Iceland & Greenland Finds

I was excited today to get an ebay purchase and find a few Iceland stamps and my first stamp from Greenland. It seems these stamps are not very common, I suppose because they have a small population?

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Post offices print the stamps they can sell (no matter to whom, and why), and both Iceland & Greenland have been in stamp catalogs & stamp albums for a long, long time.

Their stamps are collectible, and collected.

I prefer mine GPU (Genuinely Postally Used) on piece, but that's me.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

oceanguy - Congratulations on your new acquisitions.


Yepp, very small - and particularly Greenland produce much more stamps than its tiny population really needs for postal purposes. The same applies for the Faroes Islands. Really beautiful stamps tough, even some by Slania http://www.slaniastamps-heindorffhu...enland01.htm



....and me !

I like Iceland and Greenland, as well as the rest of Scandinavia. Greenland in particular is scarce to find just randomly, for reasons that have already been mentioned. Greenland's population is only about 56,000 and I doubt there's a lot of correspondence with most of the world, save Denmark and other Nordic countries, so their stamps don't circulate as widely through the mails as some other countries. Iceland, on the other hand, turns up from time to time in random mixtures, and some of their stamps are common enough to turn up with some regularity. Stamps from about 1960 to about 2000 are pretty easy to find and inexpensive, but that's true for most countries of the world for that time period.

I think my Icelandic friends may take issue at being described as Scandinavian Nordic maybe but NOT Scandinavian! As for the Greenlanders, the last time I was there most of the Inuit spoke with Canadian accents.

Blaamand - The stamps from Iceland and Greenland are really beautiful. I was looking at some more of them online and they are amazing, but then I am partial to engravings. I will have to take a look at some stamps from the Faroes Islands too ;-)

The one from Greenland is mint, but a few from Iceland are cancelled. I may have to see if I can scrounge up some packets from these countries somewhere and keep my eyes peeled on ebay.

TimH - that is pretty amazing you have had the chance to travel to Greenland. That must have been an incredible place to see.

I was involved in a scientific expedition in the south of the country in 1987. I spent 5 weeks being a research assistant on the Gardar province alkaline intrusives, then the next 4 weeks leading an expedition to study the rapakivi granites around Cape Farewell. Stunning country and great people.

I collect Greenland mint to 2000, and Iceland postally used to 1973.

Wow Tim - you have really been globetrotting . Is there any place you have not been - yet?

As a Norwegian I would say the Scandinavian/Nordic confusion is so commonplace abroad I do hardly notice it anymore. In my opinion the 3 Scandinavian countries should not have disestablished the union that was created in 1397 (the Kalmar union). If so all of the Nordic area would still have been within one border. There were some aspirations to restore the union in the 18-19th century, but the nationalist forces were too strong. Similar unions were successfully established to create new nations like Spain, Germany, Italy and even US - but the people up here in the cold north seems to have been too sedate to aim for anything bigger than themselves. If nothing else, it is a good thing for stamp collectors - making eight different Nordic stamp entities rather than one

He he, there are plenty of places I want to go to (or back to) but age, a dodgy knee and currently restricted funds have put a small hold on that. You'll be pleased to know that Norway is on the list!

For reference, here's the trickiest of the Greenland issues, the 1945 Liberation of Denmark overprint. The primary sequence of overprint colours went 1ö red, 5ö blue, 7ö red, 10ö blue, 15ö red, 30ö blue, 1k red, 2k red and 3k blue. However, the values above 10ö also had a smaller number of overprints made in the opposite colour. As you can see, some of these are not really legible (e.g. 15ö blue overprint and 30ö red overprint).

Beautiful and rare stuff Tim

Does anybody has these sets postally used ?