SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Observations on the Discoveries of the Norsemen 177
the main outline of the history of the settlement on the
basis of all the available sources. The Greenlanders set
up a republic in the same way as the Icelanders did, and
that form of constitution worked in accordance with its
principles, just like everything else. It is wrong to say, as
Professor Jones does, that "the Republic, like the white
man in Greenland, could in theory go on for ever" It
was inevitable that monarchic rule of some kind should
supersede the Republic in Greenland, and this happened
when it became a Norwegian province in 1261. There is
on the other hand no satisfying scientific explanation as
to why the white race disappeared.
Climatic deterioration and the reluctance of sailors to
make the voyage must undoubtedly have played less of
a part in bringing about the end of the settlement than
Professor Jones thinks. The Greenlanders, like the
Icelanders, tried to be self-sufficient - indeed, they had
to be. They can hardly have disappeared because one
small ship, which carried mostly luxuries, stopped running
from Norway every other year. We may gather from the
sources that shortage of iron was one of their most pressing
problems, even though they worked bog-iron to some small
extent. We hear of small sea-going ships in which they
had to bind the planking together because of the lack of
ship-nails. We see from the Grsenlendinga saga that they
went to Markland for timber, and they must have sailed
there every now and then until towards the middle of the
fourteenth century. The assertion on p. 52 that "timber,
iron and corn could not in the nature of things be obtained
from Iceland" is an exaggeration because contemporary
documents show that the Icelanders were in fact exporting
corn in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. On the
other hand there does not seem to have been much traffic
between Greenland and Iceland as the thirteenth century
progressed, and after the Black Death came to Norway
the sailings from there became very irregular. It was
fateful that, just at this time, the Skrcelings began to
encroach on the Greenland settlements.