Norse settlement of North America

thumb|Norse silhouette sculpture above L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada

The Norse began exploring North America in the late 10th century. Voyages from Iceland reached Greenland, where colonists founded settlements along its western coast. Norse settlements on Greenland lasted almost 500 years, reaching a population of 2,000 to 3,000. These settlements consisted mostly of farms along Greenland's scattered coastal fjords. Norse colonists relied heavily on hunting, especially of walruses and the harp seal. For lumber, they harvested driftwood, imported wood from Europe, and sailed to modern-day Canada. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Greenland settlers used lumber and possibly iron ore imported from North America.

One Norse settlement in North America beyond Greenland has been confirmed: L'Anse aux Meadows. In the 1960s, archaeologists found remains near the northern tip of Newfoundland dating back approximately 1,000 years. Although L'Anse aux Meadows likely held between 30 and 160 people, it lacks evidence of agriculture, livestock pens, or graves, suggesting it was not a permanent settlement. The site was deliberately abandoned with no valuables or tools left behind. No other settlements in Canada and no settlements on the North American mainland have been conclusively identified as Norse.

One explanation for the apparent absence of Norse settlements beyond Greenland is a lack of population pressure. The Greenland settlements were abandoned gradually during the 14th and 15th centuries, at least in part because of climate change. The Little Ice Age brought more storms, longer winters, and shorter springs. It reduced the availability of food at the same time that the value of Greenland's exports to Europe plummeted. The last written record from Norse Greenland was a 1408 marriage. The latest article of clothing from the Eastern Settlement has been radiocarbon-dated to 1430 (±15 years). The reasons for Norse Greenland's abandonment have long been debated.

The Norse exploration has been subject to numerous controversies concerning the exploration and settlement of North America by Europeans. The primary sources for descriptions of the Norse voyages beyond Greenland are the Vinland sagas. These heroic sagas were first written down in Iceland centuries after the events they describe. After the European discovery of the Americas, it was debated whether the lands they describe beyond Greenland (Helluland, Markland, and Vinland) corresponded to real places in North America. Since the public acknowledgment of Norse expeditions and settlements, pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical theories have emerged.

Norse Greenland

thumb|[[Hvalsey Church ruins in Greenland]]

Icelandic sagas

The two Vinland sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, cover Norse explorations into the Western Atlantic within the genre of Icelandic sagas. They are heroic narratives originally shared orally and written down in Iceland during the 13th and 14th centuries. Written according to the literary expectations of a medieval Icelandic audience, they portray Greenland as a place at the edge of the world where people were exiled and tested. This limits their reliability as a historical record.

The earliest mention of Greenland in the sagas refers to a group of rocky islands in the Atlantic reported by Gunnbjörn Ulfsson when his ship was blown off course from Iceland in the early 900s. Named after him, Gunnbjarnarsker or "Gunnbjörn's skerries", were likely near modern-day Kulusuk just off the eastern coast of Greenland, but their exact location is unknown. According to the Landnámabók, Snæbjörn Galti led the earliest recorded intentional Norse voyage to Greenland and started a failed settlement on the eastern coast of Greenland. The colony struggled: Snæbjörn Galti was murdered, the settlement was abandoned, and only two colonists survived the return to Iceland. Ívar Bárðarson, a Catholic priest sent to Greenland in 1341, wrote that the skerries were about "two days and two nights sailing due West" from Iceland and the halfway point on trips to the later more successful colonies on the western coast. After the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the area began to freeze over and became hazardous to ships.

According to the sagas, Erik the Red (Old Norse: Eiríkr rauði) was banished from Iceland for manslaughter, and sailed westward to the lands reported by Gunnbjorn. His crew continued past the skerries, down the coast of Greenland, and settled on an island near Tunulliarfik Fjord; he named the fjord Eiriksfjord after himself. He remained for three years, explored the area, and decided to found a settlement. He named the area Greenland, and returned to Iceland to recruit settlers, promising tracts of land to his followers. Erik established his estate Brattahlíð along the inner reaches of Eiriksfjord.

Life

thumb|A map of the [[Eastern Settlement on Greenland, covering approximately the modern municipality of Kujalleq. Eiriksfjord (Erik's fjord) and his farm Brattahlíð are shown, as is the location of the bishopric at Gardar.]]

