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Discovery of Greenland: from the Norse settlers to the polar explorers

Greenland's first inhabitants came not from Europe but from the west: Palaeo-Eskimo hunters crossed from Canada around 2500 BC, and around 1200 AD the ancestors of today's Inuit arrived from the Canadian Arctic. On the European side, a Norwegian sailor blown off course, Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, sighted skerries west of Iceland around 900. Outlawed from Iceland for killing, Erik the Red explored that coast from 982 to 985 and named it Grænland, the green land, a name chosen to tempt settlers. Around 985, fourteen of the twenty-five ships that set out made it there.

For almost five centuries Norse farms survived in two settlements on the south-west coast, around Brattahlíð. It was from there that Leif Eriksson sailed for Vinland around the year 1000. The Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth century tell the story; the Norwegian King's Mirror, around 1250, describes the ice, the polar bears and the northern lights. A bishopric was founded at Garðar in 1126. Around 1350 the Western Settlement was found deserted, and the last written record is a wedding held at Hvalsey in 1408. Why the Norse vanished is still debated.

Europe then rediscovered Greenland from the sea. The Portuguese Gaspar Corte-Real sailed along its coasts around 1500; the Englishmen Martin Frobisher in 1578 and John Davis between 1585 and 1587 met it while seeking the Northwest Passage, and Davis described his dealings with the Inuit, a mix of barter and music. Christian IV of Denmark sent expeditions from 1605 to 1607, which carried Inuit captives back to Copenhagen. In the seventeenth century Dutch and Basque whalers worked the strait.

In 1721 a Norwegian pastor landed hoping to find the descendants of the Norse, found only Inuit, and set out to convert them. Godthåb, today's Nuuk, was founded in 1728, and the Moravian Brethren settled nearby in 1733. Greenland became a Danish colony closed to foreign trade.

The nineteenth century belonged to mapmakers and explorers: William Scoresby charted the east coast in 1822, Gustav Holm reached Ammassalik by umiak in 1884, and Fridtjof Nansen crossed the ice sheet on skis in 1888. The country also began to describe itself. From 1866 Hinrich Rink published Inuit tales gathered by Greenlanders, the newspaper Atuagagdliutit appeared in Greenlandic from 1861, and the guide Hans Hendrik, who served several American and British expeditions, published his memoirs in 1878.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early accounts of Greenland.

Our titles on this subject

The Discoverers of the North Atlantic

Norse sagas (Landnámabók, Íslendingabók, Vinland sagas), c. 860-1000

Around 860, storm-driven Norse sailors discover Iceland. Erik the Red invents Greenland; his sons reach America five centuries before Columbus. A Viking odyssey carried by the figure of Gudrid.

The Norse discoveries in the North Atlantic, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, survive only through Icelandic memory, written down two or three centuries later. The Book of Settlements, Ari the Learned's Book of the Icelanders and the two Vinland sagas are the founding witnesses. Read side by side, they show how a settler society told the story of its own origins, and why the excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, bore out their historical core.

The Description of the Northern Islands

Adam of Bremen, c. 1075-1080

Around 1075, a canon of Bremen drafts the first written portrait of Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the mysterious Vinland, without ever leaving his cell.

Around 1075, Latin Europe knew the Scandinavian North only by hearsay. Adam, a canon of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen, which was charged with converting those lands, gathered what missionaries, merchants and above all the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson could tell him. The result is the first reasoned geography of the Baltic and the North Atlantic islands, written as the northern kingdoms turned Christian, and the only mention of Vinland older than the Icelandic sagas.

A Description of Greenland

Hans Egede, 1721-1736

He founded Nuuk, baptised the Inuit and swore he had seen a sea monster off Greenland.

In 1721, the Norwegian pastor Hans Egede founds the colony of Good Hope in Greenland, the future Nuuk, and stays there fifteen years. His *Description*, published in Danish in 1741 and then in English in 1745, takes stock of a country rediscovered after three centuries of silence: the memory of the Norse colonies, ice, whales, sea monsters, then the life of the Inuit observed at close quarters, from seal hunting to songs, language and beliefs.

