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From Erik the Red to Donald Trump: a thousand years of stories of white men taking Greenland1
Ulrik Pram Gad*†
ulpg@diis.dk
Abstract
For more than a millennium, white men have been telling stories about taking Greenland. In the stories told by Norwegians, Greenland was typically regarded as an extension of Norway, even if, in the end, it was never so. Danish stories, by contrast were always about taking care of Greenlanders, by placing them under the Kingdom’s benevolent protection. But the stories told by Americans would see in Greenland only a stepping stone to the realisation of greater ambitions: initially of polar exploration and subsequently geopolitical dominance. In the stories told by Greenlanders themselves, however, the leading characters are not European or American but Inuit. Contemporary Greenlandic counter-narratives, focusing on the modernisation period, point to Denmark’s role, as a colonial power, in extracting the resources of the country. While Europe is outraged by US President Trump’s boasts about taking Greenland, to Greenlanders themselves they echo to a familiar theme. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
Keywords
DenmarkHans EgedeErik the RedInuitFridtjof NansenRobert PearyKnud RasmussenDonald TrumpUnited States of AmericaNorwayIntroduction
Greenland’s foreign policy strategy, written in 2024 before the re-election of Donald Trump, was one big invitation to the United States of America: Greenland saw the US as an opportunity—not to swap colonial overlords, but to reduce its dependence on Denmark (Nielsen & Strandsbjerg 2024). Greenlanders had long felt trapped in Denmark’s embrace (Gad 2016). The spectacle of Air Force One hitting the tarmac at Nuuk’s brand-new international airport, on 7 March 2025, was therefore met with anxious anticipation (Gad 2025b). But even as Don Trump Junior emerged to hand out MAGA merch and take selfies, Donald Senior refused to rule out taking Greenland by force. With that, Trump managed to destroy most of any goodwill which had remained prior to his re-entry into the White House.
For Greenlanders, it may feel like a thousand years, but really, it is only a little more than a year since Trump turned global attention towards Greenland. Yet his desire is but a variation on an old theme: he is the fourth US president to dream of buying Greenland (Olsvig & Jacobsen 2024). Long before that, for literally a thousand years, white men have been telling stories about taking Greenland.
My concern here is not with how stories relate to what actually happened in the past. Rather, I am interested in the politics of how stories work. I will first attend to Norwegian stories about taking Greenland, and then turn to Danish and American stories. My basic point is that most of these stories tell us more about the white men taking Greenland, and the nations they come from, than about Greenland itself. What happens, then, when Greenlanders themselves tell stories about people who want to take Greenland?
Norwegian stories about taking Greenland
In my reading of Norwegian stories about taking Greenland, the protagonists always begin by seeing Greenland essentially as an extension of Norway. But in the end, it turns out that Greenland is not Norway after all. So, the Norwegian either goes home or ceases to be Norwegian at all.
The original Norwegian story about Greenland features Erik the Red. He crossed the North Atlantic with Norse technology, and around the year 985 took land in Greenland. American readers of Norse stories tend, however, to be more invested in Erik’s son Leif, who made his way from Greenland to America. In American eyes, Leif was a frontiersman (White House 2025). But in Greenland, the most widely known image of a Norseman is a woodcut by the Inuit artist Aron from Kangeq, dating from 1857, which shows the legendary hero Qassapi standing with an arm in his hand, severed from a slain Norse chieftain.2
Most likely, it was not the Inuit who brought Norse life in Greenland to an end. It simply did not work out for the Norse in the long run. Erik the Red’s descendants were long gone by the time, in 1721, that Lutheran vicar Hans Egede crossed the sea to rechristen them; the last time anyone had heard from them, they had been Catholics. Egede was from Lofoten in the far North of Norway, so it was not difficult for him to imagine Greenland as an extension of Norway.
Egede found no lost Norse. Rather, he met Inuit, and in his zeal to convert them, he effectively became a Dane. Not that he was aware of this, because in his time, whether you identified as Danish or Norwegian was of no consequence—at least not in Greenland—since Denmark and Norway were still one Kingdom. Nevertheless, in both Danish and Greenlandic history, Egede stands as the first white man to take Greenland in a Danish way. I will return to what this means.
In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen crossed Greenland’s ice sheet with the help of Sámi experts and their equipment, namely skis, which he was determined to appropriate as emblematic of Norwegian national identity. He started in desolate East Greenland, and arrived in the West, whose landscapes reminded him of his homeland (Nansen 1894: 1–3). But there were also Inuit living there, whom Nansen saw as disoriented by Christianity and ‘the products of civilization’ (1894: ix). Having returned to Norway, he mourned their fate in a monograph format. Today, people in Greenland have had enough of playing a tragic but ancillary role in the heroic stories of polar explorers.
