Was Viking Social Identity The Cause of Their Collapse?
This is the second in a multi-part series exploring the role of identity in the explore-exploit trade-off. If you haven’t read the first piece, on the psychology of exploration and exploitation, you can find it here.
Few communities were better at both exploring and exploiting than the Norse, a group renowned for their adept, and often ruthless skill in both of these domains. Their experiences in Greenland exemplify the explore-exploit tradeoff, and how one’s skill in navigating this space can result in incredible accomplishments.
And their ultimate collapse, after 450 years on the island, provides a cautionary tale.
The seafaring Norse, around the time of 1000 CE, showcased all facets of the explore-exploit tradeoff: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Adept mercantile travelers, they excelled at exploration, reaching staggering distances across both land and sea. And along these distances far and wide, they discovered much to exploit: with their signature style of “raping and plundering”, they all too literally exploited the fruits of their discoveries. The ethics of these means aside, they were some of the early masters of this dynamic.
Their experience in Greenland provides a microcosm of this dynamic. The Norse arrived in Greenland via Iceland around 985 CE, led by Erik the Red, whose family had been banished from Iceland for manslaughter. Arriving on its southeastern coast, the Norse came to a vast and completely uncharted, and nearly completely uninhabited territory. The Inuit wouldn’t arrive until the 1300s, and the only other inhabitants were the small bands of Dorset settlers near the arctic circle. Greenland is an incredibly vast, completely uncharted landscape.
The island, the largest in the world, spans over 2 million square miles, nearly 85% of which is covered by a permanent ice sheet. The exercise of “patch finding” - the few, precious flat areas with arable soil, is crucial. As Christian Keller, Norwegian Archeologist describes, “Life in Greenland is all about finding the good patches of useful resources”.
The Norse’s Exploration and Exploitation on Greenland
The Vikings trekked across huge swaths of the island, before ultimately establishing two outposts: one along the fjords of the southwest coast, known historically as the Eastern Settlement, where Gardar is located, and a smaller colony about 240 miles north, called the Western Settlement.
These settlements flourished into remarkably sophisticated communities that represented the pinnacle of Norse cultural achievement in the Arctic. The Eastern Settlement alone housed nearly 4,000 inhabitants at its peak, complete with 190 farms, 12 parish churches, a bishop’s residence, and even a cathedral at Gardar that rivaled those back in Norway. The Norse had successfully transplanted their entire European way of life onto this frozen frontier.
Their exploitation strategy initially proved masterful, built around the dual foundations of pastoral farming and luxury trade. They transformed the precious arable “patches” into thriving agricultural landscapes, raising cattle, sheep, and goats in carefully cultivated meadows that stretched along the protected fjords.
Simultaneously, they developed a lucrative export economy centered on Arctic exotica: walrus ivory, narwhal tusks, polar bear hides, and live falcons, all of which commanded premium prices in European courts. The walrus ivory trade was particularly profitable, as it provided a coveted alternative to increasingly scarce African elephant ivory.
The Strength of The Viking Social Identity
For centuries, this dual strategy sustained a remarkably European lifestyle in one of the world’s most challenging environments. The Norse maintained their identity as Christian dairy farmers, importing grain from Iceland, crafting elaborate wooden furniture, and even following European fashion trends, all while living closer to the Arctic Circle than any other medieval European community. Their success seemed to validate that their Norwegian agricultural traditions and cultural values could triumph over any adversity, no matter how extreme the conditions.
The Norse established themselves on the island, exploring its land and exploiting its offerings, and lived as a small farming community for nearly half a millennia. All the while, they imported a European culture and identity onto the island which still exists today. Around 1450 CE, things went south. Archeological evidence indicated that the population, which at its peak was somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 inhabitants, precipitously perished. Remains indicated that the majority had starved. Their civilization collapsed. What went wrong?
The Viking Collapse on Greenland
Nobody knows for sure. More than likely, the cause was overdetermined - temperatures fluctuated making the harsh winters even harder. The price they could fetch for ivory from walrus tusks dropped as new civilizations entered the market. Some evidence suggests a pandemic ravaged their already meager populations. There’s also reason to think that another, more surreptitious factor played a role in their demise: the stubbornness of their social identity.
The Vikings had a strong culture and social identity - a set of values, and a way of life which was a major basis for their success as explorers and builders of civilization. As Jared Diamond describes in Collapse, “Like all colonizing peoples throughout history, they arrived with their own knowledge, cultural values, and preferred lifestyle, based on generations of Norse experience in Norway and Iceland.
They thought of themselves as dairy farmers, Christians, Europeans, and specifically, Norse. Their Norwegian forebears had successfully practiced dairy farming for 3,000 years.. Without those shared Norwegian values, the Norse could not have survived in Greenland.”
However, it was those same values which ultimately became their undoing. When, due to a shifting climate, and the devaluing of their greatest export - the ivory tusk, which enabled them access to resources from Denmark - that agrarian life became much more difficult to sustain. Whatever threats that period presented, they weren’t necessarily intractable.
There were other options. The Inuit had arrived in the 1300s, and had lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle subsistent of eating seals, fish, and whales. Archeological records indicate that there was constant contact between The Norse and The Inuit, and that these other options were known to them. However, they declined. As Diamond concludes, “That they did not hunt the ringed seals, fish, and whales which they must have seen the Inuit hunting was their own decision. The Norse starved in the presence of abundant underutilized food resources.”
The Double-Edged Sword of Social Identity
Here lies the double-edged sword of our social identity: It’s a collective lifestyle, and a set of helpful practices forged together by social glue, which can hold a group together and enable incredible accomplishments. At the same time, it makes us rigid, and can shut us down to other, more viable alternatives. “The Norse were undone by the same social glue that enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties.” A social identity, especially one forged by previous successes is one which we tend to stick with through thick and thin, and for better or worse.
Farming, for the Norse, wasn’t merely an economic activity - it was a crucial part of their identity, a lifestyle that their Norwegian ancestors had subsisted on for over 3,000 years. As Diamond put it, they “ultimately decided that they would rather die as Norse than live as Inuit”.
As Diamond remarks, generalizing from this dynamic, “That proves to be a common theme throughout history, and also in the modern world: the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity”.
This is worth sitting with. The qualities that made the Norse extraordinary - their tenacity, their cultural cohesion, their refusal to bend - were the very same qualities that killed them. The sword cut both ways. And this dynamic, as Diamond suggests, is far from unique to the Vikings. It’s a pattern that shows up again and again, across centuries and civilizations, whenever a group or an individual faces a changed world with an unchanged sense of self. The Norse provide an unusually vivid, and unusually tragic, illustration of it.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: How universal is this tendency? Is it something specific to isolated medieval communities clinging to agrarian traditions in the Arctic, or does it reflect something deeper about human nature? About how all of us relate to our identities, especially under pressure?
Photo by shahin khalaji via UnSplash
This is the second in a multi-part series exploring the role of identity in the explore-exploit trade-off. Be the first to receive the next piece by signing up to the The Newsletter (for free)
References for The Psychology of Social Identity in The Vikings
Diamond, J. (2011). Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed: revised edition. Penguin.
Diehl, M. (1990). The minimal group paradigm: Theoretical explanations and empirical findings. European review of social psychology, 1(1), 263-292.
Gao, W., Liu, S., & Huang, L. (2012). A global best artificial bee colony algorithm for global optimization. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 236(11), 2741-2753.
Kembro, J. M., Lihoreau, M., Garriga, J., Raposo, E. P., & Bartumeus, F. (2019). Bumblebees learn foraging routes through exploitation–exploration cycles. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 16(156), 20190103.
