This chapter discusses a group of texts which can be categorized as ‘diaspora sagas’: sagas which take place largely in Greenland, Vínland, the Faroe Islands and Orkney, regions settled as a result of migration westward from Norway in the Viking Age. This group comprises four sagas, Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, and two þættir, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs and Grœnlendinga þáttr. The chapter discusses the rationale for considering these texts as a group, arguing that they are distinctive for their close focus on the diasporic experience and identifying the most prominent shared themes in these sagas, including settlement and voyaging, the political evolution of the diasporic communities and their relationship with the Norwegian kings, and the process of conversion to Christianity. It suggests that these sagas share an interest in the complex identities of their characters, which are explored in relation to Scandinavia, other regions of Europe and indigenous inhabitants encountered in the Vínland sagas. Finally, the chapter discusses the narrative mode of the diaspora sagas and outlines what is known of their origins, authorship and preservation.

The first part of the chapter examines how the loss of the Christian colony became a prism through which it was possible to reflect on the two globalising European projects of the nineteenth century: colonialism and Christian mission. The ‘lost colony’ in Greenland came to function as a mirror for contemporary anxieties about the danger of settling far from European metropoles. Analysis of available sources shows that this fear was fed by anecdotal evidence that the European Greenlanders had lost their Christian faith and descended into savagery. The second part of the chapter explores a series of significant themes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of the Christian mission in Greenland. As the old colonists had been Christian and new missions were now making progress, a ‘fall-and-restoration’ structure became embedded in several texts. The most notable example is the British poet James Montgomery’s Greenland (1819), a text neglected in modern criticism despite the fact that it enjoyed significant popularity in the Romantic period.

The chapter focusses on post-1721 developments, analysing the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s struggle to fit the new observations he made in Greenland into the framework of established ideas promoted in the texts he had read prior to his arrival. The transition from reading about Greenland in books to observing the land in situ led to a crisis of representation as the archive of knowledge that had been stored up over the centuries became difficult to reconcile with experience. The most significant error perpetuated in several texts was the idea that the Eastern Settlement was located on the east coast. Rather than dismiss the many expeditions that sought to reach this fabled settlement as irrelevant to the colonial project that eventually developed on the west coast, the chapter proposes that the search for the settlers and their resource-rich lands is significant for understanding Denmark’s political, religious, and commercial ambitions in Greenland. Attention is also paid to the maps Egede drew of Greenland as they are visual records of how traditional perceptions were allowed to coexist with new empirical data.

The Introduction presents the themes, scope, and arguments of the book, and it gives an overview of its structure. There is also a note on terminology.

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

This chapter provides a snapshot of the recent history of Indigenous political movements in the circumpolar north. Over the past six decades or so, Indigenous peoples across the Arctic have pushed forward with political action and initiatives that have aimed to secure national and international recognition of their rights, land claims, the granting of autonomy, and participation in many of the decision-making processes and institutions of governance that affect their lives and homelands.1 Indigenous peoples’ organizations have also become major actors in Arctic environmentalism and international circumpolar affairs.

This chapter considers the historical development of how Greenlanders acquired political participation in their own affairs. As of 2021, most political parties in Greenland see independence as the ultimate goal. The Self-Government Act of 2009 grants the inhabitants of Greenland the right to this independence.1 My argument here is that a historical view reveals that independence can be seen as the logical next step from the current self-government. This has been attained through continual negotiations between Greenlanders and Danes since the middle of the nineteenth century, and through decolonization and independence processes as seen elsewhere in the world.

Writing in 1916, shortly after his appointment as ‘Geologist in Charge of Explorations’, the celebrated Canadian geologist and explorer Charles Camsell reflected on the prospects for development in Canada’s ‘unexplored’ Arctic: ‘It is to the mining industry more than any other that we must look for co-operation and assistance in the exploration of our northern regions.’1 Camsell hailed the prospects for mining to launch the transformation of remote, sparsely populated Arctic and Northern regions into prosperous, modern Euro-Canadian settlement frontiers. Nearly forty years later, reflecting on his geological career and the surge in mineral development activity in Canada’s north in the decades around World War II, Camsell confidently concluded, ‘To my mind the whole future of the North country depends primarily upon its mineral wealth.’2 Camsell’s visions of mining’s capacity for transforming the Arctic both echoes and anticipates the ideology of ‘frontierism’ characteristic of industry boosters and state agencies around the circumpolar Arctic.

Greenland has been peopled from the west by several different groups and only once – in the late tenth century ad – from the east, this time by Norse farmers from northern Europe. Unlike the mobile Arctic hunters, the Norse settlers were sedentary, and the society they established in southwest Greenland was based on the natural vegetation, hunting, and trade with their homelands. For almost 500 years the Norse population in Greenland thrived, and then it vanished for reasons not yet fully understood. Several explanations have been put forward: that the small Norse society failed because of inflexible social and economic strategies,1 or fell victim to a combination of unfortunate circumstances,2 or (as recently argued) suffered from organized and systematic violence by invading Inuit.

When and why did the originally tropical being, Homo sapiens, enter the circumpolar north? What attracted human societies to this part of the Earth characterized by extreme seasonal variability, long periods of darkness, rough and cold weather, barren tundra, high mountains, ice caps, and vast areas of sea ice? Through analyses of ancient material remains such as stone-built structures, artefacts and bones preserved in cultural layers on dwelling sites, Arctic archaeology provides some insights into these basic questions about the expansion of human societies into the circumpolar north and how they managed to thrive there for millennia.

Mining relies on the mobilization of emotions but also fosters them. Potentiality, hope, excitement, shame, anger, concern, and despair are emotions that are activated when mining is on the agenda. Acknowledging affects and emotions as an essential social driver within planning, advocating, modifying, or banning industrial resource extraction, the chapter focuses on the consultation process in Narsaq, South Greenland for a mining project at the Kuannersuit Plateau pursued by Greenland Minerals. With this study we go beyond the created boundaries of the participatory space and study which voices, atmosphere, and understanding of time are made possible within the apparatus of the presented mining project. In this case the atmosphere of peace and good governance promoted by the organizers of the hearing aimed to instill a feeling of trust and belief in a future for Narsaq based on the mining project. However, insecurity, anger, and lack of trust prevailed among the audience. The meeting ended in frustration and lack of communication. The conclusion identifies points of attention that stakeholders should be aware of and take seriously in order to meet the ideal of ‘best practice’.

For speakers of Arctic Indigenous languages, intense language contact has come as a result of colonization, leading to extensive shift and loss across different Arctic communities. Recent years have seen contact and shift intensified by a nexus of interrelated factors, or stressors, with urbanization, climate change, and the ongoing effects of colonization being among the most significant. The case study of the multilingual language ecologies in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia shows how these factors affect language vitality and overall wellbeing. Greenland provides a contrastive example as the local ecologies differ considerably. The net impact of stressors on Arctic Indigenous communities has been language shift, but the communities are currently experiencing widespread interest in and commitment to increasing language vitality and usage, a pan-Arctic movement of revitalization and resilience to build language and cultural sustainability.