A brief history of the Vikings

History Extra

Coins depicting Viking longships, probably minted at Hedeby, Denmark, found in the Viking marketplace at Birka, Sweden. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

In 793, terror descended on the coast of Northumbria as armed raiders attacked the defenceless monastery of St Cuthbert on Lindisfarne. The terrified monks watched helplessly as the invaders made off with a haul of treasure and a clutch of captives. It was the first recorded raid by the Vikings, seaborne pirates from Scandinavia who would prey on coastal communities in north-western Europe for more than two centuries and create for themselves a reputation as fierce and pitiless warriors.
That image was magnified by those who wrote about the Viking attacks – in other words, their victims. The Anglo-Saxon cleric Alcuin of York wrote dramatically of the Lindisfarne raid that the “church was spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments… given as a prey to pagan peoples” and subsequent (mainly Christian) writers and chroniclers lost few opportunities to demonise the (mainly pagan) Vikings.
Yet, though they undeniably carried out very destructive and violent attacks, from small-scale raids against churches to major campaigns involving thousands of warriors, the Vikings formed part of a complex and often sophisticated Scandinavian culture. As well as raiders they were traders, reaching as far east as the rivers of Russia and the Caspian Sea; explorers, sending ships far across the Atlantic to land on the coastline of North America five centuries before Columbus; poets, composing verse and prose sagas of great power, and artists, creating works of astonishing beauty.

Viking origins

The Vikings originated in what is now Denmark, Norway and Sweden (although centuries before they became unified countries). Their homeland was overwhelmingly rural, with almost no towns. The vast majority earned a meagre living through agriculture, or along the coast, by fishing. Advances in shipping technology in the 7th and 8th centuries meant that boats were powered by sails rather than solely by oars. These were then added to vessels made of overlapping planks (‘clinker-built’) to create longships, swift shallow-drafted boats that could navigate coastal and inland waters and land on beaches.
Exactly what first compelled bands of men to follow their local chieftain across the North Sea in these longships is unclear. It may have been localised overpopulation, as plots became subdivided to the point where families could barely eke out a living; it may have been political instability, as chieftains fought for dominance; or it may have been news brought home by merchants of the riches to be found in trading settlements further west. Probably it was a combination of all three. But in 793 that first raiding party hit Lindisfarne and within a few years further Viking bands had struck Scotland (794), Ireland (795) and France (799).
Their victims did not refer to them as Vikings. That name came later, becoming popularised by the 11th century and possibly deriving from the word vik, which in the Old Norse language the Vikings spoke means ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’. Instead they were called Dani (‘Danes’) – there was no sense at the time that this should refer only to the inhabitants of what we now call Denmark – pagani (‘pagans’) or simply Normanni (‘Northmen’).

_{The remains of a Viking longship found at Gokstad in South Norway, c1920. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)}

Raids

At first the raids were small-scale affairs, a matter of a few boatloads of men who would return home once they had collected sufficient plunder or if the resistance they encountered was too strong. But in the 850s they began to overwinter in southern England, in Ireland and along the Seine in France, establishing bases from which they began to dominate inland areas.
The raids reached a crescendo in the second half of the ninth century. In Ireland the Vikings established longphorts – fortified ports – including at Dublin, from which they dominated much of the eastern part of the island. In France they grew in strength as a divided Frankish kingdom fractured politically and in 885 a Viking army besieged and almost captured Paris.
In Scotland they established an earldom in the Orkneys and overran the Shetlands and the Hebrides. And in England an enormous Viking host, the micel here (‘great army’) arrived in 865. Led by a pair of warrior brothers, Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless, they picked off the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England one by one. First Northumbria, with its capital at York, fell to them in 866, then East Anglia, followed by the central English kingdom of Mercia. Finally, only Wessex, ruled by Alfred, remained. A pious bookworm, Alfred had only become king because his three more martial older brothers had sickened or died in battle in previous Viking invasions.
In early January 878 a section of the Great Army led by Guthrum crossed the frontier and caught Alfred by surprise at the royal estate at Chippenham. Alfred barely managed to escape and spent months skulking in the Somerset marshes at Athelney. It looked like the independence of Wessex – and that of England generally – might be at an end. But against the odds Alfred gathered a new army, defeated the Vikings at Edington and forced Guthrum to accept baptism as a Christian. For his achievement in saving his kingdom he became the only native English ruler to gain the nickname ‘the Great’.
For 80 years England was divided between the land controlled by the kings of Wessex in the south and south-west and a Viking-controlled area in the Midlands and the north. Viking kings ruled this region until the last of them, Erik Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed in 954 and the kings of Wessex became rulers of a united England. Even so, Viking (and especially Danish) customs long persisted there and traces of Scandinavian DNA can still be found in a region that for centuries was known as the Danelaw.
By the mid-11th century united kingdoms had appeared in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the raids had finally begun to subside. There was a final burst of activity in the early 11th century when royal-sponsored expeditions succeeded in conquering England again and placing Danish kings on the throne there (including, most notably, Canute, who ruled an empire in England, Denmark and Norway, but who almost certainly did not command the tide to go out, as a folk tale alleges). Vikings remained in control of large parts of Scotland (especially Orkney), an area around Dublin and Normandy in France (where in 911 King Charles the Simple had granted land to a Norwegian chieftain, Rollo, the ancestor of William the Conqueror). They also controlled a large part of modern Ukraine and Russia, where Swedish Vikings had penetrated in the ninth century and established states based around Novgorod and Kiev.