In the 1930s, several parties of Norwegian hunters turned up in Northeast Greenland. Convinced that, being Norwegian, they were best able to exploit the region’s hunting opportunities, they promptly claimed it for their King. Somewhat oddly, they named the land after Erik the Red, even though his settlements had been a thousand kilometres away in the Southwest. Less weird was naming a separate claim after Nansen; the tract of land in question did, after all, include his landing spot for the ice-sheet crossing. Nevertheless, once again, Greenland turned out not to be an extension of Norway after all, nor did the times allow you to claim land just by taking it; rather, sovereignty was for the International Court in The Hague to decide. According to the international law of the time, Erik’s Norwegian Vikings ended up anchoring the argument for Denmark, marking the beginning of the sovereignty inherited by the Danish crown from Norway. Indigenous Greenlanders did contribute to the Danish argument for sovereignty in the Hague—not, as Danish myth has it, because their popular will supported Denmark (Andersen & Krebs 2025), but because Greenlandic workers assisted Danish archaeologists in documenting the Norse settlements.
Danish stories about taking Greenland
Erik the Red’s Norse settlement still occasionally appears as a prologue to Danish stories, when explaining Greenland’s relation to Denmark. But the archetypal Danish story is about taking care of the Greenlanders. Often the best way to do so was to make them as much as possible like the Danes themselves, at a pace they could tolerate. That is why Danish stories about Greenland almost always begin with Egede, and why his story became a Danish story. Maybe Egede had really set out to reform the Norsemen. Perhaps the King accepted the project only in the expectation of colonial profit. But the story told about Egede is that his mission was to save the souls of pagan Greenlanders (Fægteborg 2009).
Another important figure in the story of Denmark’s mission to take care of the Greenlanders was Johan Heinrich Rink (Marquardt 2009). As governor of Greenland, in his argument for Danish policies he would draw a comparison with the tragic fate of the Indigenous peoples of North America on encountering the white man. Rather than repeating the same tragedy, Denmark’s task was to protect and gradually elevate the Greenlanders.
The quintessential character in stories of Denmark’s ability to take care of Greenland was probably the polar explorer Knud Rasmussen. Like Nansen, Rasmussen carried out his expeditions using equipment of Indigenous provenance, but he had no need to take Greenland, because he already was Greenland: he was born and raised there, even counting a Greenlandic woman as his grandmother. Like Nansen, he foresaw the cultural downfall of the Greenlanders—although, like Rink, he was determined to make it gentle and cautious—but also the possibility for a revival of the Greenlandic people in a modern guise (Thisted 2009).
Caution was abruptly suspended after the Second World War, with the constitutional amendment of 1953. Following a referendum held in Denmark, but not in Greenland, Denmark ‘took’ Greenland, incorporating it into the Kingdom. Thousands of Danish craftsmen, teachers, and administrators arrived in Greenland and rolled out a welfare state across the country. The Greenlandic elite had demanded modernisation, but now it felt like an invasion (Dahl 1986). By default, Danish stories feature Greenland as an object of Danish benevolence. Greenlanders, however, have consistently demanded a seat at the table and to be allowed to tell their own stories.
American stories about taking Greenland
American stories about taking Greenland are, like Norwegian ones, little concerned with Greenland itself. But where Norwegian stories see Greenland as an extension of Norway, American stories usually look past Greenland towards more distant but also more ambitious goals.
Robert Peary was from the same generation as Nansen and had the same goal, to reach the North Pole. In this, Greenland was a convenient ramp. Peary’s expeditions used local equipment, but in order to be able to claim exclusive credit, he made sure to be the only white man. A US stamp from 1988 also features Peary’s second-in-command, Matthew Henson, who was black, but not his Inughuit sleigh drivers Oodaq, Sigluk, and Ukujaaq.
During the Second World War, the US took custody of Greenland. Again, this had little to do with Greenland itself; rather, Greenland was a stepping stone for flying aircraft for the defence of Great Britain. Moreover, to produce aluminium for the planes, the US had to take control over the Ivittuut mine—the only known source of the mineral cryolite necessary for the process.
After the war, US attention turned to the Soviet Union, now fearing that planes and later missiles with nuclear bombs would fly in over the North Pole. In response, the US took parts of the hunting grounds from the Inughuit who had helped Peary, to build the Thule Air Base. No Inuit appear in the propaganda film documenting how the American army was the first to take Greenland with modern technology (US Army 1953). In 2023, the Thule base was renamed Pituffik Space Base, appropriating the Inughuit name for the lands taken from them, ‘to celebrate and acknowledge the rich cultural heritage of Greenland and its people’ (Dillon & Brady 2023). Greenlandic officials applauded (Gad 2023).
