| Summary: | Flemming A. J. Nielsen And Thorkild Kjærgaard:The First Greenlandic Book Ever since the arrival of Norse peasants in south-west Greenland in the second halfof the tenth century there have been links between the immense island (2.2 millionkm2) in the north-eastern corner of the American hemisphere and the Scandinavianworld. At the end of the twelfth century, the ancestors of today’s Inuit, a whale- andseal-hunting people speaking a language of the Eskimo-Aleut group, migrated fromEllesmere Island across the narrow Smith Sound to northern Greenland. Within twoand a half centuries, the Norse peasants had, it seems, been exterminated by the Inuit,but Greenland was never forgotten in Scandinavia. In the European world it was generallyrecognised that Greenland was Norwegian territory. In 1380 Norway enteredinto a union with Denmark, and the dream of restoring connections with Greenlandtherefore became a shared Danish-Norwegian dream, although it seemed less and lesspracticable as time went by and the Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenlandbegan to teem with Dutch and British whalers and trading ships.However, in 1721 the course of history changed. A Norwegian priest, Hans Egede(1686‑1758), who had been offering his services for more than a decade, was appointed‘Royal Missionary in Greenland’ and was given the necessary support for an expeditionaiming to re-establish the old connection and to reintroduce Christianity into Greenland.Egede’s Greenlandic adventure succeeded, and over the course of the eighteenthcentury Greenland was reintegrated, bit by bit, into the multicultural, multinationalDanish-Norwegian state and society.In 1814 Norway was divided as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. Mainland Norway(what we know as Norway today) was ceded to Sweden while the remote Norwegianislands in the North Atlantic (Greenland, the Faroe Islands and, until 1944, Iceland)were annexed to the kingdom of Denmark.Being a true officer of the Danish-Norwegian empire, where every child had tobe taught to read and appreciate ...
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