Norse

It's based on Norse legend.

In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit the Eskimos sharing Greenland with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year.

A thousand years ago, the Norse settlers of my home city of York ate cod that weighed as much as eight kilograms. We know this from archaeologists and the fascination they have for medieval waste heaps.

In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five point framework a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society.

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how if we see it in time we can prevent it.

In the case of the Vikings in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well?

Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron.

The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country Norway and that trade dwindled partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway.