Vikings in the Hollow Earth

How conspiracy theorists laid claim to a vanished colony of Norse Greenlanders

‘Summer in the Greenland coast circa year 1000,’ by Carl Rasmussen, 1874. From Wikimedia Commons.

Around the year 985 AD, on the rocky southeastern shores of Greenland, a small community of Viking settlers laid down their roots.¹ The homesteads they erected formed the northwestern extremity of a Viking trade network that spread all the way to North Africa, the Middle East, and China.² This proved a relatively stable arrangement until sometime in the fifteenth century when European traders permanently lost contact with the Norse Greenlanders. What had become of them, or whether they still lived, was up for speculation.

We now know that the Norse did not survive long after becoming isolated. Whether they were killed by the Inuit with whom they shared the island,³ suffered dietary decline due to ecological decay and climate change,⁴ or simply emigrated to mainland America,⁵ nothing but ruined buildings remained of this once-thriving society by the time Greenland was recolonised by Denmark in the 1720s. At face value, they had simply vanished.

This lack of definitive closure makes Norse Greenlandic history the perfect outlet for speculative contrarianism. Perhaps, some have hypothesised, Norse Greenlandic society never vanished at all. Perhaps Viking settlements still exist somewhere in the concealed inner reaches of Greenland’s fjords, cut off from the world and ignorant of modern technology, but alive. Or perhaps they no longer occupy our world, but rather an unseen realm to which they found an entrance somewhere in the Far North, much in the fashion of Disney’s 1974 film The Island at the Top of the World. A few dreamers and slightly-too-lateral thinkers even claim that the Vikings live alongside lost tribal Israelites who pilot flying saucers in a paradise beneath the planet’s surface — a realm with its own Sun, its own oceans, and its own continents: the Hollow Earth.

This article tells the story of how these lost Vikings got entangled in a dubious web of counterfactual conjecture.

The Origins of the Mystery

Late-medieval and early-modern Europeans knew two key things about the Norse Greenlanders: that nobody had heard from them for some time, and that the region they lived in was afflicted by extraordinary natural forces which nobody in Europe could fully explain. These factors made for a compelling mystery.

The patchy and contradictory nature of all written accounts concerning Norse Greenland's fate also leaves much to the imagination. The earliest account comes from the fourteenth-century Norwegian priest Ivar Bardarson. Upon returning to Norway in the 1360s from an armed expedition to Greenland, Bardarson reported that all was well in the Eastern Settlement (near the southern tip of the island). But of the area surrounding modern-day Nuuk, now Greenland’s capital city, he reported that ‘skrælingjar [a Norse term for the Inuit] have the whole Western Settlement. There are enough horses, goats, cattle, and sheep, all are wild, but no people, neither Christian nor pagan.’⁶ What Bardarson meant by this brief passage is not clear.

Descriptions of crisis in the Western Settlement also reached Gisli Oddson, a seventeenth-century bishop in Skálholt, Iceland, who recorded that in 1342, ‘[t]he inhabitants of Greenland abandoned of their own free will the true faith and Christian religion, after they had repudiated all honest customs and true virtues, and they turned to the people of America.’⁷ A letter written by Pope Nicholas V to two Icelandic bishops in 1448 suggests a more violent demise befell the Eastern Settlement in 1418 when ‘barbaric pagans came by sea from the neighbouring coasts and invaded the country … by fire and the sword.’⁸ What matters here is not whether these narratives are accurate, but that they all share the same basic premise: something was awry in the land of ice-capped mountains.

Nobody could tell for sure whether the Norse were dead or merely missing, except perhaps for English traders, who probably continued to visit Greenland until the late-1400s but left no written records. Whatever the case, Europeans continued to hear intriguing rumours long after contact was lost. A merchant crew blown off-course to Greenland in the 1540s, for example, found the barely-decomposed body of a European-looking man in Inuit seal-skin clothing.⁹ As late as the 1620s, moreover, pieces of ships built in the Norse Greenlandic style still washed up on Iceland’s shores.¹⁰

Statue of the Hans Egede, a Norwegian missionary, in Nuuk, Greenland. From Wikimedia Commons.

