Finding Vinland
The evidence appears overwhelming for the location of the legendary Norse settlement.
THE EVIDENCE APPEARS OVERWHELMING FOR THE LOCATION OF THE LEGENDARY NORSE SETTLEMENT.
ADAM, AN ELEVENTH-CENTURY German historian, was the first to document the reality of Vinland, while foreshadowing the wild speculation about the settlement’s existence and location that would dog scholars to this day. His reference is the earliest report on Vinland, a mysterious place located somewhere on the northeastern coast of North America.
More complete accounts in medieval Icelandic manuscripts, written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were based on older manuscripts, which in turn were based on oral traditions passed down for two to three hundred years. In one of the most important of those oral stories, known as sagas, Erik the Red’s saga, the Norse established two bases, Straumfjord (Current Fjord), a winter base in northern Vinland, and Hóp (Estuary Lagoon), a summer camp in southern Vinland where they encountered grapes and excellent lumber. In the Greenlanders’ saga the two bases have been combined into one, Leifsbúðir (Leif’s Camp), a type of simplification that is common in oral stories retold over generations.
For the Norse, newly established in barren Greenland, endless supplies of good lumber and exotic grapes in Vinland would have been a welcome discovery. This undoubtedly took place in North America, but where, exactly?
The King of Denmark … also told me that many in this part of the Ocean have discovered an island called Vinland because wild grapevines grow there that produce the best of wines. That one can also find there great fields of cereal which is self-sown is something I have from descriptions by trustworthy Danes and not from outlandish stories. — Adam of Bremen, “Description of the Nordic Islands,” circa 1075 (author’s translation)
That question and the mystery that prompted it have attracted enormous attention in North America, sparked by the publication in the United States of the Vinland sagas and all related documents in Latin translation in 1837 and in a shorter English version in 1838. The translator was Carl Christian Rafn, an Icelandic-born antiquarian working in Denmark. The title of
the 1837 work is as long as it is impressive: Antiquitates Americanae sive scriptores septentrionalis rerum ante-Columbarium in
America (American antiquities according to northern documents on pre-Columbian events in America).
It was considered so significant that Rafn had started corresponding with American scholars to discuss his ideas as early as the 1820s. The idea that Europeans had set foot on North American shores long before Columbus appealed to American intellectuals of the time. Because so little was known about the world of America’s Indigenous inhabitants, Old World origins were sought for almost any discovery of note.
Antiquarian hearts quickened in 1832 at the discovery of a skeleton that appeared to be wearing armour and that was identified as a Norse warrior, at Fall River, Massachusetts. Ten years later the event was immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Skeleton in Armor.” The skeleton has since been identified as that of an Indigenous person of the early colonial period who had been interred with a brass breastplate and tubular brass beads.
Of particular interest were Rafn’s attempts to correlate specific regions and actual monuments with the Norse visits. He concluded that they had gone to Sakonnet Point on Narraganset Bay, south of present-day Boston, an area where one could indeed find wild grapes. Starting with Rafn’s assertions, quickly and enduringly picked up by others, a small stone tower at nearby Newport, Rhode Island, was said to be a Norse church, and Indigenous petroglyphs at Dighton Rock, Massachusetts, were believed to be Norse runic script. Again, however, the theories were disproven; for instance, radiocarbon dating showed the tower was built in the mid-seventeenth century.
The next three decades saw an ever-increasing volume of writing on the subject, and the flow has never stopped. A notable early discourse, The Problem of the Northmen, was published in 1889 by Eben N. Horsford, a Harvard chemistry professor who had made a fortune with his improved formula for baking powder. He believed that the area around Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was Leif’s Vinland. Horsford built a “Viking” tower and laid down a granite marker to celebrate it. His statue of Leif still stands on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
The so-called Beardmore finds of the 1930s caused a stir in Canada when James Edward Dodd, a prospector from Port Arthur, Ontario, walked into Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum with a rusted Viking sword, an axe head, and a broken iron rattle of the type used as jingle bells on Viking horses. The items, he explained, had been found on a mining claim at Beardmore, Ontario.
