The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy - Hardcover

Rix, Robert W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009359479 ISBN 13: 9781009359474

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Synopsis

For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.

About this title

About the Author

Robert W. Rix is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is widely known for his prolific publication profile in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. This includes areas such as politics, religion, language, nationalism, and print culture. Rix has also published on earlier periods, for example The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (2014).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009359479
• ISBN 13: 9781009359474
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 217