Greenland got its name from a Viking exile running what might be history’s earliest marketing campaign. Around 985 CE, a Norse explorer named Erik the Red was banished from Iceland for killing two men. He sailed west, found a massive island, and deliberately gave it an appealing name to lure settlers. The Saga of Erik the Red records his reasoning in a single line: “Men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name.”
Erik the Red’s Real Estate Pitch
Erik the Red had already been exiled once before. Originally from Norway, he was banished to Iceland after his father committed manslaughter. Then, around 982 CE, Erik himself killed two men in a feud and was sentenced to three years of exile from Iceland. With nowhere else to go, he sailed west toward land that had been spotted by earlier Norse sailors but never explored.
He spent his exile years scouting the southwestern coast, and when he returned to Iceland, he needed colonists. The Old Norse name he chose, Grœnland (literally “green land”), was strategic. It worked. Erik returned to Greenland with a fleet of ships carrying settlers who established two main colonies: the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement. These communities survived for nearly 500 years.
Was Greenland Actually Green?
Here’s where the story gets more interesting than a simple trick. Erik wasn’t entirely lying. The southwestern fjords where he settled were, in fact, relatively green. He arrived during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 900 to 1250 CE), when temperatures in the North Atlantic were warmer than the long-term average. Lake sediment analyses from sites just two kilometers from Norse ruins show that the landscape before and during settlement was dominated by birch and alder scrubland. The Norse cleared some of this vegetation and introduced farming, raising cattle and sheep in the coastal lowlands.
So the name was exaggerated, not fabricated. The sheltered fjords of southwestern Greenland supported grass, shrubs, and enough pasture for livestock. The vast interior ice sheet, which covers about 80% of the island, was something the settlers never tried to cross or claim. Erik named the place based on the narrow green margins he actually lived on.
What About Iceland?
The schoolyard version of this story often includes a companion theory: that Iceland’s settlers deliberately chose a harsh name to discourage newcomers from crowding their lush island, while Erik did the reverse for Greenland. The reality is less coordinated. Iceland got its name from an early Norse visitor named Flóki Vilgerðarson, who had a rough first winter, watched ice drift through a fjord, and called the place “Iceland” out of frustration. There was no grand conspiracy between the two names. Iceland was named by a disappointed Viking, and Greenland was named by a cunning one.
Why the Settlements Disappeared
The green margins that made Erik’s name plausible didn’t last. Starting around the mid-13th century, the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, which persisted until roughly 1900 CE. Temperatures dropped, growing seasons shortened, and the ice sheet advanced. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that this ice sheet growth, counterintuitively, drove local sea levels up by about three meters in the settlement region. That rise flooded roughly 204 square kilometers of coastal land, exactly the low-lying areas the Norse depended on for farming and grazing.
The Western Settlement was abandoned by the 14th century. The last written record of Norse life in Greenland is a wedding at Hvalsey Church in the Eastern Settlement in the early 1400s, with radiocarbon dating suggesting people hung on for another half century after that. The causes were likely a combination of worsening climate, flooding, declining trade in walrus ivory (their main export), and shifting interactions with the Inuit communities in the north. By the mid-15th century, the Norse were gone.
Greenland Today Is Getting Greener
In an ironic twist, the name is becoming more accurate. Satellite data analyzed over the past three decades shows that vegetation coverage across Greenland has roughly doubled, increasing by 111%. Shrubs and grasses are spreading into areas that were previously bare rock or ice margin. Meanwhile, the ice sheet itself is melting at historically unprecedented rates. Meltwater runoff has increased by about 50% compared to pre-industrial levels, and 30% since the 20th century alone. These rates are, in the words of glaciologists studying ice core records stretching back centuries, “off the charts.”
None of this means Greenland is becoming a temperate paradise. The ice sheet still covers the vast majority of the island and contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by about seven meters if it fully melted. But the coastal edges are visibly transforming.
The Name the Land Already Had
It’s worth noting that Greenland already had people and a name long before Erik the Red showed up. The Inuit, who have lived on the island for centuries and make up the majority of its population today, call it Kalaallit Nunaat, which translates to “Land of the Kalaallit” (the Greenlandic Inuit people). The island is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic Inuit language, is its official language. The name “Greenland” stuck in European languages because Norse sagas were the texts that shaped European knowledge of the island, but for the people who live there, the land has always had its own name rooted in identity rather than salesmanship.