Norse Greenland consisted of two main settlements. The Eastern Settlement was at the southwestern tip of Greenland, while the Western Settlement was about up the west coast, near present-day Nuuk. A smaller settlement later founded near the Eastern Settlement is sometimes considered the Middle Settlement. The combined population peaked around 2,000–3,000. Archaeologists have identified about 500 farms from the larger Eastern Settlement.

thumb|Remains of stables on Greenland

Norse Greenlanders were limited to living along scattered fjords on the island that provided habitable land for their animals (such as cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, and cats) to be kept and farms to be established. In these fjords, the farms depended upon stables (byres) to host their livestock in the winter, and farmers routinely culled their herds so that their remaining livestock could survive the season. With the coming of the warmer season livestock were taken from their byres to pastures, the most fertile being controlled by the most powerful farms and the church. What was produced by livestock and farming was supplemented with subsistence hunting of mainly seal and caribou as well as walrus for trade.

Trade was highly important to the Greenland Norse, who relied on imports of lumber because of the barrenness of the land. In turn they exported goods such as walrus ivory and hide, polar bear skins, and narwhal tusks. In spring, the voyages to where migratory harp seals could be found became more dangerous because of more frequent storms, and the lower population of harp seals meant that Nordrsetur hunts became less successful, making subsistence hunting extremely difficult.

thumb|A runestick from [[Herjolfsnes]]

In 1126, the population requested a bishop (headquartered at a bishopric established in Garðar), and in 1261, they accepted the overlordship of the Norwegian king. They continued to have their own law and became almost completely politically independent after 1349, the time of the Black Death. In 1380, the Kingdom of Norway entered into a personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark. The last bishop at Garðar died in 1377. Several theories have been advanced to explain the decline.

Climate and decline

thumb|Map showing the expansion of the [[Thule people (900 to 1500)]]

The Little Ice Age of this period made travel between Greenland and Europe, as well as farming, more difficult. Although the hunting of seal and other animals provided a healthy diet, there was more prestige in cattle farming, and there was increased availability of farms in Scandinavian countries depopulated by famine and plague epidemics. In addition, Greenlandic ivory may have been supplanted in European markets by cheaper ivory from Africa. Despite the loss of contact with the Greenlanders, Denmark–Norway continued to consider Greenland a dependency.

Not knowing whether the old Norse civilization remained in Greenland or not—and worried that if it did, it would still be Catholic 200 years after the Scandinavian homelands had undergone the Reformation—a joint merchant-clerical expedition led by the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland in 1721. Though this expedition found no surviving Europeans, it marked the beginning of Denmark's re-assertion of sovereignty over the island.

thumb|Replica garments of those found in graves in Herjolfsness, Greenland

To some extent, it seemed that the Norse were unwilling to integrate with the Thule people of Greenland, through either marriage or culture. There is evidence of contact as seen through the Thule archaeological record, including ivory depictions of the Norse as well as bronze and steel artifacts. In the 20th century, there was little evidence for Thule artifacts among Norse habitations. The older research posited that it was not climate change alone that led to Norse decline, but also their unwillingness to adapt. Also, had Norse individuals used skins instead of wool for their clothing, they would have fared better nearer to the coast, and would not have been as confined to the fjords. However, even with these attempts, climate change was not the only thing putting pressure on the Greenland Norse. The economy was changing, and the exports they relied on were losing value.

Norse settlements in Canada

thumb|A reconstruction of Norse buildings at the [[UNESCO listed L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland, Canada. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that iron working, carpentry, and boat repair were conducted at the site.]]

Greenland lacked natural resources like forests and iron ore. There is generally believed to be a historical basis for Norse voyages to these places, despite some fantastical elements in the sagas such as Great Ireland and the uniped who kills Thorvald Asvaldsson in Vinland. In Adam of Bremen's 11th-century chronicle Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, he briefly mentions Greenland and islands beyond Norway including one "called Vinland".

