Americanae (1837), Which Proposed That The Place The Icelandic Sagas Called Vinland (Meaning Vine

Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory,
arrived in the Americas before Columbus? The question has fascinated generations of scholars. Could
a Chinese tribute ship, as Gavin Menzies proposed in 2002, have departed from the rest of the Ming
fleet in East Africa in 1421 and sailed to North and South America, Australia and the Arctic? Could
fishing vessels from the British port of Bristol, as David Beers Quinn suggested in 1974, have
followed schools of cod across the north Atlantic and reached the fishing grounds off the Canadian
shore in 1480 or 1481? No persuasive evidence supports the claim about the 15th-century Chinese.
The voyages of the Bristol cod fishermen are more likely, but no documentation concerning them
predates 1492, possibly because they wanted to keep the location of the fishing grounds secret.
The most credible claim – that the Vikings reached North America around the year 1000 – deserves
more attention. It arose in the 19th century, following the publication of C C Rafn’s Antiquitates
Americanae (1837), which proposed that the place the Icelandic sagas called Vinland (meaning ‘vine
land’) was located somewhere near Cape Cod in Massachusetts, or the islands of Nantucket and
Martha’s Vineyard. (The Vinland Sagas refers to two different orally transmitted sagas about these
early voyages: Erik the Red’s saga was written down shortly after 1264, and the Greenlanders’ saga
was copied into a collection of different materials in 1387.)
According to these two sagas, the Vikings encountered a group of indigenous Amerindians, whom
they called Skraelings, or ‘wretched ones’. The Norse traded red woollen textiles for animal pelts.
That exchange marked a turning point in world history: it is the earliest documented encounter
between the peoples living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
A round the year 1000, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland and landed first in ‘Stone-slab land’,
then ‘Forest land’ and finally in Vinland, where Erikson and his men found ‘fields of wild wheat
growing there, and vines, and among the trees there were maples’.
Where exactly did Erikson land? The sagas provide important clues. Vinland enjoyed more hours of
daylight than Greenland: ‘In the depth of winter, the sun was aloft by mid-morning and still visible at
mid-afternoon,’ information that places Vinland somewhere between New Jersey and the Gulf of
Saint Lawrence.
In 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, set
out to find these places. Hoping that the descriptions in the sagas might lead them to Norse sites, they
set off in a sailboat and went down the northeastern Canadian coast. They were looking for places
mentioned in the sagas, including Forest Land, which ‘was flat and wooded, with white sandy beaches
wherever they went; and the land sloped gently down to the sea’, a description that fit the Labrador
coast perfectly. Continuing to sail in southerly direction, the Ingstads reached Newfoundland.
When they arrived at the village of L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island, they asked
the locals about possible Viking remains. One man showed them some grassy mounds on a beach,
which the villagers believed were abandoned dwellings of native peoples. The structures turned out to
be the collapsed remains of eight sod buildings originally held up by wooden frames.
Digging at the site for seven summers from 1961 to 1968, the Ingstads concluded that it was indeed a
Viking settlement. The excavators found evidence of iron-working: a work shed with an anvil and a
large stone, iron fragments, and slag. The working of gold, copper and arsenic occurred elsewhere in
the Americas in the year 1000 but, because no one else in the Americas worked iron, the
archaeologists reasoned that outsiders – quite possibly the Norse – had to be doing the smelting.

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Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory,

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