Greenland's name: a saga about salesmanship
According to the Icelandic sagas, above all Eiriks saga rauda and Islendingabok, written down generations after the events they describe, the Norse explorer Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland around 982 for manslaughter and spent his exile years exploring the coast of the island to its west. When he returned to recruit settlers, the saga tradition says he deliberately called the new land Greenland because he believed people would be more willing to go somewhere with an inviting name. It worked well enough that he led a fleet of settlers there around 985. The story is usually read today as an early example of place branding rather than literal history, since the sagas were composed centuries later and mix genuine memory with narrative flourish, but the core point, that the name was chosen to sound appealing rather than accurate, is the version historians generally accept.
Iceland's name: a saga about disappointment
Iceland's name comes from an earlier, less flattering visit. Landnamabok, the Book of Settlements, credits the Norwegian Viking Floki Vilgerdarson as the first Norseman to sail to the island with the deliberate intention of settling it, sometime in the 9th century. After a harsh winter in which his livestock died, Floki is said to have climbed a mountain, looked out at a fjord choked with drift ice, and named the country Iceland in his frustration before sailing home. As with the Greenland story, historians generally treat this as saga tradition rather than a verified transcript, and some read it as a myth meant to discourage rival settlers from following, but it is the origin story Icelanders themselves tell and the one that stuck.
The names versus the actual landscape
The irony is that neither name fits the land especially well. Greenland's ice sheet covers around 80% of the island, about 1.7 million square kilometers on the National Snow and Ice Data Center's figures, and it is one of only two ice sheets on Earth alongside Antarctica's, leaving a narrow green and rocky coastal fringe where nearly the entire population lives. Iceland, by contrast, is mostly green: glaciers and permanent ice cover only around 10% of its surface, down from about 11% before 2008 as the ice caps retreat, and the interior highlands aside, much of the country is grassland, moss covered lava fields and low vegetation kept mild by the North Atlantic Current. So the country named for greenery is mostly bare rock and glacier, and the country named for ice is mostly green.
Greenland vs Iceland, side by side
| Measure | Greenland | Iceland |
|---|---|---|
| Approximate ice or glacier cover | About 80% | About 10% |
| Climate | Arctic, polar interior | Subarctic, moderated by the Gulf Stream |
| Political status | Autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark | Independent republic |
| Where people live | Narrow ice free coastal fringe | Coastal lowlands, especially the southwest |
Quick facts
- Greenland's ice sheet covers about 80% of the island; Iceland's glaciers cover about 10% of its surface.
- Saga tradition credits Erik the Red with naming Greenland to attract settlers around 985.
- Saga tradition credits Floki Vilgerdarson with naming Iceland after a bitter winter, sometime in the 9th century.
- Both origin stories come from sagas written down long after the events, so they are read as tradition, not verified transcripts.