, yeah, It's. It's crazy. It's. You know, they start off by trading and they trade furs and skins and, you know, for milk products. The native people there want weapons, but they won't give it to them.

[William Durample]

And it all, again, like Captain Cook.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, exactly. It really is uncannily similar in some ways. And then it breaks down and then we start to see people being killed and it doesn't end well. And initially. And again, we're talking very much about the sagas here. The sagas tell us that they wanted to settle, the Norse wanted to settle there. And by the end, it's very much, we found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to use them. And off they go with everything that they can fit in a fighting retreat.

[William Durample]

In the end, a large army, a large indigenous army turn up shooting arrows.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. Depending on which of the food sources. Exactly. But also, I mean, it becomes quite magically inflected at that point, you know, that people are disappearing and appearing and there's strange artifacts and sort of bellowing. It's very much this sense of, you Suspect that neither side knew exactly how to interpret the other.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

What I find really striking is that there is this terminology that creeps in of civilizing the natives or civilizing these people. You'll pick them up, you take them away, you'll teach them the ways of civilization and. And they will be better for it. I mean, that's Colonialism 101, isn't it, really?

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. So there are a couple of examples certainly in Greenland as well, where they. Yeah, they take, you know, indigenous people.

[William Durample]

On their boats, like Joseph Banks, taking the guy from Tahiti and bringing him back to the.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, the Norse diaspora is so culturally broad and varied and there's so much cultural assimilation in other parts. But here it's very weird, the sort of echoes of what comes later.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

I wonder if that is a brown skin thing actually, because these are sort of the first kind of brown skinned people. They will have come across the other places that they've gone to and sort of settled in, in Europe, I suppose, mostly. And certainly the Anglo Saxon forays they've made are people who have the same color skin as them.

[Unnamed Guest]

That's a good point. You know, I haven't considered that.

[William Durample]

Looking in the. In the broader scale, in the kind of global scale of human history. This is an extraordinary moment because you have 10,000 years of migration going through Asia, up through the Bering Straits, into Alaska, through the North American continent. Then you have another whole volume of human history of the people going into Europe and the gradual westward drift of humanity. And then these final moments. And it's the Norse who close that circle. The Norse take the European end of humanity. And with the meetings of the Skraeling in Vinland recorded in your sagas at this moment in the year 1000, those two halves of the human race meet together for the first time.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah. Extraordinary moment it is. And we have the textual sources that suggest that and we have the archeological evidence that suggests that, which is incredible.

[William Durample]

Let's take a break here and then we're gonna get returned to Greenland. And the end of the Greenland Norse story in the second half.

[Anita Arnand]

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[Unnamed Guest]

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[Eleanor Barraclough]

Exhale.

[William Durample]

Feel your body relax and let go.

[Unnamed Guest]

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[Eleanor Barraclough]

I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.

[Unnamed Guest]

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[Anita Arnand]

And breathe.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.

[Unnamed Guest]

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[Anita Arnand]

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[Unnamed Guest]

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[William Durample]

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[Anita Arnand]

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[Unnamed Guest]

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[Eleanor Barraclough]

Welcome back. So, yes, let's talk about the decline of the, the Vikings in Greenland. And it starts, I mean it's climate change, isn't it that, you know, we talk about our demise as a human race and we talk about climate change, but this was a climate change where Greenland was going to get a lot, lot colder and that would make it uninhabitable.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, this is, it's really interesting. So there are probably a lot of factors coming into play. Some internal to Greenland, some very much external. But, but what we start to see. So yeah, they're settling in Greenland around 985 and things are good for a while, for quite a long while. We've got to remember their settlements there lasted almost 500 years. That's important. They weren't on a hiding to nothing there.

[William Durample]

That's the distance between Henry VIII and us.

[Unnamed Guest]

I mean, exactly. And they were successful and that's important. We can't just see the end as the inevitability. I think that's really, really important.

