THE VINLAND MAP
Controversial chart is finally revealed as a deliberate fake
Since it was made public in 1965, the Vinland map has been mired in controversy. It was claimed to be a 15th century map that shows the east coast of North America, drawn before Columbus discovered the continent and informed by Norse exploration; but despite high-profile endorsements, there have always been doubts as to whether it was genuine. Besides showing the American coast, the map shows Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as Greenland, and possibly Japan. The map first came to light in 1957, bound with a mediæval text called Hystoria Tartarorum (usually translated as Tartar Relations) when it was offered to the British Museum by two book dealers, Irving Davis and Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry. The museum declined to buy it, but de Ry then sold it for $3,500 (£2,500) to an American dealer, Laurence C Witten II, who donated it to Yale University.
Yale were suspicious of the map because wormholes in it did not match those in Hystoria Tartarorum, but Davis, via Witten, was later able to conveniently sell them (at $300,000) another
It shows the east coast of America informed by Norse exploration
mediæval manuscript, Speculum Historiale (Historical Mirror), that did have wormholes matching both the Vinland Map and Hystoria Tartarorum, demonstrating it had originally been bound at the front of that book, with Hystoria Tartarorum at the back. All former ownership marks had been removed from the manuscripts and Witten declined to provide any provenance, allegedly because of the previous owner’s tax concerns. Yale’s purchase of Speculum Historiale was funded by the philanthropist Paul Mellon, as long as the Vinland map could be authenticated. He required a scholarly book to be written to demonstrate the authenticity and for the map’s existence to be kept secret until this was published. This book was duly written by two Yale scholars and a British Museum curator and took some years, finally seeing the light in 1965, when the map was revealed to great fanfare the day before Columbus Day.
Immediately, academic reviewers called the map’s authenticity into question, pointing out that it bore strong resemblance to another 15th century map that did not include America, that the way Greenland was depicted was suspiciously modern, while other, betterknown places, such as Norway, were more consistent with mediæval maps. There was even evidence that the way the Vinland map was drawn took account of damage caused by folds in the map that it may have been derived from, while some of the text used anachronistic phrasing. None the less, the Vinland map was never conclusively demonstrated to be fraudulent, and its claim to represent lost Viking knowledge of America was bolstered by the later discovery of the Viking settlement at L’anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. Yale librarian Alice Prochaska commented in 2002 that: “We regard ourselves as
the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document… and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest.”
Now, though, that scholarly work has come to a definitive and hard-to-refute conclusion. The most thorough analysis yet carried out on the map, conducted over several years by Yale conservation scientists, has found that it is “awash in 20th century ink”. Previous analyses had indicated that there was modern ink on parts of the map, but the latest work, using cuttingedge tools and techniques, examined the entire document’s elemental composition, showing that both the map itself and the accompanying text are in inks containing a titanium compound not used prior to the 1920s and most closely resembling pigment that was commercially produced in Norway in 1923. A genuine 15th century map would most probably have been drawn with iron gall ink, which is composed of iron sulphate, powdered gall nuts, and a binder. There is also clear evidence of intentional deception with an authentic mediæval bookbinding instruction for Speculum Historiale being overwritten in modern ink to make it look like an instruction to bind the map into the volume. Given the matching wormholes, it appears that the Vinland Map is a modern fake, drawn on a blank endpaper of Speculum Historiale.
Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which contains the map, says: “The Vinland Map is a fake, there is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest… The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale… It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was coopted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception.” news.yale.edu, 1 Sept 2021; boingboing.net, 7 Sept, 2021.