Stories of this sort convinced Hans Egede, a Norwegian missionary who led the Danish recolonisation of Greenland in the 1720s, that the Norse Greenlanders yet lived.¹¹ He traveled to Greenland with the specific intention of finding the Vikings, whom he assumed to be pagans — or worse, Catholics — and converting them to the Lutheran faith.¹² Even after meeting nobody but the Inuit during his 15 years on the Western shore of the country, he continued to believe that the Norse would be found on the Eastern shore, ‘where it is confessed the chief colony has been seated; and perhaps the offspring of the Norwegians and Icelanders may be recovered.’ The only thing preventing the rediscovery of the Vikings, he wrote after his return to Europe, was the ‘vast quantity of ice’ that strangled the Eastern fjords.¹³

If Egede, having explored large areas of Greenland and turned up neither sign nor whisper of living Norse Greenlanders, was able to keep faith in their survival, it should come as no surprise that many intelligent and influential people down the ages have shared the same hopeful conviction. Without tangible proof that they had departed this life or migrated beyond reach, there seemed no reason to close the book on the Norse. Thus, in 1492, when Pope Alexander VI wrote of his concern for the lost Greenlandic Christians who lived ‘at the world’s end,’¹⁴ his primary worry was not that they were all dead, but that they were lacking in religious instruction. He hoped to bring them back into the flock when possible.

For these educated observers, the mystery was deepened further by tales of strange natural phenomena around the North Pole. In 1360 an English Minorite explorer arrived in Greenland and from there organised an expedition through ‘the whole of the North.’ He later produced a book called Inventio Fortunatae. No copies of the book survive, but we do have a description of its contents from correspondence between the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator and the English occultist John Dee, dated 1577. According to their interpretation, the Minorite discovered at the North Pole a circle of mountainous terrain cut into sections by four ‘Indrawing Seas,’ leading to a large magnetic rock and a great oceanic sinkhole in the middle.

Mercator’s letter to Dee elaborates further:

“In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool … into which there empty these four Indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea.”¹⁵

Gerardus Mercator’s 1606 map of the Arctic, as described in Inventio Fortunatae. From Wikimedia Commons.

Cartographers and explorers continued to reference Inventio Fortunatae for centuries to come.¹⁶ Some observers also began to draw connections between these widely-accepted polar descriptions and cases, real or imagined, of people going missing in the Arctic. Dee’s manuscript based on his correspondence with Mercator, for example, contains a curious reference to 4,000 subjects of King Arthur who ‘entered the indrawing seas [and] never returned.’¹⁷

Whatever strange force reigned beneath the Pole, it was clearly thought capable of making large numbers of people vanish without a trace. It took only a small leap of the imagination to ascribe the same fate to the Norse Greenlanders, and another small leap to believe that this might have something to do with entrances to underground realms, which had featured in Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Norse mythology for millennia. In the late-seventeenth century, these disparate traditions were updated for the scientific age in the form of Hollow Earth theory.

A Hollow Solution

Modern Hollow Earth theory can trace its roots to a 1692 paper by Edmond Halley, an accomplished and highly respected English scientist whose name was given to a certain comet. Halley argued that the Earth was formed of a series of concentric spheres, with the inner spheres being habitable so as to provide ‘as great a Surface for the use of living Creatures as can consist with the conveniencey and security of the whole.’¹⁸ The theory was later popularised in the nineteenth century by an American soldier and merchant named John Cleves Symmes. In 1818, Symmes sent a circular to governments and learned institutions across the world declaring that ‘the earth is hollow, and habitable within.’¹⁹

Aside from kickstarting a whole cottage industry of Hollow Earth theorists in the United States, Symmes’s main contribution was the idea that the planet was ‘widely open about the poles,’²⁰ and that humans might travel through these holes into the interior. It is this concept that brought the theory into direct contact with the mystery of the lost Vikings of Greenland.

Since the Arctic hole was thought to be extremely wide and surrounded by remarkable weather events, anyone living in the Far North might reasonably be assumed to know about it, or perhaps even to have come from it. The Inuit people, in particular, were believed to be descendants of a subterranean race. The theorist Marshall B. Gardner argued in his book A Journey to the Earth’s Interior (1920) that ‘the Eskimo [Inuit] race as we know it today is an overflow from settlements on the borders of the polar orifice.’²¹

Illustration of the Hollow Earth as imagined by Symmes. From Wikimedia Commons.

It would be equally possible for a struggling Arctic community to leave the outer world behind and seek a better life inside. In The Phantom of the Poles (1906), William Reed concludes that ‘another race besides Eskimos have dwealt in the Arctic regions, and may still live, perhaps, in the interior of the earth.’²² It is unlikely that he means the Norse, however, as he describes this other race as having no construction skills.

