Groenlendiga Saga and Eiriks Saga are often vague about locations but have a fairly detailed description of a site called Straumey “current island” where the coast stops running east-west and starts to bend north-south; here Straumfjord forks at the upper end of the island and the current goes in a circle around the island up one side and back down the other. This appears to be Manhattan Island: the Norse take time to describe it in detail because it was obvious to them that this was a strategic site; however, that was about the furthest they explored and there is no indication that there was any effort to plant a settlement so far away from their nearest base.
Yeah I’ve never seen any evidence of St. Brendan’s voyage even though Tim Severin in the '70s showed that such a voyage may have been possible. The story I linked to isn’t one I’d come across before.
When you look at the globe from the top, It’s hard to believe Vikings and later, Norse, having already made it to Greenland and to Newfoundland, DIDN’T just come on down. Seems common sense to me that they would have sent exploration parties south along the US coast in search of things they needed and even a site for a settlement. They weren’t successful probably because their resources were stretched too far and they were too far from reliable supplies in Iceland. When the Greenland settlement went down, the need for exploration vanished.
Take a look at a map of Atlantic Canada. L’anse aux Meadows is about as close to the tip of Greenland as a straight line measure as any point in Canada. Once there, the Vikings were harassed by the native tribes and left within an estimated 10 years.
They did have the choice to proceed farther south. But doing so certainly would have exposed them to more hostile natives, as far as they knew. They might have sent out exploring parties and probably did. But where would that have taken them? Newfoundland is a good sized island, more than 100,000 sq. mi. Reaching Nova Scotia or New Brunswick would mean a trip of hundreds of miles and again would almost certainly place them deeper into hostile territory. The whole settlement was nothing more than a tiny party of explorers rather than an expeditionary force. Sending any sizable group away for the months or years of a voyage would have greatly thinned their numbers. Staying within reasonable reach of their base camp would have been the only logical way to proceed.
This all multiples when you think of the 1200 miles or so between the northern tip of Newfoundland and Maine. And it gets worse if you start looking at the interior of Massachusetts.* Southern Labrador and Quebec are a much, much better places to search since access up the Gulf of St. Lawrence is easier and calmer than searching thousands of miles of Atlantic Coast. But the odds of another settlement than was more than a temporary camp are low and drop off drastically with distance. And the best efforts of archaeologists for decades have turned up nothing.
In my view, it defies common sense to look for them much farther south.
*I know you said North America in the OP, not the U.S. But with the number of people talking about the U.S. the utter unlikelihood of it has to be mentioned.
There’s still the matter of the sagas-they do say that wine grapes were gathered in Vinland. They also relate that a voyage was made to a place where there was no snow in wintertime-the grass did not even turn brown.
As for L’anse Au Meadow-no hickory nuts grow anywhere in Newfoundland-yet shells were found in the site ruins. The closest source of hickory nuts would be New Brunswick-several hundred miles to the south.
Not only did the Vikings go south, they also went North. Viking cairns have been found on Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, considerably north of the Greenland settlements. Were the Beothuck Indians warlike? Not according to later missionaries-they were small in numbers and not at all warlike.
I am still thinking about communicable diseases and this scenario. Small pox and measles are highly contagious. I assume the Norse posessed them, and any contact with the natives would have spread these diseases. Perhaps the native population was thin enough in Newfoundland and New Brunswick that any contact and decimation by diseases was limited to small, local bands that did not interact more widely with other groups. If the Norse did, in fact venture further south to warmer climates, and denser populations, one would think disease would have left a bigger mark, but it was not until the Spanish arrived that Euro-diseases started to impact native populations in a big way.
I thought everyone knew that the Vikings moved to Hahira, Georgia…
I didn’t. Last I heard, they still played in the Metrodome. Geez, I’m always behind on all the news…
Pohl also found the postholes of Lief’s houses at Follins Pond. As to why nobody followed his work up, who knows. The fact is, the sagas confirm the location-L’anse aux Meadows never was a place where winegraps or timber could be obtained. It was simply a port to stop in on the way from Greenland.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Vikings went there themselves, though. They could have traded with Native Americans who’d been there, or killed some Native Americans and nicked their nut stash.