When it was established that the pieces were genuine, a grant of five hundred dollars, a considerable amount of money at the time, was raised to purchase the artifacts, which were then displayed in a special exhibition. Not long after, however, it was discovered that the find had not been made on the mining claim but in the basement of Dodd’s landlord, J.M. Hansen. The pieces had arrived not by Viking ship but in 1923 with a young Norwegian who had placed them with Hansen as guarantee for a loan. They are still in the ROM’s collection but are not on display.
Many other artifacts and sites have been advanced as evidence of the Vinland voyages. For a brief time in 2015, a site
at Point Rosee, in the southwest of the island of Newfoundland, looked promising. But excavations in 2016 proved that it, too, was a red herring. The only proven Norse site is L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Too often, the search for Vinland has been based on the sagas’ descriptions of geographical features and specific resources. The problem with that approach is that the descriptions are so general that they fit not one but hundreds of places along the eastern seaboard: lakes, rivers, islands, mountains, and even tides. The tides, described by the sagas as so dramatic that ships could land only during high tide, have prompted some to believe that only a location in the Bay of Fundy would warrant this description. But the descriptions could also apply to the shallow coastal waters of Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, or to areas farther south.
The resources are also mentioned in very general terms: eider ducks, halibut, wild grapes, burl wood, salmon, and “self-sown wheat.” All can be found along the entire eastern coast as well as in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, although in summer eider ducks are not common south of Maine.
“Self-sown wheat” was originally identified as wild rice by the botanist Frederik Schübeler in 1858. His assertion is often repeated today but makes little sense, given that wild rice does not resemble Norse wheat and grows mostly in inland lakes.
Other European newcomers to Canada provide a better explanation. Jacques Cartier described the dune grass at Chaleur Bay as “wild wheat with a head like barley and a seed like oats.” At Cap aux Oies, east of Quebec City, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm observed in 1749, “The sea-lime grass likewise abounds on the shores … the places covered with them looking, at a distance, like corn fields; which might explain the passage in our northern accounts … which mentions, that they had found whole fields of wheat growing wild.” Corn in this account reflects the English term for cereal grains, rather than North American maize.
What Kalm and Cartier refer to is American dune grass, or lyme grass, Elymus mollis, which grows along most of the eastern coastline of North America. It is a New World species distinct from the European Elymus arenarius and is strikingly similar in appearance to Norse wheat of the time, which was predominantly emmer, a subspecies of Triticum turgidum.
Two of the assets reported by the Norse are helpful in locating Vinland: salmon and wild grapes. While salmon bones have been found in pre-contact sites in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador, none have been found at sites of the same period south of New Brunswick, according to the Canadian archaeologist Catherine Carlson. Thus Vinland could not have extended south of Maine.
Rivers in New Brunswick, on the other hand, were famous for
their abundance of salmon. Early European explorers noted the plentiful fish in the Miramichi and Restigouche rivers, and the salmon figured in the totem of the Mi’kmaq in the Restigouche River area. The size of the fish amazed European immigrants; in the late eighteenth century, individual salmon occasionally reached a weight of more than twenty-five kilograms. But changes to habitat mean the species today is on the verge of extinction.
Many enthusiasts have assumed that the northern limit of wild grapes was in New England because of the abundance noted there by early European explorers. In fact, wild grapes also thrive in New Brunswick and in the St. Lawrence Valley, primarily in river valleys with good sun exposure and rather dry soils.
