Empire: World History - 264. Viking Greenland: Mysteries of the Lost Norse Settlers (Ep 2)

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

How did the Vikings and the Inuit interact in Greenland? When was the last record of Norse settlers in the region? How did climate change affect the decline of Viking settlers in Greenland, and why is their disappearance shrouded in mystery?  William and Anita are joined once again by Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of The Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, to explore the last of the Norse Settlers. ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. And we have with us the wonderful Eleanor Barrett Club, the author of Beyond the Northlands, Viking Voyages, old North sagas and boy did we have some sagas for you last time. You mustn't forget her embers of the hand.

Hidden histories of the Viking Age. Listen, all round an excellent person but also filthy, it turns out. Filthy. Have you heard the last episode of this? So I got rather excited the last episode because we had horny zombies, which is new to this podcast. We had horny zombies, which William cannot let go of at all. But I want to pursue this, exactly.

You do. Of course you do. Why wouldn't you? Not the Hordy's obvious. We've exhausted that. But that world. So we have a very clear image of these guys hunting warruses, seals, eating fish and sea birds and so on. But it's their mental world that's going on in these long dark nights, in these long houses by the fire, the stories they're telling, the sagas they're recording. And although these are written down in Iceland, they quite often do. deal with the people in Greenland. So we have a real and unexpectedly rich window into the supernatural and the mythological and the religious world that's somewhere between pagan and Christian.

And in your book, there's all these fantastic things. We've done the Hornie Zombies, but we haven't done the nymphomaniac snow queen. I should say, this is nearly 10 years ago. Nor have we done trolls, spirit worship. and we haven't done uncanny tales of murdered men who sing in their burial mounds, witches who bring about death by carving bloody ruins into driftwood, curses made by dead men who return to plague the living, and ill-fated weapons that cast long shadows over several generations.

Eleanor Barclough, go for it. Eleanor Baraklough, who is a serious academic in Viking history. Okay, let's start with nymphomaniac snow queens. Yeah, go on. Right, okay. I feel quite honestly ambushed here. I thought this was going to be a serious pog. That's what I thought too.

You and me both, baby. Sorry to disappoint you, babe. Oh, God. All right, well, we're nowhere near Greenland for this. You want nymphomaniacs, no queens. We're heading over to essentially what is sort of Russia, Ukraine. Therefore, a very brief nymphomaniac, so queen. Right.

Queen Eaglebeak, skinless, nymphomaniac, right? Thor Malva, apparently of both Thor, And Odin. That is quite a superhero double to that. I know, right? I mean, at the same time, we will never know. But she's an unconventional queen of Jottenheimer, sort of the world of giants, the giant lands. And she's in this really crazy saga.

It's called Ale's Saga Enhender on Ausmunder, Bezekia Banner. It's like the saga of Ail, the one-handed, and Ausmundur, who's the killer of berserkers. And these two heroes, they're on the heart. hunt, they're going to rescue a princess and then they're taken in by Queen Eaglebeak and she lives in a cave and she rules over this giant land. She cooks them porridge for dinner. She tells them stories of berserkers and zombies. Don't ask me if they're horny. I have no idea if these zombies are horny. And then essentially she says she's one of, I think it's eight giant daughters. They all sleep with the pagan god Thor. And she says ever since I've done that, I've now

been plagued by such lustfulness that I can't live without a man. So all those sort of Viking Netflix series, it's all, it's all based on, I mean, that's the world we're talking. Once you go Thor, you just want more. I mean, I'm just doing the strap lines for this. They just write themselves, to be honest. And this is going on in Greenland too. I mean, Queen Eaglebeacon and her and her Nymphomelian ways are more towards Norway.

But this whole sort of mental world is travels first to Iceland and then on to Greenland. So it's a world of magic. It's a world of folklore. It's a world, you know, where the veil between the spiritual and the corporeal are very blended, shall we say. Yeah. Yeah. Well, exactly. But it depends on what sort of sagas we're talking about.

So those sagas very much legendary fairy tale sagas, all right? When we're looking at the two main sources for Norse Greenland in terms of textual material, these sagas, and as we said, sort of we're talking about a bit sagas in the last episode, they're transmitted orally down the generations, then they're written down. So we're not talking about history as we think of history, but we're talking exactly as you say, sort of world view. And that, in a way, makes it more interesting because you see all the different layers of what that world view looks like.