[William Durample]

And it's not initially that fragile. There's an economy that works. They're finding very much valuable things there that they can sell.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

And they're giving polar bears to kings. I mean they're doing all right, they're doing okay.

[Unnamed Guest]

It's exactly true. And so what we see is that that bigger, more Southerly settlement, the eastern settlement, that has its own bishopric that's kind of three times the size of the other one. That's still pretty good. But around the middle of the 1300s, there seems to be trouble further up the coastline in the western settlement, which is always more marginal. You know, it's further north, so it doesn't have so good farming land. It has longer, colder winters. There seems to be the possibility that essentially this is very new evidence that's coming out. They may have started to exhaust the walrus population. And so again, that's not so good.

[William Durample]

There's that kind of level of extinction. Like in. Like the buffalo in the plains.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. So this is literally. These papers are sort of coming out now. I think kind of six months ago, the last one came out where they're saying, look, starting to see as they're using females and sort of the younger ones. And you don't do that if you've got healthy males to take. And there's a really interesting text reported by someone called Eva Bowderson. And he lives in the eastern. Eastern settlement for 20 years, and he's managing the bishop's estate there. And at some point, and this is sort of 13. Well, he's sent to Greenland, I think, in 1341. But he's part of a party that go to the western settlement to check out what's going on, because. Doesn't seem quite right. And his account says. And it's a bit garbled, but it seems to be. There's no one there. You know, essentially he says, and this is interesting, but we don't have any other evidence for this now. The Skreilinger. So, you know, the. The natives coming from north have destroyed the western settlements. And there are still horses, there's still goats and cows and all the rest of it, and they're running wild. But we didn't find any people.

[William Durample]

This is like. This has uncanny echoes of the. Of Sir Walter Raleigh in the first Elizabethan settlement. When they come back and there's no one there, and there's the word of the local tribe, the Crudton, written on a tree, and that's all there is.

[Unnamed Guest]

But this is it. And it is. Yes. Yeah. And a deserted settlement. Exactly. And it's like. But what's even weirder is, archaeologically, it doesn't quite fit with that. And, you know, perhaps it hadn't completely collapsed at that point. You know, it's quite a long area that it extends. It's all these fjords. So something's happening. But we can't quite tell from this what's going on, but we also start to see archaeologically is signs of famine. There's a really horrible site and it is just one farmstead, but where they find the hunting dogs all butchered and the lambs and the calves.

[William Durample]

This is the Farm Beneath the Sand.

[Unnamed Guest]

This one is just down the road. They'd have known each other, they were neighbours. But the Farm Beneath the sand is fascinating. Now, the reason it's called the Farm Beneath the Sand is because essentially the glacial. That there was this lovely river and they lasted there for hundreds of years and they're probably one of the last big farms to leave. But the river sort of starts to. The silt starts to wash up all over their lands and then eventually it's just buried. And it was two. I think it was two caribou hunters in the 90s who found bits of wood sticking out. And it turns out that to be a Norse Greenlandic loom, you know, so it's. But. But we. But they, they seem fine. I mean, for the most part, it looks like the Western Settlement, it was an orderly retreat and they probably ended up going down the coast into the Eastern Settlement.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

And when you say an orderly retreat, I mean, does it sort of map with the drops in temperatures? Are we talking about over a period of years or months or, you know, how long is this retreat taking?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, I. I mean, it's essentially Greenland being what it was, and particularly when you get further north towards the Arctic Circle, which the Western Settlement was, you see, you know, you have a couple of bad years in a row and things are really bad suddenly, you know, there's not a lot of margin for error. And so they're always on the edge of what they can farm the habitable land as hunters, as farmers with their sort of Northern European, early medieval or mid medieval way of life. But you just get a few bad years in a row and things start to tip. And this specific site where you see butchered bones and it's all. It's all really nasty.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Well, butchered dogs, I mean, that tells you a huge story.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yes, it's quite icky. I mean, that feels like a horror movie, that particular one, but it's not all like that. And they seem to take everything that they can that's valuable, which suggests they're not. They haven't just all died there. So that is sort of. Yeah, the mid-1300s. We've got to think there as well. There are things happening outside. So it is getting colder and getting icier. But we've also got plague. We've got Black Death that hits Norway, their main trading partners, in the middle of the 1300s. We have it then hitting Iceland around 1400, and they're wiping out sort of a third of the population, something.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

And this is traveling around on their own ship, I guess, on Norse ships. Is it from. Because it has to landmass hop, doesn't it, over great ocean expanse.

