The Apostle of Greenland

Wikipedia:

Hans Poulsen Egede (31 January 1686 – 5 November 1758) was a Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary priest who launched mission efforts to Greenland, which led him to be styled the Apostle of Greenland. He established a successful mission among the Inuit and is credited with revitalizing Danish-Norwegian interest in the island after contact had been broken for about 300 years. He founded Greenland’s capital Godthåb, now known as Nuuk.

. . . Haabet (“The Hope”) and two smaller ships departed Bergen on 2 May 1721 bearing Egede, his wife and four children, and forty other colonists. On 3 July[5] they reached Nuup Kangerlua and established Hope Colony (Haabets Colonie) with the erection of a portable house on Kangeq Island, which Egede christened the Island of Hope (Haabets Ø). Searching for months for descendants of the old Norse colonists, he found only the local Kalaallit people and began studying their language.

A common myth states that, as the Inuit had no bread nor any idea of it, Egede adapted the Lord’s Prayer as “Give us this day our daily seal”. Egede at first tried the word “mamaq” but it does not mean “food”, as Hans Egede thought, but “how delicious!” This first attempt stems from 1724, when he had only been in the country for three years and he has probably often heard someone say “mamaq!” It was not long before he came up with the word “neqissat”, “food”. When Egede’s son Poul published the four Gospels in print in 1744, he used the word “timiusaq”. This word was already written down by Hans in 1725 and is used by Greenlanders as an explanation of how bread looks. The old dictionaries suggest that at that time one could use the word “timia” in the sense of “bone marrow” or, as Samuel Kleinschmidt wrote in his dictionary in 1871, “the inner, porous part of the leg or Horn”. “Timiusaq” therefore originally means “it which resembles bone marrow ”. Today, this word is used in it ecclesiastical languages in the sense of “wafer” and in North Greenland in the sense of “ship’s biscuit”.

Egede holds the legacy of a national “saint” of Greenland. The town of Egedesminde (lit. “Memory of Egede”) commemorates him. It was established by Hans’s second son, Niels, in 1759 on the Eqalussuit peninsula. It was moved to the island of Aasiaat in 1763, which had been the site of a pre-Viking Inuit settlement. His grandson and namesake Hans Egede Saabye also became a missionary to Greenland and published a celebrated diary of his time there.

The Royal Danish Geographical Society established the Egede Medal in his honour in 1916. The medal is in silver and awarded ‘preferably for geographical studies and researches in the Arctic countries’.

An excerpt from, “Takeaways from AP’s report on why so many Greenlanders are Lutheran” The Press Democrat: 

About 90% of the 57,000 Greenlanders identify as Inuit and the vast majority of them belong to the Lutheran Church today, more than 300 years after a Danish missionary brought that branch of Christianity to the world’s largest island.

For many, their devotion to ritual and tradition is as much a part of what it means to be a Greenlander as is their fierce deference to the homeland. The one so many want U.S. President Donald Trump to understand is not for sale despite his threats to seize it.

Greenland is huge — about three times the size of Texas; most of it covered in ice. Still, its 17 parishes are located across many settlements in the icy land and people endure the frigid Arctic climate to fill up church pews on Sundays.

Some even tune in to radio-transmitted services on their phones on a break from fishing and hunting for seals, whales and polar bears, as their ancestors have done for generations.

That rugged yet vulnerable lifestyle helps fuel people’s devotion, said Bishop Paneeraq Siegstad Munk, leader of Greenland’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.