An Account of the Greenland Mission

Hans Egede, 1721-1736

He brings the Gospel to Greenland and observes, year after year, the ways of its people.

Sailing from Bergen in 1721, the Norwegian pastor Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the west coast of Greenland, where he founded the colony that would become Nuuk. His journal, published in Danish in 1738, is the first continuous account of the encounter between the Greenlanders and the Lutheran mission: learning the language, disputes with the angekoks, ships awaited, the order to abandon the colony in 1731, the smallpox of 1733 and the missionary's bereavement.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)

A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)

Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.
Jacques Cartier, Voyages au Canada (1534-1542)

Five centuries after Leif, a sailor from Saint-Malo travels up the Saint Lawrence and believes he is opening a new world. Cartier knows nothing of the Norsemen who preceded him on these same shores; he names, maps, and winters in the cold that decimates his men, exactly as Thorvald's companions once did. His accounts speak to the persistence of a challenge: landing on a hostile northern America, surviving there, understanding peoples whose language one does not share. Worth reading alongside the sagas, so closely do the ordeals echo one another across the centuries.
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Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555)

In 1555, this Swedish prelate, exiled in Rome, published a vast description of Scandinavia, illustrated with famous engravings. Five centuries after Adam, he still describes the same ice, the same sea monsters, the same peoples of the far reaches, but with the eye of the Renaissance. Adam's wonder survives here, barely tempered by the new science.
David Cranz, The History of Greenland (1761-1762)

In 1733, in Egede's lifetime, Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut settle next to his colony and found New Herrnhut; relations between Lutherans and Moravians are not always peaceful. Thirty years later, David Cranz is sent by his Church to write the history of this mission. He stays in Greenland in 1761 and 1762, then publishes in 1765 a comprehensive work on the country, its inhabitants and the work of the Brethren, translated into English as early as 1767. Cranz draws heavily on Egede, completes him, debates him, and adds what thirty years of presence have taught. Reading the two books one after the other means seeing the same coast described by two rival missions.
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Paul Egede, Efterretninger om Grønland, uddragne af en Journal holden fra 1721 til 1788 (1788)

Paul Egede is twelve when he lands with his parents in 1721, and the Account follows him from journey to journey until he returns, ordained, in 1734, to help found Christianshåb on Disko Bay. He stays in Greenland until 1740, then becomes the author of the first Greenlandic dictionary and grammar, translates the New Testament and ends his life as Bishop of Greenland. Shortly before his death, he publishes in Copenhagen extracts from his own journal, kept from 1721 to 1788. The son takes up where the father leaves off: the same fjords, the same families, but with the language at last mastered and the hindsight of a whole lifetime.
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William Scoresby, Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-Fishery (1822)

A Whitby whaler and a recognised man of science, William Scoresby sails in 1822 along the east coast of Greenland, the coast Egede dreamed of reaching in small boats and where the lost Eastern Settlement of the Norse was still placed. Between two whaling campaigns, he charts the capes and fjords over some four hundred miles, between the sixty-ninth and the seventy-third degree, and measures the ice, the currents and the depths. His journal, published in 1823, provides a map of a precision then unprecedented for this coastline. A century after Egede, the forbidden coast begins to emerge from the fog, not thanks to royal expeditions, but thanks to the whalers the missionary already saw cruising off Disko.
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Hinrich Rink, Danish Greenland, its People and its Products (1848-1868)

The geologist Hinrich Rink arrives in Greenland in 1848 and returns again and again over twenty years. As Royal Inspector of South Greenland, he lives at Godthaab, the colony founded by Egede, where he sets up a printing press and in 1861 launches Atuagagdliutit, the first newspaper in the Greenlandic language. He also collects hundreds of traditional tales from storytellers. His great portrait of Danish Greenland, published in English in 1877, describes hunting, trade, administration and the effects of a century and a half of colonial rule. It shows what had become, a hundred and fifty years later, of the small settlement on Hope Island.
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Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1886)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the French novelist follows Breton sailors on their campaigns across the icy fishing banks of Iceland. Adam's Thule, a land where the ice burns, has become a place of toil and mourning. The novel gives flesh, eight centuries on, to the dread the canon felt before these seas at the edge of the world.
Fridtjof Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland (1888)