[Unnamed Guest]

So the thing with Norway is it's very internationally connected and by that point you have places like Bergen that are big international trading hubs. So who knows where it is? Certainly, yeah. When you're going up to Iceland, I don't know if they know exactly where it came from, but Norway is a good possibility. But there are others. It doesn't seem to reach Greenland because if you think about it, that voyage is just long enough that if you've got the plague, you're probably not going to make it to the other side. However, with that sort of social and political and economic breakdown in Norway in particular, you have fewer ships going backwards and forwards. And that's combined with the fact that you then have accounts saying, look, our old shipping routes between, say, Norway, Iceland and Greenland, they're icing up and it's stormier and we can't get. So you're seeing these different factors. So within Greenland itself, things are not good, but also they rely on that network. They have to be part of that diaspora.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Well, because if you can't grow it, you need to import it. And if you trade is everything for.

[Unnamed Guest]

This network exactly in the same way that they were successful when wool recovery was in demand, then what you also see is wool recovery sort of goes out of fashion a little bit. And anyway, you can, you know, other trading routes start to open up, and so they can then get down to sort of elephant ivory, for example, so, you know, it's. They're not so important.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Yes, it's so yesterday. Exactly. It's not fashionable anymore.

[Unnamed Guest]

It's not, but.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Yeah, but it is.

[Unnamed Guest]

And so it's these combinations of factors. However the western settlement might have gone, the eastern settlement still survives. And our last textual records of life there are from the first decade of the 1400s. But they're both really interesting. So the first one, again, I mean, this should be a film. It's absolutely extraordinary. 1407, and it's the burning of a man for witchcraft, and he's called Colgrimur, and it says that Colgrimur was burnt to death in Greenland for seducing another man's wife. We know that she's called Steinan. We know that she's the daughter of Fraen the lawmaker. And it says Colgrimur seduced with black magic. And so he was burnt. And then a little later, the woman who was never the same afterwards, died as well. So we know this happens. Really interesting that economists. So Emily Ostler, I think she's mapped that later witch burnings and witch hunts seem to come at these periods of economic and political and social crisis.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

When people are desperate, they are cruel. I mean, that's a story that you can map all over Europe, can't you?

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly, exactly. But the next one is slightly better. So the following year, we have. So these accounts come from Iceland. They're sort of legal accounts from later on, but they're witnesses to a marriage. And this brings us back to. I mentioned this church at Kfalzium which has these thick, thick walls.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

The one, the thick, thick walls.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly. They're still standing apart from the roof. It's extraordinary. But this is this wedding that takes place. The woman is called Siglidr Bjnsdotir. She's Icelandic, and she marries Thorsten. I mean, they're all if.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

And they're all called Thorsten. Everyone's called Thorsten. It's a good name.

[Unnamed Guest]

But. Yeah, but. But what's interesting there is they return to Iceland and we've got to think, okay, this is 1408. So the plague has happened in Iceland as well. Lots of the population has been wiped out. What do we have land available? And so when we're thinking about, okay, well, we know. And this is what I end Embers of the hands with is the last graveyard in Norse Greenland. And the last layers of burials, you know, the fact that their dresses survive, the last people to be laid in the ground survive. And yet the question is, well, who pulled those garments over the dead person's body?

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Yeah, what happened to them? And where did they go? And where were they buried? It's like, they can't have just disappeared.