Now, we're going to move on to one of the more historical sagas, the Vinland saga, by far the most famous because it talks about the North's discovery of North America. But in actual fact, it's quite a small passage, isn't it? In the whole width of Atlantic saga, it's almost a footnote. We know it now because it's America. But just before we go there, I want a little bit more idea of this sort of half-pagan, half-Christian world of the settlements in Greenland. They have a bishop, they've got cathedrals, but a lot of them are still absorbed

in their old pagan ways. They expose children. They don't want. They're getting up to all sorts of magic. The Sami, the northern hunts people up in the north who they're bumping into, they fear but their magic because they think their magic is even darker and richer. It's various layers we can sort of unpick there. So when we're talking about the Sami, we're talking particularly about the semi-nomadic peoples of Scandinavia and going over that whole area. And definitely there. So kind of Arctic, Norway, Arctic Sweden, coming further south as well,

they are very much associated, both in the sagas and more generally throughout sort of the centuries with magic, absolutely. When we're looking at Greenland, what we have is it's really interesting. So Greenland gets settled around, yeah, 985. This is when Christianity is making its way into Norse culture in a more sort of muscular form in a way. So the traditional... These are muscular missionaries convert or die. Yes. And they definitely do that in Iceland.

And Iceland gets officially converted around the year 1000. And you have sort of a series of missionaries going in, creating all sorts of difficulties, killing a few people. You know, the Icelanders make up some scurrilous verses about one of them. And it all gets a bit nasty. And eventually the Icelanders say, look, we're just going to convert. This is, you know, we've all got to be on the same page here. So it's around that time that we see the settlement of Greenland.

What's interesting is in these two sagas, so they're actually two separate sagas, the saga of Eric the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders, but together they're called the Vinland sagas, exactly as you say, because they also look further west of Vinland, which we'll talk about. But what we see in these sagas is Greenland, and we've got to think, they're written from an Icelandic point of view, Greenland is very much this world just on the cusp of conversion. And so there's a couple of really interesting examples of that. One of which is, as is so often the case, women seem to convert earlier. And one example of that is Eric the Redd's

wife. She converts Christendi refused to sleep with him again. Exactly. She puts him on a sex ban and he's very cross about it according to the sagas. Yeah, but it's because he won't convert. And she's the one having a dirty pagan in my bed. Thank you very much. So this is the same, just to clarify, Eric the Red is the key figure, the psycho killer. How does the song go? Psycho killer, what's the key say? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's what my friend is trying to say.

For those younger than us, this is talking heads circa 1977. Anyway, so Eric the Red is the serial killer who is expelled from Norway, goes to Iceland, kill some more people, gets to Greenland, that his wife converts to Christianity, he won't sleep with him anymore. There may have been more behind this than just the fact that he converted to Christianity. Can I just say, while they were sleeping together,

Lee Ferriksson is born. And Lee Ferriksson is going to be pivotal. And when you say America, William, I mean, I think we should say Canada now, because it is actually sort of the Canadian coast that Lee Ferrexon is meant to have landed. Right. But, you know, it's sort of Newfoundland

and places like that where the whole sort of entry into what is now Canada, what is North America, by Leif Erikson takes place, Eric's son. But, but, but the Vinland Salgas are about Vin, which is wine, which comes from grapes. I'm presumably you can't grow grapes in Canada, can you? So I've done a deep dive on this,

because as you know, I've been doing a Canada series, which is coming up. Coming up. It is not, Eleanor, grapes, is it? It is something called the Butternut, which sent me down a rabbit hole I definitely didn't need in my life. Is this true, Eleanor? It is not but squash.

It's not. Squash. these are berries, aren't they? Butternuts. You're both right. How can we both be right? I can be right. How is this possible?

You're always right. Go on, Eleanor. You're both right in that. Eric has several children, all of whom seem to be involved in these expeditions to the edge of the North American continent, which is indeed sort of they end up,

they go first up to what's now Baffin Island. They call Hetlu lands, Stone Slab Island. This is around the year 1000. So again, when Christianity is sort of taking root, Leif Erikson traditionally very much a sort of Christian conversion figure as well, so important to say that. Then they come down the coast, they pass what they call Markland, which means forestland. It's probably Labrador.

