Talk:Gunnbjörn's skerries

Changed "skerries" to "islands"

It says "Gunnbjörn's skerries were a group of small skerries...". But it doesn't seem that they could have been skerries, since Skerry says

A skerry is a small rocky island, usually too small for human habitation. It may simply be a rocky reef. A skerry can also be called a low sea stack. A skerry may have vegetative life such as moss and small, hardy grasses. Skerries also, in some areas of the world, are rested upon by animals such as seals or birds, though usually not inhabited.

yet this article says that there were at one time 18 farms on the islands. This doesn't seem very skerry-like. The islands are gone now so there's no objective measure we make now.

I get they are are named "skerry", but so. Lots of things are misnamed. If a hill is called "X's Mountain" we still tell the reader that its a hill not a mountain. Even if the sources say "skerry", that just shows the sources are wrong and falling into a kind of false friend type trap based on the name of the islands. I mean, if someone can demonstrate that they were skerries which, unique among skerries I guess, were somehow able to support 18 farms, then fine.

Considering all this, I've changed it to "Gunnbjörn's skerries were a group of small islands..." Herostratus (talk) 20:15, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Location

I've added some detail from an NOAA publication,and remooved the uncited reference to 69°N - this seems much too far north, mmore than 120 nautical miles north of the northenmost part of the Iceland mainland, which doesn't tally with the description. Kognos (talk) 22:14, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Rewrite

This article probably needs to be rewritten. Copying from a message that I posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Archaeology:

This starts from the assumption that the islands blew up like a bomb. Initially I thought that it was original research, but looking at the citations, I think it's just from only having access to outdated sources (1873, 1874, 1972).

Here is a sourced paragraph from Talk:Norse colonization of North America/sandbox where I am rewriting another article. Maybe this can be a start for an article based on more recent sources:

The earliest mention of Greenland in the sagas is a group of rocky islands in the Atlantic reported by Gunnbjörn Ulfsson when his ship was blown off course from Iceland in the early 900s. Named after him, Gunnbjarnarsker or "Gunnbjörn's skerries", were likely near modern-day Kulusuk just off the eastern coast of Greenland, but their exact location is unknown. According to the Landnámabók, Snæbjörn Galti led the earliest recorded intentional Norse voyage to Greenland and started a failed settlement on the eastern coast of Greenland. The colony struggled, Snæbjörn Galti was murdered, the settlment was abandoned, and only 2 colonists survived the return to Iceland. Ívar Bárðarson, a Catholic priest sent to Greenland in 1341, wrote that the skerries were about "two days and two nights sailing due West" from Iceland and the halfway point on trips to the later more successful colonies on the western coast. After the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the area began to freeze over and became hazardous to ships. Some later medieval cartographers claim the entire area was "destroyed" by volcanic activity.

References

Regards, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)