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The disappearance of the Norse Greenlanders at some point in the 15th century remains one of the great historical mysteries. In 1948, Danish archaeologist Christen Vebæk was excavating the ruins of the Norse site Ø149 located on the western shore of a fjord known to the Norse as Siglufjord and is today called Uunartoq ("the hot"), a name that denotes both the fjord and the islands at its mouth.
The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, from northwestern Greenland. While the Inuit survived in the icy world of the Little Ice Age , the early Norse settlements along the southwestern coast disappeared, leaving the Inuit as the only inhabitants of the island for ...
The sources on the settlement of Greenland are sparse. The main sources are the Íslendingabók by the scholar Ari Thorgilsson, the Landnámabók (the land seizure book) by an unknown author, but probably with Ari's involvement, [2] the anonymous Grænlendinga saga (Saga of the Greenlanders) and the also anonymous Saga of Erik the Red.
Herjolfsnes (Danish: Herjolfsnæs) was a Norse settlement in Greenland, 50 km northwest of Cape Farewell.It was established by Herjolf Bardsson in the late 10th century and is believed to have lasted some 500 years.
Erik the Red's Land (Norwegian: Eirik Raudes Land) was the name given by Norwegians to an area on the coast of eastern Greenland occupied by Norway in the early 1930s. It was named after Erik the Red, the founder of the first Norse or Viking settlements in Greenland in the 10th century.
During the Norse period, Vatnahverfi was initially settled by kinsmen of Erik the Red who accompanied him in a large exodus out of Iceland in 985 AD. The Greenlander's Saga states that “men who went abroad with Eirik took possession of land in Greenland” and includes in a list of founding chieftains a man named Hafgrim who claimed “Hafgrímsfjörð and Vatnahverfi.”
The Thule first arrived in Greenland from the North American mainland in the 13th century and were thereafter in contact with the Greenlanders. The Greenlanders' Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red , which were written in the 13th century, use this same term for the people of the area known as Vinland whom the Norse met in the early 11th century.
Some of these buildings still stood in 1953, contemporaneous with the Bluie West One airfield at Narsarsuaq, but today they exist mostly as depressions in the ground. Brattahlíð still has some of the best farmland in Greenland, owing to its location at the inner end of Eriksfjord , which protects it from the cold foggy weather and arctic ...