Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (38 page)

The locations of Leif’s discoveries will probably never be known for certain. Leif’s description of Helluland is a good fit for Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and Markland is almost certainly Labrador. Vinland is much harder to identify. The Hudson River is the southern limit of Atlantic salmon, while the St Lawrence is the northern limit of wild grapes, which would place Vinland in New England or the Canadian Maritimes. However, winters in these areas are certainly not frost free. According to
Grænlendinga
saga
, Leif observed that on the shortest day the sun rose before 9 a.m. and did not set until after 3 p.m. but these are not clock times, as the Vikings did not have clocks, so they cannot help us determine Vinland’s latitude. What is certain, however, is that Leif and his crew were the first Europeans to set foot on the North American continent.

Leif’s voyage was followed-up by his brother Thorvald. Thorvald spent a winter at Leifsbuðir. The next summer Thorvald explored the coast to the north-east. The ship broke its keel when it was driven ashore in a storm. The party had to spend some time repairing the ship: they left the old keel on a headland that Thorvald decided to call Kjalarnes (‘Keel headland’). Sailing further east, the party landed to explore at the mouth of a fjord. Returning to the ship, they saw three humps on the beach. These turned out to be canoes, each with three men hiding underneath. So began the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. It did not go well. The Native Americans tried to run away from the strangers but Thorvald’s men captured eight of them and killed them, apparently without any provocation. Unfortunately for Thorvald, the ninth escaped in one of the boats and raised the alarm. Further up the fjord, the Norse could see low humps which they surmised to be houses. Soon a swarm of canoes was heading down the fjord towards them. The heavily outnumbered Norse defended themselves with their shields and the natives soon withdrew but not before Thorvald had received a fatal arrow wound. He died soon after and became the first European to be buried in North America. The rest of the party returned safely to Greenland.

The identity of the unfortunate native Americans is unknown: if Vinland really was as far south as Leif’s account implies, they would have belonged to one of the many Algonquian-speaking peoples who inhabited the east coast between Chesapeake Bay and the St Lawrence before European settlement. In the Icelandic sources, all native peoples encountered in North America and Greenland are described simply as Skrælings. The origins of the name are uncertain. One is that it means ‘screamers’, perhaps because the Norse found their language completely incomprehensible. Perhaps more likely, it may be derived from the Old Norse word
skrá
, meaning skin. This would probably be a reference to their animal skin clothing, which would have contrasted with the woven woollen clothing worn by the Norse.

A few years later Thorfinn Karlsefni set out from Greenland to found a permanent colony at Leifsbuðir. He took with him his wife Gudrid, sixty men and five women, and a variety of livestock. The party spent an uneventful winter during which Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European to be born in America. The following spring saw their first encounter with Skrælings, who came to Leifsbuðir to trade furs. The Greenlanders’ iron tools and weapons must have fascinated the Skrælings, who still had a Stone Age culture (small artefacts of native copper and meteoritic iron were used), but Karlsefni forbade his men to trade any of them. During a second encounter later in the year, one of Karlsefni’s men killed a Skræling for trying to steal some weapons. The rest fled but soon returned to get their revenge. Expecting this, Karlsefni had prepared an ambush and the Skrælings were easily driven off. Nevertheless, the next spring Karlsefni abandoned the settlement and returned to Greenland. He eventually bought lands in Iceland.

Erik’s saga adds that on the return voyage a ship owned by Bjarni Grimolfsson was blown far off course into Irish waters. The ship’s hull became infested with driftwood-eating worms and began to leak. The ship’s boat was only large enough to take half the crew. Bjarni decreed that lots would be drawn to decide who would go in the boat, and who would remain behind. Bjarni was one of those who drew a place in the boat. As Bjarni prepared to depart with the boat, a young Icelander asked:

‘Are you going to leave me here Bjarni?’

‘That is how it has to be,’ replied Bjarni.

The Icelander said, ‘But that is not what you promised when I left my father’s farm in Iceland to go with you.’

