Robert Thomsen
In 1931, Augo Lynge’s Ukiut 300-ngornerat (in English: Three Hundred Years Hence) became the second novel ever published in Kalaallisut (West-Greenlandic). Looking three centuries ahead from the arrival of the missionary Hans Egede and the beginning of Danish colonisation of the island in 1721,2 this piece of speculative fiction provides an optimistic modernistic view of future Greenland as a thriving, technologically advanced society. Clearly moulded in the image of the former coloniser, Greenland of 2021 as described in the novel is a Danish county, with an ethnically mixed, Greenland-Danish population. While modernisation has been fully embraced, in Lynge’s Greenland, traditional culture is barely surviving, and the county is largely bilingual (Kalaallisut-Danish). The Greenland population are confidently settled in their collective identity in a comfortable, integrated relationship with Denmark (Lynge, 1931/1989).
