Pre-Modern Seminar No 2: Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist

On Wednesday November 24th Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist will give a talk called:

"The Medieval Norse Settlements on Greenland"

Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist is researcher at the Department of History at Stockholm University and secretary for the Center of Medieval Studies at Stockholm University.

He has sent us the following abstract of his lecture:

"The lecture provides an overview of the medieval Norse society on Greenland from a historical, archeological, environmental and climatological perspective. Norse people from Iceland settled as pastoral farmers in the fjords of southwestern Greenland c. AD 985. Two major settlement areas emerged: the Eastern Settlement in a relatively fertile region of meadows and birch forest at the edge of the inland ice sheet in the extreme south and the Western Settlement in a much harder arctic dwarf-scrub environment further up the coast. The Norse Greenland society numbered a couple of thousand settlers at its peak and was a European medieval society in miniature with its own episcopal see, stone churches, monasteries and a legal assembly. The Norse Greenlanders were not merely farmers, they also engaged in remarkably long annual hunting expeditions up to northern Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic to obtain valuable trading goods for trade with Europe. Despite being remote and marginal, the Norse Greenland society flourished for several hundred years. During the Late Middle Ages, however, something occurred, approximately at the time of the North European agrarian crisis. The Western Settlement became extinguished c. AD 1350. Approximately one hundred years later the Eastern Settlement had also ceased to exist. The former Norse pastoral farming settlements were now solely occupied by arctic-adapted Inuit hunters."

The seminar will take place in the library of Skandinavistika (Ülikooli 17) at 18.15.
 

Welcome!