Did the Norse in Greenland Eat Fish? Sources and Corrections
The Norse in Greenland left almost no fish bones, yet bone chemistry shows they ate a great deal from the sea. The animal bones show that marine food was mostly seal, not fish, and the reason looks like a hunting calendar rather than a taboo. Nobody knows for certain what happened to the settlers.
Every claim in the Greenland carousel, with the source it came from, and the things we deliberately did not claim. If you find an error here, tell us and cite something. We will correct it on this page and say that we did.
The short version
The Norse in Greenland ate the sea and left almost no fish bones. That part of the famous story is true. What is disputed is why, and the explanation that made the story famous is the part the archaeologists who worked on the middens reject.
What the carousel claims, and where it comes from
Fish bones are almost absent
Two fish bones out of about 35,000 at one farm; 166 out of 8,250 identified fragments at the Farm Beneath the Sand, which is the richest fish sample in Norse Greenland. In Iceland and northern Norway fish run from half the bones to nearly all of them. Fishhooks, line sinkers and net sinkers are missing too.
Source: Enghoff, I.B. 2003, Hunting, fishing and animal husbandry at The Farm Beneath The Sand, Meddelelser om Grønland, Man & Society 28. The 2-in-35,000 count and the comparative percentages are Diamond's summary in Collapse (2005), ch. 7.
The caveat the bone analyst herself prints: those 166 bones turned up only in sieved samples, and their poor preservation means “fishing may have played a larger role than the sheer number of fish bones indicates”. We print that next to the number because it is the strongest thing anyone can say against the low-fish reading.
From about a fifth marine to up to four fifths
Bone chemistry on 27 individuals from six churchyards, spanning roughly five centuries.
Source: Arneborg, J., Heinemeier, J., Lynnerup, N., Nielsen, H.L., Rud, N. & Sveinbjörnsdóttir, Á.E. 1999, “Change of Diet of the Greenland Vikings…”, Radiocarbon 41(2): 157–168. doi:10.1017/S0033822200019512
What that number does not mean. The 80 per cent is the highest single individual, dated to about 1418. The last dated Greenlander, about 1448, is about half marine, and the last seven dated individuals average around 63 per cent (our arithmetic on Arneborg et al. 2012, Table 1, on the 1999 scale). Every figure carries ten points of stated slack. And the chemistry only says the sea: carbon cannot separate seal from fish. The seal attribution comes from the middens, not from the isotopes. The same team wrote in 2012 that their study “does not add anything to the discussion concerning whether the Norse ate fish”.
The bone did not change. The ruler did.
The marine percentage is not measured directly. It is a straight interpolation between two assumed end points, and in 2012 the same team moved both of them. Run the earliest Brattahlíð individual through each scale and the result is 29 per cent marine on the old one and 12 on the new.
Source: 1999 end points −21.0‰ and −12.5‰; 2012 end points −19.2‰ and −13.4‰. Nelson, D.E. et al. 2012 and Arneborg, J., Lynnerup, N. & Heinemeier, J. 2012, Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 3. You can check the old scale yourself: per cent marine = (δ13C + 21) ÷ 8.5 × 100. The paper's own range, −19‰ to −14.5‰, gives 23.5 and 76.5, the famous “20 to 80”.
“Special pleading”
That is how the authors of a 2012 synthesis in PNAS, several of whom have worked on these middens, described explanations of the switch from fish to seal, citing Diamond's Collapse. Their alternative is seasonal scheduling rather than a taboo: ice-riding harp and hooded seals arrived in spring, filling a late-winter gap in stores, and a communal seal drive would probably have needed most of the available boats and crew.
Source: Dugmore, A.J., McGovern, T.H., Vésteinsson, O., Arneborg, J., Streeter, R. & Keller, C. 2012, PNAS 109(10): 3658–3663. doi:10.1073/pnas.1115292109
In fairness to Diamond: he hedges the taboo with “may”, he describes the heavy seal use himself, and the collapse of the walrus ivory trade is part of his own third factor of five, the decline of contact with Norway. His bone counts are accepted by his critics. What they reject is one explanation. And his hardest point is still unanswered: the fishhooks and net sinkers are missing too.
Europe's ivory supply turned Greenlandic, and it is datable
Ancient DNA from walrus specimens found at European trading centres: before about 1125, one western-clade animal against six eastern; after it, ten against two.
Source: Star, B., Barrett, J.H., Gondek, A.T. & Boessenkool, S. 2018, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285: 20180978. doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.0978
Eastern-clade animals make up roughly half the modern West Greenland population, so eastern-clade ivory in Europe could also be Greenlandic. What flips is the share that can only have come from Greenland or Arctic Canada: from one specimen in seven to ten in twelve.
