A church community waiting for a ship from Iceland or Norway.

A household deciding whether a sick animal can be spared.

Those decisions accumulated over generations.

The colony survived not because Greenland was easy, but because people learned how to extract a living from a narrow ecological window.

For several centuries, that window remained open.

The decision to settle Greenland also reflects the larger expansion of Norse society across the North Atlantic.

Iceland had already demonstrated that Scandinavian communities could establish themselves far from continental Europe.