Hi
I’m interested in whether or not the Viking of Greenland taught the indigenous whale-hunting Thule anything about whaling or perhaps transferred their technology to the Thule culture. I haven’t been able to find any. I’m aware of course that the Thule had been whaling long before the Vikings.
I look forward to your feedback.
An interesting book on Greenland is Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” which among others discusses … wait for it… the collapse of the Greenland colony. The point he made was that the Vikings learned nothing from the Inuit locals, so tried to use Scandinavian tech to endure Arctic winters. Wool for example was not as good an insulator in wet weather as was sealskin; and an agricultural society dependent on grass eventually died out as the climate deteriorated - while they lost the ability to make boats when they could no longer import wood, and do not have appeared to make use of skin kayaks. It seems most interactions with the Inuit were hostile, so not much exchange of techniques or methods.
An alternative theory was set forth by Tryggvi J. Oleson, a Canadian of Icelandic descent, who argued that in fact the Norse settlements in Greenland didn’t “collapse”, but gradually merged with the INdigenous populations, and that the resulting culture / toolkit was a merger of those two traditions: Early Voyages and Northern Approaches, 1000-1632. Now, that text came out back in the 60s and caused quite a stir at the time, because his thesis ran contrary to the developing theories at that time. Don’t know how it’s been received. See: Canadian Centenary Series - Wikipedia for a summary.