William F. Warren’s Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885) attempts to integrate the Vikings more overtly into the mythos of secret polar habitats. Warren argues that references in pre-Christian Norse religion to realms in ‘the centre of the world’ are really warped reflections of ancient knowledge about the Arctic Eden, from which he believed all humanity had emerged in antiquity.²³ Like Reed, he stops short of stating that the Norse Greenlanders actually returned there. Such notions have mostly been the preserve of fantasy novels, like Ian Cameron’s The Lost Ones (1961).

Several Nazi occultists were also interested in the Hollow Earth. Members of the Thule Society and The Black Order posited whether they might discover the entrance to the interior in or near Greenland. However, their expectations as to what they would find inside revolved mostly around pseudo-Hindu mythology, rather than a few thousand impoverished Norse peasants.²⁴ Nor do modern conspiracy theorists who believe Hitler fled to the Hollow Earth typically draw a Norse connection.²⁵

Raymond Bernard (real name Walter Siegmeister), the American theorist whose book The Hollow Earth (1964) helped popularise the idea that flying saucers were the work of an advanced subterranean race, is equally silent on the subject of the Greenlanders.²⁶

After centuries of appearing mostly as oblique references or plot points in novels, the Vikings were finally put front-and-centre in Hollow Earth literature in the twenty-first century through the singular efforts of Rodney M. Cluff. Born in an American Mormon colony in northern Mexico, Cluff is a seasoned conspiracy theorist who has appeared on The History Channel's infamous Ancient Aliens show and The Conspiracy Show with Richard Syrett.²⁷ He was involved in an aborted expedition in 2007 to find the Arctic hole into the inner Earth,²⁸ and is currently trying to organise another attempt in 2022.²⁹ His book, World Top Secret: Our Earth IS Hollow! (2014, 2nd edition 2020), did the rounds in internet conspiracy networks in various digital guises for years prior to its physical publication.

Unlike its predecessors, World Top Secret specifically states that ‘the lost Viking Greenland colony migrated to our Hollow Earth via the North polar opening.’³⁰ Cluff’s only piece of evidence for this is an article in the December 1923 edition of Popular Science Monthly. In the article, Lieutenant-Commander Fitzhugh Green quotes a purported Inuit oral tradition that claims the Norse Greenlanders departed for a ‘polar paradise’ in the Far North, where game and driftwood aplenty could be found.³¹ Green’s contention that this paradise existed on the planet’s surface is ignored by Cluff in favour of his own belief that the Norse inhabit the Hollow Earth together with the lost tribes of Israel, leading members of the Nazi regime, and flying saucers.

In recent years, news outlets read by tens of millions of people have reported on Cluff’s ideas.³² The notion that Vikings live inside the Earth suddenly had a massive platform, albeit as an even ‘crazier’ alternative to Flat Earth. In an interview with Vice, Cluff was given the chance to tell the world in all seriousness that ‘the Viking colonists from Greenland’ live down below.³³ Another surge in interest was driven by the film Godzilla Vs. Kong (2021), which featured a gorgeous representation of the Hollow Earth as its key location.

The uptick in internet search traffic from this exposure will no doubt encourage Cluff to carry on his obsessive crusade. So long as there are people like him, the Hollow Earth and its mythical inhabitants are here to stay. Just don't hold your breath for the return of the Vikings.

