Tales from the Viking Age: Captivating Legendary and Historical Sagas by Matt Clayton

Author:Matt Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Captivating History
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Voyages to Vinland

The story of the attempted Viking settlement in what is now eastern Canada was the subject of much controversy for a very long time. Many scholars had doubted its historical veracity, but in 1960, the Norwegian archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and her husband Helge discovered the remains of what seemed to be a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows on the large island on the Gulf of St Lawrence in Newfoundland. At this site, which apparently was in use c. 990–1050 CE, Ingstad found the remains of several houses, everyday household items, the remains of a loom, an iron smithy, and rivets such as those that Vikings used to build their ships. While it is unlikely that this particular settlement is the one called “Leif’s houses” in the saga, it provides incontrovertible proof of a Norse presence in North America around the turn of the eleventh century. Not only that, but more recent archaeological excavations, such as the one on Baffin Island in the Canadian province of Nunavut that began in 2001, have continued to turn up evidence of other Viking settlements.

The Vinland Sagas is the collective title given to The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders, each of which contain a version of the Norse sojourns in northeastern Canada. Although it is now generally accepted that Norse explorers did make relatively short-lived settlements in North America, it would be a mistake to take these thirteenth-century Norse texts as actual historical documents, not least because they contain elements that suggest a certain amount of romanticization of this new place the Norse called “Vinland,” supposedly named after the great number of wild grapes that grew there. One such romanticized element concerns the harshness of the winters. The sagas report that the winters at the Vinland settlement were relatively mild, without much snow or freezing temperatures, but anyone who knows anything about northeastern Canadian weather will understand this to be more a product of wishful thinking (or perhaps an element of propaganda) than a description of actual winter conditions in that part of the world.

Despite their fictionalization of historical events, The Vinland Sagas remain vital documents in the history of both Europe and the Americas. In these sagas, we read of the first attempted European settlements in North America and the first contacts between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, and of the courage and resourcefulness of the Norse people who made voyages west to explore a new land.

Of Bjarni Herjolfsson

Once there was a man named Bjarni Herjolfsson who was a well-respected merchant with his own ship. Bjarni’s parents lived in Iceland. Sometimes Bjarni would spend his winters with them, while at other times he would spend them in Norway. Bjarni was an adventurous man, well willing to take risks to find new lands.

One summer, Bjarni’s father, Herjolf, decided to leave Iceland and join Eirik the Red’s new settlement in Greenland. Herjolf sold his farm, then put his family, slaves, and possessions into ships and sailed to Greenland, where he began a new farm at a place he called Herjolfsness.

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