Pull up a satellite image of Greenland. About 80 percent of it is covered by a permanent ice sheet that reaches three kilometres thick in places. Almost the entire interior is uninhabitable. Now pull up Iceland. It is rugged, but most of it is green — lush coastal pastures, vivid moss-covered lava fields, and only about 11 percent ice cover. The names seem reversed. So how did they end up this way?
The short answer: a 10th-century PR campaign, a Viking exile with a marketing problem, and a thousand years of geographic naming inertia. The longer answer is one of the best-documented stories in medieval European geography.
Iceland: Named by an Unhappy Settler
Iceland was first settled by Norse explorers in the 870s CE. The country's first known permanent settlers, including Ingólfr Arnarson, arrived from Norway and the Norse settlements in the British Isles. According to the Landnámabók (the medieval Icelandic Book of Settlements), one of the earliest Norse visitors was a man named Flóki Vilgerðarson, who arrived a few years before permanent settlement began.
Flóki arrived in winter, climbed a mountain in the West Fjords, looked out across a fjord filled with drift ice, and was so unimpressed that he gave the island the name Ísland — "Iceland." According to the saga, his livestock died over the winter, he failed to harvest enough hay, and he left the next spring vowing not to return. (He did eventually return and settled permanently, but the name stuck.) The country's permanent name, in other words, was given by one of its early visitors at the worst possible time of year, based on his most unfortunate impressions.
From orbit today, Iceland is dominated by green coastal lowlands, dark basalt deserts in the interior, glaciers covering the high plateaus, and a permanent network of bright moss-covered lava fields. Less than 12 percent of the country is glaciated, and the lowland coastal strips that contain most of the population are intensely green during the summer. The name has been geographically misleading for over a thousand years.
Greenland: Named by an Exile with a Marketing Problem
Greenland's name is the more famous story. It was named by Erik the Red, a Norse explorer who had been outlawed from Iceland in the late 10th century for a series of killings related to a dispute over property. With three years to serve before he could return, Erik sailed west and spent his exile exploring the southwestern coast of Greenland. When his exile ended, he returned to Iceland and started recruiting settlers for a colony in his newly discovered land.
According to the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, both written in the 13th century, Erik explicitly chose the name Grœnland ("Greenland") because he believed a positive-sounding name would attract more settlers. As the saga puts it: "he gave the land a good name and called it Greenland, because, he said, people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name."
He gave the country a good name and called it Greenland; for he said that people would be much more drawn to the land if it had a fine name.
— The Saga of Erik the Red, c. 13th century
This is, by any reasonable definition, the earliest documented example of geographic marketing. It worked: in the year 985 or 986 CE, Erik led a fleet of about 25 ships from Iceland to Greenland, of which approximately 14 arrived. The Norse settlement of Greenland lasted nearly 500 years, eventually peaking at around 2,500 inhabitants across two main colonies on the southwest coast.
Why the Norse Settlements in Greenland Disappeared
By the mid-15th century, the Norse Greenland colonies had vanished. The exact cause is still debated by historians and archaeologists, but the leading theories combine several factors: the Little Ice Age cooled the regional climate substantially, making farming and grazing harder; trade contact with Norway dwindled as ship traffic declined; the Norse settlers may have been outcompeted or absorbed by the Inuit Thule culture, which was moving into Greenland from the north during the same period; and the settlers' diet stayed heavily dependent on cattle and sheep when shifting to a more marine-based food system would have helped them survive the cooling climate.
When European ships rediscovered Greenland in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Norse settlements were already abandoned. The Inuit population continued, and Danish-Norwegian colonisation began in earnest in 1721 under the missionary Hans Egede. Greenland has remained connected to Denmark politically ever since, though it now has substantial autonomy and ongoing discussions of full independence.
Was Greenland Actually Greener?
One additional layer to the story: the medieval climate in Greenland during the Norse settlement era was warmer than it had been before, and warmer than it would become during the Little Ice Age that followed. The southern coastal fjords where the Norse settled were genuinely green during the summer — meadows, pasture for cattle and sheep, scattered birch and willow shrubs. The interior was always ice, and the far north was always Arctic, but the specific southwestern fjords Erik the Red was promoting really were greener than the name might suggest.
In other words: the name was self-serving marketing, but it was not a complete lie. Erik did not name a frozen wasteland "Greenland" — he named a place that was, in the area he was promoting, genuinely green during the growing season. He just left out everything else.
What This Tells Us About Geographic Names
The Iceland/Greenland naming reversal is the most famous example of a much broader truth: place names are products of the moments and motives of the people who gave them. Some names are descriptive ("Iceland" was Flóki's bad winter), some are aspirational ("Greenland" was Erik's recruitment pitch), some are political (renaming colonial-era places), and most are accidental — they survive because changing them is harder than living with the inaccuracy.
Iceland's name is one of the worst pieces of geographic branding in history. Greenland's name is one of the earliest examples of geographic marketing on record. Both have stuck for over a thousand years. Names, once given, are remarkably resistant to revision, even when they no longer fit the place. It is one of the most consistent patterns in geography — and one of the most reliable sources of the question "wait, really?" that makes the subject endlessly fun.