Postcard from Greenland

Following a mystery across the Atlantic

I’m in Greenland for a couple of weeks, working on the book and researching what’s become one of my obsessions: the Vikings of Greenland. The Vikings—or better yet, the Norse—came to the enormous island in the late 10th century and began building farms, raising livestock, and hunting walrus, seals, and foxes.

The Greenlandic Norse were frontier folk, living at the remotest edge of European society. The climate was harsh, the winters long and dark. And yet the Norse thrived here for nearly 500 years. Then, in the middle of the 15th century, something happened, and the farms began to blink out one by one until all of the Norse were gone.