Vinland

• 1. Introduction

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  Vinland is the name Norse explorers gave to a stretch of coastal North America, and Leif Erikson landed there around AD 1000, nearly five centuries before Christopher Columbus or John Cabot crossed the Atlantic. For centuries the place existed only in stories, passed mouth to ear for roughly 250 years before anyone wrote them down. Two Icelandic sagas recorded what happened, and they contradict each other on basic facts. A considerable number of Vikings made the crossing in multiple expeditions, and they came home with timber, grapes or currants, and hides. Then the voyages stopped, and Vinland vanished from the map of the known world.

  In 1960, a small Norse encampment was uncovered at the northern tip of Newfoundland, a place called L'Anse aux Meadows. It was the first and, so far, only confirmed Norse site in North America. But the discovery raised almost as many questions as it answered. Was this the Vinland of the sagas? How far south did the Norse actually travel? What became of the people who tried to settle there? And what does it mean, centuries later, to claim that a particular group of people discovered a land that others had lived in for generations? This is the story of a place that may be one location or many, a word that carries within it a debate about history, geography, and who gets to tell the past.

• 2. A Name in Dispute

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  Adam of Bremen wrote down the first commonly acknowledged surviving reference to Winland around 1075, and his source was King Svend Estridson of Denmark, who described an island in the Atlantic where grapevines grew wild and produced the best wine. Adam was rendering a Norse word, and the question of which Norse word has never been fully resolved.

  The dispute turns on a single vowel. One reading takes the root as vín with a long vowel, meaning wine, cognate with the Latin vinum. The 13th-century Grœnlendinga saga supported this reading, saying the land was named after vínber, a term specifically meaning grapes. Kirsten Seaver wrote bluntly that the short-vowel reading had been so thoroughly discarded that the long-vowelled vin, meaning wine, was all that remained. Birgitta Wallace went further, arguing that theories linking vínber to other berries such as cranberries or currants are unsupportable.

  The rival reading, introduced by Sven Söderberg in 1898 and first published in 1910, reads the root as vin with a short vowel, meaning meadow or pasture. Vainö Tanner accepted it in 1941, and Valter Jansson defended it in a 1951 dissertation on vin-names across Scandinavia. Einar Haugen rejected it in 1977, arguing that vin as a place-name element had shifted meaning from pasture to farm long before the Old Norse period. Erik Wahlgren called the pastureland thesis quite untenable.

  A runestone from Norderhov, Norway, may have contained the name Vinland in a form slightly predating Adam of Bremen. The Hønen Runestone was discovered shortly before 1817 and then lost. What survives is a sketch made by an antiquarian named L. D. Klüwer in 1823, itself later lost but copied by Wilhelm Frimann Koren Christie in 1838. The inscription was dated to around 1010-1050. One reading, by Sophus Bugge in 1902, found the phrase Vínlandi á ísa, meaning from Vinland over ice. A competing reading by Magnus Olsen in 1951 found instead vindkalda á ísa, meaning over the wind-cold ice. The stone itself is gone, and neither reading can be confirmed.

• 3. Two Sagas, One Voyage

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  Thorfinn Karlsefni led the largest known expedition to Vinland, but the two sagas cannot agree on how many people he brought. The Saga of Erik the Red says his crew numbered 160; the Saga of the Greenlanders puts it at 60. Both accounts agree that he brought livestock, that the party traded with local inhabitants who were frightened by the Norse bull, and that Gudrid gave birth to a son named Snorri during the stay.

  The two sagas share a set of story elements that they use in different ways. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, it was Bjarni Herjólfsson who accidentally sighted the new land around 986 CE while sailing from Norway to find his father. He did not land. He remained in Greenland for the rest of his father's life and only reported the discovery to his overlord, an earl also named Erik, around 1000 CE. That report inspired Leif Eriksson to mount an expedition. In the Saga of Erik the Red, it was Leif who first encountered the land, blown off course while carrying out a Christian mission for King Olaf Tryggvason.

  The sagas also assign the same death differently. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, Thorvald Eiriksson, Leif's brother, led a company of 30 men and died from an arrow wound after his group killed several local inhabitants, who then attacked in force with a large fleet of hide boats. In the Saga of Erik the Red, Thorvald died from an arrow fired by a one-footed man, shot at while the party was moored on the south side of a west-flowing river near Markland. One saga places the killing in Vinland; the other places it somewhere else entirely.

  Freydis, daughter of Eric the Red, appears in both sagas but to opposite effect. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, she organized a final expedition to Vinland, fell into a dispute with two Icelander brothers over the use of Leif Eriksson's houses, and had all the Icelanders killed, including five women, as they lay sleeping. In the Saga of Erik the Red, she appears during the Karlsefni expedition and, when the Norse were under attack, picked up the sword of a fallen companion and brandished it against her bare breast, driving the attackers into retreat. The sagas present the same person as both murderer and hero.

• 4. L'Anse aux Meadows

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  William A. Munn, a Newfoundland marine insurance agent and historian who lived from 1864 to 1939, studied literary sources in Europe and concluded in his 1914 book that the Vinland explorers had gone ashore at a place he called Lancey Meadows. In 1960, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remains of a small Norse encampment at exactly that spot.

