Greenland's history: a Danish claim made for colonists already gone

Who lived in Greenland before the Norse came

People first reached Greenland from what is now Canada around 2500 BC, and for the next three and a half thousand years the island was settled, emptied and settled again. The Saqqaq culture held the south and west from about 2500 to 800 BC, and most of its remains have been found around Disko Bay, where the site that gives it its name lies. In the far north the Independence I culture lasted from about 2400 to 1300 BC, and a separate Independence II culture appears in the same region around 800 BC. Recent work treats Independence II and the early Dorset culture as one tradition, now called Greenlandic Dorset.

Then the record goes quiet. After the early Dorset culture disappeared around AD 1, Greenland seems to have been empty for seven centuries, until Late Dorset people crossed to the Greenlandic side of the Nares Strait around AD 700. They were still in the north-west when the Norse arrived in the south, and they lasted until about 1300.

The people who stayed came last. The Thule culture moved east out of Alaska from around AD 1000, and its people crossed the Nares Strait from northern Canada in the thirteenth century; the accounts put the crossing anywhere from about 1200 to 1300. The Thule brought dog sleds and the toggling harpoon, hunted walrus, narwhal and seal, and are the ancestors of the Greenlanders living now. No Dorset genes have been found in the present population, which suggests the newcomers replaced the older people with little or no mixing.

UNESCO's listing of Aasivissuit and Nipisat, a strip of West Greenland running from the sea to the edge of the ice cap, rests on this sequence. It holds sites from the Saqqaq, Dorset, Thule Inuit and colonial periods along one transect, 4,200 years of occupation in all.

How the Norse colony lived on walrus ivory

Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for three years for killing a man around 982. He explored the south-west coast and came back to recruit settlers. The sagas say 25 ships left Iceland with him in 985 and 14 arrived. Radiocarbon dates from the first farm at Brattahlíð, now Qassiarsuk, come out at about 1000, which roughly confirms the saga's timeline. The Saga of Erik the Red says he named the place Greenland because "people would be attracted there if it had a favourable name".

The settlers took the south-western fjords in two main groups, the larger Eastern Settlement and the smaller Western Settlement, with a Middle Settlement between them that is often counted with the eastern one. Archaeologists have identified the ruins of about 620 farms, 500 in the east, 95 in the west and 20 in the middle. Estimates of the combined population of the medieval colony at its height have run from 2,000 to 10,000, and recent ones trend toward the lower figure. The revised tallies of farms and graves reported in Smithsonian put the Norse Greenlanders at no more than 2,500 at their peak, under half the older estimate of 5,000.

A diocese was founded at Garðar, now Igaliku, in 1126, subject to the archbishop at Nidaros in Norway. In 1261 the Greenlanders accepted the overlordship of the King of Norway while keeping their own law, and from the late thirteenth century every ship leaving Greenland was required to sail straight to Norway.

What paid for all of it was ivory. Archaeologists now read the Norse sites as hunting stations with farms attached. A single document from 1327 shows the scale: one boatload of tusks from 260 walruses, shipped to Bergen, was worth more than all the woollen cloth that nearly 4,000 Icelandic farms sent the king as tithe over a six-year period. The herds were at Disko Bay, far to the north, a sailing of 27 days from the Eastern Settlement by the written records of the period. The colony imported grain, iron and timber from its first year, and walrus tusk was what it paid with.

Why the Norse Greenlanders vanished from the record

The last written record of the colony is a wedding. On 16 September 1408, at Hvalsey Church, Sigrid Bjornsdottir married Thorstein Olafsson, two Icelanders who had been blown off course between Norway and Iceland. The letters that mention it give no hint of hardship.

The signs of decline sit in the decades before it. The papacy excused the Greenlanders their tithes in 1345 because the colony was poor. The Western Settlement had been abandoned by about 1350. The Groenlands Knorr, the ship that made the run from Norway, sank in 1369 and was apparently never replaced, and there was no bishop at Garðar after 1378. The Eastern Settlement was probably empty by the middle of the fifteenth century. In the 1540s a ship's crew that drifted to the old settlement found a dead man lying face down, in a well-sewn hood and clothes of homespun and sealskin, with a knife beside him worn down by whetting. No European recorded seeing a Norse Greenlander again.

Why they went is still argued, and the explanation archaeologists favour has changed within one career.

The older consensus, which the archaeologist Thomas McGovern helped build and Jared Diamond popularised in Collapse in 2005, held that the Norse farmed beyond their range and died when the climate turned. McGovern has since given it up. A study of 118 skeletons found the sea supplying 30 to 40% of the diet at first and 80% by the end.

The newer reading, set out in Smithsonian by the archaeologists working the sites, is of three blows arriving close together: a colder climate after a volcanic eruption on Lombok in 1257, the collapse of the ivory market, and the Black Death, which never reached Greenland but killed half the population of Norway, the colony's one link to Europe. Kirsten Seaver argued in The Frozen Echo that the colony was healthier near its end than supposed. Arnved Nedkvitne holds that "the hypothesis of an ethnic confrontation is today significantly better verified" than an ecological crisis, while Danielle Kurin and others find no convincing evidence of violence at all.

