You Got Ice in My Greenland! You Got Green in My Iceland!

Anyone who's ever showed up naked on the shores of Greenland expecting a lush tropical paradise, only to have his dong bit off by a penguin, is liable to be curious as to how the island got its misleading name. Likewise for any cold-loving Eskimo freak living in Iceland and wondering why his balls are sweating all the time and why everybody makes fun of his bulbous whale-fur parka while they're all kicking it in Hawaiian shirts and jams. The mystery of why Iceland is green and Greenland is icier than Catherine Zeta-Jones' chest cavity is something that has vexed tourists, indiscriminate immigrants and the uninformed for centuries.

The reasons behind this cartographical bait-and-switch date back to ancient times. In 330 B.C., the ancient explorer Pytheas sailed north from France to try and find some place to dump a dead horse that nobody wanted to take off his hands. Back in those days you couldn't just dump a dead horse by the side of the freeway like you can now, there were laws and steep horse-carcass-disposal fees. Pytheas's horse died of shock after walking on the explorer having sex with his wife's hat rack, and so even beyond the expense of paying somebody to dump the corpse off a high cliff, Pytheas was not looking forward to explaining to someone why the horse died with such a surprised look on his face.

So the explorer set out in his ship, with the horse's body in tow, beginning to smell even more ripe than a horse does when alive. Six days north of Britain, and a day south of the edge of the world where you could peek around to the other side and see the word search puzzle and maze game on the back, Pytheas found a beautiful uncharted island. After taking a quick look around to make sure he didn't see anybody he knew, Pytheas dumped the horse and planted his own personal "Found it!" flag, as a warning to any other explorers inclined to claim the island for their own, and their horses.

Iceland was populated mainly by embarrassing corpses and explorers' flags until the 9th century, when it was settled by Norwegians who brought with them a number of Celts in their luggage. Around this time the island came to be known as Tholböp, an Icelandic word meaning "Land of Easy Women." But the natives there eventually changed the name to "Iceland," so Vikings in the area would look at their maps and say "Fuck that, sounds cold!" and instead carry on their raping and pillaging in Greenland, where they would freeze to death because Greenland is nothing but a big hunk of ice floating out in the ocean. Nobody said the Icelanders didn't have a good sense of humor. This has been evidenced in the high percentage of Icelandic men named Snorri and in the nation's major exports: pet rocks and really hot women who look like Björk.

The half-dozen natives of Greenland didn't appreciate having their island's name changed without being consulted first, but the resulting bumper crop of dead Vikings washing up on their shores soon assuaged all of their concerns. This development served to found Greenland's economy, which was soon booming with the import of dead frozen Vikings and the export of Greenlanders who thought it might be nicer to live somewhere else. Those who remained lived the good life, as much as any life lived in constant oppressive cold on top of a giant hunk of ice can be called good, and they were content to sing songs about snow while huddled inside their igloos made of piles of dead frozen Vikings.

Greenland was originally known as Igapaquk, an Inuit word meaning "Eeh, it's okay." The first colony on the island was founded in 500 B.C. by a lost band of Inuit sailors from Canada who were very pessimistic about their chances of finding something better if they sailed on further. Legend has it that these early inexperienced pilgrims only stayed on Greenland because of a linguistic snafu which caused them to confuse the two meanings of the word "settle," one being to build a colony in a new land and the other to accept something shitty even though you could probably do better.

So now that the globe's great lie has been exposed we can move on to more pressing questions, such as what do they call really nice dishes in China? Stay tuned.

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