Origin of the Name “Greenland” and Its Justification
There can be no doubt that the Down East sea captain, who was so quick to perceive green vegetation on his fancied Green Island, came nearer the true explanation of Greenland’s name than the good prebendary of Bremen with his bluish-green Norsemen colored by the sea. It is pretty well understood that about 985 or 986 Eric Rauda (Eric the Red, or Ruddy), the first explorer and colonizer of this new region, applied the name at least partly as an advertisement of fertility and promising conditions for the encouragement of Icelandic colonists. This is the way Ari Frode (the Wise), the best informed man of Iceland, puts it in his surviving Libellus of the “Islendingabok” about a century later:[186]
This country which is called Greenland was discovered and colonized from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of the man, an inhabitant of Breidafirth, who went thither from here and settled at that place, which has since been called Ericsfirth. He gave a name to the country and called it Greenland and said that it must persuade men to go thither if it had a good name. They found there both east and west in the country the dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone implements such that it might be perceived from these that that manner of people had been there who have inhabited Wineland and whom Greenlanders call Skraelings. And this when he set about the colonization of the country was fourteen or fifteen winters before the introduction of Christianity here in Iceland, according to what a certain man who himself accompanied Eric the Red thither informed Thorkell Gellison.
This last was an uncle of Ari, a man of liberal and inquiring mind and one of Ari’s most valued sources of knowledge as to the affairs of earlier generations.
The passage has been often quoted, but that Eric was largely justified in his nomenclature is less generally known. Greenland to the intending colonists would naturally mean not the ice-enshrouded waste of the almost continental interior nor yet the forbidding cliffs of the eastern coast guarded by a nearly impassable floe-laden Arctic current, but the really habitable thousand-mile fringe of uncovered land along the southwestern shore, on the average fifty miles wide and occasionally much wider. It was partly shut in by forbidding headlands and perverse currents, but feasible of access when the true course was disclosed. Some parts of this region were, and still are, green with grass and bright with summer flowers. Nansen, who certainly ought to know, declares that the Greenland sites chosen would have seemed more attractive than Iceland to an Icelander. Rink, who was connected with the Greenland government for a full generation, mentions certain places with special approval and regards life in most parts of the inhabited region quite contentedly.[187] Professor Hovgaard tells us:[188]