How a claim outlived the colony it rested on

Nobody in Scandinavia recorded the colony's end, because nobody there noticed it. A study published in 2009 found no perceptible contact between Iceland and Greenland after the middle of the fifteenth century, and no official in Denmark, Norway or Iceland who knew the colony had ceased to exist. In 1448 Pope Nicholas V wrote to the two Icelandic bishops asking them to provide the Greenlanders with priests and a bishop, while conceding that he did "not have certain knowledge of their circumstances". Around 1514 Erik Valkendorf, archbishop of Nidaros, planned an expedition to Greenland in full expectation of finding a Norse population to bring back to church and crown, a century after the Hvalsey wedding.

The claim passed from crown to crown with the Norwegian throne. Norway entered a personal union with Denmark in 1380 and the Kalmar Union in 1397, and after Sweden left, the remaining kingdoms were reorganised as Denmark-Norway in 1536. The medieval Norwegian records on Greenland were moved from Trondheim to Copenhagen in 1664 and were probably lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728, so the crown held its title with little of the paper that had once supported it.

Others went looking in the meantime: Gaspar Corte-Real for Portugal in 1500, Martin Frobisher in 1578 and John Davis in 1585. Christian IV sent three expeditions between 1605 and 1607 to find the lost Eastern Settlement and assert Dano-Norwegian sovereignty. Their instructions sent them to the east coast just north of Cape Farewell, which drifting ice makes almost unreachable, and they came back without finding it. In the 1660s the crown put a polar bear into the state's coat of arms in protest against foreign involvement around the island.

The people actually living in Greenland through all of this were the Inuit. After the Norse were gone they spread along the southern and western coasts, and for more than two hundred years they lived under no European authority at all, while European governments assumed that the island was still a Norwegian possession.

What Hans Egede found in the fjords

From 1711 the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede, a Norwegian, petitioned Frederick IV of Denmark for money to reach the Norse settlers and bring them the Reformation. He sailed in 1721 with the crown's support and a group of Bergen merchants organised as the Bergen Greenland Company. He found the ruins of the colony and misidentified them, and he found no Norse, only Inuit, whom he set about converting instead.

The first decades went badly. A royal colony founded under Major Claus Paarss at Godthåb, now Nuuk, in 1728 ended with most of the soldiers in mutiny and settlers dead of scurvy. Two child converts sent to Copenhagen for the coronation of Christian VI came home in 1733 with smallpox, which devastated the island. The same ship brought the first Moravian missionaries. The merchant Jacob Severin then took over the colony's trade with a full royal monopoly and drove the Dutch off at Jacobshavn in 1738 and 1739. Egede left after fifteen years and handed the mission to his son Poul.

The mission worked in Greenlandic. Egede and his son both studied Kalaallisut and published on it, and two Greenlandic women, Arnarsaq and Maalia, translated for the missionaries and helped write the first Greenlandic-Danish dictionaries. Samuel Kleinschmidt devised an orthography in 1851 that stayed in use until a reform in 1973, and the first journal in Greenlandic was founded in 1861. In the south, Inuit families later took up farming beside the ruined Norse farms; UNESCO's listing of Kujataa dates those farming communities from the end of the eighteenth century and treats the two farming cultures, Norse and Inuit, as one inscribed site.

Colonial rule meant a closed trade. The crown kept a strict monopoly on Greenlandic commerce and allowed little beyond small-scale barter with British whalers, and Danish law applied only to the Danish settlers. District assemblies were elected for the first time in 1862 and 1863, but no assembly for the whole country was allowed. In 1911 two landsråd were set up, one for the north and one for the south, and they were merged only in 1951. Most decisions were taken in Copenhagen, where Greenlanders had no seat. By 1911 the population was about 14,000, scattered along the southern shores and nearly all Christian.

Who owned Greenland once Norway left the union

When the Treaty of Kiel handed Norway to Sweden on 14 January 1814, the Danish crown kept Greenland, and the question of what the medieval Norse title had meant came back a century later. After Norway regained full independence in 1905 it argued that the Danish claim was invalid, because the island had been a Norwegian possession before 1814.

The United States had its own claim, based on the northern coast charted by Robert Peary and other American explorers. In 1916, in the agreement by which the United States bought the Danish West Indies, Washington confirmed Denmark's rights to Greenland and dropped its own.

In July 1931 the Norwegian meteorologist Hallvard Devold occupied a stretch of uninhabited east Greenland on his own initiative, and the Norwegian government then backed him and claimed the area as Erik the Red's Land, on the ground that it was terra nullius. The two states put the dispute to the Permanent Court of International Justice, founded by the League of Nations, and in 1933 it ruled for Denmark. A title first held over medieval Norse colonists, carried for three centuries after the colonists were gone, was settled in an international court.