Icelandic annals record that, in 1347, a ship arrived from Greenland that had drifted off course while sailing to Markland for wood. A 13th-century Icelandic description of the world gives the rough order of the lands described in the sagas as Greenland, Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, which the author suspected was part of Africa. Where these places would correspond to in modern-day Canada is still debated. and she determined that 8 pieces had been clearly imported from North America: one hemlock piece and seven jack pine, which "can be distinguished from Scots pine by the ray tracheids". A ruined stone and sod building at Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island may have been a medieval Norse home. It contained whetstones that had been used to sharpen copper-alloy blades. Dating the Tanfield Valley site is complicated by it having been inhabited and abandoned multiple times. No settlements have been found in mainland Canada. No Norse materials have been recovered from excavations in mainland Labrador, which implies a lack of trading and a low likelihood for larger Norse sites south of Newfoundland. Surveys in the 1970s and 1980s could find no evidence of Norse settlements on the coasts of modern-day Quebec. Population pressure was one of the factors that affected migrations out of Scandinavia and medieval Iceland, where as many as 70,000 Icelanders competed for limited resources.

Newfoundland

thumb|The location of [[L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland]]

Evidence of the Norse west of Greenland came in the 1960s when the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and the author Helge Ingstad excavated what proved to be a Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. They found a bronze, ring-headed pin like those the Norse used to fasten their cloaks inside the cooking pit of one of the larger dwellings. A stone oil lamp and a small spindle whorl, used to maintain the spindle's speed of rotation while spinning fiber, were found inside another building. A fragment of a bone needle was discovered in the firepit of a third dwelling. A small, decorated brass fragment, once gilded, was also discovered. Much slag, formed as a by-product from the smelting and working of iron, was found on the site along with many iron boat nails or rivets.

The site is different from the colonies in Greenland; it was not a permanent continuous settlement.

Birgitta Wallace noted that the site's location and building types "suggests that seafaring was the most important function of the settlement". The land is bare and open now, but it was forested during the time the Norse were active. The presence of wood and nuts from the Juglans cinerea walnut tree, which grows wild on the continental mainland but not Newfoundland itself, indicates that the site was used as a staging area for further voyages.

It is unlikely that there were any permanent settlements on the scale of L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland or in nearby areas of Canada. The sailing season from Greenland was short, the voyage was long, and Greenland had a limited population to found further colonies. L'Anse aux Meadows itself may have drawn 10 to 20 percent of the total Greenland colonists; Point Rosee was identified by the archaeologist Sarah Parcak as a possible Norse settlement on the basis of near-infrared satellite images and high-resolution aerial photographs, but archaeological excavations in 2015 and 2016 showed no signs of Norse occupation. What initially appeared to be a turf wall and bog iron at Point Rosee were determined to be the result of natural processes.

Trees at L'Anse aux Meadows were felled by the Norse in 1021. Chunks of wood from the site were dated in 2021 using the 993–994 carbon-14 spike and tree rings. This provided the first certain date for the Norse presence at the site. Although not inhabited for long stretches of time, the site may have been used as late as 1145 AD.

Baffin Island

By 2012, Canadian researchers identified possible signs of Norse outposts from several areas on and around Baffin Island, notably possible Norse artifacts at the Nanook site in Tanfield Valley. They also suspected yarn from Willows Island and Nunguvik (near Pond Inlet) to be Norse, but these were not corroborated by later dating methods. On Willows Island, archaeological sites contained strands of Dorset yarn spun between 15 BC and AD 725, possibly from Arctic hare or muskox. This predates all known European arrivals. Unlike European cordage, the Dorset yarn was spun at a consistent diameter and was never woven into fabric.

A team led by the archaeologist Patricia Sutherland excavated a ruined stone and sod building in Tanfield Valley and found a range of artifacts that indicate a possible Viking presence on the island. Moreau Maxwell had begun a dig in the 1960s and described the structure as "very difficult to interpret". The presence of possible Norse artifacts on the island led Sutherland to suspect the building itself was Norse.

Labrador

When Martin Frobisher explored Labrador in the 1570s, the native peoples had an oral history of people they called kablunat ('white men') whose behaviors and customs resembled those of the Norse. Labrador also contained bog iron ore and nearby timber to supply charcoal as fuel for its smelting. The Native Americans who inhabited the southern portion were the ancestors of the Innu; they would have spoken one of the Algonquian languages and were possibly related to the Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland. At the Sandnæs farmstead in Greenland, arrowheads found in a 1930 excavation resembled nothing in Norse culture nor appeared to be of Inuit origin but matched the arrows used by the Point Revenge peoples. Further, scientists who in 2010 studied some 80 Icelanders’ mitochondrial DNA deemed a lineage found there most likely to have arisen from an Indigenous American ancestor who lived centuries before 1700 (although Asian or European origin of the lineage’s haplogroup were possible too). They surmised that Viking voyagers had brought back to Iceland an Eastern Canadian native woman who bore one or more children with a Norse father.

