Vikings in North America

Although they often do not receive their due accolades, the Vikings were actually the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic Ocean and discover and explore North America – almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus. The Viking sagas have long told of their journeys westwards across from their Greenland colonies around 1000 CE to establish a North American colony known as Vinland. The stories were widely considered as merely mythology, however, until maps surfaced in the 20^th century which hinted at a precise location of the colony.

Using the information contained in the maps, a Norwegian scholar Helge Ingstad scoured the Canadian coasts to make a monumental discovery in 1960: remnants of a small Viking settlement lay covered under grass mounds at L’Anse Aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland. Now, using precise radiocarbon dating techniques, archaeologists have been able to date Viking occupation at the site to the exact year of 1021, confirming their presence as the first Europeans in North America.

This article explores the Viking occupation in North America. It is intended as background reading for Odyssey Travellers Vikings tours in Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Much of the information is sourced from Simon Winchester’s Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, as well as sources linked to throughout.

North America in the Viking Sagas

Two Viking sagas – The Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red’s Saga – tell of the journeys westwards from the Viking’s Greenland colonies. It is said that a Viking Greenlander trader named Bjarni Herjolfsson sighted lands to the west in 986 after being blown off course sailing to Greenland. Having heard the news, the Viking explorer Leif Erikson and his crew set sail across 2,900 km (1,800 miles) of open sea to retrace Bjarni’s route.

Leif sailed in dire winter weather, though sea thick with ice and bergs. The winds he encountered were exceptionally fierce, coming almost exclusively from the west and northwest, contrary to his intended direction. On occasion these gales were so fierce, the tiny ship had stay put for hours and sometimes even days at a time. Masts broke, sails ripped, and everyone aboard was drenched, chill and miserable.

Along the way, Leif named the different areas he encountered, including Helluland (widely believed to be part of Baflin Island), and Markland (widely believed to be an expanse of the Labrador coastline). Eventually, he located a more congenial place to base camp and spent the winter there. One of his crew, a German, is credited with recognising the wild grapevines that promoted Leif to name the area Vinland (‘Wineland’).

Following Leif’s expedition, the Greenlanders returned to Vinland to start a new colony. However – unlike the other Viking colonies in Iceland and Greenland – it was already settled, and the Vikings soon encountered hostile native Americans. This combined with the investment of manpower necessary to sustain a viable settled community was too much for the small population of Greenland, and so the Viking occupation there did not last long.

Viking Maps of Vinland

For centuries, the sagas lay testimony to the Viking’s settlement of Vinland, however it was unclear if the Vikings had really reached North America. Then, finally in the late 1950s, evidence surfaced which seemed to support the stories.

In 1957 a young dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, bought what appeared to be a fifteenth-century map of the known world from a dealer in Italy. But it included one crucial feature that had never before been seen. Situated on the left side of the map, to the west of Greenland, was a large island, with two elongated indentations on its east coast. This island was identified on the map as Vinland, with Latin written above it indicating it had been visited in the eleventh century, first by “companions Bjarni and Leif Eriksson,” and later by a legate from the Apostolic See.

Eight years later, a team of British Museum specialists finally declared the map to be genuine. Yale University, which had since acquired the map, released the news to the public, garnering a thrilled response. It appeared to be a final cartographic confirmation that the “Vinland” mentioned in the Icelandic sagas did in fact exist in North America.

It didn’t take long, however, for the narrative to fall apart. The map soon turned out to be fraught with all sorts of uncertainties. For one, the book dealer had lied about how he had acquired the map. The Italian who had sold it to him (for $3,5oo) had previously sought but failed to sell it to the British Museum and turned out to have been both a fascist and a convicted thief.

Later tests on the map’s ink then showed high levels of chemicals that had not been invented at the time the map was said to have been made. Plus, although the parchment itself was proved to be from the fifteenth century, it appeared to have been coated with an oil made in the 1950s. The map’s Latin text also heavily featured the æ ligature, a lexical form rarely used at the time of the map’s supposed created.

Yale University, which still owns the so-called Vinland Map, has flip flopped over the years on the authenticity of the map. Most recently, in September 2021, it announced its certainty that the map is a 20^th century fake.

Nevertheless, a series of other, and undoubtedly genuine, charts had since surfaced. These maps were all copies of the document known today as the Skálholt Map, drawn originally in 1570 by a schoolmaster named Sigurd Stefansson. Stefansson did so to show from the available documentary evidence just where the Nordic explorers and traded had landed on their journeys in the North Atlantic.

Although the original no longer survives, the numerous existing copies show the locations of the Viking discoveries. This includes, jutting from the southwest of the cart, a slender, north-pointing peninsula-marked as Promenterium Vinlandiae, i.e. The Peninsula of Vinland.  It is positioned at about 51 degrees north, where the northern promontory of Newfoundland exists on modern maps. When these maps first surfaced, they provided the most precise clue to date of where the Viking settlement may have been located.

Archaeological Discovery in Newfoundland

In the mid-1950s, a Norwegian scholar of Viking history, Helge Ingstad, felt confident he could locate where the Viking colony Vinland had been using the information contained in the Skálholt Map. He surmised it was in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, somewhere on Great Northern Peninsula, under the mountains of the Long Range, on the island’s western side.

