The Norse Greenland colony lasted about 470 years before it vanished. Its last documented event was a routine social occasion — the kind that anywhere else in medieval Europe would not have been recorded at all. What was it?
The Hvalsey Church wedding of 16 September 1408 — between Thorstein Ólafsson and Sigríd Björnsdóttir — is the last documented event in the Norse Greenland record. It survives because the parties later moved back to Iceland and registered the marriage there; the certificates were preserved. After 1408 the colony went silent. When Hans Egede sailed for Greenland in 1721 looking for surviving Norse descendants, he found only ruins. The Hvalsey Church itself — a small stone structure built around 1300 — still stands almost intact, one of the best-preserved medieval European buildings in the Americas.
Read the full story →Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent three years exploring the next island to the west. He returned, organised a settler expedition of 25 ships, and gave the new territory the most successful real-estate name in medieval European history.
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