Greenland Is Badly Named

The seemingly swapped names of Greenland and Iceland are the result of a brilliant, if misleading, 10th-century marketing campaign. After being exiled from Iceland for murder, the Norse explorer Erik the Red sailed west and discovered a massive island, about 80% of which was covered by an ice sheet. Needing to attract followers to establish a new settlement, he strategically named it Grænland ("Green Land"), hoping the appealing name would entice people to join him. To his credit, he wasn't entirely lying; during a climatic phase known as the Medieval Warm Period, the southern coastal areas where he settled were genuinely greener and more suitable for farming than they are today.

Iceland’s name, on the other hand, may have been a case of anti-marketing. According to the Icelandic Sagas, an early Viking visitor named Flóki Vilgerðarson had a disastrously difficult winter there. Discouraged, he saw a fjord full of drift ice and gave the land its forbidding name, Ísland ("Ice Land"), possibly to deter others from making the same journey. This name ignored the reality that the Gulf Stream gives Iceland a relatively temperate climate with lush, green lowlands. Ultimately, Erik the Red's sales pitch worked, while Flóki's warning created a lasting misnomer, leaving us with a great historical irony where the icy island got the green name and the green one got the icy name.