From Erik the Red to Donald the Orange: A brief history of Greenland

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

First came Erik the Red (who got his nickname because he loved a glass of pinot noir with dinner).

Erik was what we might now call a troubled soul. Born in Norway, the family moved to Iceland because his father committed “a number of killings,” according to Greenland’s tourism department (it’s never a good sign when people stop counting how many murders you’ve done).

Alas, the apple didn’t fall far from the birch tree and Erik was kicked out of Iceland for murder after a dispute with a neighbor (who presumably borrowed his lawnmover and didn’t return it) resulted in a number of deaths. We’ve all been there.

So Erik rocked up in Greenland, becoming the first viking on the island. He’s credited with coining the name “green land” as either a) cunning marketing trick to lure people there, or b) because in old norse, the word “green” meant “not in the slightest bit green.”

One of Erik’s sons was Leif Eriksson, who was the first European to reach North America — some 500 years before that slacker Christoper Columbus.

Incidentally, 400 years after settling in Greenland, the vikings abandoned the island in part, according to researchers from Harvard and Penn State universities, because of rising sea levels caused by climatic shift. Yes, the vikings were worried about climate change. Woke!

Which brings us nicely (if skipping more than 1,000 years) to the present day, when Donald the Orange has his sights set firmly on Greenland.

So keen is Trump on acquiring Greenland for the U.S. that he had Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance (playing the roles of good cop and weird cop) meet with the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers in Washington this week. On a scale of 1 to Ambushed Like Zelenskyy Was, it was about a 5; not a disaster but problematic enough that Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Denmark and Vivian Motzfeldt of Greenland needed to head to the car park for a calming post-meeting cigarette.

While we wait for Trump to make his move, new polling from Reuters/IPSOS reveals that just one in five Americans supports the president’s efforts to get hold of Greenland. Mind you, in 1999, a Gallup poll revealed that 18 percent of Americans thought the sun revolved around the Earth (and, perhaps worse, 3 percent said they didn’t have an opinion), so we can take polling in the U.S. with a pinch of Sassuma Sea Salt sourced from the Nuuk fjord.

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by Adrian Casey