By 1000 AD, the island of Greenland was essentially uninhabited, but two waves of migrants were on their way. One of them, the Normans, sailed the rough Atlantic on Icelandic rooks; the other, the Eskimos, sea hunters, travelled down the coast from northwest to south on their narrow umiaks.

The Normans were led by Erik the Red, a Norwegian who had been implicated in several murders, was deprived of his right to live in his homeland and settled in north-west Iceland. Erik Redhead was characterized by a hard, fiery temper. In a wild brawl, he killed a neighbor and his two sons. After this crime, Erik had to flee the island.

He had previously heard of a land lying to the west of Iceland. He sailed there and lived there for three years, thoroughly exploring the south of the island, which he christened Greenland, before returning to Iceland. Having learnt about the green island from Erik, 700 settlers left Iceland in 986 on 25 heavily laden ships loaded with grain and livestock. Only 14 ships made it to their new homeland. The rest either turned back or crashed on the rocks off Cape Farvel.

As a pioneer, Erik chose the best place for his homestead, on the banks of a deep, quiet fjord named after him. Other Icelanders settled nearby; gradually, a large, widely scattered settlement grew up and was named ‘Esterbugd’ (East Village). A second town, Vesterbyugd (West Village), was founded 400 kilometers north of it. Thus began a life that lasted five and a half centuries on the virgin green land of southern Greenland.

Eskimos appeared in the vicinity of Greenlandic settlements only at the end of their history. At the time of the Norman migration, the Eskimo camps were far away, many thousands of kilometers to the north. Eskimos first appear in Greenlandic annals in the 13th century - the settlers of Vesterbygd met them on one of their multi-day hunting trips far to the north - in the area of Disco Bay.

We do not know what kind of relations developed between the Normans and the Eskimos when the latter descended southwards in the beginning of the 14th century, as it was during this period that European travelling to Greenland, and therefore written sources about the Greenlanders, became extremely rare.

In 1341, the descendants of Erik the Red sent Ivar Brodson with armed men to Vesterbygd, from where there had been no news for a long time - the people of Vesterbygd suspected that the settlement had been attacked by ‘skrellings’ (i.e. ‘dwarfs’ - the name given to short northern Eskimos in the south of the island). When Brodson reached Vesterbygd, he saw a strange picture: feral cattle roamed the streets, the town was empty, there were ‘neither Christians nor pagans’.

Ivar could not solve the mystery of the abandoned settlement, nor could modern archaeologists. All they could find out was that the people left the settlement in a great hurry, not because of hunger or cold (large supplies of food and fuel were found), but because of something else entirely. Several houses were burnt down, but no skeletons with signs of violent death were found in the perfectly preserved burials and among the ruins.

There are two hypotheses to explain the departure of the inhabitants of the settlement. They could have been taken away by force by Eskimos or the settlers themselves moved to Vinland (Newfoundland) or Markland (Labrador) discovered by Eric's son Leif Happy. But these hypotheses are not based on solid evidence. No skeletons of Norman or mixed types have been found in the excavations of Eskimo burials. Greenlanders' settlements have not been found on these islands either.

Against the resettlement version is also the fact that it would have been easier for the Westerbyugds to move to the flourishing Österbügde, but they not only did not do so, but also did not inform their friends or - even more strange for Catholics - the church authorities, their bishop, of their plans to move.

Another century later came the fall of Esterbügd. The largest city of the island had been isolated from Europe since 1411. There were many reasons for this - the ‘black death’ in Europe (plague epidemic), and the decline of Danish navigation under the pressure of the powerful Hanse, and the export of Russian fur and African ivory, which made the risk of dangerous ‘Greenlandic voyages’ for the Europeans for fox skins and walrus tusks unjustified.

Nevertheless, the settlement, forgotten in Europe, fought for the right to live for more than a century. This struggle was obviously somewhat facilitated by occasional visits of European ships. That there were such visits is evidenced by the perfectly preserved in permafrost garments from Greenlandic burials of the 15th century. Among the hoods with long plaits, pointed shoes, and heavily flared dresses, some were found that came into fashion only in the second half of the 15th century.

Little is known about how the settlement lived during the last period in its history. A papal bull of 1448 speaks of the decline of the Greenlandic church after ‘30 years ago pagans destroyed many churches and took the parishioners captive’.

Eskimo tales also provide some information. They say that pirates on three ships attacked the ‘Norwegians’. And although the townspeople drove the robbers away and even seized one ship from them, a year later they returned ‘with a whole fleet’, killed many people and seized some cattle. The attack was repeated the third year, but the Eskimos rescued the women and children, taking them from the settlement with them.

By autumn the northerners returned, but found the settlement burnt and empty, after which the women and children stayed with them. Much in this story is plausible, but much is contrary to the truth: for example, no traces of fire and military destruction were found in the excavations of Esterbyugd.

Other Eskimo tales speak of a battle at Kakertok, where the last Normans were killed. In any case, when the ships of the Danish squadron anchored off the island in 1474, the sailors were met only by Eskimos. The dilapidated houses and churches were empty.

The weak point of both mutually exclusive legends is the same absence of skeletons with signs of violent death in excavations. Recently, a third version has emerged - about the voluntary resettlement of the last descendants of the Normans. It is based on a striking fact - in the excavations of Greenlandic churches found no temple inventory. Such items are found in the ruins of houses, but the churches are empty, as if they had been swept away.

We can assume that the valuables were stolen by pirates - but where did the bulky font and crucifixes, which were of no interest to the robbers, go? In the excavations of Eskimo camps there were found a lot of household items of urban origin - and not a single church item! It is logical to assume that the temple utensils were taken with them by those to whom they were most dear - namely, parishioners leaving the town for good.

The skeletons found in the excavations testify to the Grenadier stature of the Normans; men of 185 cm height were not uncommon, women were more diminutive, averaging 156 cm. But later finds show that the Greenlanders had begun to degenerate, with some of them presenting a terrible picture of malnutrition, deformity, disease and early death. These descendants of the once tall, strong, energetic Normans were all short, puny and sickly men, with small skulls.

And the two most smartly dressed women had curved spines and narrowed pelvic bones. It was hardly possible for them to bring a healthy and viable child into this nightmare world in which they were living their own miserable existence. In their ridiculously fashionable clothes, which also served as a shroud, they seemed a pathetic symbol of a declining culture and a doomed race.

Yet the question of whether the gloomy interpretation outlined above should be accepted remains open. The number of skeletons found is small, and they are poorly preserved. The skulls, thought to be small, are in fact quite comparable to those of the inhabitants of Son and Jøren in Norway, from which most of the colonists originated. Similarly, the conclusions about the small stature and puny nature of the Greenlanders cannot be called unquestionable.

In 1540, a German sailing ship was marooned by bad weather in South Greenland. The skipper managed to steer the ship into the calm waters of a long fjord covered by rocks. On board the sailing ship was one Jon, nicknamed the Greenlander, who had previously been to Esterbygde, Jon was nicknamed the Greenlander because his ship had been carried to the shores of that country at least three times. The sailors travelled in dinghies to the shore, where houses and barns for drying fish were visible.

When they reached the wharf, the sailors went ashore and found a man, dressed in a fur jacket and cloth trousers, lying on his back at the wharf. Turning the islander over on his back, the sailors saw that he was dead. Beside him lay a European-style hat and a knife, badly thinned by long use. The sailors took the knife with them, and when they returned home they told of a strange village at the end of the world whose only inhabitant was dead.