‘I see no other way,’ said Bjarni, ‘what do you suggest?’”

‘I suggest we change places, you come up here and I shall go down there.’

‘So be it,’ said Bjarni, ‘I can see that you would spare no effort to live and are afraid to die.’ (trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson.)

With that, Bjarni climbed back into the sinking ship and the Icelander took his place in the boat. Those in the ship’s boat reached safety in Ireland; Bjarni and everyone left with him in the ship were never seen again and presumably drowned. Bjarni was within his rights to refuse to change places with the Icelander, but could not have done so without also appearing to be afraid of death. The Icelander, perhaps intentionally, had put him in a difficult situation. Bjarni could save his life or save his honour, but not both. For a proud man like Bjarni, it was not a difficult dilemma to resolve. By giving up his place in the boat Bjarmi saved his honour, secured his posthumous reputation, and was remembered by future generations. No one knows the name of the cowardly Icelander, he was
niðing
and would have lived the rest of his life as a social outcast.

A second attempt at settlement was led by Leif’s half-sister Freydis, who, according to Erik’s saga, had already been to Vinland as part of Karlsefni’s expedition. She invited two brothers called Helgi and Finnbogi to join her, but she was a difficult, uncompromising woman who seemed set on causing conflict with them from the very start. Ill feeling grew during the winter and in the spring Freydis sent her men to kill the brothers and their followers after an argument over a ship. None of the men were willing to kill the five women so Freydis took an axe and did the job herself. Despite threatening to kill anyone who told of her evil deeds when they got home, people inevitably talked. Leif, who was now leader of the Greenland community, was horrified when he heard the rumours, but had not the heart to punish his sister, only predicting that her sins would blight her descendents’ fortunes.

The failure of Freydis’ expedition ended Norse attempts at settlement in America. The distances involved were too great and the small Greenland colony simply did not have the resources or the surplus population to support a colonisation effort so far away. Though iron weapons gave the Norse a military advantage over the natives, it was not marked enough to prevail against their superior numbers. The immediate consequences of the Norse discovery of North America were slight. The existence of Vinland soon became known in Europe but it was thought merely to be another island in the Atlantic Ocean, like Iceland or Greenland, so its significance was not understood. Erik Gnupsson, the bishop of Garðar, set off on a new expedition to Vinland in 1112 but its fate is not recorded. As a new bishop was sent to Greenland in 1115, Erik may not have returned and been given up for dead. After this interest in Vinland faded and by the time the Vinland sagas were written, it had largely been forgotten outside Iceland and Greenland. There is no evidence, for example, that Columbus knew of Vinland’s existence when he set off on his voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 in search of a route to China, only to find America in the way.

Voyages from Greenland to Markland and Helluland continued at least until the fourteenth century. The last recorded expedition was in 1347, when a small ship with seventeen Greenlanders was blown off course to Iceland while returning from cutting timber in Markland. As far as Native Americans were concerned, the Vinland voyages might as well have never happened: they had no impact whatsoever on North America’s cultural development. Despite this, the Norse discovery of North America does mark a significant moment in world history: it was the end of humanity’s 70,000 year journey out of Africa. The descendents of peoples who had left Africa and migrated east through Asia to the Americas had finally met the descendents of people who had left Africa and migrated west. The circle of the world was closed.

L’Anse aux Meadows

The first archaeological evidence for the Norse presence in North America was a runestone found at Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898, or so it briefly seemed. The text purported to describe the journey of eight Goths (i.e. Swedes) and twenty-two Norwegians from Vinland to Minnesota via the Great Lakes in 1362. Closer examination revealed that the runes were a mixture of types used from the ninth to the eleventh century and homemade symbols. The language used was the distinctive Swedish-Norwegian dialect spoken by Scandinavian settlers in Minnesota in the 1890s, while the date was based on the Arabic system of numeration that was not used in fourteenth-century Scandinavia. Although it still has its advocates, academics quickly recognised that the Kensington runestone was a forgery, presumably made by local Scandinavian settlers either as a joke or for reasons of ethnic prestige. The stone was the beginning of a minor tradition of providing the missing evidence that would prove beyond doubt that the Vinland sagas were not just romantic travellers’ tales about imaginary lands. Runic inscriptions have even been found in Oklahoma.