But the Spanish sent a *lot *of people, in waves. If the Norse just sent a few small bands, maybe they all happened to be healthy. Assuming the Norse did suffer from smallpox, measles, etc, that doesn’t mean all of them were carrying all or any of those diseases at any given time. In fact, if you’re sending out an intrepid band of explorers, it’s likely that you’re going to try to pick the healthy ones. For the Norse to give a new disease to the Native Americans, you need a Norse guy who a) is carrying the disease when he leaves home, b) isn’t showing enough symptoms to get him booted off the trip, c) survives long enough, or passes the disease on to someone who survives long enough, to get to North America and d) come into close contact with a native. It’s perfectly plausible for that not to have happened.
Regarding the alleged “rune stones” found in N. America. None of the Indian tribes of the NE USA ever had a written language-so nothing found could ever have been made by the local inhabitants. The only example of native American carving was a boulder found in Eastern Connecticut, in 1985. A local anthropologist found marks on it, which seemed to indicate the rising pint of the sun at the equinoxes-he speculated that it served as a crude calendar of sorts-indicating the date to plant corn and harvest it.
Are any of these runestones real? Who knows, but the KRS has some evidence of being correct for the period it was (allegedly) written in.
But it could have been made by a white man the day before it was found.
Not the KRS.
Same thing basically. Norse refers to the period before christianization. After that you have Norwegian, Swedish etc.
This is simply not true. There is still an almost complete consensus among scholars that the KRS is fake.
Nope, my friends still call themselves Norse.
Nope. There is no evidence at all it’s a fake. Mind you, it’s out in the middle of no-where, which makes it doubtful.
Why does that make it doubtful? The person who found it could have made it, or planted it there after someone else made it. There is no means of physically dating it. Most of the evidence against it is linquistic. As shown in the wikipedia article:
The linguistic arguments don’t stand up for a number of reasons. Each has been debunked (and the debunking argued) and every expert has a different reason why part of the KRS runes are bad and which part are bad.
In any case, with such a short phrase, linguistics can’t really be used to prove anything.
There is no evidence it’s a hoax as has been said before. The finder didn’t try to make money off it, he was reputable , and there was no death bed confession or anything.
What argues against the KRS is that it is so far from the coast. That makes it “doubtful” in my mind. It’s too bad we no longer have the Vérendrye Runestone, as that is definitely not a hoax. But was it Norse? Or what?
Your friends may call themselves whatever they choose, but that is not how the word is normally used.
There may not be a single piece of evidence that absolutely proves that it is not medieval, but is it probable? Almost everything about it points to no.
I suggest you read an article by Henrik Williams, a Swedish professor in Scandinavian languages and an expert in runology, called “The Kensington Runestone: Fact and Fiction”. He tries to give a fair and balanced assesment of the runestone, and why he thinks that it is a 19th century artifact.
(Click on “fulltext” to download pdf)
Greenland Vikings were Hipsters.
The Starbucks logo is green and white.
Ergo, Starbucks was founded by Vikings.
One of the facts that I find most compelling in the arguments over whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is that without exception to my knowledge none of the champions of other writers are professional English professors or scholars. Whatever other expertise they might have, they are amateurs in this profession.
I was going to ask what the situation was here. You read that there is controversy or argument or diverging opinions, but that’s in and of itself meaningless. The only proper question is whether the true professional experts on the subject are divided.
Then I read the article in Huvudtvätt’s link. It gives an answer.
Three people with even marginally relevant academic training make the case that the KRS is medieval. Three. One of them in 1951, before the majority of known information on runestones was available. The rest are self-educated amateurs.
There are no examples of subjects in which every professional is on one side and only amateurs on the other have been subsequently proven in favor of the amateurs. This is fantasy.