Before history is totally re-written, it is important to read and record historical facts before they disappear from our libraries and the internet.
Many times my husband has told me that Greenland used to be a green lush island with warm temperatures. It was appropriately named Greenland for that reason. Since he descends from the Vikings and from the Reindeer People, known as the Saami People, this is part of his ancestral history.
So, I did a duckduckgo.com search and discovered that Wikipedia had revised the history of Greenland and only talked about the glaciers, with nothing about the pleasant weather of 1000 A.D. Many other sites have also doctored the history of Greenland to omit the mention of fields of wheat and groves of fruit trees that covered much of Greenland.
Here are excerpts from a book written on Greenland.
The Greenland Vikings
Selected quotes from- The Last Viking: West by Northwest, by John N. Harris, M.A.(CMNS).
... Nevertheless, it likely follows that prior to this time - the " Viking Age " between 800 and 1100 CE especially - that a warmer climate prevailed along at least the eastern approaches to the Northwest Passage if not its entirety. Indeed, as Charles W. Moore notes ( Did 14th Century Scandinavian Explorers Visit Midwestern North America? ):
For the first century or so of their Greenland colonization, the Vikings and their descendants enjoyed a reasonably prosperous and pleasant life there. Greenland's climate c. 1000 A.D. was in an extraordinarily warm phase, and the name Eric chose for his new land may not have been quite the real-estate promoter's con-job as has been assumed. Even 350 years later, after a general global cooling had altered Greenland's climate for the worse, Ivar Bardson wrote that "On the mountains and lower down grow the best of fruits, as big as apples and good to eat. There also grows the best wheat that exists." Life in Greenland was hardly the rough outpost existence we might expect....
However by 1200, climatic change allowed the arctic ice pack to creep farther southward, making navigation in Greenland waters increasingly hazardous -- even in summer. Ships came now only sporadically, and some years none called at all. In 1261, the Greenlanders felt obliged to accept union with Norway and subjection to the Norwegian crown, in return for which two ships would be sent per year. This effectively shut the Hansa markets off from Greenland trade, and sometimes even the promised Norwegian vessels didn't make it through the ice. The colonies' decline accelerated. ...