Deciding to act on his educated hunch, he started to make annual excursions to Canada. To track down the site, he asked repeated questions to the villagers and farmers between the town of Stephenville Crossing and the tiny inlets nearly three hundred miles north, on the shores of the Strait of Belle Isle.

Finally, one day in 1960, having sailed with his daughter Benedicte on a small yacht to the tiny settlement of L’Anse Aux Meadows, Ingstad received the answer he was seeking. A local fisherman, George Decker, told him he knew the locations of some old ruins and that he could lead him to the site. There, over a field of cloudberries, wild iris, and gale-stunted pines, stood a dozen very large grass-covered mounds, all set on a slight slope that ran down to Epaves Bay.

L’Anse aux Meadows soon became the most famous archaeological site in North America – quite probably the Vinland settlement itself. Excavations made by Ingestad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine during 1961-68 revealed wood-framed peat buildings buildings in total – three of them houses and five workshops – with about 125 wooden, bronze and bone artefacts that were clearly not in the native American tradition.

The vast majority of the objects found were iron nails, which the native population did not possess the technology to produce. Also found was a copper-alloy dress pin of the style widely distributed throughout the western sector of the Viking world.  As was a glass bead, a soapstone spindle-whorl, a fragmentary bone needle, and whetstones. As all are characteristic of Scandinavian occupation sites elsewhere, the occupation was confirmed to date to the Viking Age.

Later excavations further revealed preserved organic objects in boggy areas. Among them were carpenters’ wooden debris, lengths of rope made form spruce roots, and a birch-bark container – items all present during the Viking Age. A series of radiocarbon dates then confirmed these items had been created between 980 and 1020, dates compatible with the tales in the sagas.

The rotted remains of three butternuts (white walnuts) were also discovered, which agricultural climatologist are certain never grew north of New Brunswick. It is assumed the Vikings had penetrated some 800km (500 miles) south of L’Anse aux Meadows to gather the foodstuffs. There too it may have been where grapes were found, as vines do not grow in north Newfoundland.

This implies the Vinland extended all the way south to include the south part of the Gulf of St Lawrence, including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and, perhaps, Maine. As the L’Anse aux Meadows site is quite small, it is believed not to be the main Vinland colony, but rather likely functioned as an explorer’s and exploiter’s base. Nevertheless, it remains the only Viking site in or near North America apart from Greenland.

Refining the Timeline of Viking Occupancy in North America

Although scholars are certain the Vikings settled in North America at L’Anse aux Meadows, the precise date for the occupation has long been difficult to pinpoint. Scholars have had to make educated guesses about when they first arrived and how long they stayed, relying on the Icelandic sagas and conventional radiocarbon dating techniques, which give approximate dates but do not reveal the exact year.

That is until recently. In October 2021, archaeologists were able to analyse wooden artefacts found amid the L’Anse aux Meadows site using a new radiocarbon technique to refine the timeline. The artefacts – including a tree stump, a branch and a block of timber all scarred with cut marks – were dated to the precise year of 1021 CE. The archaeologists are certain the artefacts belonged to the Vikings, as the metal tools used to make the marks were not produced among the Indigenous people of the era, who used only stone tools.

To date the artefacts, the archaeologists used an incredible and creative dating tool known as dendrochronology, which is based on counting tree rings, combined with evidence of a radioactive isotope of carbon called carbon-14, or radiocarbon.

Radiocarbon is created in the upper atmosphere at a fairly constant rate and then absorbed by the plants on the ground below. Usually it only occurring in trace amounts, however it can flood the atmosphere following solar storms. The evidence of one such mammoth storm is found in the remnants of a large radiocarbon spike in tree rings from around the world dating to 993 CE.

It was this spike, appearing in the three wooden artefacts found at L’Anse aux Meadows, which allowed researchers to determine exactly when the trees were cut down. By using the spike as a reference point, they counted the tree rings in each specimen until they reached the bark, indicating the year cut down was 1021. The date of Viking presence in North America had been confirmed.

Odyssey Traveller Viking Tours

A small group tour is the best way to discover the rich Viking history in Scandinavia and beyond. There are specialised Viking tours that follow the footsteps of long forgotten Viking men, expand remarkable Viking heritage, encourage a closer look at a runic inscription, and a traveller might even get to see the marvellous northern lights.

Odyssey Traveller explores this history during our numerous small group tours in the lands of the Vikings, including our:

• Scandinavia Tour (13 days)
• Discover Greenland Small Group Tour (5 days)
• Faroe Islands Small Group Tour (5 days)
• Iceland Cultural and Wilderness Small Group tour (17 days)
• Tour of Denmark’s Culture and History (20 days)

Odyssey Traveller has been serving global travellers since 1983 with educational tours of the history, culture, and architecture of our destinations designed for mature and senior travellers. We specialise in offering small group tours partnering with a local tour guide at each destination to provide a relaxed and comfortable pace and atmosphere that sets us apart from larger tour groups. Tours consist of small groups of between 6 and 12 people and are cost inclusive of all entrances, tipping and majority of meals. For more information, click here, and head to this page to make a booking.