thumb|Recreated [[Norsemen|Norse long house, L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1978.]]

Vinland, Vineland, or Winland () was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Erikson landed there around AD 1000, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The name appears in the Vinland sagas and describes a land beyond Greenland, Helluland, and Markland. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America.

In 1960, archaeological evidence of the only known Norse site in North America, L'Anse aux Meadows, was found on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. Before the discovery of archaeological evidence, Vinland was known only from the sagas and medieval historiography. The 1960 discovery further proved the pre-Columbian Norse exploration of mainland North America.

Name

Vinland was the name given to part of North America by the Icelandic Norseman Leif Eriksson, about 1000 AD. It was also spelled Winland, This etymology is retained in the 13th-century Grœnlendinga saga, which provides a circumstantial account of the discovery of Vinland and its being named from the vínber, i.e. "wineberry", a term for grapes. According to Birgitta Wallace, theories that the sagas' vínber refers to other berries such as cranberries or currants are insupportable. Kirsten Seaver also rejects the "Pastureland" interpretation and has written "The notion that the first syllable was vin with a short vowel (meaning ~ 'green meadow') has been so thoroughly discarded that we are left with the incontrovertible, long-vowelled vin or 'wine'."

There is also a long-standing Scandinavian tradition of fermenting berries into wine. The discovery of butternuts at the site implies that the Norse explored Vinland further to the south, at least as far as St. Lawrence River and parts of New Brunswick, the northern limit for both butternut and wild grapes (Vitis riparia). This suggestion involves interpreting the Old Norse name not as vín-land with the first vowel spoken as /iː/, but as vin-land, spoken as /ɪ/; a short vowel. Old Norse vín (from Proto-Norse winju) has a meaning of "meadow, pasture".

This interpretation of Vinland as "pasture-land" rather than "wine-land" was accepted by Vainö Tanner (1941) and by Valter Jansson in his classic 1951 dissertation on the vin-names of Scandinavia. It was rejected by Einar Haugen (1977), who argued that the vin element had changed its meaning from "pasture" to "farm" long before the Old Norse period. Names in vin were given in the Proto Norse period, and they are absent from places colonized in the Viking Age. Erik Wahlgren rejected the "Pastureland" interpretation, writing "The simple fact is that Soderberg's thesis is quite untenable."

<!--potentially split to Hønen Runestone-->

There is a runestone which may have contained a record of the Old Norse name slightly predating Adam of Bremen's Winland. The Hønen Runestone was discovered in Norderhov, Norway, shortly before 1817, but it was subsequently lost. Its assessment depends on a sketch made by antiquarian L. D. Klüwer (1823), now also lost but in turn copied by Wilhelm Frimann Koren Christie (1838). The Younger Futhark inscription was dated to c.&nbsp;1010–1050. The stone had been erected in memory of a Norwegian, possibly a descendant of Sigurd Syr. Sophus Bugge (1902) read part of the inscription as:

This is highly uncertain; the same sequence is read by Magnus Olsen (1951) as:

The Vinland sagas

thumb|The beginning of the [[Saga of Erik the Red (13th-century manuscript)]]

The main sources of information about the Norse voyages to Vinland are two Icelandic sagas: the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders. These stories were preserved by oral tradition until they were written down some 250 years after the events they describe. The existence of two versions of the story shows some of the challenges of using traditional sources for history, because they share a large number of story elements but use them in different ways. A possible example is the reference to two different men named Bjarni who are blown off course. A brief summary of the plots of the two sagas, given at the end of this article, shows other examples.

The sagas report that a considerable number of Vikings were in parties that visited Vinland. Thorfinn Karlsefni's crew consisted of 140 or 160 people according to the Saga of Erik the Red, 60 according to the Saga of the Greenlanders. Still according to the latter, Leif Ericson led a company of 35, Thorvald Eiriksson a company of 30, and Helgi and Finnbogi had 30 crew members.

According to the Saga of Erik the Red, Þorfinnr "Karlsefni" Þórðarson and a company of 160 men, going south from Greenland traversed an open stretch of sea, found Helluland, another stretch of sea, Markland, another stretch of sea, the headland of Kjalarnes, the Wonderstrands, Straumfjörð and at last a place called Hóp, a bountiful place where no snow fell during winter. However, after several years away from Greenland, they chose to turn back to their homes when they realized that they would otherwise face an indefinite conflict with the natives.

This saga references the place-name Vinland in four ways. First, it is identified as the land found by Leif Erikson. Karlsefni and his men subsequently find "vín-ber" near the Wonderstrands. Later, the tale locates Vinland to the south of Markland, with the headland of Kjalarnes at its northern extreme. However, it also mentions that while at Straumfjord, some of the explorers wished to go in search for Vinland west of Kjalarnes.