Real archaeological evidence of a Norse presence in North America finally came to light in 1961 with the discovery of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. L’Anse aux Meadows is a shallow, sheltered cove at Newfoundland’s northern tip. The cove faces west, with a clear view of the hills of Labrador 30 miles away across the Strait of Belle Isle. Although the landscape is open grassland, the name actually has nothing to do with meadows, it is an English corruption of the name given by early French settlers, L’Anse-aux-Méduses, meaning ‘Jellyfish Bay’. L’Anse aux Meadows was uninhabited when the Norse arrived but they were not the first to spot its attractions; there had been several phases of occupation by early Inuit seal hunters spread over thousands of years.

The Norse settlement consisted of eight buildings, all of them built of turf and lined with timber. Three of the buildings were longhouses, the others were probably workshops. The settlement could have accommodated up to about ninety people. Longhouses may have been the typical Viking dwelling but they are not unique to them. Longhouses were built by several Native American peoples including the Inuit; indeed, the foundations of long-abandoned Inuit longhouses in the Canadian Arctic have sometimes been mistaken for Viking longhouses. However, the large numbers of metal artefacts excavated from the settlement prove beyond any doubt that L’Anse aux Meadows was a Norse settlement. The majority of these objects were wrought iron ship rivets, suggesting that ship repair was a major activity on site. The rivets may have been manufactured at a small forge that was built a small distance from the settlement, probably as a precaution against fire. Native Americans made small tools from meteoritic iron and by cold-hammering native copper, but they lacked the technology to smelt iron. A typically Scandinavian bronze ring pin was also found on the site. The discovery of a soapstone spindle whorl confirmed the saga accounts that women went on the Vinland voyages as spinning was a female activity. Stone weights found in one building may have been part of a loom. A glass bead, a broken bone needle and a whetstone for sharpening needles and knives are also all typical of the sort of artefacts that are found in Norse settlements of the Viking Age. Radiocarbon-dating of organic materials indicates that the site was occupied
c.
980-1020, which accords well with the saga traditions.

Even though the sagas say that the Norse took livestock with them, the excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows provided no evidence of farming or the presence of European domesticated animals. The settlers were, however, active hunters. The bones of caribou, wolf, fox, bear, lynx, marten, seal, whale and walrus and of many species of fish and wildfowl have been found on the site. The environment around L’Anse aux Meadows bears little resemblance to that of Vinland. Winters are severe and there are no wild grapes so, unless Leif greatly exaggerated the delights of Vinland, which is not impossible – his father had taught him the importance of good marketing – L’Anse aux Meadows is unlikely to be Leifsbuðir. It seems more likely that L’Anse aux Meadows was a base for expeditions further south. That such expeditions took place is proven by the presence of butternuts among food remains on the site. An American species of walnut, butternuts grow no further north than southern New Brunswick and the lower St Lawrence, more than 500 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows.

So far, only one Norse artefact that is generally accepted as genuine has been found in the United States. This is a worn silver penny minted during the reign of the Norwegian king Olaf Kyrre (r. 1067 – 93) that was found during excavations of a large Native American village at Goddard Point on the coast of Maine. The exact circumstances in which the coin was found are undocumented and the possibility that it was introduced to the site to manipulate the evidence cannot be ruled out. Even if this was not the case, it is not evidence that Norse seafarers visited Maine. The Goddard site provided abundant evidence that it was at the centre of an extensive trade network that extended as far as Arctic Canada. As the Greenland Norse continued to visit Labrador until the fourteenth century, the coin could originally have been acquired as an exotic curio by an Inuit and found its way to Maine along the native trade routes, probably changing hands many times.

Vikings
and
Skrælings
in
the
Arctic