The Tale of Vinland ...

What to do with a 20-year-old history/politics university student kicking about the house on his summer holidays? (aka my son). Set him writing challenges - that's what!

So, here we have The Tale of Vinland, written by Ben Patterson

Modern pop culture knows the Vikings as bloodthirsty raiders and conquerors, setting out from the frozen hellscape of Scandinavia that they called home to terrorise Europe for the next two centuries, whether sailing down the Seine and razing Paris or bringing the Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms to their knees. While this is not an incorrect assessment, it does not take into account the varied culture that the Northmen exhibited. Before we move on to the main focal point of this essay, I will provide some context on this basis.

To begin with, the term ‘Viking’ is often used as a catch-all umbrella term for the pagan peoples of the Nordics, when this is an incorrect label to be applied. Regardless of whether they hailed from Sweden, Norway or Denmark, the Scandinavians that dwelled there referred to themselves as ‘Norse’, with the cultural distinctions between the three nations not arising until the widespread adoption of Christianity later in time. ‘Viking’, then, was a term denoting those Norsemen that went out raiding and pillaging across Europe, but that was only a fraction of their population. Those that stayed home to tend the farms, work the fields, hunt and gather or rule in the stead of the warrior-kings that sailed across the sea were not Vikings by any means. To provide a comparison, this would be akin to calling every medieval Norman a crusader, since some of them participated in the First Crusade, or to give a more modern variation like calling every citizen of a country a soldier, because some of them are. The majority of Norsemen were not Vikings, as established, though every Viking was a Norseman.

Even then, not all Vikings were exclusively bellicose marauders looking to pilfer your gold and steal your women. They did not raid out of bloodthirst or glory (though no doubt some did have such motivations), but largely to feed and supply themselves. Prior to the beginning of the ‘Viking Age’ (roughly beginning around 800 AD), the Norse had little contact with the “civilised” kingdoms of Western Europe and thus did not enjoy the same trade and communication of ideas – this had many effects, but chiefly here meant they did not often import food from other nations. Scandinavia, being the bitter, harsh environment that it is, meant that growing crops was difficult (though not impossible) and animals were not as plentiful as elsewhere, which eventually necessitated raiding when populations grew too large for their comparatively meagre food source to sustain. Why continue suffering with your poor crop yields, when you can simply steal someone else’s?

Eventually this practice extended to exploration, as well. Iceland, the small land mass in the North Atlantic, had only been sparsely populated by Irish and Gaelic monks that left shortly after the Norse discovered it, and from 870 AD onward it received an influx of settlers, largely from Norway but also from adjacent Nordic realms. In the early 10^th century – according to the ancient Icelandic sagas – a Norseman by the name of Gunnbjörn Ulfsson (because all of the ancient Norse had fantastic naming conventions) was cast adrift whilst on a journey to Iceland from his home in Norway, accidentally passing by the southern tip of what we know now to be Greenland. Some eighty years later, along comes Erik Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik ‘the Red’ for his flaming red hair. He and his family were exiled from Norway on a charge of manslaughter, and exiled again from Iceland some time later. One would think that he should have learned from his mistake the previous time, but alas. Nevertheless, this second exile prompted him to sail west from Iceland, having heard of Gunnbjörn’s wayward travel several decades prior and wanting to find that landmass that he spotted. He succeeded, and thus Greenland had been properly discovered by the Norse. There were native populations sporadically spread across it but not in any great concentration yet, but this is where the importance of Greenland fades in our essay. After all, this was meant to be a brief context behind the eventual Norse discovery of northern America. Being precisely (checks notes), 700 words brief. That still qualifies as brief, right? Close enough to it, anyway.

Now we come to the primary aspect of this essay, and in a timely manner too. The common consensus is that Europeans first “discovered” (if we ignore the fact that there were humans already there, who had been there for millennia prior) the Americas with the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, but this is factually incorrect. Europeans first landed on the shores of the New World around the year 1000, nearly 5 centuries before old Chris was even born. This first voyage was, much like the discovery of Greenland, borne from a nautical mishap; around 985 AD (according to the Saga of the Greenlanders), a Norse sailor named Bjarni Herjólfsson (another fantastic name) was blown off-course when trying to reach Greenland, at which point his vessel was redirected to the eastern coast of Canada. Fifteen years later, a voyage was assembled under the command of Leif Eriksson, the firstborn son of aforementioned Erik the Red, to find this land and explore it.

The Norse charted three different regions, the first of which was a barren land of desolate rocks and not much else, aptly named Helluland (‘Land of Flat Rocks’). Sailing further south, they came upon an equally flat region, but this one was covered with forests rather than rocks. This was creatively dubbed Markland (‘Land of Forests’), and even further south than that was a warm, temperate region with an abundance of grapes. Feeling exceptionally creative, Leif did not call this ‘Land of Grapes’, but rather ‘Land of Wine’, or Vinland. Real imaginative soul, that Leif.

The Norse settlements of Canada were not a long-lived endeavour, being abandoned even earlier than Greenland was (the latter occurring in the 14-15^th centuries) due to a number of factors. The most instrumental of these negative factors was distance – even for such advanced seafarers as the Norse, the distance was simply too great with the technology available to them at the time for supplying any settlement to be worth the cost. Distance was already one of the underlying causes of the Greenland colonies eventually being abandoned, and the stretch of ocean between western Greenland and Vinland (over 2,200 miles!) was over double what lay between eastern Greenland and Iceland. It was far too expensive in time, manpower and resources for, frankly, not enough gain. Not only this, but the Vinland colony maintained quite a small population throughout its entire existence, only in the hundreds, which exacerbated already present issues and made the problems with the natives even worse. At the time, eastern Canada was home to several different indigenous tribes (dubbed skrælings by the Norse), and while relations were mixed, they never became positive. The first Norseman to establish a permanent settlement in the region, Thorfinn Karlsefni (once again, great name!), is described in the Saga of Erik the Red to have established trade with the skrælings, though he barred his company from giving away any of their weapons and instead utilised cloth. Relations remained neutral until a short time later, when a tamed bull had broken free from the Norse camp and frightened the natives into attacking. After the ensuing conflict had ended, Thorfinn came to the realisation that conflict with Vinland’s native tribes was inevitable despite the natural wealth that the region offered them. With this in mind, the company went home to Greenland, and no major settlement effort was made again by the Norse,  though evidence suggests that some Greenlanders still visited Markland for timber every now and then. The same site would be rediscovered by complete coincidence by English-sponsored Italian explorer John Cabot in 1497, wherein the former Vinland was renamed ‘Newfoundland’, as it still is to this day.

Thus ends the tale of Vinland, and the settlement of the Norse in North America. It is fun to imagine an alternate timeline in which they remained and established some flourishing Norse-native hybrid kingdom, but the tragic reality of Vinland’s situation meant that such a thing was entirely impossible. Even still, the story of Vinland, Leif Eriksson and even the saga of Greenland as a whole remains a fascinating and underrepresented aspect of early colonial history.

Image from Unsplash