How the war cut Greenland loose from Copenhagen

Germany occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940, and Greenland lost contact with its government in a day. Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish minister in Washington, who had refused to recognise the occupation, signed an agreement with the United States on 9 April 1941 allowing American bases on the island. He acted without the knowledge of the government in Copenhagen, which declared the agreement void, accused him of high treason and recalled him, to no effect. The first American troops landed on 7 July 1941, and 14 bases went up on the west and east coasts.

For five years the island governed itself in practice. Cryolite from the mine at Ivittuut paid for goods from the United States and Canada, and Governor Eske Brun ran the administration under an emergency law of 1925. The Sirius patrol, small teams of Greenlanders with sled dogs, hunted German weather stations on the north-east coast alongside American units; one Dane and one German were killed, and by 1944 the Germans had abandoned the stations. When the war ended, a commission of 1946 that included the Greenlandic councils recommended patience and no radical reform.

The Americans stayed. In 1946 the United States offered Denmark US$100 million for the island and was refused. A defence agreement of 1951 replaced the wartime one, and the United States expanded Thule Air Base between 1951 and 1953; the people of three nearby villages were moved more than 100 kilometres away, in winter, to make room. The move has remained a grievance. On 21 January 1968 a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed on the sea ice of North Star Bay near the base and spread radioactive contamination, and one of the bombs was never recovered. A Danish scandal in 1995 revealed that the government had tacitly allowed nuclear weapons in Greenland's airspace, against its own nuclear-free policy.

How the colony became a Danish county

The Greenland Commission sat from 1948 to 1950, and its report, known as G-50, recommended a modern welfare state on the Danish model, with Denmark paying for the development. The trade monopoly was abolished. The United Nations expected colonies to become independent, enter free association or be integrated into the former colonial power, and Denmark chose integration in 1952. The constitution of 1953 ended Greenland's status as a colony, made it a Danish county, extended Danish citizenship to Greenlanders and gave them two seats in the Folketing.

Integration was carried out as assimilation. The state built housing and infrastructure in the Danish mould and moved people from villages and trading posts into towns, both to end a dependence on dwindling seal stocks and to supply workers for the cod fishery. Blok P in Nuuk came to house nearly 1% of the population, before it was demolished in 2012. Danish was promoted for official business, further education meant going to Denmark, and many children of the 1950s and 1960s grew up without learning Greenlandic.

In 1951 the Danish authorities sent 22 Greenlandic children aged five to eight to Denmark to be raised as a Danish-speaking elite. The 16 who returned two years later were placed in an orphanage in Greenland, and many never saw their families again. By one report from the mid-1970s, 80% of the island's 800 teachers were Danish, and only one doctor and three lawyers were Greenlandic.

How Greenland took back its own government

How home rule was won

In the 1970s students who feared that Greenlandic would disappear began to protest, and a movement for more autonomy grew in the same decade. Membership of the European Common Market brought the question to a head: 70.3% of Greenlanders rejected entry, and the island was taken in with Denmark in 1973 all the same, because its two seats in the Folketing could not change the result.

In 1972 a committee of Greenlandic members was set up at the request of the Provincial Council, and in 1975 it recommended home rule as quickly as possible. Greenlanders approved home rule in a referendum on 17 January 1979, and the law came into force on 1 May 1979. Godthåb became Nuuk that year and Greenlandic returned as the main language of schooling. On 23 February 1982, 53% voted to leave the European Economic Community, and the Greenland Treaty took the island out in 1985. The flag was adopted on 21 June 1985.

What the Self-Government Act changed

A referendum on 25 November 2008 approved self-government with 75.5% for and 23.6% against, by the count published by the Danish Prime Minister's Office. The Self-Government Act came into force on 21 June 2009, now the national day. Its preamble recognises that "the people of Greenland is a people pursuant to international law with the right of self-determination", and the Act rests on an agreement between the two governments as equal partners. It made Greenlandic the official language, fixed the Danish subsidy at DKK 3.4 billion a year at 2009 price levels, and listed fields Greenland may take over, among them the police, the courts and mineral resources. It took over mineral resources on 1 January 2010. The constitution, nationality, the Supreme Court, foreign, defence and security policy and monetary policy stay with the realm.

Section 21 of the Act puts the decision on independence with the people of Greenland. An agreement between the two governments would need the consent of Inatsisartut, a referendum in Greenland and the consent of the Folketing. No independence referendum has been held. In 2008 campaigners named 2021, three hundred years after Egede landed, as a possible date, and a commission presented a draft constitution in 2023.

In January 2025 a newly inaugurated United States president pressed Denmark to sell the island and would not rule out force. A poll that month found 85% of Greenlanders opposed to joining the United States and 6% in favour. Greenland counted 56,542 people on 1 January 2025, and in January 2026, 88% of its population had been born in Greenland.