Saga of the Greenlanders

thumb|[[Church of Hvalsey, one of the best preserved remnants from the Norse settlement in Greenland.]]

thumb|[[Simiutaq Island, Greenland, as seen from the Davis Strait. This has been suggested to be a suitable starting point for a crossing to Canada The explorers returned to Straumsfjord, but disagreements during the following winter led to the abandonment of the venture. On the way home, the ship of Bjarni the Icelander was swept into the Sea of Worms (Maðkasjár in Skálholtsbók, Maðksjár in Hauksbók) by contrary winds. The marine worms destroyed the hull, and only those who escaped in the ship's worm-proofed boat survived. This was the last Vinland expedition recorded in the saga.

Medieval geographers

Adam of Bremen

The oldest commonly acknowledged surviving written record of Vinland appears in Descriptio insularum Aquilonis by Adam of Bremen written in about 1075. Adam was told about "islands" discovered by Norse sailors in the Atlantic by the Danish king Svend Estridsen.

Galvano Fiamma

The nearby Norse outpost of Markland was mentioned in the writings of Galvano Fiamma in his book, Cronica universalis. He is believed to be the first Southern European to write about the New World.'

Sigurd Stefansson

The earliest map of Vinland was drawn by Sigurd Stefansson, a schoolmaster at Skalholt, Iceland, around 1570, which placed Vinland somewhere that can be Chesapeake Bay, St. Lawrence, or Cape Cod Bay.

In the early 14th century, a geography encyclopedia called Geographica Universalis was compiled at Malmesbury Abbey in England, which was in turn used as a source for one of the most widely circulated medieval English educational works, Polychronicon by Ranulf Higden, a few years later. Both these works, with Adam of Bremen as a possible source, were confused about the location of what they called Wintland—the Malmesbury monk had it on the ocean east of Norway, while Higden put it west of Denmark but failed to explain the distance. Copies of Polychronicon commonly included a world map on which Wintland was marked in the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland, but again much closer to the Scandinavian mainland than in reality. The name was explained in both texts as referring to the savage inhabitants' ability to tie the wind up in knotted cords, which they sold to sailors who could then undo a knot whenever they needed a good wind. Neither mentioned grapes, and the Malmesbury work specifically states that little grows there but grass and trees, which reflects the saga descriptions of the area round the main Norse expedition base.

thumb|upright=1.3|Medieval Norse sailing routes and geography of the North Atlantic, based on the saga texts (after Árni Ibsen, Svart á hvítu, 1987)

More geographically correct were Icelandic texts from about the same time, which presented a clear picture of the northern countries as experienced by Norse explorers: north of Iceland a vast, barren plain (which we now know to be the Polar ice-cap) extended from Biarmeland (northern Russia) east of the White Sea, to Greenland, then further west and south were, in succession, Helluland, Markland and Vinland. The Icelanders had no knowledge of how far south Vinland extended, and they speculated that it might reach as far as Africa.

The "Historia Norwegiae" (History of Norway), compiled around 15th–16th century, does not refer directly to Vinland and tries to reconcile information from Greenland with mainland European sources; in this text Greenland's territory extends so that it is "almost touching the African islands, where the waters of ocean flood in".

Later Norse voyages

Icelandic chronicles record another attempt to visit Vinland from Greenland, over a century after the saga voyages. In 1121, Icelandic bishop Eric Gnupsson, who had been based on Greenland since 1112, "went to seek Vinland". Nothing more is reported of him, and three years later another bishop, Arnald, was sent to Greenland. No written records, other than inscribed stones, have survived in Greenland, so the next reference to a voyage also comes from Icelandic chronicles. In 1347, a ship arrived in Iceland, after being blown off course on its way home from Markland to Greenland with a load of timber. The implication is that the Greenlanders had continued to use Markland as a source of timber over several centuries.

Controversy over the location of Vinland

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|upright=1.3|The [[Skálholt Map showing Latinized Norse placenames in the North Atlantic:

]]

The definition of Vinland is somewhat elusive. According to a 1969 article by Douglas McManis in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,

This leads him to conclude that "there is not a Vinland, there are many Vinlands". According to a 1970 reply by Matti Kaups in the same journal,

In geographical terms, Vinland is sometimes used to refer generally to all areas in Atlantic Canada. In the sagas, Vinland is sometimes indicated to not include the territories of Helluland and Markland, which appear to also be located in North America beyond Greenland. Moreover, some sagas establish vague links between Vinland and an island or territory that some sources refer to as Hvítramannaland.

