Vikings in America (31 page)

On the other side of the Atlantic there is similar uncertainty. The name England comes from English – it is quite simply the land of the English. But a meaning for English is long lost. Similarly Scotland is the land of the Scots, though why the Scots are called Scots is not known. We're on stronger ground with Wales, the land of the Welsh. Welsh is a straightforward Old English word, and it means slave. Wales was called by the English the land
of the slaves – so no wonder that today the people of Wales prefer their country to be known by its name in their own Welsh language – Cymru. The name Britain has been around for a very long time. In this case there is no known origin for the name, but this didn't stop writers of an earlier age inventing an origin, and creating a foundation myth. To Geoffrey of Monmouth and to the mediaeval world, Britain was named after Brutus, a Prince of Troy who fled the city following its destruction at the hands of the Greeks, and founded a new home for himself in what we now call after him the British Isles. There is no likelihood of truth in this story but so strong is the need to find an origin for names that a whole myth cycle was created around it: the fictitious person of Brutus and his supposed Trojan origin in Anatolia, his voyage through the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, and his conquest of a great island which he named Britain after him.

America is a name as much in need of an origin as Canada or England or Scotland or Britain. The story which has found its way into the history books and which is still taught in American schools is that America takes its name from an explorer called Amerigo Vespucci. Of course this is not correct. It is a foundation myth comparable to the naming of Britain after Brutus.

Amerigo Vespucci is a real enough figure. An Italian born in Florence around 1451 he moved to Seville in 1492, and in the years from 1497 to 1504 took part in four Spanish voyages to the New World, possibly leading the last of them. He was therefore one of the early explorers who followed Columbus across the Atlantic, and the voyages he took part in made discoveries in South America and in the southern Caribbean. He never set foot in the present area of the USA. Vespucci's role in history is as a rather minor figure in the exploration of the continent. The Europeans of Amerigo Vespucci's time were clear that the New World had been ‘discovered' by Christopher Columbus, and if that land was to be named after anyone it would have been after Columbus. Amerigo Vespucci as the origin of the name America is not credible; as much a myth as the origins proposed for Canada, or the mythical origin of Britain. Whatever the origin of the name America might be, we can be sure that this is not it.

The origin of the myth of Amerigo Vespucci comes from historians' accounts based on a map produced by a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller, and dated 1507, which shows the New World and gives the name as America, writing the word America roughly in the area of present-day Brazil.
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In a marginal note Waldseemuller links the name America with Amerigo Vespucci. His motive seems to be desperation. The format of the
notes on his map required him to explain the origins of the names of all the continents, something that he does with conventional accuracy for the Old World continents of Europe, Africa and Asia. Yet he clearly has no idea of the origin of America, and he grasps at a straw by linking it with the name of an explorer he has heard of. Waldseemuller makes a mistake; whatever the reason for calling America by its name, this cannot be it.

Other ideas for the origin of America have been proposed. One just about plausible is that America is indeed named for a man, but after Richard Ameryke, the name of the Bristol tax collector and civil servant of the English king Henry VII who handled the funding and administration of Jean Cabot's first voyage to America. As far as the English court and civil service were concerned the project was linked not with Jean Cabot, the hired captain, but rather with Richard Ameryke, the civil servant responsible for administering the project. There have also been suggestions that the name is an Old Norse phrase meaning either ‘far kingdom' or ‘west kingdom', in my view linguistically untenable as well as nonsensical.

However, I believe there is a plausible Viking origin for the name which should be considered. The clue comes from the way in which the Vikings used names. Thus for example the name Norway is a simple description – it means the north coast. It was the coast the Vikings sailed up when travelling north, towards the summer hunting grounds of the Scandinavian Arctic. West across the sea were the islands of the Faroe Islands. When the Vikings arrived they found sheep running wild over the islands and in great numbers. The Vikings named the land for its dominant feature, ‘Faroe Islands' means simply ‘the sheep islands'. North from the Faroe Islands is Iceland. The Vikings arriving from the Faroe Islands were met with the vast Vatnajokul glacier, ice visible well out to sea. Iceland was a simple, factual description of this dominant feature. Iceland seems to have been an unfortunate choice of name because it does seem to have deterred settlers, a state of affairs that the Vikings themselves remarked upon. When land was discovered to the west there was an incentive not to repeat the mistake, and so Greenland received its attractive name. Yet the name is more than just a piece of Viking propaganda. The coasts of Greenland are spectacularly green, with lush sedge meadows that stretch from the sea to the interior ice cap. For Vikings arriving from Iceland, a land with thin soil, few meadows and little grass, ‘Greenland' was a simple factual description.

West of Greenland the Vikings made landfall in the New World. Three names they used have been preserved. Helluland was used of the northern
part of the New World. The name means slab-land, a description of a land of bare, ice-scoured slabs of rock. Markland to the south means forest-land. South of Markland was Vinland, meaning fertile-land. The underlying principle used in all these place names is simple physical description.

There is one name that the Vikings applied to many lands they visited – ‘merki'. The primary dictionary meaning is a boundary, a wide expanse of land, a frontier. In particular it signified to the Vikings and to other Germanic peoples speaking cognate languages an area of unfarmed land, a land beyond the area they had settled, a border land, a land ‘beyond the pale', over the border. Perhaps the closest single word in modern English which expresses this concept comes from Australia: outback. To past generations of Americans an equivalent was simply ‘the west', the frontier beyond the first colonies on the east coast. The name ‘merki' was very common throughout the Germanic lands of northern Europe. Thus in England the unfarmed, unsettled area of the interior was called in the English dialect ‘Mercia'. The name lives on today not as an administrative unit but as a regional term used by several English Midlands media and utility companies.

