--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> :
>
> --- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > But whether we call the Greenland Norse a
> > civilization or not is really
> > besides the point.
>
> I'm interested in this region/period of history.
> Does
> Diamond discuss or allude to the type of relations
> that existed between the Norse and the natives (or
> "skralings," as they called them)?
Yes. He points out that "skraelings" is a pejorative term that means "wretches" in Norse. He discusses why the Greenland Norse failed to adopt the superior (for living in Greenland) technologies of the Inuit -- kayeks, harpoons, and the like -- and persisted in Scandanavian-style farming and even raising the world's smallest cattle in a land that was totally unsuited for that sort of agriculture. Lots of other stuff, it's a very interesting discussion.
Clearly they did
> a
> great deal of trading back and forth.
Not so clearly, according to Diamond.
The Icelandic
> sagas (short relevant extract from the Greenland
> Saga
> below) describe them as doing a great deal of mutual
> killing. ;) But it's a saga, and the desciption
> concerns events in what is now Canada, not
> Greenland.
According William Ian Miller, using the Sagas to write about Iceland, a lot of the sagas, which means stories, are probably reasonably reliable histories.
Diamond says that that there are few references to the "skraelings" in Greenland Norse literature -- I mean, like three references in 400 years, and at least one of these is a brief reference to a Norse attack on a small group of the the Inuit (if that is who these "skraelings" were -- there were other peoples too, whom the Inuit probably exterminated.)
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com