NATIONAL POST – What’s the reason Greenland was colonized by Denmark?
The answer is one of the most insane reasons for a colony in history.
Denmark colonized Greenland because they were looking for Arctic Norsemen so that they could tell them to stop being Catholics.
By the 17th century, Europe had just finished up a devastating series of wars that saw the continent split between Catholics and Protestants, with Denmark falling on the Protestant side.
And for Danish missionary Hans Egede, this posed a problem. Like most Danes, he knew about the Norse sagas, which describe Viking expeditions to what is now Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland conducted around the year 1000.
We know now that the Greenland and Newfoundland settlements were already long-abandoned. Newfoundland pretty much immediately. The Greenland ones limped along for a few hundred years before disappearing without a trace.
But Egede didn’t know that. He figured, what if there was a lost world of medieval Viking colonists dwelling somewhere in Greenland?
But most importantly, if these Norsemen still existed, they were probably still Catholics, and someone should go tell them to instead be Lutherans.
And thus, in 1721, Egede leads an expedition to Greenland to find them.
But as they would learn, there were no Vikings, and there hadn’t been for hundreds of years …
