The saga of the Greenland Vikings

Vikings! Rampaging about the north seas, taking and destroying then getting drunk and singing about it all. What could we possibly have to learn from them about environmental management? Last week I wrote about Easter Island, based on Jared Diamond’s Collapse. But I think the Viking case study in that book is fascinating too, and wanted to share it with you.

Vikings made raids across many places in Europe, with some of those raiding sites turning into Viking settlements and some of those settlements merging with the locals to become stable societies. But not all of their expeditions were 100% successful.

• the Vinland colony in North America only lasted 10 years before the Native Americans there got rid of them
• the Greenland colony lasted for 450 years, and ended badly
• the Iceland colony struggled at first but survived to become the modern society we know today
• the Orkney, Shetland and Faeroe island communities had very few problems
• Viking settlers across Europe merged with local populations and played a part in forming the nations of Britain, France and Russia

Why were some of these attempts work out so much better than others? The six different types of Vikings are a good experiment for seeing how a local environment can change the way a people live. The Greenland settlement is particularly interesting, because the Inuit had settlements there too which were a success, with their descendants still there today. Why couldn’t the Vikings make it work in that place, when they did so well in other lands?

The Greenland Vikings brought the usual Viking customs and lifestyle with them: they brought cows, pigs and horses with them to farm, as well as barley, oats, cabbage and hops. They fished and hunted seals and reindeer. They forged iron tools and weapons, and held massive feasts to compete with each other over who was the richest and could get the strongest allies.

Back then, the climate in Greenland was pretty similar to what it is today. But the weather was much colder and more changeable there than the Vikings were used to in Norway. Greenland’s got a much shorter growing season, and much steeper mountainous regions. The soil there is more fragile, as are the plants.

So their normal farming techniques didn’t suit their new home. Pigs destroyed the fragile soil and plants, cows required pasture for longer than the short summer months allowed, and needed to be sheltered from the extreme cold. The crops were too small to allow everyone grains for bread or beer, or many vegetables besides cabbage and onions.

But the Vikings kept feeding the cows all their grains, because they were status symbols. They kept sending men off for the annual sea hunt, and spent lots of money on churches and fine clothes to impress visiting traders, instead of figuring out more appropriate farm techniques. They cut down most of the trees, thinking that they’d grow back as quickly as they did in Norway, which left them short of lumber for building, home fires and iron forge fires. They were determined to maintain their old lifestyle even if it was difficult.

Meanwhile, the Inuit who had moved to the region from North America were happy to eat reindeer and seals and the abundant fish. They learned to hunt whales, and used the blubber as lamp fuel. They built their homes from ice, the igloos we recognise today; their boats were made from sealskin stretched over a wooden frame instead of entirely from wood; their weapons used walrus tusks instead of iron. They adapted their lifestyle to suit the area, instead of trying to do it the other way around.

So what can we learn from the Greenland Vikings? That you have to pay attention to the resources you’ve got, not the ones you wish you had. I think it’s relevant to us in Australia - we grow crops like rice, which are better suited to the rainy tropics; we keep sheep and introduced rabbits from Britain, instead of keeping animals like kangaroos or camels that are used to the plants and weather. We do these things because they’re what we’ve always done. But I think it’s time to re-visit those decisions and see if they’re still appropriate, now that we’ve got a better understanding of the climate we have to live with. And we need to be looking to Aboriginal people to find out what worked for them, for the 40,000 years they were here before Europeans showed up. Like the Inuit, they adapted their lifestyles to suit the land.

As Diamond points out, the things the Greenland Vikings valued were the things that eventually caused their downfall. But we shouldn’t get too smug - at 450 years of continuous society there, they lasted longer than Europeans have been living in Australia. Maybe we need to have a careful look at what our expectations are for our future…