Why Is Greenland Called Greenland? The Quote Is Secondhand

The story is always told the same way. Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland around 982 after a feud that left men dead, spends three years of outlawry mapping an unknown coast to the west. He sails home and recruits settlers by giving the place a name it has not earned. Men will desire much the more to go there, he tells them, if the land has a good name. An outlaw, an ice sheet, and the oldest advertising slogan in Europe.

Most of that holds up. The quotation is the part that does not.

Why is Greenland called Greenland?

Because Erik the Red chose a name that would sell the place. The earliest surviving account of the naming, written around 1122 by the Icelandic priest Ari Thorgilsson, says Erik called the land Greenland and said people would be more eager to go there because the land had a good name. No account survives from Erik’s own century.

The line everyone quotes has a chain of custody

Ari Thorgilsson, known as Ari the Wise, was born in 1067 or 1068 and compiled Islendingabok, the Book of the Icelanders, between roughly 1122 and 1133. Its Greenland chapter dates the settlement to “fourteen or fifteen winters before Christianity came here to Iceland”, and the same book puts that conversion at 1000, which lands the voyage around 985.

So the oldest text is about 140 years late, set down by a man born roughly eighty years after the ships sailed. Ari does not hide it. In the same sentence he says where the dating came from: what one man told Thorkell Gellison.

The wording everybody repeats is later still. “Men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name” is Eiriks saga rauda, chapter 2, in J. Sephton’s translation, from a saga composed generations after Ari was in his grave. A quotation can pick up a speaker it never had: Rousseau recalled the brioche answer of an unnamed “great princess” some fifteen years before Marie Antoinette was born, and let them eat cake was first tied to her in print in the 1840s.

Every retelling puts that sentence in Erik’s mouth. The oldest surviving version is a twelfth-century priest’s paraphrase, and the priest is careful to say where his information came from: one man, speaking to Thorkell Gellison.

The green was real and it is still there

About 80 percent of the island lies under the ice sheet, which the National Snow and Ice Data Center measures at 1.7 million square kilometres, or 656,000 square miles. The fifth that is not includes sheltered fjord pastures in the southwest, and Norse farmers worked them for almost four centuries.

UNESCO inscribed that landscape in 2017 as Kujataa, described in the listing as “the earliest introduction of farming to the Arctic, and the Norse expansion of settlement beyond Europe”. The protected area takes in Qassiarsuk, where Erik’s own estate at Brattahlid stood. A sales pitch can be true and still be a sales pitch. A place name can also start as one person’s line and outlive everyone who heard it, which is roughly how Tennessee ended up known for its volunteers.

Western Greenland was cold when the Norse arrived

The standard defence of the name is that the whole region really was greener in the tenth century, during the Medieval Warm Period. The glacial record for western Greenland says otherwise.

Nicolas Young, Avriel Schweinsberg, Jason Briner and Joerg Schaefer published beryllium-10 dating of moraines in Science Advances on 4 December 2015, including a moraine system in the Uigordleq Lake valley in western Greenland. Those glaciers sat “at or near their maximum LIA configurations” through the Medieval Warm Period, “between ~975 and 1275 CE”. Little Ice Age extent, centuries before the Little Ice Age.

Their conclusion is blunt about the geography: “the western North Atlantic region remained cool, whereas the eastern North Atlantic region was comparatively warmer during the MWP”. The medieval warmth people are picturing happened on the other side of the ocean.

The forested Greenland study is off by 450,000 years

The second defence cites a real paper and loses its date. In 2007, Eske Willerslev and twenty-nine co-authors published DNA recovered from the base of the Dye 3 ice core in Science: alder, spruce, pine and the yew family, along with butterflies, moths, beetles and flies, all from silty ice beneath about two kilometres of the southern Greenland ice sheet. A boreal forest on Greenland, recovered as molecules.

The paper is equally clear that “all four dating methods give overlapping dates for the silty ice between 450Ka and 800Ka” - 450,000 to 800,000 years ago. That forest was gone long before anatomically modern humans existed, let alone Norse ones. A citation can travel on how good it sounds rather than on what it says, which is much how the eye on the dollar bill picked up a secret society it never belonged to.

Nobody swapped the names

The tidiest version of the story has the Norse naming Iceland ugly to repel settlers and Greenland pretty to attract them, one trick with two matching halves. The names came from different men, generations apart.

Name	Who named it	When	What the source says
Iceland	Hrafna-Floki Vilgerdarson	c. 868	Named after a fjord full of drift ice, per Landnamabok
Greenland	Erik the Red	c. 985	Named so people would be “more eager to go there”, per Islendingabok

Floki wintered at Vatnsfjordur, climbed the mountain above his camp, saw Isafjordur choked with drift ice and named the whole island for it. Greenland was still unsettled and unnamed, and Erik’s voyage was more than a century off. Two unrelated namings get matched into a pair in the retelling, the way nobody can settle where the word cocktail came from and everyone keeps a favourite version anyway.

In Greenlandic the country has a name of its own, Kalaallit Nunaat, land of the Kalaallit, with no green in it. Underneath the branding anecdote sits a real pasture at Kujataa, a real sales line, one priest’s paraphrase of it fourteen decades on, and a forest that died half a million years before there was anybody around to name anything. Strictly FYI.