With the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump actively pledging to annex Greenland from Denmark, it would be an understandable question to ask why Greenland is Danish in the first place. Scandinavia was never known for its colonial empire, which never amounted to much more than a handful of trading posts or tropical islands. And yet, one of the world’s largest islands remains in the hands of a tiny European nation of just six million people.
The answer is one of the most bizarre stories in the history of European colonization. Canada was colonized in search of land and furs. South America was colonized in search of precious metals. But Greenland was colonized because some missionaries thought the island was home to a lost world of medieval Vikings who needed to be converted to Lutheranism. Watch the video or read the transcript below to learn more.
Like a lot of people, you’ve probably found yourself paying closer attention to Greenland than usual. In which time you’ve probably learned that it’s a territory of Denmark.
Which is why Denmark is one of just two countries that share a land border with Canada. There’s the United States, obviously. And then there’s Hans Island, an Arctic rock between Nunavut and Greenland that is neatly divided between Canada and Denmark.
But why Denmark? The whole Western hemisphere was basically colonized by four countries: Spain, Portugal, France and Britain. And yet, right up here, just next to a bunch of islands colonized by Britain, you have this one island that was colonized by Scandinavians, of all people.
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.
The Danes set up a trading monopoly with Greenland – one that would hold for 200 years – but initially, the effort wasn’t really expected to make much money. Greenland didn’t really have a lot of resources. But it didn’t matter: The whole point was to find and convert the lost Vikings.
But as they would learn, there were no Vikings, and there hadn’t been for hundreds of years.
So, the missionaries just stayed and converted the Inuit native people instead. Three hundred years later, Greenland is still Danish.