History · Greenland

Greenland: The Ice Island

The world's largest island — waves of Arctic peoples, a Norse colony that vanished, two centuries of Danish monopoly, and an Inuit nation now edging toward independence

By Worldlore Editorial · 10 September 2026

A container ship in a harbour below the low colourful buildings of Nuuk, snow-streaked mountains behind
Nuuk, Greenland's capital, founded as a Danish mission colony in 1721. Around 57,000 people live on an island of 2.16 million square kilometres, most of it under ice. (Gordon Leggett / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0)

An island of edges

Greenland is the largest island on Earth, and about four-fifths of it is a permanent ice sheet up to three kilometres thick. People live only on the ice-free coastal fringe — around 57,000 of them, nine in ten Greenlandic Inuit, the Kalaallit. It is geographically part of North America, politically part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and, since it left the European Community in 1985, the only territory ever to have done so. It has had self-rule since 2009, with a legal path to full independence whenever its people choose to take it.

A short history

  1. c. 2500 BCE

    First peoples

    Palaeo-Eskimo cultures arrive from Arctic Canada.

  2. c. 985 CE

    Erik the Red

    Norse settlers from Iceland found colonies in the south-west.

  3. c. 1200–1300

    The Thule migration

    The ancestors of today's Inuit arrive from the west.

  4. 15th century

    The Norse vanish

    The Scandinavian settlements die out.

  5. 1721

    Hans Egede

    A Danish-Norwegian mission colony is founded at Godthåb (Nuuk).

  6. 1774

    The monopoly

    The Royal Greenland Trade closes the island to outsiders.

  7. 1953

    County of Denmark

    Colonial status ends; intensive "Danization" follows.

  8. 1979

    Home Rule

    Greenland gets its own parliament and government.

  9. 2009

    Self-Government

    Expanded autonomy, resource rights, and a route to independence.

Waves of arrival

People reached Greenland in several distinct migrations from the Canadian Arctic — the Saqqaq and then the Dorset cultures — each of which appears to have died out or withdrawn.

The Norse came from the east. Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland, sailed west around 985 and gave the island its inviting name. Two settlements on the south-western fjords grew to a few thousand people, farming livestock and exporting walrus ivory, with a bishop's seat and stone churches. Norse Greenlanders reached North America around the year 1000.

The roofless stone walls of a small medieval church on a grassy slope above a fjord
Hvalsey Church, the best-preserved Norse ruin in Greenland. A wedding here in 1408 is the last written record of the Scandinavian settlements; within decades they were gone. (Wikimedia Commons)

Why the Norse vanished is still argued — a cooling climate, exhausted soils, the collapse of the ivory trade, isolation from Norway, friction with the Inuit. By the late 15th century they had disappeared.

The Thule, and the Danes

The ancestors of today's Greenlanders were a separate people: the Thule culture, who spread from Alaska across the Canadian Arctic and reached northern Greenland around 1200–1300, moving down both coasts with dog sleds, kayaks and harpoons. They overlapped the last of the Norse, and their descendants have lived in Greenland continuously ever since.

A team of sled dogs harnessed on snow in front of low Arctic hills
A Greenlandic sled-dog team. The Thule migration brought the sled, the kayak and the toggling harpoon; the modern Kalaallit are their descendants. (Drew Avery / Wikimedia Commons)

Denmark-Norway claimed Greenland as former Norse land, and in 1721 the missionary Hans Egede founded a colony at Godthåb — now Nuuk — hoping to find the lost Norse Christians. He found only Inuit, whom the mission set about converting. From 1774 a royal trade monopoly sealed the island off from the outside world for nearly two centuries.

A bronze statue of Hans Egede in clerical robes on a tall stone plinth on a hill above Nuuk
The statue of Hans Egede above Nuuk. In 2020 it was daubed with paint and 'decolonize', and a vote was held on whether to remove it; it stayed. (Svickova / Wikimedia Commons)

Modernisation and its costs

When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, the United States took over Greenland's defence and supply, building airbases — including the far-northern Thule base in 1951, for which an Inuit village was forcibly relocated. Cryolite from Greenland was vital to wartime aluminium.

In 1953 Denmark ended Greenland's colonial status and made it an integral county. The modernisation policies that followed concentrated the scattered population into a few towns with Danish-style apartment blocks, built an industrial fishing economy, and made Danish the language of advancement — a wrenching social change, run largely by Danish officials. The same years saw a birth-control campaign that fitted contraceptive coils in thousands of Greenlandic women and girls, often without consent, now the subject of a formal inquiry.

A large plain white apartment block dominating the low-rise centre of Nuuk
Blok P in Nuuk, once home to about one per cent of Greenland's entire population. Built in the modernisation era, it was demolished in 2012 as a symbol of that period. (Vincent van Zeijst / Wikimedia Commons)

Toward independence

A 1979 referendum brought Home Rule — a Greenlandic parliament and government running most domestic affairs, and Greenlandic as the official language. In 1982 Greenland voted to leave the European Community over fishing rights. The Self-Government Act of 2009, following another referendum, went further: it recognised the Greenlandic people under international law, transferred rights over underground resources, and set out how Greenland could become fully independent — which would end the Danish annual grant that funds about half the public budget.

The economy still rests on fishing and that subsidy. A melting ice sheet has drawn outside interest in Greenland's minerals and shipping routes, and renewed attention from the United States, which has twice offered to buy the island and keeps a missile-warning base there. Most Greenlanders want independence eventually, but not at the price of their standard of living.

What Greenland carries

Greenland's history is a sequence of peoples meeting an unforgiving environment — some who did not last, one Norse colony that failed, and the Thule Inuit who endured and became a nation. The modern chapter is about undoing a colonial relationship on Greenlandic terms: enough self-rule to decide its own future, and a slow, deliberate approach to the moment it might.

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