_{Silver penny of King Alfred. The reverse of this coin bears a monogram made up of the letters of LVNDONIA (London), possibly to commemorate the recovery or restoration of London after its occupation by the Danes. (Photo by Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images)}

Settlements

This was not the full extent of the Viking world, however. The same maritime aggression that had caused them to plunder (and ultimately conquer) settled lands also led them to venture in search of unknown shores on which to settle. Vikings probably arrived in the Faroes in the eighth century and they used this as a stepping-stone to sail further west across the Atlantic.
In the mid-ninth century a series of Viking voyages came across Iceland and in the year 872 colonists led by Ingólf Arnarson settled on the island. They established a unique society, fiercely independent and owing no formal allegiance to the kings of Norway. It was a republic whose supreme governing body was, from 930, the Althing, an assembly made up of Iceland’s chief men which met each summer in a plain beside a massive cleft in a ring of hills in the centre of the island. It has a strong claim to be the world’s oldest parliament.
From Iceland, too, we have other vital pieces of evidence of the inventiveness of Viking societies. These include the earliest pieces of history written by Vikings themselves in the form of a 12th-century history of Iceland, the Íslendingabók, and the Landnámabók, an account of the original settlement of the island (with the names of each of the first settlers and the land they took).
But more important – and surprising for those who view of the Vikings is as one-dimensional warriors – is the collection of sagas known as the Íslendingasögur or Icelandic Family Sagas. Their setting is the first 150 years of the Viking colony in Iceland and they tell of often-troubled relations between the main Icelandic families. Alliances, betrayals, feuds and murders play out against the backdrop of a landscape in which features can still often be identified today. At their best, in tales such as Njál’s Saga or Egil’s Saga, they are powerful pieces of literature in their own right, and among the most important writing to survive from any European country in the Middle Ages.

Religion

Iceland was the location of another drama that highlights the transition of Viking societies away from warrior chieftainships. Christianity came later to Scandinavian Viking societies than to many other parts of Europe. Whereas France’s kings had accepted Christianity by the early sixth century and the Anglo-Saxon kings of England largely in the seventh, Christian missionaries only appeared in southern Scandinavia in the ninth century and made little headway there until Harald Bluetooth of Denmark accepted baptism in around 960. Harald had become Christian after a typical piece of Viking theatre: a drunken argument around the feasting table as to which was more powerful – Odin and Thor, or the new Christian God and his son, Jesus.
Iceland remained resolutely pagan, loyal to old gods such as Odin; the All Father; a one-eyed god who had sacrificed the other eye in exchange for knowledge of runes; and Thor, the thunder-god with his great hammer Mjölnir, who was also especially popular with warriors.
Iceland became Christian to avoid a civil war. Competing pagan and Christian factions threatened to tear the Althing apart and dissolve Iceland into separate, religiously hostile, states. At the Althing’s meeting in the year 1000 the rival factions appealed to Iceland’s most important official, the lawspeaker Thorgeir Thorkelsson. As a pagan he might have been expected to favour the old gods but, after an entire day spent agonising over the decision, he concluded that henceforth all Icelanders would be Christian. A few exceptions were made – for example the eating of horsemeat, a favoured delicacy that was also associated with pagan sacrifices, was to be permitted.

