How exactly did Europe not know/forget about the Vikings finding

>>2199460
well it was never universal knowledge in europe but it also wasn't useful knowledge either. most kingdoms were not producing ships and navigators of the quality that would allow them to cross the ocean and make claims there until they actually did it.

Access to knowledge wasn't as easy as it is today. Also how could anyone guess that a super irrelevant Danish colony in greenland be close to another huge landmass, I mean would you sail to the end of the universe based on some fairy stories some half wit from the north is telling you?

>>2199473
yeah knowledge was definitely power in the age of exploration

>be me
>crewman under henry hudson
>think we've found the northwest passage
>its just a huge fucking bay at the top of the world
>chart the entire east side of "hudson" bay
>ship gets stuck in ice
>cold as fuck
>finally free of the ice after 4 months of waiting
>captain wants to keep going to look for the northwest passage
>fuck this, mutiny time
>put the captain, a few loyalists, and some sick sailors on a rowboat with a few supplies (but not enough to realistically survive)
>on the way back to England two shipmates die
>make sure everybody has the story straight that those two were the leaders of the mutiny and we all just went along with it
>make landfall in england
>arrested for piracy, a capital crime
>charges are eventually dropped for me and all my shipmates because our information is far too valuable
>sorry henry

Norse knew. They just didn't care.

Because no one ever gave a shit about Iceland before Bjork released Post

>>2199519
Ever read Egil's saga? It makes Iceland almost seem like a retirement home for elderly raiders.

>>2199507
>I don't care about free fertile land, Olaf
Of course they would care, but they couldn't be sure it was true, like >>2199486 pointed out it could be a fairytale, and no one would risk his life to travel to bumblefuck nowhere on the off chance that there's land there

>>2200102
But it wasn't free. It was filled with hostile savages. That's why they left in the first place.

>>2199486
Greenland became a danish colony when the new world was known...

>>2200102
>Fertile

You konw they didn't stay there because it couldn't grow crops for shit, right.

Greenland was settled by the Norse in about 980 ad, the colony there later came under the rule of the Norwegian king and that power then transferred to the Danish king and then the settlement in greenland failed sometime after 1400, it was so irrelevant that the Danish didn't even bother themselves about the place until 1712 when they sent a missionary just to make sure that the people living there hadn't turned heathen.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland