Erik the Red’s Land: the land that never was

Abstract

In May this year, a Briton named Alex Hartley gamely claimed as his personal territory a tiny island in Svalbard that had been revealed by retreating ice. Sval bard’s islands have a long history of claims and counter-claims by adventurers of diverse nations: the question of who owns the Arctic is an old one. In this next article in our unreviewed biographical/historical series, Frode Skarstein describes Norway’s bid to wrest a corner of Greenland from the Danish crown 75 years ago.