_{Detail of a stone relief representing the divine triad: Odin (the chief god in Norse mythology), Thor (god of thunder) and Freyr (god of fertility). Gotland, Sweden. Image c1987. (Photo By DEA/G DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)}

Explorations

Iceland, too, was the platform from which the Vikings launched their furthest-flung explorations. In 982 a fiery tempered chieftain, Erik the Red, who had already been exiled from Norway for his father’s part in a homicide, was then exiled from Iceland for involvement in another murder. He had heard rumours of land to the west and, with a small group of companions, sailed in search of it. What he found was beyond his wildest imaginings. Only 300 kilometres west of Iceland, Greenland is the world’s largest island, and its south and south-west tip had fjords [deep, narrow and elongated sea or lakedrain, with steep land on three sides] and lush pastures that must have reminded Erik of his Scandinavian homeland. He returned back to Iceland, gathered 25 ship-loads of settlers and established a new Viking colony in Greenland that survived into the 15th century.
Erik’s son, Leif, outdid his father. Having heard from another Viking Greenlander, Bjarni Herjolfsson, that he had sighted land even further west, Leif went to see for himself. In around 1002 he and his crew found themselves sailing somewhere along the coast of North America. They found a glacial, mountainous coast, then a wooded one, and finally a country of fertile pastures that they named Vinland. Although they resolved to start a new colony there, it was – unlike either Iceland or Greenland – already settled and hostility from native Americans and their own small numbers (Greenland at the time probably had about 3,000 Viking inhabitants) meant that it was soon abandoned. They had, though, become the first Europeans to land in (and settle in) the Americas, almost five centuries before Christopher Columbus.
For centuries Erik’s achievement lived on only in a pair of sagas, The Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red’s Saga. The location of Vinland, despite attempts to work out where it lay from information contained in the sagas, remained elusive. It was even unclear if the Vikings really had reached North America. Then, in the early 1960s, a Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife, Anne Stine, found the remains of ancient houses at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland in Canada. Fragments of worked iron (many of them nails, probably from a ship), which the native population did not possess the technology to produce, meant that it was soon clear this was a Viking settlement. Although perhaps too small to be the main Vinland colony, it was still astonishing confirmation of what the sagas had said. Leif Erikson’s reputation as a great explorer and discoverer of new lands was confirmed without doubt.
This might well have pleased him, for a man’s reputation was everything to a Viking. Quick wit, bravery and action were among the key attributes for a Viking warrior, but to be remembered for great deeds was the most important of all. The Hávamál, a collection of Viking aphorisms, contains much apt advice such as “Never let a bad man know your own bad fortune”, but most famous of all is the saying “Cattle die, kindred die, we ourselves shall die, but I know one thing that never dies: the reputations of each one dead”.

The reputation of the Vikings simply as raiders and plunderers has long been established. Restoring their fame as traders, storytellers, explorers, missionaries, artists and rulers is long overdue.

Philip Parker is author of The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World (Vintage, 2015).

Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers

History Extra

A detail of the decorative carving on the side of the Oseberg cart depicting a woman with streaming hair apparently restraining a man's sword-arm as he strikes at a horseman accompanied by a dog. Below is a frieze of intertwined serpentine beasts. c850 AD. Viking Ship Museum, Bygdoy. (Werner Forman Archive/Bridgeman Images)

In the long history of Scandinavia, the period that saw the greatest transformation was the Viking Age (AD 750–1100). This great movement of peoples from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, heading both east and west, and the social, religious, political and cultural changes that resulted from it, affected the lives and roles of women as well as the male warriors and traders whom we more usually associate with ‘Viking’ activities.
Scandinavian society was hierarchical, with slaves at the bottom, a large class of the free in the middle, and a top level of wealthy local and regional leaders, some of whom eventually sowed the seeds of the medieval Scandinavian monarchies. The slaves and the free lived a predominantly rural and agricultural life, while the upper levels of the hierarchy derived their wealth from the control and export of natural resources. The desire to increase such wealth was a major motivating factor of the Viking Age expansion.
One way to acquire wealth was to raid the richer countries to the south and west. The Scandinavians burst on the scene in the eighth century as feared warriors attacking parts of the British Isles and the European continent. Such raiding parties were mainly composed of men, but there is contemporary evidence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that some warbands were accompanied by women and, inevitably, children, particularly if they had been away from Scandinavia for some time. The sources do not reveal whether these women had come from Scandinavia with the men or joined them along the way, but both are likely.
Despite popular misconceptions, however, there is no convincing evidence that women participated directly in fighting and raiding – indeed, the Chronicle describes women and children being put in a place of safety. The Viking mind, a product of a militarised culture, could certainly imagine women warriors, as evidenced by their art and mythology, but this was not an option for real women.