And then they end up sort of around Newfoundland. And there we have the only archaeological evidence of essentially Norse buildings that they didn't sort of live in. We're going to go there in some detail in a bit. Ladsor Medo. Exactly. So we have sort of our points that we know they hit. According to these two sagas, it's when they get to this area that, yeah, they call Vineland, which is an area.

It's not a specific location that they find self-sewing wheat and wild grapes, as they call them, and wild vines and sort of salmon. And more importantly, it's not the Norwegians that discover the grapes. It's two Scotsmen. This is an important national pride point for my proud people. and hardly surprising at all. Are you going to have to include the Germans in there as well? Because according to one of the sagas...

Possibly a German in a different account, but two Scotsmen by name. Well, so there's Haki and there's Hekya, so a woman and a man, but they're two enslaved people who are on the journey with them, and they're sent in land and they come back with all this bounty. According to the other of those sagas... They come back with grapes. They come back with... So, right, where the butternuts come in...

Yes, please. Where's Lita's butternuts? Could he stop shouting grapes at you in that intimidating manner? It is all about the butternut, not squash. It's hard to feel a bit faint here. Push through, Ella. Tell us about the butter nuts. So the butternuts, this comes back to what we just slid in there as a little teaser,

which is this archaeological site, Lance of Meadows, where we have evidence that the Norse were around the year 1000. In fact, up to around 1,000, and it's either 22 or 23s. Some exciting new stuff has happened with Dendocronology. But around the turn of the millennium, we know they're there. And one of the things that archaeologists found in those layers, those archaeological layers, were butternuts. Now, butternuts do not grow on Newfoundland. You have to go further south.

You have to go to around the St. Lawrence River. And so that tells us that in all likelihood that Norse went further south than Newfoundland. They're not just there. And they bring these back. Being a persistent co-presenter here, I do want to just, though, press this point. The Vinland sagas, the Vin is vine, is he right? I mean, you can side with him. I just won't speak to you again.

So there is a slight argument here if it helps, which is if it's a long eye, so an eye with an accent, that would be like wine, you know, grapes. And if it's a short eye, then it could be something like fields or meadows. It's probably a long eye, but if that helps, it's bloody batten us. I think we should collaborate, we should write an academic paper on this and set the academic world on fire. Of fire. Okay. All right, but look, they're settling in Finland. So what does happen after Lee Ferriksen, who is a very Christian fellow, comes, does he come land and leave? Does he come, land, stay? What are his plans for this?

So someone sees it, and I think actually this is the one where they don't land and they get into trouble for it. I can't remember which one it is, but the people say, oh, again, we are talking about the sagas here. So we can't be absolutely certain. However, it's, It is interesting that when in the 60s, archaeologists first found, you know, this site. Lassau Meadow. Yeah, exactly. They partly found that because the sagas essentially told them where to go. And then the people living locally said, well, there's some interesting humps over there. You can go and look at that could well be in. So it's not that the sagas are, it comes back to what we're saying in the beginning.

They're not fiction, but they're not fact historically as we would think of it. And they tell us slightly different versions, these two sagas that together we call the Vinland sagas. the reason for that seems to be because they're both based on this oral pool of knowledge, not because they're copying from each other. So that makes it sort of a little bit tricky. And one of them, I think there's three voyages and the other there's six voyages, different people are doing different things. So we can't say for sure that we know the historical truth behind that.

But Leif is definitely set up as sort of the first one to go over there with his crew and he goes on this adventure and he names all the lands. And he ends up in this place, Vinland, where he, builds what are called Leif's Boudir, so his huts, essentially, as a good chance that those are what were found archaeologically, or at least that's where he first built them and maybe built a few more after that. There's another theory, though, isn't there, that what was discovered at Lansomadeau is in fact a sort of staging post on the way to something else. That it's not the settlement. No, there is no settlement. As far as we know, there is no settlement.

There's no graves, for example. Exactly. there's no, there's no middens full of rubbish, you know, people are not living here. When I was a student archaeologist, all I ever seemed to be digging was graves and middens. And neither of these were there. No, well, this is exactly it. And so, again, if we look at the sagas, that sort of confirms that. What we have is a series of trips, first maybe by Leif and then by, so you've got to think,

going back to the horny zombies, I don't want to bring up the horny zombies and get you started again. But the horny zombie, potentially, the druger, who is not in the hoiger. So you've got to remember Thorsten complains because she's trying to get in bed with him. He then dies. So Guzreither, his wife, then marries again. She marries Thorsten Kulsefni. And he's again one of these. So Guzreithr and Thorsten go over to Vinland.

