When I left college one summer I went to Iceland and met a girl whose Dad owned a trawler that caught big fish off the coast of Greenland. I did some trips on the boat as an extended part of the family and despite being British and there recently having been a cod war!
Greenland was a dangerous place to go ashore and the boat had a stash of penicillin for those who’d been with Greenlandic girls who met them for sex. My memories of Greenland in the early 1980s were of a country that had connections with sailors , with American who had soldiers and with Denmark who owned them.
It was a place where Inuit men farmed for seals and lived a little in the way of benefits and something off their women. To suppose that Greenland is an easy place today is difficult for me to imagine, there are less people living in the world’s largest island than in the Isle of Man.
But we were always aware that it held the keys to other places. The Viking stories suggest that it was called “Green” to get those from north west Europe to venture west of Iceland , to get to Vineland which is generally thought Newfoundland.
Many Norse confused Iceland with Greenland and so it seems does Trump, he has fallen for all the Norse lies but most especially Greenland
So Greenland is a lie and so it seems to remain, Nowadays the Greenland lie as promulgated yesterday is that it was owned by America (it has always been Danish) and that today it is surrounded by Chinese and Russians boats that will move in and steal its huge natural resources that will appear from under the ice as it melts.
It will be owned again by America, in Donald Trump’s imagination, and just how strange that imagination is , was available to people who tuned into his hour of fantasy in Davos.
It sent my imagination back to the Greenland that I never landed on (I was terrified of venereal disease). It was a place surrounded by whales and dolphins and huge halibut and cod and haddock and of course seals who keep everybody warm.
Suddenly it is a huge island which if owned by America would presumably make America bigger than any Western country and capable of taking advantage of an ice cap it could consider itself capable of melting with its huge use of power.
When I was in my late teenage years, I thought of Iceland and Greenland as they were when the Sagas were written. I read English at university and believed that the English language was more nobly derived from these Sagas and Icelandic than French and Latin.
Now I am in my mid sixties and have lived a life apart from Greenland, until these past few weeks. The Vinland Saga is a myth that grips the mind of Trump, who has much in common with Viking warlords! I fear he will find Greenland no more hospitable that they did, despite its name!
If you want something a little more reliable than my memories, you might try this. – the Vinland Sagas.
The picture above and below is what’s thought the roots and routes of Sagas
