More on medieval Greenland

Greenland is in the news, whether it, its people or its autonomous government want it to be or not. The background to the present furore can be read in an article from the Politico news website at Trump joins history’s long line of suitors coveting Greenland

I have posted in the past about research into the cause of the medieval eastern and western settlements in the south of the island. I came came upon a video about the medieval settlements in the territory which can be seen at  What Happened to Norse Greenland?

The Medieval Religion discussion group was sent an interesting link last week to an article about monastic foundations in Greenland and also later stories about monasteries in Greenland, which, according to the reports,  had thermal underfloor heating….. The far north seems to have been a fruitful breeding ground for rather fanciful stories of the unusual in that period. The link can be seen at Monastic orders in medieval Greenland

The Viking and Norse trade in Walrus Ivory

Recently published research into the trading networks established by Viking and Norse  seafarers across the North Atlantic in search of walrus ivory and their internal trade routes across Europe as far as Kyiv to sell this valuable commodity were reported upon recently by The Independent and on the Life Science website.

The period concerned stretches from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the period of the colonisation of the coasts of southern Greenland by Europeans.

Analysis of the physical makeup of surviving examples of such craftsmanship has been compared with that from existing walrus colonies on the coasts of Greenland and northern Canada. What has emerged is that the sources of the tusks were further afield than had been thought and this opened up the possibility of more contact between the Vikings or Norse and the Inuit of the sub-Arctic than had been thought previously.

The Independent article can be seen at Study of walrus ivory gives remarkable insights into how Vikings travelled

The longer and more detailed account from Live Science can be accessed at Medieval walrus ivory may reveal trade between Norse and Indigenous Americans hundreds of years before Columbus, study finds