Notes

1. The colonisation of Greenland and attempted colonisation of ‘Vinland’ in Eastern Canada was recorded by Icelandic scribes in the so-called ‘Vinland sagas.’ See translations by Keneva Kunz in The Sagas of Icelanders (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
2. Patrick Plumet, ‘When the Eskimo met the Viking: an important step in the globalization process’ in Bjarne Grønnow, On the track of the Thule Culture from Bering Strait to East Greenland (Copenhagen: Publications from the National Museum, 2009); Peter Frankopan, The silk roads: a new history of the world (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 114–6.
3. Arnved Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland: Viking peasants in the Arctic (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 363.
4. Thomas McGovern, ‘Economics of extinction in Norse Greenland’ in T. M. Wrigley, M. J. Ingram, and G. Farmer (eds.), Climate and history, studies in past climates and their impact on man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Joel Berglund, ‘The decline of the Norse settlements in Greenland,’ Arctic Anthropology, 23 (1986), pp. 109–35; Hans Christian Gulløv, ‘Prehistory’ in Einar Lund Jensen, Kristine Raahauge, and Hans Christian Gulløv (eds.), Cultural encounters at Cape Farewell: the East Greenlandic immigrants and the German Moravian mission in the 19th century (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011).
5. Helge Ingstad, Land under the polar star (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 320–4; Kirsten A. Seaver, The last Vikings: the epic story of the great Norse voyages (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 158–83; David Abulafia, The boundless sea: a human history of the oceans (London, Allen Lane, 2019), pp. 406–7.
6. Translation in Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, p. 348.
7. Ibid., p. 344.
8. Translation in Louis Rey, ‘Gardar, the “Diocese of Ice,”’ Arctic, 4 (1984), pp. 331–2.
9. Gunnar Karlsson, The history of Iceland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 103.
10. Kirsten A. Seaver, The frozen echo: Greenland and the exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford [CA]: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 308.
11. David Crantz, The history of Greenland, including an account of the mission carried on by the United Brethren in that country, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), p. 258; Gustav Nieritz, Hans Egede: missionary to Greenland (Philadelphia: Lutheran Board of Publication, 1876), p. 24.
12. Eve Garnett, To Greenland’s icy mountains: the story of Hans Egede, explorer, coloniser, missionary (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 26.
13. Hans Egede, A description of Greenland (London: T. and J. Allman, 1818), pp. cxxxi-cxxxii and p. 13.
14. Quoted in Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic saga: being the Norse voyages of discovery and settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 87.
15. Reproduced and translated in E. G. R. Taylor, ‘A letter dated 1577 from Mercator to John Dee,’ Imago Mundi, 13 (1956), p. 60.
16. Duane Griffin, ‘“What curiosity in the structure:” The Hollow Earth theory in science’ in Hanjo Berressem, Michael Bucher, and Uwe Schwagmeier (eds.), Between science and fiction: the Hollow Earth as concept and conceit (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), p. 5.
17. Taylor, ‘A letter dated 1577,’ p. 58.
18. Edmund Halley, ‘An account of the cause of the change of the variation of the magnetical needle; with an hypothesis of the structure of the internal parts of the Earth,’ Philosophical Transactions, 16 (1686–92), pp. 575–6.
19. See Chapter 2, ‘Symmes’ Holes’ in David Standish, Hollow Earth: the long and curious history of imagining strange lands, fantastical creatures, advanced civilizations, and marvelous machines below the Earth’s surface (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006).
20. Americus Symmes, The Symmes theory of concentric spheres, demonstrating that the Earth is hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles. Compiled by Americus Symmes from the writings of his father, Capt. John Cleves Symmes (Louisville: Bradley and Gilbert, 1878).
21. Marshall B. Gardner, A journey to the Earth’s interior, or have the poles really been discovered (Aurora [IL]: Marshall B. Gardner, 1920), p. 296.
22. William Reed, The phantom of the poles (New York: Walter S. Rockey Company, 1906), p. 201.
23. William F. Warren, Paradise found: the cradle of the human race at the North Pole, a study of the prehistoric world (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), pp. 197, 246, and 263–4.
24. Joscelyn Godwyn, Arktos: the polar myth in science, symbolism, and Nazi survival (Kempton [IL]: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996).
25. See, for example, Gray Barker and Ruth Anne Leedy, Serpents of fire: German secret weapons, UFOs, and the Hitler/Hollow Earth connection (Point Pleasant [WV]: New Saucerian Press, 2014).
26. Bernard Raymond, The Hollow Earth: the greatest geographical discovery in history made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the mysterious land beyond the poles - the true origin of the flying saucers (New York: Fieldcrest Publishing, 1964).
27. See Rodney Cluff’s IMDb page.
28. See Rodney Cluff’s biography on his website.
29. See the expedition’s website.
30. Rodney M. Cluff, World top secret: our Earth is hollow! The scientific, scriptural, and historical evidence that out Earth is hollow, second edition (Independently published, 2020 [2014]), pp. 422–3.
31. Popular Science Monthly, ‘Will the ZR-1 discover a polar paradise?,’ December 1923. Reproduced on Cluff’s website.
32. The Telegraph, ’Hollow Earth conspiracy theories: the hole truth,’ 13 July 2014; MailOnline, ‘The conspiracy theorists who think the Earth is HOLLOW: Growing community believe superior ‘alien’ humans, Vikings and Nazis live in paradise in the centre,’ 25 December 2017; The Sun, ‘The hole truth: Inside the weird world of conspiracy theorists convinced the Earth is HOLLOW with “alien” humans and Nazis living inside,’ 25 December 2017; New York Post, ‘Conspiracy theorists convinced Earth is hollow and filled with aliens,’ 26 December 2017.
33. Quoted by Mack Lamoureux in Vice, ‘A journey to the center of modern Hollow Earth theory,’ 18 June 2017.