The Vanished Settlers of Greenland

In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy

Robert Rix

For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished, and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.

Robert Rix is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is widely known for his prolific publication profile in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. This includes areas such as politics, religion, language, nationalism, and print culture. His previous books include The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature

Advance praise

‘The Vanished Settlers of Greenland embeds speculation about the fate – or survival – of the Norse medieval Greenlandic colony in a series of historical contexts, demonstrating the long and deep roots of the European imaginative fascination with the Arctic and its peoples. Moving adeptly between political and cultural history, ethnography, literary criticism and post-colonial critique, Rix’s study is indispensable to understanding Greenland’s colonial past – and its changing present.’

Carolyne Larrington, University of Oxford