Review: The Vanished Settlers of Greenland by Robert Rix

Synopsis: For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.

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I came to this one through my reading of some of the medieval explorers - John de Mandeville, Marco Polo, Hugh Willoughby, Walter Raleigh and their ilk. And like many readers, I was fascinated by tales of lost cities of incalcuable wealth, whose demise was a mystery - shades of Atlantis, Crete, El Dorado, isolated worlds and utopias, and even Roanoke. So it was with keen anticipation that I was able to pick up this tome.

The scholarly tome is not a "search for" but a "look at" how this particular settlement of Greenland - or rather it vanished Norse settlement - became a cultural memory. This book provides a study of ".. how the memory of Greenland's "lost colony" was transmitted, interpreted and negotiated from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century." In short, it looks at the Wests fascination and imagination of the Arctic and its peoples; it is a study of European misconceptions, legends, folklores; and of how contemporary scholarship fueled the germination of these legends. Rix then examines the cultivation of memories of the past and how they are often driven by national and geographical motivations before considering the "master trope" of the fabled lost settlement.

For those looking for something different - an analysis of the European interpretations of history and an idealised, poetic imagery of a land and its people that metamorphosed into fantastical whimsy presented as fact, then this is for you.