FROM THE OLD NORSE POEM THE HÁVAMÁL
Centuries before Columbus, the Vikings trod the sands of American shores. In Greenland, Eirik Raudi, also known as Erik the Red, had successfully colonized a new home for himself, his family and followers, after being banished from Norway for the crime of manslaughter. Stories of his vast, fertile new country were propelled by Eirik’s cunning invention of ‘Greenland’ as an alluring name for the new settlement, three-quarters of which is actually covered by a permanent ice sheet. Rumour of abundant walrus tusk ivory – one of Medieval Europe’s most valuable trade materials – reached Norwegian and Icelandic ears, and the northern waters soon teemed with vessels carrying families determined to stake their claim in the new land rush. And so perhaps it was inevitable that among this throng of traffic a ship would slip from its course by accident, and its passengers stumble onto an even greater discovery.
In 986 the Norseman Bjarni Herjólfsson made landfall in Iceland, intending to meet up with his family. To his dismay he was told that his father had left the country, having sold his home to join Erik the Red on his quest to colonize Greenland. Herjólfsson set out again, this time for the new settlement, but things didn’t quite go to plan. On the third day of his journey his ship was swept up by a northern wind, carrying him a great distance until finally he met with strange terrain – he had discovered Labrador (northeast Canada). Herjólfsson explored the forests and hills, and then made another attempt for Greenland, this time successfully. Little was made of his sightings until fifteen years later when Leif Erikson, son of the Red, bought Herjólfsson’s own boat and headed for the land he had described. (Incidentally, it is Erikson, not Herjólfsson, who is given credit for the discovery in the saga of Erik the Red.)
Around the year 1000, Erikson and his fifteen-man crew retraced Herjólfsson’s voyage and arrived at ‘a land of flat stones’ they called Helluland, according to the sagas that record the story. It is generally agreed that this is Baffin Island, the fifth-largest island in the world, in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The barren ground and mountains were not the most suitable for settlement though and Erikson moved on, south to ‘Markland’. Here again he found inhospitable shores thick with woodland and so continued his journey, making for another shore in the distance which he found to have a more agreeable terrain and climate. He remained there for a winter, and sung the country’s praises on his return: temperate, rich with vegetation, its freshwater teeming with fish. Most wonderfully he told of lush grapes on the vine, and so it was named ‘Vinland’, the land of wine. (Whether this last feature was true, or whether Erikson had as great a gift for false advertising as his father, is debatable.)
Regardless, Vinland was now on the Norse radar and another expedition was dispatched, led by Leif’s brother Thorvald, as Erikson had to remain behind to maintain the Greenland colony. This time, however, the Vikings encountered resistance from the native population and Thorvald was felled by an arrow. For a while the Norse were put off from making further efforts at exploring the new country until 1010, when Erikson’s brother-in-law, Thorfinn Karlsefini, landed with a contingent of sixty-one men with their wives and farming animals in tow, determined to form a settlement. From this point the story is told with variation among the sagas, but it can be gathered that the Norse base was situated on the northern tip of Newfoundland. There is currently little evidence as to how much of their surroundings they explored, but it seems they maintained a presence on the American continent until the mid-fourteenth century. In 1960 an archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows at this general spot produced evidence of such a settlement, confirming this extraordinary pre-Columbian transoceanic contact.
Another related discovery of recent times is decidedly more controversial. ‘The Vinland Map’ is purported to be a fifteenth-century world map showing these Norse discoveries in the New World, including ‘Vinlanda Insula’, as well as Africa, Asia and Europe. The map was found in 1957 (three years before the unearthing of the Viking site at L’Anse aux Meadows) among the pages of a medieval text Hystoria Tartarorum, after a London book dealer named Irving Davis offered the slim volume for sale to the British Museum. It was treated with deep suspicion right away. The position of wormholes in the document did not match those in the book, although this appeared to be resolved a year later when the same dealer happened to come across a third volume with the corresponding markings. Since this time, the Vinland map has been subjected to increasingly intense and technologically complex scrutiny, with chemical analysis of the ink, photomicrography, spectroscopy and radiocarbon dating all carried out over the years. No official consensus has so far been reached as to its authenticity.
Yale University, to which the map was donated in 1965, have refused to officially come down on either side. ‘We regard ourselves as the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document’, said university librarian Alice Prochaska in 2002, ‘and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest.’ However, in 2011 Yale’s Professor of History, Paul Freedman, stated that the map is ‘unfortunately a fake’, and this is the position generally held today.