Trying to guess what ‘really’ drives Trump’s ambition to take Greenland is pointless (but see Duhaime et al. (2026)). But around him, cronies and officials rationalise the idea in ways that resonate with well-established American stories which look beyond Greenland: to Russian nukes, Chinese infiltration, or even to life on Mars. Inuit feature, in such stories, mainly as impediments to the grand schemes of white men.
Greenlandic stories about outsiders taking Greenland
Greenlandic stories insist on having Inuit as their main characters. They begin much earlier than Erik the Red. From a Greenlandic perspective, the Norse were just one of a series of peoples who tried to take Greenland but failed in the long run. Only the Inuit managed to survive. While Danish researchers and amateur historians have written shelf-loads of books about Knud Rasmussen, his Inuit companions—as Greenlandic critics have pointed out—were essential co-producers of his heroic deeds. His expedition by sled across the Canadian tundra was largely financed by exporting blue fox skins, shot and traded by the Inughuit (Gad 2017). And it would have been both impractical and ethnographically less productive had not his female Inuk companion Arnarulunnguaq mastered the traditionally women’s crafts necessary for their survival (Knudsen 2024).
More politically pertinent is the critique of the heroic stories that Denmark tells of its colonial projects. On the tricentennial of Egede’s landing, his statue was painted over, even if—unlike statues of white imperialists elsewhere—it was left standing (Andersen & Krebs 2025). Currently, Greenlandic counter-narratives concentrate on the modernisation period (Jensen et al. 2025). Their fundamental criticism is that the Danish state, having deemed Greenlandic people incapable of managing their own affairs, took responsibility for the Greenlanders, in effect denying them agency (Andersen 2024). Just as in Greenlandic stories of polar heroes, the Greenlanders’ agency is key to stories of the postcolonial era. The self-determination enshrined in the 1979 and 2009 autonomy arrangements was not given to Greenland, as Danish discourse would have it, but a hard-won achievement.
Another kind of Greenlandic counter-narrative insists that the Danes did not just come to take care of the Greenlanders. Like all other colonists, they came to extract value. But they were not always very good at it. In the early colonial period, when only Greenlandic technology could practicably exploit Greenland’s riches, European technology was often useless. Lately, the cryolite mine in Ivittuut has received particular attention, as a project in which white men literally took resources out of Greenlandic ground and made off with them to Europe (Pilehave & Rosing 2025) (see also Graugaard (2026)).
Today, Trump’s intervention has cast new light on Greenland’s strategic value. Historians have discussed the value for Denmark in making Greenland’s territory available for the United States’ defence of itself—in ‘playing the Greenland card’, as it is called. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the card can be played only by Greenland itself (Olsvig & Gad 2025). But at the same time, with Trump’s threats to ‘clear the table’, the value of the card has become ever more uncertain (see also Nielsen & Strandsbjerg (2026)).
Stories resembling and conflicting
Greenlandic and Danish stories are in noisy conflict. But noise and conflict are not straightforward indicators of oppression. Noise can come when those who were previously oppressed have the strength and language to take on the conflict (Volquardsen 2025). And conflict can be the first step towards a new relation—towards new stories, not just entangled, but told in common.
But for a common Greenlandic–Danish narrative to have a chance, the Danish public needs to understand one basic thing. To audiences in Europe, Trump’s boasts about taking Greenland appear outrageous and bizarre. Greenlanders, of course, also find them outrageous. But they also bear a family resemblance to stories that are all too familiar. Between Trump, and a panel of three white, male, middle-aged Danish pundits talking on TV about how Greenlanders cannot do without Denmark taking care of them, lies a difference only of degree, not of kind.
During Trump’s 2025 campaign, Greenlanders came together under a new slogan: ‘We don’t want to be Americans; we don’t want to be Danes; we want to be Greenlanders.’ In whatever way a plot to take over Greenland may be rationalised, it removes the right to self-determination from Greenlanders themselves.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declare no potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
Google Translate was used to produce a first draft translation of the manuscript to English from the original Danish and earlier Norwegian versions. Human intelligence was used to reorganise, condense and consolidate the final English version.
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Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a28
Published on: 25 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 9
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Gad, U. P. (2026), ‘From Erik the Red to Donald Trump: a thousand years of stories of white men taking Greenland’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a28 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a28Crossref
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October 2022
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May 2023
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July 2023
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