They did not give up. They sailed further.
Fourteen of the 31 sourced artefacts, close to half the whole sample, trace to the North Water Polynya, high in the Arctic, roughly thirty days' sailing out and fifteen back, and only the larger expeditionary ships could make it. The near grounds in Disko Bay kept being worked; the range stretched rather than moved. Over the same period the animals get smaller and the catch shifts from bulls towards cows.
Source: Ruiz-Puerta, E.J. et al. 2024, Science Advances 10(39): eadq4127, doi:10.1126/sciadv.adq4127. Size and sex shift: Barrett, J.H. et al. 2020, Quaternary Science Reviews 229: 106122. What was measured is the internal cross-section of the tusk socket, not the tusk.
Nobody knows what happened to the people
No bodies have been found on any abandoned farm, and the skeletal record shows no starvation. But no arrival of a Norse Greenlandic population is documented anywhere else either, and there is no evidence they maintained ocean-going ships. Thirteen specialists interviewed for a 2025 study: there is no consensus about the fate of the settlers, and the same scholars argue both ways in different papers.
Source: Jackson, R. & Dugmore, A. 2025, “Interpreting Collapse in Norse Greenland”, Heritage 8(8): 293. doi:10.3390/heritage8080293
What we did not claim, and why
- That they actually ate plenty of fish. The evidence does not support it. Fish bones and fishing gear are nearly absent, and the isotope paper usually cited for it attributes the marine signal to seal, while itself calling the question open.
- That they refused to eat fish. “Refused” asserts a motive nobody can evidence. The taboo is an inference, and its author hedges it.
- That the Little Ice Age froze them out. The best record from inside the Eastern Settlement finds no abrupt cooling at abandonment and puts the late 14th century among the warmest periods of a record reaching back to about AD 375. Across the Norse centuries its long-term cooling trend adds up to about a third of a degree, less than its own calibration error (our arithmetic on their published figures). The Little Ice Age temperature curve that the 1999 diet paper invoked comes from ice-sheet boreholes about 450 to 1,300 km away and up to 3.2 km higher than the farms. Zhao et al. 2022, Science Advances 8(12): eabm4346; Dahl-Jensen et al. 1998, Science 282: 268–271.
- That the Inuit destroyed them. No excavated Norse farm has produced evidence of violent destruction. Inuit stories of conflict with the Norse do exist, but at least one was shaped by its collector: the missionary Poul Egede reportedly told an Inuk that the Inuit had destroyed the Norse, and the story came back to him.
- That they all starved. Exactly one site has evidence of death in the house, and that evidence is carrion-fly puparia, not bodies.
- That 802 kg of ivory was shipped in 1327. That figure is a modern back-calculation from a recorded monetary value, not anything the medieval document says. What can be said: a modern reading of the 1327 tithe record (Nedkvitne 2019, cited by Barrett et al. 2020) puts two walrus tusks in Bergen at about one mark, or roughly a hundred dried cod.
- That there were 500 farms and 4,000 people. The 500 is a count of ruin groups. Peak population was about 2,000 across both settlements.
FAQ
Did the Norse in Greenland eat fish?
Very little, as far as the evidence shows. Fish bones are almost absent from their middens, and so are fishhooks and net sinkers. The zooarchaeologist who analysed the richest site notes that fish bones only appeared in sieved samples, so fishing may have mattered somewhat more than the count suggests.
What did the Greenland Norse eat?
Farm produce and a large and growing share of marine food, mostly seal. Bone chemistry shows the marine share rising over five centuries, and the middens show seal bones increasing over time, until even inland farms held as many seal bones as sheep and goat bones.
Did the Norse refuse to eat fish because of a taboo?
That is Jared Diamond's suggestion, which he hedged as something they may have developed. A 2012 study in PNAS, citing Diamond, describes such explanations as special pleading and proposes a seasonal one: harp seals arrived in spring, when winter stores ran low, and the hunt probably needed most of the available boats.
Why did the Norse settlements in Greenland end?
There is no consensus. The settlements contracted over roughly two centuries, and the walrus ivory trade that paid for them changed. No bodies have been found on abandoned farms and the skeletons show no starvation, but no arrival of the settlers anywhere else is recorded either.
Corrections to this page
None yet. When there are, they will be listed here with the date and what changed.
Keep exploring: how the colony began in our story of Leif Erikson and the Greenland Norse, trace the route on the free Viking world map, or see the silver Viking rings from the carousel.