Hans Egede sailed from Bergen to Greenland in 1721 with a Lutheran missionary commission. He was looking for a specific community he hoped to reconvert. Who?
Egede had read about the medieval Norse Greenland community in the surviving Icelandic chronicles and believed they were still there, isolated, still nominally Catholic, in need of Lutheran re-Christianisation. He found no Norse — the Eastern Settlement had died out, probably during the [Spörer Minimum cold period](/articles/spoerer-minimum). The standing Greenland population was Thule Inuit, who had progressively occupied the west and southwest coast through the 14th and 15th centuries. Egede stayed anyway and produced the first European dictionary of an Inuit language.
Read the full story →Hans Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 expecting to find the lost Norse community. He found Inuit. Over the following fourteen years he learned the local Kalaallisut language well enough to compile the first European dictionary and grammar of any Inuit language — published in 1750 by his son Paul.
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