And actually it's related. It's related to the horridorby story. Tungentially related. But it is. But that Guzreither, who was with the farmer's wife, the lugubrious farmer's wife, right? She then, according to the sagas, goes. on one of these voyages to the edge of the

North American continent and there she gives birth she gives birth to a child called Snorri and actually quite a lot of the saga of Eric the Red one of these Vinland sagas

is actually about her she's a much more interesting in some ways character there's a there's a story about her helping a little a seeress

called Thorubierk had to do sort of magic spells to try and ward away a famine in the winter so she's really cool but this is somebody who can read the runes

and can tell the future and can tell you what, you know, befalls you at the time of your death. That's what we're talking about. So that's sort of thing. We don't know exactly what they did. The idea is that they may have practiced a type of magic that they called saithers, which is also sort of, it's a very, it's really tricky. Because it's like, how do we actually know what that looks like? Can I read at this point a description that you have in one of your books of Thorberg, the pagan Cirrus? here she is. And there's own translation of the saga, and this is what, this is this woman, the Ceres.

She wore about herself a blue black mantle, which was covered in precious stones all the way down the hem. Around her neck she wore glass beads and on her head a black lambskin lined inside with white cat skin. In her hands she carried a staff with a knob on the top. coated in brass and set with precious stones. She wore a belt around her waist with a large purse attached, in which she kept the charms that she needed for her prophecies. On her feet she wore furry, calf-skinned boots, tied with long laces that had big pewter knobs on the end.

On her hands, she wore catskin gloves, which were white and furry. I love that. So powerful women figured in their own right in these stories. Oh, very much. Yeah. So, Eleanor, there's a landing of the Vikings. They've gone from Greenland. They've gone past the Labrador coast where they're getting wood. They've gone to Lance Omeadow or to the staging post in the north.

Is it on Labrador? Where is it? The staging post is Lancer Meadows. It's on the tip of Newfoundland. Newfoundland. And then they're heading further south to an area. aware both Anita's squash, whatever it is. Butternut, her butternuts and Anita's butternuts and my lovely wine and the grapes all grow. But in the middle of all this, they begin to run into the people they again call the scrawlings,

the scrawny people who are the Native America. We're talking about the indigenous people of those lands. And again, just to remind people if they didn't listen to their, last episode, the scrolling word, is a pejorative. It means as close to having a racist term as you can't get in those days, which just means weak, small, half man. It's just, it's a, it's a horrible insulting word. Yeah, exactly. And actually, what happens there is very similar to what happens in later encounters as well. It's, it reads like Captain Cook. Yeah, I mean, honestly, yeah, yeah, it's, it's crazy. It's, you know, they start off by trading and they trade furs and skins and, you know, for, for milk products.

The native people there want weapons, but they won't give it to them. Again, like Captain Cook. Yeah, exactly. It really is uncannily similar in some ways. And then it breaks down. And then we start to see people being killed. And it doesn't end well. And initially, and again, we're talking very much about the sagas here,

the sagas tell us that they wanted to settle. The Norse wanted to settle there. And by the end, it's very much we found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to use them. and off they go with everything that they can fit in their ships. And there's kind of fighting retreat. There's in the end a large army, a large indigenous army turn up shooting arrows. Yeah, depending on...

Which of the few sources. Exactly. But also, I mean, it becomes quite magically inflected at that point. You know, people are disappearing and appearing and there's strange artifacts and some bellowing. It's very much this sense of, you suspect that neither side knew exactly how to interpret the other What I find really striking is that there is this terminology that creeps in of civilising the natives or civilising these people. You'll pick them up, you'll take them away, you'll teach them the ways of civilisation and they will be better for it. I mean, that's colonialism 101, isn't it, really?

