Translated from the Danish by Ernst Dupont.
This is a translation from the Danish edition 'Grønlands Histone I Indtill 1700', 1967, published by Nyt Nordisk Forlag/Arnold Busck, Copenhagen.
The complex history of human life in Greenland, a country offering one of the world’s most hostile environments, has now continued since the first Eskimo immigration about 5,000 years ago. A way of life that is unique and peculiar to Greenland and to nowhere else has evolved there. This is due not only to the Eskimos, who are found also in North America and Eastern Siberia, but to the nature of its settlement from Europe. Greenland has twice been colonised, by men from Scandinavia. The first settlement, by Norsemen led by Erik the Red, lasted from ad 986 until about 1500; how the colonies came to an end is a classic historical mystery and tragedy. For the last 250 years Greenland has been colonised by Denmark. Contact between the early Norsemen and the Eskimos was at best tenuous, at worst hostile. Under the Danes, there has been extensive and deliberate culture-contact and miscegenation, but, the environment being what it is, it is a specific 'Greenlandic' way of life which has come into being.
Author(s): Finn Gad
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Year: 1971
Language: English
Pages: 396
City: Montreal
PREFACE xi
INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter
1. The First Settlers 8
2. The Norse Settlers 26
3. The Neo-Eskimos in Greenland 89
4. The Norse Settlers from 1100 to 1400 103
5. The Fifteenth Century 153
6. The Sixteenth Century 183
7. Europe and Greenland 1600-1670 217
8. The West Greenland Eskimo Culture after 1650 259
9. European Activity 1670-1700 311
NOTES AND REFERENCES 319
LIST OF LITERATURE 334
GLOSSARY 34O
INDEX 34I
