“Pygmies” of the Far North

A recurring issue in discussions about the medieval Norse in Greenland is the name Skræling(j)ar (Skrælings) for the natives whom the eleventh-century Norse encountered in North America. Grappling with this problem involves confronting the nineteenth- century assumption that medieval people believed in a fl at world. The fact that medieval people, including the Norse, took for granted a spherical world, on whose unexplored fringes lived the monster races described in the medieval Christian canon, is the key both to understanding how the Norse saw their North American experiences and to the interpretation of oddities in several medieval and early Renaissance texts and maps.