On the Avayalik Islands, off the very northern tip of Labrador, Patricia Sutherland found yarn being excavated that was distinct from the sinew-based cordage typically used by Indigenous Arctic hunters. Analysis of the yarn showed evidence for the Dorset spinning their own cordage and trading in a network that included the Norse, but not for a Norse settlement on the island. Norse materials have not been found in Native American archaeological sites in mainland Labrador, which indicates a lack of trading and a low possibility that Norse sites as large as L'Anse aux Meadows will be found south of Newfoundland.

Vinland sagas

According to the Icelandic sagasSaga of Erik the Red, plus chapters of the Hauksbók and the Flatey Bookthe Norse started to explore lands to the west of Greenland only a few years after the Greenland settlements were established. In 985, while sailing from Iceland to Greenland with a migration fleet consisting of 400–700 settlers and 25 other ships (14 of which completed the journey), a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson was blown off course, and after three days' sailing, he sighted land to the west. Bjarni was interested only in finding his father's farm, but he described his findings to Leif Erikson, who explored the area in more detail and started a small settlement fifteen years later. There has long been debate about identifying any of the three "lands" to actual, known locations in North America. Vinland in particular has been the topic of widely divergent claims and theories.

In 2019, the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace wrote:

Historiography

alt=map with Vinland, Greenland, and other areas shown as a parts of a large continent bordering the western and northern edges of the Atlantic, full text at link |thumb|The [[Skálholt Map showing Latinized Norse placenames in the North Atlantic

]]

For centuries, it remained unclear whether the Icelandic sagas represented real voyages by the Norse to North America. Although the idea of Norse voyages to, and a colony in, North America was discussed by the Swiss scholar Paul Henri Mallet in his book Northern Antiquities (English translation 1770), the sagas first gained widespread attention in 1837 when the Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn revived the idea of a Viking presence in North America. North America, by the name Winland, first appeared in written sources in a work by Adam of Bremen from approximately 1075. The most important works about North America and the early Norse activities there, namely the sagas of Icelanders, were recorded in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 1420, some Inuit captives and their kayaks were taken to Scandinavia. The Norse sites were depicted in the Skálholt Map, made by an Icelandic teacher in 1570 and depicting part of northeastern North America and mentioning Helluland, Markland and Vinland.

{| class="wikitable"

|+Locations proposed

! scope="col" |Theorist

! scope="col" |Helluland

! scope="col" |Markland

! scope="col" |Vinland

|-

|Carl Christian Rafn (1837)

|-

|William Hovgaard (1914)

|Northern Labrador

|Southern Labrador

|New England

|-

|John R. Swanton (1947)

|Northern Labrador

|Southern Labrador

|New England

|-

|colspan=4|

|-

|Tryggvi J. Oleson (1963)

|Baffin Island

|Labrador

|Cape Cod

|-

|Johannes Kr. Tornoe (1964)

|Baffin Island

|Labrador

|Waquoit Bay, Cape Cod

|-

|M. Magnusson and H. Palsson (1965)

|Baffin Island or northern Labrador

|Southern Labrador or Newfoundland

|New England

|-

|John R. L. Anderson (1967)

|Baffin Island or northern Labrador

|Southern Labrador

|Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

|-

|Carl O. Sauer (1968)

|Baffin Island

|Southern Labrador or Newfoundland

|Southern New England, Buzzard Bay or west.

|-

|Anne Stine Ingstad (1969)

|Baffin Island

|Labrador

|Newfoundland and New Brunswick

|-

| (1997)

|Baffin Island or Labrador

|Southern Labrador

|St. Lawrence Valley or New England

|}

Pseudohistory

While there is no physical evidence of Norse settlements in North America except for the far east of Canada, other so-called discoveries have been proposed and rejected by scholars. Unsubstantiated claims of Norse colonization are especially common in New England.