When the Vikings arrived anywhere at the edge of their range they would have used the name merki, not as a specific name for a specific land, but simply as a description for the type of land. We can be sure that this everyday geographical term in the Old Norse language was used by the Vikings for America.

There is a similarity of sorts between ‘merki' and ‘America', but plenty of room for coincidence. It could not be asserted that just because merki and America are similar they must be linked. Etymology does not work that way. However there is a discipline which enables the problem to be addressed – philology – which concerns itself particularly with language change, including etymology. Philology has as its fundamental idea the neogrammarian hypothesis, that language change is governed by rules which may be precisely described, and which admit of no exceptions. It is possible therefore to compare words in related languages, or in the same language at different dates, and say something about whether they really are or are not related, something which goes beyond merely noting a general similarity.

An example from English illustrates how philology operates. We know that as a rule, one without any exceptions whatsoever, any Old English word which contains a diphthong lost that diphthong as the language developed into Middle English, and took in its place a monophthong. So Old English
chiese
we can say for sure must lose the diphthong
ie
and replace it with a single vowel. And we can further say as an absolute rule that when
the diphthong is
ie
the vowel will be
e
. And when the diphthong is pronounced long – as it is in
chiese
– the resulting vowel will be long, which in our spelling convention is
ee
. So
chiese
by application of rules must become
cheese
– which it does.
Chiese
is the Old English word for
cheese
, and even if somehow we didn't know the modern English word we could work it out from the Old English original by applying rules. Using rules we can project the forms of words forward with much confidence, and we can go backwards with a measure of success. Thus we have now worked out that the word for
cheese
in Indo-European, the postulated first language of the European and Indian peoples, is
kasi
. This word changes in the earliest forms of Germanic according to exactly describable rules to
kaesi
. Still following rules
kaesi
becomes
kiesi
and
chiese
, then
cheese
. If we have the rules worked out and we know that the Indo-European form is
kasi
then we can work out that the Modern English form will be
cheese
.
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So what can we say about
merki
? Quite a lot, in fact. First of all the word was used throughout the Viking world, with different forms in different dialects.
Merki
is the West Norse form, used in Iceland, Greenland, and by the Vikings who found the New World. In East Norse – the language of Denmark – it is found as
maerke
and
mirke
. In England the same word is found as
mierce
and
mercia
. These words are cognate, effectively the same word but with differences in pronunciation. A Norwegian Viking would have said
merki
, his Danish Viking companion
maerke
or
mirke
, and an Englishman
mierce
or
mercia
, and they would have perceived these differences as no more than different accents.

The English form
mierce
developed through rules that have been worked out.
Mierce
loses its diphthong and becomes first
merce
, then by the application of separate processes becomes next
merch
and then
march
, the basic modern English form of
mierce
. Certain English dialects favoured
k
to
ch
giving
mark
. The word still hangs on in English in the term
march
for a border land – as in the Welsh Marches. ‘Mark' can also be found as a word for a territory or area of land, though it is now archaic. A familiar form is
landmark
, originally something which showed the boundary of a territory.

The Old Norse
merki
is subject to a different set of rules, doesn't have a diphthong to lose, but it does have an awkward -
rk
- consonant cluster. This is subject to a special change, metathesis, by which sounds have their positions within a word swapped around. Metathesis is very common in all languages.
⁹
No-one's tongue likes dealing with clusters of consonants. An example from English is the old word
brid
, where the tongue was confronted with the
initial two consonants. Of course we can manage this in English – after all there are plenty of words starting
br-
– but in linguistic terms we are all lazy and seek to avoid exercise for our tongues wherever possible. By a regular process of metathesis the Old English
brid
becomes modern English
bird
.

Just the same process – metathesis – applies to the Viking name
merki
. The consonant cluster was broken by bringing the
-i-
forward to give
merik
. Thus regular processes mean that the Viking word for outback, and which the Vikings applied to the New World, must become by one route in English
march
and
mark
, and by another route in the Scandinavian languages
merik
.

Merik, of course, is not America. The initial A- is a feature of Romance philology, particularly in Spanish. It is intrusive, a modification of a name as Spanish speakers assimilated an alien word into their language. A Spaniard using the Viking name
Merik
would tend to form
Amerik
. The final vowel is again a Romance feature –
Amerik
becomes
Amerika
. From this to
America
is purely a convention of spelling.

This is not a proof that America is a Viking name. However if it is a coincidence, it is a remarkable one. A name that the Vikings would have used to describe America when brought forward to fifteenth-century forms of Norse and adopted by Romance speakers gives America, exactly the name that the Spanish gave to the New World. At the very least it is a plausible derivation. It must be preferred to derivation from the name Amerigo Vespucci. It is far better than the weak derivations proposed for Canada or Britain.

On the evidence that we have, it is most likely that it is the Vikings who could have named America!

In this book we have seen the impact of the Vikings on America. It investigates just how far they travelled, where they settled and the effect they had on the land they settled. It examines too the knowledge that Europe had of the New World before Columbus.

Above all there is an awareness that the Vikings matter. The Vikings are the European discoverers of America – not Christopher Columbus. Certainly they settled there, probably they left their genes there, certainly they traded North American goods back to Europe, and even provided the sea routes which enabled Columbus and the renaissance European explorers with the means to get to America. Plausibly the Vikings even named the land. Their
contribution was immense, yet it has been marginalised. In working on this book I have felt there is a spirit of disinformation in the records of Europe and in much modern writing, almost a conspiracy to marginalise the Vikings' contribution. Europe has wanted to forget the Vikings, and even today the world is slow to accord the Vikings their central role.