In 1888, the young Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and five companions land on the east coast of Greenland and cross the ice sheet on skis, from one shore to the other, for the first time. They come down by Ameralik Fjord to Godthaab, the colony founded by Egede. The last ship of the season has gone: Nansen spends the winter among the Greenlanders, learns the kayak, observes the hunting and the life of the houses, material for a second book on the Inuit. This Norwegian who reaches Nuuk across the ice, nearly a hundred and seventy years after the Norwegian pastor who came by sea, closes a circle that Egede's reader will appreciate.
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Fridtjof Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland (1888-1889)

In 1888, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and five companions land on the east coast of Greenland, the one Egede had searched for in vain, and cross the ice sheet on skis from one shore to the other. They come down by the Ameralik Fjord, the Amaralik where Egede sowed his wheat and said his farewells in 1735, then reach Godthaab by boat. The last ship of the season has gone: Nansen winters among the Greenlanders, learns to handle a kayak and observes life in their houses. His narrative appears in 1890. A Norwegian arriving over the ice, nearly a hundred and seventy years after the Norwegian pastor who arrived by sea, closes a circle that Egede's reader will appreciate.
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Fridtjof Nansen, Vers le pôle (1893-1896)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Norwegian explorer Nansen lets his ship, the Fram, become locked in Arctic ice so as to drift toward the pole. A distant heir to the sailors of this book, he faces the same pack ice, the same white silence, the same sea that decides in place of men. Nansen, who also studied the history of Norse voyages, knew what he owed these ancestors. His account extends, in the age of science, the adventure begun a thousand years earlier by Vikings releasing ravens to find land.
Knud Rasmussen, Nye Mennesker (1902-1904)

Born in 1879 in Ilulissat, on Disko Bay, the son of a Danish pastor and a partly Greenlandic mother, Knud Rasmussen has spoken Greenlandic since childhood. From 1902 to 1904, the Danish Literary Expedition takes him as far as the Inughuit of Cape York, the northernmost Inuit in the world. He brings back Nye Mennesker (1905), a collection of tales, myths and portraits taken down from the storytellers' own lips. Where Egede recorded the Greenlanders' beliefs the better to fight them, Rasmussen listens to them to save them from oblivion. The land of souls, the spirits of the sea, the angekoks return, this time told from within.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Le Pays de l'aventure (1906-1918)

At the start of the twentieth century, this explorer of Icelandic descent, born in Canada, travels the Arctic and lives for years among the Inuit. A descendant of the settlers whose epic this book tells, he closes the circle in a sense: the distant sons of the Norsemen return to the New World, no longer to name it, but to learn to live there alongside those their forebears called Skraelings. His testimony offers the counterpoint the sagas lack: that of a genuine encounter with the peoples of the Arctic.
Jean Malaurie, The Last Kings of Thule (1950-1951)

In 1950, the geographer Jean Malaurie sets off alone for northwest Greenland, to the Inughuit of the Thule region. He lives with them, travels by dog sledge, shares the hunting and the polar winter, and records the families and the camps. In 1951, he discovers the immense air base that the Americans are secretly building a few kilometres from the igloos. His book, published in 1955, launches the Terre humaine series. Two centuries after Egede, another European observes a Greenlandic people at the moment the outside world bursts in on it, but he does so as an anxious witness, and no longer as a missionary.
Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga (1964)

The Welsh historian retraces, document in hand, the entire journey of this book: from the first drift voyages to Iceland to the camps of Vinland. Jones does not merely summarize the sagas; he tests them against geography, winds, and currents, and proposes cautious identifications for Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. His account, both scholarly and clear, makes an ideal companion for anyone who wants to follow the Norsemen on an actual map. It is the surest bridge between the memory of the sagas and the ground archaeologists walk today.

Discovery of Greenland: from the Norse settlers to the polar explorers