[Unnamed Guest]

No.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

So did they just go home?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, this is it.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

What happened? Elena, what happened? I said, you can't just leave us like this. What happened?

[Unnamed Guest]

I'm just gonna have to leave you hanging. We don't know. I mean, the fact that those. The newlyweds go back to Iceland, that could be a clue. You know, this idea that basically it's like any sort of remote, particularly island community, the young start to leave first. And so we might just be saying, this isn't some big exciting story.

[William Durample]

You see this in the Western Isles of Scotland today.

[Unnamed Guest]

Exactly.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

It's slow bleed to death. It's not a cataclysm.

[Unnamed Guest]

It just drips.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Drips away.

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, that.

[William Durample]

So the impression is that you have a few last old people starving to death and the desertion of this entire world that for 500 years had supported what was in community at the max. A thousand, two thousand people.

[Unnamed Guest]

A few thousand. Yeah, exactly. And not necessarily. I mean, everyone. Yeah. It doesn't look good towards the end, but it's that in terms of that starvation evidence, it's limited. It's actually more mysterious in a way, if we just found a load. In every farm, there were butchered hunting dogs and baby animals and bodies, human bodies, in a way that would be easier. And this is what's really interesting, is that then, a few hundred years later, when the Danes and the Norwegians sort of look back to this part of the world, they think those people are still there. They don't realize that the whole community's gone.

[William Durample]

And they send missionaries to convert them from, as they imagined, Catholicism to the.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

New reform religion to the new religion. And do they also, in the later accounts, do they think of this whole. Leif Erikson and the settlements of North America and the settlements of Greenland as their high point when they were the best Norse of all, or did they look at it as a failure? I mean, what do they. Or do they. What. What do they say?

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I don't know. I think we have to think in terms of those forays to the edge of the North American continent. They don't know it's a continent. They don't know there's more there. So we have bits and pieces. You know, it's not just those sagas. We have sort of a little tiny paper trail that suggests that people still know about this and sort of in Scandinavia, they still know, but it's not got this huge significance because exactly as you describe the world sort of joining for the first time across the North Atlantic, they don't realize that's what's going on. But in terms of a high point more generally, I think that, again, it comes back to what we're saying about why are the sagas, as textual evidence, written down? Because they're looking back to a high point. Because they're now looking to a time where, you know, again, we have transformation. It's not sort of the death of the Viking age, the death of the medieval Norse world. They transform into something else, but in the sense of certainly Iceland and we've got to think they are the main storytellers. They are no longer the big players that they were. Norway is very much looming over them. And so, yes, I think in that sense, in terms of that body of textual evidence, they are looking back to a high point.

[William Durample]

Oh, wonderful. We're going to go back to that in the next episode and we're going to deal with the second way of Scandinavian colonization, the Danish colonization in the 1700s when this missionary leaves Copenhagen to try and find the lost Norse settlements, unaware that they've been disappeared from the face of the Earth for 200 years.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Yeah, it's going to be a good one. And if you can't wait, you know, you can get all of the miniseries all in one big gulp. You just have to go to EmpirePod UK and dot com EmpirePod UK.com and join our club and there's a whole chat community and you get a newsletter and you get books like Eleanor Barraclough's brilliant book on Discount. That's what we do for you because we love the club members. Books, plural. So listen, just so grateful, Eleanor. You are one of our most unprepectable guests on this podcast. You took us to places and used language that I've never heard on this podcast before.

[William Durample]

We've never had a night of the Polar bear order on the show before.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

Knighted by. It all started when she was knighted with a. We should have known, with a walrus penis. And it's just gone on since.

[William Durample]

Fantastic.

[Unnamed Guest]

I feel you're both bad influences. I don't usually. I'm usually a very serious historian.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

She's a very serious academic. Anyway, listen, thank you very much for being with us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand, and goodbye.

[William Durample]

From me, William Durample.

[Eleanor Barraclough]

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[William Durample]

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[Eleanor Barraclough]

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[William Durample]

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[Eleanor Barraclough]

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