  Excavations during the 1960s and 1970s produced wooden objects, radiocarbon dates confirming occupation around 1000 CE, and small pieces of jasper of the kind the Norse used as fire-strikers. When the jasper fragments were compared against samples from sources around the North Atlantic, two of the buildings contained only Icelandic jasper and another held pieces from Greenland, with a single piece from the east coast of Newfoundland. In 2021, wood from the site was shown to have been cut in 1021, using metal blades that the local Indigenous people did not possess.

  Three butternuts were found at L'Anse aux Meadows, a detail with geographical significance. Butternuts do not grow north of the St. Lawrence River and the northeastern part of New Brunswick. The Norse brought them back to the site from somewhere to the south, implying that the explorers traveled at least that far. A 2012 article by Jónas Kristjánsson in Acta Archeologica proposed that L'Anse aux Meadows may correspond to the camp called Straumfjörð in the Saga of Erik the Red, pointing out that no other fjord in Newfoundland was found to have an island at its mouth.

  Erik Wahlgren, in his book The Vikings and America, argued that L'Anse aux Meadows cannot itself be Vinland, because the sagas describe a place with both salmon in the rivers and wild grapes growing freely, and those conditions point south. He suggested Passamaquoddy Bay as Leif Erikson's camp and the Bay of Fundy as the place where Thorvald Erikson died. The site at L'Anse aux Meadows was small and apparently short-lived; archaeologists have suggested it functioned mainly as a base for timber gathering and boat repair rather than as a permanent colony.

• 5. Medieval Geographers and the Shifting Map

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  Galvano Fiamma wrote about the nearby Norse outpost of Markland in his Cronica universalis, and he is considered the first southern European to record the existence of the New World. Yet the location of Vinland remained deeply confused in European geographic writing for centuries.

  In the early 14th century, Malmesbury Abbey in England compiled a geography encyclopedia called Geographica Universalis, and that work fed into one of the most widely circulated medieval English educational texts, the Polychronicon by Ranulf Higden. Both works drew on Adam of Bremen, but neither had accurate information. The Malmesbury monk placed Wintland on the ocean east of Norway. Higden put it west of Denmark without explaining the distance. Copies of Polychronicon commonly included a world map that showed Wintland near Iceland but far too close to Scandinavia. Neither work mentioned grapes. The Malmesbury text stated that little grew there but grass and trees, a description that actually matches the saga accounts of the area around the main Norse base, though the author did not know that.

  Both texts explained the name by saying the savage inhabitants could tie the wind up in knotted cords and sell them to sailors, who could release a knot to summon a favorable wind. Icelandic texts from roughly the same period were far more accurate. They described the northern world as Norse explorers had experienced it: north of Iceland lay vast barren plains, then Greenland, then Helluland, Markland, and Vinland extending further west and south. Icelandic writers speculated that Vinland might reach as far as Africa, though they acknowledged they did not know how far south it went.

  Sigurd Stefansson, a schoolmaster at Skalholt in Iceland, drew the earliest known map of Vinland around 1570. It placed Vinland in a position that could correspond to Chesapeake Bay, the St. Lawrence, or Cape Cod Bay. Another Icelandic map, called the Skálholt Map and dated to 1570 or 1590 but surviving only through later copies, showed Promontorium Winlandiae as a narrow cape whose northern tip sat at roughly the same latitude as southern Ireland.

• 6. Who Vinland Belongs To

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  Sverrir Jakobsson has pointed out that the earliest written mentions of Vinland date to 1070 and 1120, and no contemporary records of the actual journeys survive. He notes that the two main sagas show signs of having been composed independently, and he questions the scholarly habit of treating them as a single coherent source. He found references in Icelandic manuscripts from around 1300 that placed Vinland in Africa, which he interprets as the influence of medieval Catholic geography, which recognized only three continents. On this reading, the Norse voyages to Vinland did not produce the kind of geographic reckoning that later voyages to the Americas did.

  Christopher Crocker has argued that the search for Vinland is best understood as a form of colonial history-making. Placing Norse expeditions at the center of North American prehistory, he suggests, extends European historical claims deeper into the continent's past at the cost of Indigenous perspectives. He points out that claims of Beothuck extinction, supported by the Vinland narrative, were used by British settlers to deny Mi'kmaq land claims. Anette Kolodny has written that attempts to locate Vinland in New England owed much to the fact that New England was in economic decline by 1850, and that situating the Norse in that region was a way of reclaiming prestige for it.

  A 1969 article by Douglas McManis in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers described the study of Norse voyages to North America as a field characterized by controversy and conflicting, often irreconcilable, opinions, largely because the only evidence is two sagas that contradict each other on basic issues and contain nonhistorical passages. His conclusion was that there is not a Vinland; there are many Vinlands. A 1970 reply by Matti Kaups distinguished a symbolic Vinland of the sagas from the numerous suppositional spatial entities proposed by later scholars, listing Rafn's Vinland, Steensby's Vinland, and Ingstad's Vinland as examples of how each researcher created a version of the place shaped by their own methods and assumptions. That multiplicity has not collapsed. The debate over where, exactly, the Norse went remains unresolved, and Point Rosee on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, once identified through satellite imagery in 2014 as a possible Norse settlement, was formally ruled out in a November 2017 report by Sarah Parcak and Gregory Mumford, who found no evidence whatsoever of Norse presence or human activity at the site prior to the historic period.