Hide-covered canoes described in the sagas were common among the ancestors of Algonquin-speaking people north of Massachusetts — especially those in northern Maine and in Atlantic Canada, where the canoes were mainly used on rivers. South of there, Indigenous people used dugouts. The combination of wild grapes, salmon, and canoes suggests that Vinland must have included areas surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The discovery of a Norse site in 1960 offered an opportunity to look at Vinland from a different angle. A tall Norwegian by the name of Helge Ingstad arrived at the little village of L’Anse aux Meadows on the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula asking about signs of Norse turf houses. Four years earlier, a Danish archaeologist, Jørgen Meldgaard, had asked the same questions. This time a local fisherman Ingstad approached had an answer: “Yes, there is something like that on my property.”
Ingstad returned the next year with an excavation crew headed by his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, to begin work on the site. The excavations continued over the summers until 1968, by which time the site had been verified as Norse and dated to the eleventh century. It was declared a National Historic Site of Canada and placed under the management of Parks Canada.
But many questions remained: How long had the site been occupied? Why had it been abandoned? What was the relationship of the Norse to the many Indigenous occupations of the site? A series of excavations under Parks Canada’s auspices from 1973 to 1976 provided some answers.
It is now possible to look at Vinland using evidence from archaeology, independently of the literary sources. In fact, L’Anse aux Meadows provides the key to Vinland. Dating from sometime between 980 and 1020, the settlement was occupied for only about a decade. Its eight buildings, made of turf laid in thick layers over wooden frames, are typical of Icelandic and Greenland architecture of that time, but the layout shows that it was not a normal settlement site. At the time, the Norse depended almost wholly on livestock farming. Barns and animal enclosures are prominent features on Norse
farms of the period, but there are no such structures at L’Anse aux Meadows. If any livestock were present, they were perhaps so few that they left no mark.
With one exception, all the buildings were dwellings of different kinds for different social ranks. There were three large halls, two of which were of a size typically occupied by chieftains and their staff. The halls were flanked by smaller and simpler dwellings for workers of low rank. The buildings’ thick walls and heavy sod roofs were clearly meant to withstand winter. The likely population of seventy to ninety people was sizeable, considering that the Norse colony in Greenland numbered no more than five hundred inhabitants.
The location on the exposed northern tip of the peninsula is unusual. In Iceland and Greenland the favoured locations are in more protected places inland. L’Anse aux Meadows faces Labrador and has a wide view over the Strait of Belle Isle, suggesting that navigation in the strait was an important factor.
Building L’Anse aux Meadows required a considerable amount of work. The construction would have taken the better part of a summer. From the turf patterns and the complementary work activities we can tell that all the houses were built and occupied at the same time.
The artifacts reveal that this was not a normal family settlement filled with domestic chores. Practically all of the items relate to a workstation for carpentry, boat repair, and the fabrication of iron. Carpenters left hundreds of wood chips from axe and knife cuts together with broken and discarded objects, such as the floor plank from a small boat, a birchbark cup, and a bow drill. Concentrations of cut-off boat nails show where the repair of a small boat had taken place. In a hut dug into the bank along a brook that runs through the site, bog ore had been smelted into iron in a simple furnace, which appears to have been used only once. This iron could have been forged into nails to complete the boat repair.
Small personal objects lost by their owners also provide clues: a small bronze pin for a man’s cloak, the flywheel of a hand-held spindle, a small whetstone for sharpening scissors, a glass bead, a broken bone pin, and a tiny fragment of a gilded brass ring. While the work debris shows that most of the inhabitants were men, the spindle whorl and whetstone testify to the presence of women.
Other artifacts found at the site show that L’Anse aux Meadows served as a base for exploratory excursions, which in turn explains why the site is directly on the coast. For instance, among the wood chips were pieces of linden, beech, eastern hemlock, elm, and butternut wood.
None of these are native to Newfoundland, and none grow north of Prince Edward Island and the St. Lawrence Valley. The presence of linden and butternut tells us that the Norse at L’Anse aux Meadows had been at least as far south as eastern New Brunswick, where those species thrive.
Significant here are the facts that butternut trees grow in the same areas as wild grapes and that the produce of both ripens in late September to early October. It seems likely that anyone picking the nuts — favoured as a luxury imported food back home — had also encountered grapes.