Yeah, so there are a couple of examples, certainly in Greenland as well where they, yeah, they take, you know, indigenous people on their boats. Like Joseph Banks taking the guy from Tahiti and bringing him back to London. Yeah, it's really interesting because the North diaspora is so culturally broad and varied and there's so much cultural assimilation in other parts. But here it's very weird, the sort of echoes of what comes later. I wonder if that is a brown skin thing, actually, because these are sort of the first kind of brown skin people they will have come across. The other places that they've gone to and sort of settled in in Europe, I suppose,

are mostly, and certainly the Anglo-Saxon forays they've made, are people who have the same colour skin as them. That's a good point. I haven't considered that. Looking in the broader scale, in the global scale of human history, this is an extraordinary moment because you have 10,000 years of migration going through Asia, up through the Bering Straits, into Alaska, through the North American continent. Then you have another whole volume of human history of the people going into Europe and the gradual westward drift of humanity. And then these final moments, and it's the Norse who closed that circle, the Norse take the European end of humanity, and with the meetings of the Scray Ling in Vinland,

recorded in your sagas at this moment in the year 1000, those two halves of the human race meet together for the first time. Yeah, that's extraordinary moment. It is, and we have the textual sources that suggest that, and we have the archaeological evidence that suggests that, which is incredible. Let's take a break here and then we're going to get returned to Greenland and the end of the Greenland North story in the second half. Welcome back. So, yes, let's talk about the decline of the Vikings in Greenland.

And it starts, I mean, it's climate change, isn't it? We talk about our demise as a human race and we talk about climate change. But this was a climate change where Greenland was going to get a lot, lot cold. and that would make it uninhabitable. Yeah, this is, it's really interesting. So there are probably a lot of factors coming into place, some internal to Greenland, some very much external. But what we start to see, so yeah, they're settling in Greenland around 985.

And things are good for a while. For quite a long while, we've got to remember their settlements there lasted almost 500 years. That's important. It wasn't, they weren't on a hiding to nothing there. That's the distance between Henry the 8th and us. Exactly. Exactly. And they were successful and they, you know, that's important. We can't just see the end as the inevitability. I think that's really, really important. And it's not initially that fragile. There's an economy that works. They're finding valuable things there that they can sell in return. They're giving polar bears to kings. I mean, they're doing all right. They're doing okay. It's exactly true. And so what we see is that that bigger, more southerly settlement, the eastern settlement that has its own bishopric. that's kind of three times the size of the other one. That's still pretty good, but around the middle of the 1300s, there seems to be trouble further up the coastline in the Western settlement,

which is always more marginal. You know, it's further north, so it doesn't have so good farming land. It has longer, colder winters. There seems to be the possibility that essentially, this is very new evidence that's coming out. They may have started to exhaust the walrus population. And so again, that's not so good. There's that kind of level of extinction, like the buffalo in the plains. Exactly. So this is literally, these papers are sort of coming out now. I think, I think kind of six months ago, the last one came out, where they're saying,

look, what we're starting to see is they're using females and sort of the younger ones. And you don't do that if you've got healthy males to take. And there's a really interesting text reported by someone called Eva Bauderson. And he lives in the Eastern settlement for 20 years, and he's managing the bishop's estate. there. And at some point, and this is sort of 13, well, he's sent to Greenland, I think, in 1341, but he's part of a party that go to the Western settlement to check out what's going on, because it doesn't seem quite right. And his account says, and it's a bit garbled, but it seems to be there's no one there. You know, essentially he says, and this is interesting,

but we don't have any other evidence for this. Now the Scrilinger, so, you know, the natives coming from north have destroyed the western settlement and there are still horses, there's still goats and cows and all the rest of it, and they're running wild, but we didn't find any people. This has uncanny echoes of the Swalter Rally in the first Elizabethan settlement when they come back and there's no one there. And there's the word of the local tribe, the Crohn, written on a tree and that's all there is. But this is it and it is fascinating. Yes, yeah.

A deserted settlement. Exactly. And it's like, but what's even weirder is, archaeologically, it doesn't quite fit with that. And, you know, perhaps it hadn't completely collapsed at that point. You know, it's quite a long area that it extends. It's all these fjords. So something's happening, but we can't quite tell from this what's going on. But we also start to see archaeologically is signs of famine. There's a really horrible site. And it is just one farmstead. But where they find the hunting dogs all butchered and the lambs and the car. This is the palm beneath the sand. This one is just down the road. They'd have known each other. They were neighbours. But the farm beneath the sand is fascinating.

