Few missionaries faced a calling as icy as that of Hans Egede. A pastor in a modest parish in northern Norway, he spent years developing a plan that sounded impossible: sailing to Greenland, a land that Christian Europe had nearly forgotten.
Born in 1686 in Harstad, he studied theology in Copenhagen and became a pastor in the Lofoten Islands in 1707. There, reading old Norse chronicles, he discovered that Christian settlers had established themselves in Greenland during the Middle Ages and then vanished, with no word from them for nearly three centuries.
Convinced that descendants of these settlers still lived on the island, cut off from the faith, he spent years seeking support from the king of Denmark-Norway. Only in 1721 did he set sail from Bergen with his wife, Gertrud Rask, and their children, bound for a territory that almost no European knew firsthand.
On arrival, he found no trace of the Norse descendants he was looking for, only ruins. Instead of giving up, he turned his attention to the Inuit already living in the region, gradually learning their language and customs, a slow work, with no translated Bible and no reliable interpreters.
In 1728, with the support of a royal expedition, the colony he had founded at Kangeq was moved to the site that would become Godthåb, today’s Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Contact brought by the Europeans came, however, at a real cost: between 1733 and 1735, a smallpox epidemic carried in on supply ships killed thousands of Inuit.
The work of evangelization also had a harsher side. Records from the period show that Egede resorted to threats and punishments to combat the traditional religious practices of the Inuit, especially the role of the shamans, the angakkuit, a mark of intolerance now read as part of the broader process of Danish colonization of Greenland.
His wife, Gertrud, died in December 1735, having fallen ill while caring for the sick during the epidemic. Egede returned to Denmark the following year, leaving the work of translation and catechesis to his son, Poul Egede. In Copenhagen, he founded a seminary to train new missionaries, and in 1741 he became titular bishop of Greenland.
His memory divides opinion: in 2020, residents of Nuuk publicly debated the statue raised in his honor, a symbol of both the arrival of the gospel and the Danish colonial rule that came with it. That ambiguity is a legitimate part of his legacy, not a detail to hide.
Egede died in 1758, in Denmark, after devoting decades to a people who were not his own, in a language he had to learn from scratch. His insistence on staying, despite the losses, still inspires those who today carry the gospel to isolated places resistant to change.