Another possibility is to interpret the name of Vinland as not referring to one defined location, but to every location where vínber could be found, i.e. to understand it as a common noun, vinland, rather than a toponym, Vinland. The Old Norse and Icelandic languages were, and are, very flexible in forming compound words.

Sixteenth century Icelanders realized that the "New World" which European geographers were calling "America" was the land described in their Vinland Sagas. The Skálholt Map, drawn in 1570 or 1590 but surviving only through later copies, shows Promontorium Winlandiae ("promontory/cape/foreland of Vinland") as a narrow cape with its northern tip at the same latitude as southern Ireland. (The scales of degrees in the map margins are inaccurate.) This effective identification of northern Newfoundland with the northern tip of Vinland was taken up by later Scandinavian scholars such as bishop Hans Resen.

Although it is generally agreed, on the basis of the saga descriptions, that Helluland includes Baffin Island, and Markland represents at least the southern part of the modern Labrador, there has been considerable controversy over the location of the actual Norse landings and settlement. Comparison of the sagas, as summarized below, shows that they give similar descriptions and names to different places. One of the few reasonably consistent pieces of information is that exploration voyages from the main base sailed down both the east and west coasts of the land; this was one of the factors which helped archaeologists locate the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, at the tip of Newfoundland's long northern peninsula.

Erik Wahlgren examines the question in his book The Vikings and America, and points out clearly that L'Anse aux Meadows cannot be the location of Vínland, as the location described in the sagas has both salmon in the rivers and the 'vínber' (meaning specifically 'grape', that according to Wahlgren the explorers were familiar with and would have thus recognized), growing freely.

Charting the overlap of the limits of wild vine and wild salmon habitats, as well as nautical clues from the sagas, Wahlgren indicates a location in Maine or New Brunswick. He hazards a guess that Leif Erikson camped at Passamaquoddy Bay and Thorvald Erikson was killed in the Bay of Fundy.

On the other hand, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a medical missionary and scholar living in Newfoundland and Labrador in the early 20th century wrote of the issue of the location of Vinland that,

Other clues appear to place the main settlement farther south, such as the mention of a winter with no snow and the reports in both sagas of grapes being found. A very specific indication in the Greenlanders' Saga of the latitude of the base has also been subject to misinterpretation. This passage states that in the shortest days of midwinter, the sun was still above the horizon at "dagmal" and "eykt", two specific times in the Norse day. Carl Christian Rafn, in the first detailed study of the Norse exploration of the New World, "Antiquitates Americanae" (1837), interpreted these times as equivalent to 7:30&nbsp;a.m. and 4:30&nbsp;p.m., which would put the base a long way south of Newfoundland. According to the 1880 Sephton translation of the saga, Rafn and other Danish scholars placed Kjalarnes at Cape Cod, Straumfjörð at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and Straumsey at Martha's Vineyard.

An Icelandic law text gives a very specific explanation of "eykt", with reference to Norse navigation techniques. The eight major divisions of the compass were subdivided into three hours each, to make a total of 24, and "eykt" was the end of the second hour of the south-west division. In modern terms this would be 3:30&nbsp;p.m. "Dagmal", the "day-meal," is specifically distinguished from the earlier "rismal" (breakfast), and would thus be about 8:30&nbsp;a.m.

A 2012 article by Jónas Kristjánsson in the scientific journal Acta Archeologica, which assumes that the headland of Kjalarnes referred to in the Saga of Erik the Red is at L'Anse aux Meadows, suggests that Straumfjörð refers to Sop's Arm, Newfoundland, as no other fjord in Newfoundland was found to have an island at its mouth.

L'Anse aux Meadows

thumb|Viking colonization site at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland

thumb|L'Anse-aux-Meadows

Newfoundland marine insurance agent and historian William A. Munn (1864–1939), after studying literary sources in Europe, suggested in his 1914 book Location of Helluland, Markland & Vinland from the Icelandic Sagas that the Vinland explorers "went ashore at Lancey Meadows, as it is called to-day". In 1960, the remains of a small Norse encampment In 2021, wood from the site was shown to have been cut in 1021, using metal blades, which the local Indigenous people did not have.

Although it is now generally accepted that L'Anse aux Meadows was the main base of the Norse explorers, the southernmost limit of Norse exploration remains a subject of intense speculation. Gustav Storm (1887) and Joseph Fischer (1902) both suggested Cape Breton; Samuel Eliot Morison (1971) the southern part of Newfoundland; Erik Wahlgren (1986) Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick; and Icelandic climate specialist Pall Bergthorsson (1997) proposed New York City. The insistence in all the main historical sources that grapes were found in Vinland suggests that the explorers ventured at least to the south side of the St. Lawrence River, as Jacques Cartier did 500 years later, finding both wild vines and nut trees. Three butternuts were found at L'Anse aux Meadows, another species which grows only as far north as the St. Lawrence.

