IN NORTHERN MISTS 



seat of government was thereby removed to Copenhagen, and 

 interest in Norway, and especially in its so-called tributary coun- 

 tries, was further greatly diminished by the larger claims of Den- 

 mark and Sweden. 



It is reasonable to suppose that under such conditions 

 the settlements in Greenland, which were almost entirely 

 cut off, must have decayed; comparatively few, perhaps, were 

 able to get a passage, and left the country by degrees; but 

 the people declined in numbers; they adopted an entirely 

 Eskimo mode of living, and mixed with the Eskimo, who 

 perhaps at the same time spread southward in greater 

 numbers along the west coast of Greenland. It was remarked 

 in the last chapter that the Norsemen, when they arrived in 

 the country, evidently looked down upon the stone-age, 

 troll-like * Skraelings, whom they could hunt and ill use with 

 impunity; with their iron weapons, their warlike pro- 

 pensities, and their larger vessels, they may perhaps have 

 been able to maintain this imaginary superiority in the early 

 days, so long as they still had some kind of supplies from 

 abroad. But it is obvious that these relations must have 

 been fundamentally changed when this communication 

 gradually ceased, and they were reduced, without any support 

 from Europe, to make the best of the country's resources; 

 then the real superiority of the Eskimo in these surroundings 

 asserted its full rights, and the Greenlanders had to begin 

 to look upon them in a very different light. It is therefore 

 perfectly natural that from this very fourteenth century a 

 fundamental change in the relations between Norsemen and 

 Skraelings set in. And that such was the case seems to 

 result in many ways from the meager information we 

 possess. 



In the Annals of Bishop Gisle Oddsson, written in 

 Iceland in Latin before 1637, we read under the year 1342 

 [G. Storm, 1890, pp. 355 f.; Gronl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 459]: 



"The inhabitants of Greenland voluntarily forsook the true faith and the 

 religion of the Christians, and after having abandonied all good morals and 

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