1200–1450
Greenland and the sagas, 1200–1450
Most of what is told of the Viking Age in the north was written down in Iceland two to four centuries later. Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), twice lawspeaker of the Althing, lives at Reykholt and is held to be the author of the Prose Edda and of Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway. The sagas of Icelanders, the two Vinland sagas among them, are written down mostly in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Saga of the Greenlanders survives only in Flateyjarbók, copied in 1387 to 1394.
A page of Flateyjarbók, written in Iceland in 1387 to 1394, with the beginning of the saga of Olaf Tryggvason, Árni Magnússon Institute, ReykjavíkWikimedia Commons, Jón Þórðarson and Magnús Þórhallsson, Public domain (GKS 1005 fol., 0005v - 15.jpg)
Snorri is killed at Reykholt on 23 September 1241 by men claiming to act for King Haakon IV of Norway. The Norse of Greenland accept the overlordship of the Norwegian king in 1261. The Icelandic chieftains swear allegiance to Haakon and his son Magnus in 1262–1264, and the Icelandic Commonwealth ends.
Snorralaug, Snorri Sturluson’s hot spring bath at Reykholt, drawn by W. G. Collingwood for A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland, 1899Wikimedia Commons, W. G. Collingwood, No restrictions (Snorri's Bathhouse at Reykholt.jpg)
The two settlements of Greenland decline in the 14th century as the summers grow colder. Ivar Bardarson, sent from Norway to the bishop’s seat at Garðar in 1341, sails to the Western Settlement and finds only empty farms, and its last farms are abandoned around 1360. The last bishop at Garðar dies in 1377.
The ruined church at Hvalsey in the Eastern Settlement, built in the early 14th centuryWikimedia Commons, Number 57, CC0 (Hvalsey Church.jpg)
In September 1408 Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Björnsdóttir marry in the church at Hvalsey in the Eastern Settlement, the last written record of the Norse in Greenland. The latest radiocarbon dates from the Norse farms fall around 1430, and the Eastern Settlement is empty by the late 15th century.
Sources
- Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (1996), p. 154.
- Joel Berglund, "The Decline of the Norse Settlements in Greenland", Arctic Anthropology 23 (1986), pp. 109 to 135.
- J. Arneborg and others, "C-14 dating and the disappearance of Norsemen from Greenland", Europhysics News 33 (2002), pp. 77 to 80.
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