Supposed physical evidence has been found to be deliberately falsified or historically baseless, often to promote a political agenda. Literary critic Annette Kolodny criticized attempts to evoke what she termed "plastic vikings". These were fictional characters treated as historical figures, but "depicted variously as heroic warriors and empire builders, barbarous berserker invaders, fighters for freedom, courageous explorers, would-be colonists, seamen and merchants, poets and saga men, glorious ancestors, bloodthirsty pagan pirates, and civilized Christian converts" depending on the speaker or author. Purported runestones have been found in North America, most famously the Kensington Runestone. These are generally considered forgeries or misinterpretations of Native American petroglyphs. Gordon Campbell's book Norse America, published in 2021, presents his thesis that the "fleeting and ill-documented" idea that Vikings "discovered America" quickly seduced Americans of northern European Protestant descent, some of whom went on to deliberately manufacture evidence to support it.

Monuments claimed to be Norse include:

• Stone Tower in Newport, Rhode Island
• Viking Altar Rock
• Spirit Pond runestones
• AVM Runestone
• Hammer of Thor (monument)
• Bourne Stone
• Narragansett Runestone
• Maine penny
• Ulen sword
• Beardmore Relics
• Oklahoma runestones
• The petroglyphs on Dighton Rock, from the Taunton River in Massachusetts

Kensington Runestone

thumb|upright=1.1|The 200-pound [[Kensington Runestone is on display in the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota. Linguists dismissed the stone as a hoax after it was brought to public attention. Olaus J. Breda (1853–1916), professor of Scandinavian languages and literature in the Scandinavian Department at the University of Minnesota, found the runestone to be a forgery. Breda forwarded copies of the inscription to contemporary Scandinavian linguists and historians, such as Oluf Rygh, Sophus Bugge, Gustav Storm, Magnus Olsen and Adolf Noreen. They "unanimously pronounced the Kensington inscription a fraud and forgery of recent date". The inscription dates itself to 1362, but scholars have found many anachronisms in it, including runes that had not come into widespread use at that time and odd runic numerals. These unusual runes did match the kind of code-writing found to have been used by contemporary Swedish tailor Edward Larsson. For example, both the purported runestone and Larsson used pentadic numerals, but with the place value system from Arabic numerals.

Residents of the area described the stone itself as unlike those found naturally in the area. In 1899, Norwegian newspaper Skandinaven quoted general store owner E. E. Aaberg: "Moreover I have never seen around here the kind of stone from which this one has been cut off." Despite its reputation as a hoax, the stone has been exhibited in museums and at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

Horsford's Norumbega

The nineteenth-century Harvard chemist Eben Norton Horsford connected the Charles River Basin to places described in the Norse sagas and elsewhere, notably Norumbega. He published several books on the topic and had a range of memorials created in New England to his supposed Viking past, including the bronze Leif Erikson statue in Boston, Massachusetts. His work received little support from mainstream historians and archeologists at the time, and even less today.

Other nineteenth-century writers, such as Horsford's friend Thomas Gold Appleton in A Sheaf of Papers (1875) and George Perkins Marsh in The Goths in New England, also seized upon false notions of Viking expansion to promote white superiority and oppose the Catholic Church. Such misuse of Viking history and imagery reemerged in the twentieth century among some groups promoting white supremacy. Historian Carlo Rotella coined the term "pulp history" to describe Horsford's pseudo-historical writing, comparing its origin and appeal to the pulp fiction histories invented by pulp author Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, the setting of the Conan the Barbarian stories. However, certain experts doubted the authenticity of the map, based on cartographic inconsistencies. For example, medieval maps often depicted Greenland vaguely as a peninsula. On the "Vinland Map", Icelandic researcher Gisli Sigurdsson described Greenland's northern coast as "suspiciously similar to what you can see on modern maps". Chemical analysis of the map's ink later shed further doubts on its authenticity as the ink contains a titanium compound first used in 20th century ink. Scientific debate continued until 2021. Researchers found an older Latin inscription beneath the modern ink, and Yale finally acknowledged that the Vinland Map is a forgery.

See also

• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories
• Vestri Obygdir
• History of Greenland
• Gunnbjörn's skerries
• History of Nunavut
• History of Newfoundland
• Danish-Norwegian colonization of the Americas
• Leif Erikson Day
• List of North American settlements by year of foundation
• Akilineq
• Wonderstrands
• Vinland flag
• White Amazonian Indians

Notes

References

External links

• L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site, Parks Canada website
• The Norse in the North Atlantic, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage website
• Freda Harold Research Papers at Dartmouth College Library