Speakers Bureau 2020-2021 topics

During the warm period known as the “medieval climatic optimum”, from c. 800-1250, Norse raiders (“Vikings”) dramatically expanded their range, exploring, conquering and settling territories over a vast area -- from the Mediterranean to Russia, the coasts of France to the Hebrides, Shetlands, Faroe Islands and Iceland, even establishing a brief foothold in “Vinland”, an area widely believed to be in modern Newfoundland. The Norse colony in Greenland was established by Eric the Red around 1000. During the “High Middle Ages” (c.1050-1300), Norse Greenland boasted a population of about 2000, numerous religious houses and even a bishopric, a flourishing trade in walrus and narwhale tusks (“unicorn” horns), live gyrfalcons and polar bears. After about 1300, in the wake of economic downturn, political disruptions and cooling weather, the colony declined and communication became more sporadic and disquieting, with rumours of attacks by pirates and Skraelings (the Thule Inuit). The last verified report was brought back by an Icelandic ship in 1408: after this there was only silence, as pack ice cut off the colony from the rest of Europe. Early eighteenth-century Scandinavian missionaries found only the ruins of the settlement, and tantalizing fragments gleaned from the oral traditions of the Greenland Inuit. Had the Norse Greenlanders been violently replaced or assimilated by the ancestors of the Inuit? Had they emigrated en masse, or succumbed to plague or some sudden disaster? Or they slowly starved to death, the victims of overgrazing, “the Little Ice Age” (1300-1800) and their own stubborn inability to abandon European customs and practices? This talk will explore these and other theories about this unsolved mystery, and propose some tentative conclusions.