Now, the reason it's called the farm beneath the sand is because essentially the glacier, there was this lovely river and they lasted there for hundreds of years. And they're probably one of the last big farms to leave. But the river sort of starts to, the silt starts to wash up all over their lands. And then eventually it's just buried. And it was too, I think it was too, caribou hunters in the 90s who found bits of wood sticking out and it turns out to be a north greenlandic loom. But they seem fine. I mean, for the most part, it looks like the Western

settlement. It was an orderly retreat and they probably ended up going down the coast into the eastern settlement. And when you say an orderly retreat, I mean, does it sort of map with the drops and temperatures? Are we talking about over a period of years or months or, you know, how long is this retreat taking? Well, I mean, it's essentially Greenland. being what it was, and particularly when you get further north towards the Arctic Circle, which the Western settlement was, you see, you know, you have a couple of bad years in a row, and things are really bad suddenly. You know, there's not a lot of margin for error.

And so they're always on the edge of what they can farm, the habitable land as hunters, as farmers, with their sort of northern European, early medieval or mid-medieval way of life. but you just get a few bad years in a row and things start to tip. And this specific site where you see butchered bones and it's all really nasty. Well, butchered dogs. I mean, that tells you a huge story. It's quite icky. I mean, that feels like a horror movie, that particular one.

But it's not all like that. And they seem to take everything that they can that's valuable, which suggests they're not. They haven't just all died there. So that is sort of, yeah, the mid-1300s. We've got to think there as well. There are things happening outside. So it is getting colder and getting icier.

But we've also got plague. We've got Black Death that hits Norway, their main trading partners, in the middle of the 1300s. We have it then hitting Iceland around 1400. And they're wiping out sort of a third of the population, something like that. And this is travelling around on their own ships, I guess, on North ships. Is it from, because it has to landmass hop, doesn't it? It's a great ocean expanse.

So the thing with Norway is it's very internationally connected. And by that point, you have places like Bergen that are big international trading pubs. So who knows where it is? Certainly, yeah, when you're going up to Iceland, I don't know if they know exactly where it came from. But Norway is a good possibility, but there are others. It doesn't seem to reach Greenland. Because if you think about it, that voyage is just long enough that if you've got the plague, you're probably not going to make it to the other side. However, with that sort of social, and political and economic breakdown in Norway in particular, you have fewer ships going backwards and forwards. And that's combined with the fact that you then have accounts saying, look, our old shipping routes between, say, Norway, Iceland and Greenland, they're icing up and it's stormier and we can't get. So you're seeing these different factors. So within Greenland itself, things are not good, but also they rely on that network. They have to be part of that diaspora. Because if you can't grow it, you need to import it. And if you trade is everything for this network.

Exactly. Exactly. In the same way that they were successful when walrus ivory was in demand. Then what you also see is walrus ivory sort of goes out of fashion a little bit. And anyway, you can, you know, are the trading routes start to open up? And so they can then get down to sort of elephant ivory, for example. So, you know, they're not so important. Yes, it's so yesterday.

Exactly. It's not fashionable anymore. It's not. Yeah, but it is. And so it's these combinations of factors. However, the Western settlement might have gone. The eastern settlement still survives. And our last textual records of life there are from the first decade of the 1400s.

But they're both really interesting. So the first one, again, I mean, this should be a film. It's absolutely extraordinary. 1407, and it's the burning of a man for witchcraft. And he's called Colgrimur. And it says that Colgrimur was burnt to death. In Greenland, for seducing another man's wife, we know that she's called Steynan. We know that she's the daughter of Fraffen, the lawmaker.

And it says, Colgrimur seduced her with black magic. And so he was burnt. And then a little later, the woman who was never the same afterwards, died as well. So we know this happens. Really interesting that economists, so Emily Oslo, I think she's mapped, that later which burnings and witch hunts seem to come at these periods of economic, and political and social crisis. When people are desperate, they are cruel.

I mean, that's a story that you can map all over Europe, aren't you? Exactly, exactly. But the next one is slightly better. So the following year, we have, so these accounts come from Iceland, they're sort of legal accounts from later on, but they're witnesses to a marriage.