The vinviðir (wine wood) the Norse were cutting down in the sagas may refer to the vines of Vitis riparia, a species of wild grape that grows on trees. As the Norse were searching for lumber, a material that was needed in Greenland, they found trees covered with Vitis riparia south of L'Anse aux Meadows and called them vinviðir.

Vinland in Colonial Discourses

Sverrir Jakobsson notes that there are no contemporary written records of journeys to Vinland - pointing out that the earliest mentions of the location occurred in 1070 and 1120. Jakobsson points out that there are contradictions between Eiriks saga rautha and the Graenlandinga saga and that their textual history suggests they were composed independently of each other and he is highly critical of treating the sagas as a cohesive unit. He also suggests that attempts at "harmonizing the evidence of the sagas with the modern belief that journeys were directed towards North America" has led to gaps in the scholarship surrounding the sagas. He notes references to Vinland in Icelandic manuscripts from around 1300 indicated Vinland as being in Africa. He treats this as being the influence of the medieval Catholic epistemology which only supported the existence of three continents. Based on this textual interpretation Jakobsson considers that the Norse travels to Vinland failed to discover America as they did not bring about the paradigmatic shift in Christian geography of later voyages to the New World. Anette Kolodny suggests that attempts to situate Vinland in New England "owed much to the fact that, by 1850 and the decades beyond, New England was in decline, and this effort reflected the attempt to recapture glory for the region.

Life in Vinland

The main resources that the people of Vinland relied on were wheat, berries, wine and fish. However, the wheat in the Vinlandic context is sandwort and not traditional wheat, and the grapes mentioned are native North American grapes, because the European grape (Vitis vinifera) and wheat (Triticum sp.) existing in the New World before the Viking arrival in the tenth century is highly unlikely. Both the sagas reference a river and a lake that had an abundance of fish. The sagas specifically mention salmon, and note how the salmon that was encountered was larger than any salmon they had seen before.

Before arriving in Vinland, the Norsemen imported their lumber from Norway while in Greenland and had occasional birch trees for firewood. Therefore, the timber they acquired in North America increased their supply of wood.

Other possible Norse finds

An authentic late-11th-century Norwegian silver penny, with a hole for stringing on a necklace, was found in Maine. Its discovery by an amateur archaeologist in 1957 is controversial; questions have been raised whether it was planted as a hoax. Numerous artifacts attributed to the Norse have been found in Canada, particularly on Baffin Island and in northern Labrador.

Other claimed Norse artifacts in the area south of the St. Lawrence include a number of stones inscribed with runic letters. The Kensington Runestone was found in Minnesota, but is generally considered a hoax. The authenticity of the Spirit Pond runestones, recovered in Phippsburg, Maine, is also questioned. Other examples are the Heavener Runestone, the Shawnee Runestone, and the Vérendrye Runestone. The age and origin of these stones is debated, and so far none has been firmly dated or associated with clear evidence of a medieval Norse presence. In general, script in the runic alphabet does not in itself guarantee a Viking age or medieval connection, as it has been suggested that Dalecarlian runes have been used until the 20th century.

Point Rosee, on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, was thought to be the location of a possible Norse settlement. The site was discovered through satellite imagery in 2014 by Sarah Parcak. In their November 8, 2017, report, which was submitted to the Provincial Archaeology Office in St. John's, Newfoundland, Sarah Parcak and Gregory "Greg" Mumford wrote that they "found no evidence whatsoever for either a Norse presence or human activity at Point Rosee prior to the historic period" and that "None of the team members, including the Norse specialists, deemed this area as having any traces of human activity."

See also

  • L'Anse aux Meadows
  • Blackberry
  • Vitis labrusca
  • Antillia
  • Great Ireland (Hvítramannaland)
  • Norse colonization of the Americas
  • Point Rosee
  • Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories
  • Saint Brendan's Island, a hypothetical area that is thought by some to be located in North America.
  • Vinland map
  • Vinland the Good
  • Vinland Saga, a Japanese manga series

Notes

References

  • Jones, Gwyn (1986). The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America. Oxford University Press. .
  • Sverrir Jakobsson, "Vínland and Wishful Thinking: Medieval and Modern Fantasies," Canadian Journal of History (2012) 47#3 pp 493–514.
  • Parks Canada - L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site of Canada
  • Vikings: The north Atlantic saga ; Searching for archeological evidence of Vikings in Labrador and Newfoundland - from The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History
  • The Vinland Mystery - a National Film Board of Canada documentary
  • "Where is Vinland?", Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History website
  • Skálholt Map - in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Full text of Eirik the Red's Saga from Project Gutenberg