Another indication of the Norse travelling away from the site is the presence of a fire-striker made of jasper; striking the jasper against a piece of steel produces a spark.
The jasper came from Baie Verte on the northern coast of the island of Newfoundland, about two hundred kilometres southeast of L’Anse aux Meadows. Other jasper fire-strikers found on the site originated in Greenland and Iceland. The Greenland jasper was found in and around the biggest and most complex hall on the site, which, based on Norse settlements elsewhere, must have belonged to the leader.
At this point we can return to the sagas to see what they really say. Geographical descriptions are sketchy at best. Far more important is the nature of the expeditions, including the type of participants, the reasons for the expeditions, the kind of community established, activities occurring year-round, resources, and the time and length of the stays.
According to the sagas, most of the settlement’s inhabitants were male. There were aristocratic leaders and well-to-do merchant shipowners. With them were hired labourers plus members of the leaders’ domestic staff who would have had special abilities and experiences, such as serving on previous explorations and proficiency in crafts. The tales also tell that at least one resident was a foreign-born slave who served as a child-minder, or fóstri, in Leif’s family. The expeditions also included a few women, who would have performed domestic tasks.
All expeditions were expected to return to Greenland with a valuable cargo. The Norse explorers established an inventory of useful resources, especially goods that were not available in Greenland, such as timber. Everyone returned to the base for the winter.
Travel, especially to faraway, little-known countries, could also bring fame. Both sagas tie the date of the Vinland voyages to the last few years of the reign of King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, who ruled from roughly 995 to 1000, when he died in the Battle of Svolder.
Although we do not have an exact date for the Norse voyages, they must have begun sometime around the year 1000, the period during which L’Anse aux Meadows was established. Each expedition stayed two to three years to make the long journeys worthwhile, but the voyages stopped after about a decade. The reason given in the sagas for abandoning Vinland is that the new land was already inhabited and the Norse were outnumbered and sure to lose in any kind of conflict.
The meetings of the Norse with the land’s Indigenous occupants surprised both parties, as described in Erik the Red’s saga: “Early one morning they saw hide-covered boats rowing in from the south around a headland. There were so many that it seemed like coals strewn over the lagoon, and poles were swung on every boat.” Paddles and paddling were unknown to the Norse.
“The strangers rowed towards them and stared at them in amazement .... The men were dark in complexion, grim-looking and with unruly hair on their heads. Their eyes were big and their faces broad.
“Karlsefni and his men raised their red shields against them, and the natives leapt off their boats and then they all began to fight.... Karlsefni and his men were struck with fear and fled upriver ... until they reached a rock wall where they began to fight. ... Two of Karlsefni’s men were killed and many of the natives fell, yet Karlsefni’s force was outnumbered.”
Many researchers have looked for oral accounts of interactions between Indigenous peoples and the Norse, with no definitive results. There were further interchanges, with deadly outcome on both sides — and, apparently feeling outnumbered, the Norse eventually returned to Greenland.
The parallels between L’Anse aux Meadows and the Vinland of the sagas are clear. And the size of L’Anse aux Meadows makes it likely that it would have been mentioned in the sagas. Greenland simply did not have the population to set up more than one such base. L’Anse aux Meadows is in fact the Straumfjord of Erik the Red’s saga.
Even the sagas’ geographical description applies: At this point the Strait of Belle Isle narrows in the distance; in the middle is an island, Belle Isle, known for the multidirectional currents swirling around it. As L’Anse aux Meadows site manager Lloyd Decker said, this is “the only place where one can see the same iceberg come around twice.”
L’Anse aux Meadows is also an easy landmark for anyone following the Labrador coast south. When another coast appears on the port side, one simply has to cross over to find the site.
Hóp, where the grapes, hardwood lumber, and butternuts grew, is in eastern New Brunswick, making Vinland the entire area surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with Straumfjord at its northern limit. The mystery of Vinland has been solved.