And this brings us back to, I mentioned this church at Falsium, which has these thick, thick walls. The one of the thick walls. Exactly. They're still standing, apart from the roof. It's extraordinary. But this is this wedding that takes place,

The woman is called Sigridor, Bionstotter. She's Icelandic and she marries Thorsten. They're all called Thorsten. They're all called Thorsten. Everyone's called Thorsten. It's a good name. But what's interesting there is they return to Iceland. And we've got to think, okay, this is 1408.

So the plague has happened in Iceland as well. Lots of the population has been wiped out. What do we have land available? And so when we're thinking about, okay, well, we know, and this is what I end embers of the hands with, is the last graveyard in North Greenland and the last layers of burials, you know, the fact that their dresses survive, the last people to be laid in the ground survive. And yet the question is, well, who pulled those garments over the dead person's body who laid them in the ground?

And where did they go? And where were they buried? It's like they can't have just disappeared. No. So did they just go home? Well, this is it. What happened? Ellen, what happened?

You can't just leave us like this. What happened? I'm just going to have to leave you hanging. We don't know. I mean, the fact that those, the newlyweds, go back to Iceland, that could be a clue. You know, this idea that basically it's like any sort of remote, particularly island community, the young start to leave first. And so we might just be saying this isn't some big, exciting story. You see this in the Western Isles of Scotland today.

Exactly. It's slow bleed to death. It's not a cataclysm. It just drips, drips away. Yeah, that. So the impression is that you have a few last old people starving to death and the desertion of this entire world that for 500 years and supported what was in the community at the max? A thousand, two thousand people?

Yeah, a few thousand. Yeah, exactly. And not necessarily, I mean, everyone, yeah, it doesn't look good towards the end. But in terms of that starvation evidence, it's limited. It's actually more mysterious. In a way, if we just found a load in every farm. there were butchered hunting dogs and baby animals and bodies, human bodies, in a way that would be easier. And this is what's really interesting is that then, a few hundred years later, when the Danes and the Norwegians sort of look back to this part of the world, they think those people are still there.

They don't realize that the whole community's gone. And they send missionaries to convert them from, as they imagined, Catholicism to the new reformed religion. To the new religion. And do they also? in the later accounts, do they think of this whole Laf Erexon and the settlements of North America and the settlements of Greenland as their high point when they were the best Norse of a war? Or do they look at it as a failure? I mean, what do they, what do they say? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I don't, I think we have to think in terms of those

forays to the edge of the North American continent, they don't know it's a continent. They don't know there's more there. So we have bits and simple. pieces, you know, it's not just those sagas. We have sort of a little tiny paper trail that suggests that people still know about this and sort of in Scandinavia, they still know. But it's not got this huge significance because exactly, as you describe, the world's sort of joining for the first time across the North Atlantic, they don't realize that's what's going on. But in terms of a high point, more generally, I think that, again, it comes back to what we're saying about why are the sagas as textual evidence written down because they're looking back to a high

point, because they're now looking to a time where, you know, again, we have transformation. It's not sort of the death of the Viking Age, the death of the medieval Norse world. They transform into something else. But in the sense of certainly Iceland, and we've got to think they are the main storytellers, they are no longer the big players that they were. Norway is very much looming over them. And so, yes, I think in that sense, in terms of that body of textual evidence, they are looking back to a high point. Oh, wonderful. We're going to go back to that in the next episode. And we're going to deal with the second wave of Scandinavian colonization, the Danish colonization in 1700s,

when this missionary leaves Copenhagen to try and find the lost, north settlements, unaware that they've been disappeared from the face of the earth. For 200 years. Yeah, it's going to be a good one. And if you can't wait, you know, you can get a wall of the miniseries, all in one big gulp. You just have to go to Empirpoduk.com, Empirepodukukuk, and join our club. And there's a whole chat community and you get a newsletter and you get books like Eleanor Barrow Club's brilliant book on discount. That's what we do for you because we love the club members. Books plural.

So listen, just so grateful, Eleanor. You are one of our most unpredictable guests. this podcast. He took us to places and used language that have never heard on this podcast before. We've never had a knight of the polar bear order on the show before. Maybe they're all like that. All started when she was knighted with a, we should have known, with a walrus penis and it's just gone on since then. I feel you're both bad influences. I don't usually, I'm usually a very serious historian. She's a very serious academic. Anyway, listen, thank you very much for being with us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me,

Anita Arnhem And goodbye from me William Duremberg.