The Vikings founded a society in Greenland which would last for almost 500 years. Then, quite suddenly, it disappeared. What happened?

Icelandic historian Valur Gunnarsson travels through southern Greenland as he attempts to solve the greatest mystery in Nordic history. He navigates icefloes on an open boat, meets the locals, stays with a modern-day Norse settler on a reindeer farm and examines the church where the last Viking wedding was held before everything went dark. Was it climate change, plague, class-struggle, trade wars or foreign invasion that did them in? Did they try to leave before it was too late? And if so, where did they go? The answer to the riddle might just tell us something about how to navigate our own perilous times.

“Valur writes very good books. I taught him well.”
GUDNI TH. JOHANNESSON, HISTORIAN AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF ICELAND

“This is an accessible and entertaining book that deals with one of history´s great unsolved mysteries, the disappearance of the Norse Greenlanders in the fifteenth century. The narrative alternates seamlessly between a diary, a travelogue, a discussion of a historical mystery and a commentary on current events, creating a stimulating mosaic of the situation of Greenland in the past and in the present.”
Sverrir Jakobsson, professor of history, University of Iceland