 

Settlement

In parts of Britain and Ireland and on the north-western coasts of the European continent, these raids were succeeded by settlement, as recorded in contemporary documents and shown by language, place-names and archaeology. An interesting question is whether these warriors-turned-settlers established families with Scandinavian wives or whether they integrated more quickly by taking local partners. There is strong evidence in many parts of Britain for whole communities speaking Scandinavian as the everyday language of the home, implying the presence of Scandinavian-speaking women.
Metal-detectorist finds show that Scandinavian-style jewellery was imported into England in considerable numbers on the clothing of the female settlers themselves. In the north and west of Scotland, Scandinavian speech and culture persisted well into the Middle Ages, and genetic evidence suggests that Scandinavian families and communities emigrated to places such as Orkney and Shetland en masse.
Not all of these settlers stayed in the British Isles, however. From both the Norwegian homeland and the British Isles, ambitious emigrants relocated to the previously uninhabited Faroe Islands and Iceland and, somewhat later, to Greenland and even North America. The Icelandic Book of Settlements, written in the 13th century, catalogues more than 400 Viking-Age settlers of Iceland. Thirteen of these were women, remembered as leading their households to a new life in a new land. One of them was Aud (also known as Unn), the deep-minded who, having lost her father, husband and son in the British Isles, took it on herself to have a ship built and move the rest of her household to Iceland, where the Book of the Icelanders lists her as one of the four most prominent Norwegian founders of Iceland. As a widow, Aud had complete control of the resources of her household and was wealthy enough to give both land and freedom to her slaves once they arrived in Iceland.

 

Slavery

Other women were, however, taken to Iceland as slaves. Studies of the genetic make-up of the modern Icelandic population have been taken to suggest that up to two-thirds of its female founding population had their origins in the British Isles, while only one third came from Norway (the situation is, however, the reverse for the male founding population).
The Norwegian women were the wives of leading Norwegian chieftains who established large estates in Iceland, while the British women may have been taken there as slaves to work on these estates.  But the situation was complex and it is likely that some of the British women were wives legally married to Scandinavian men who had spent a generation or two in Scotland or Ireland before moving on to Iceland. The written sources also show that some of the British slaves taken to Iceland were male, as in the case of Aud, discussed above.
These pioneer women, both chieftains’ wives and slaves, endured the hardships of travel across the North Atlantic in an open boat along with their children and all their worldly goods, including their cows, sheep, horses and other animals. Women of all classes were essential to the setting up of new households in unknown and uninhabited territories, not only in Iceland but also in Greenland, where the Norse settlement lasted for around 500 years.
Both the Icelandic sagas and archaeology show that women participated in the voyages from Greenland to some parts of North America (known to them as Vinland). An Icelandic woman named Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is particularly remembered for having been to Vinland (where she gave birth to a son), but also for having in later life gone on pilgrimage to Rome and become a nun.

_{A page from the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' in Anglo-Saxon or Old English, telling of King Aethelred I of Wessex and his brother, the future King Alfred the Great, and their battles with the Viking invaders at Reading and Ashdown in AD 871 (c1950). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

Mistress of the house

These new settlements in the west were, like those of the homelands, rural and agricultural, and the roles of women were the traditional ones of running the household. Although free women did not by convention participate in public life, it is clear that the mistress of the household had absolute authority in the most important matters of daily life within its four walls, and also in many aspects of farm work.
Runic inscriptions show that women were highly valued for this. On a commemorative stone from Hassmyra, in Sweden, the deceased Odindisa is praised in runic verse by her husband for her role as mistress of that farm. The rune stones of the Isle of Man include a particularly high proportion commemorating women.
Those women who remained in Scandinavia also felt the effects of the Viking Age. The evidence of burials shows that women, at least those of the wealthier classes, were valued and respected. Much precious metalwork from the British Isles found its way into the graves of Norwegian women, usually presumed to be gifts from men who went west, but some were surely acquired abroad by the women themselves.
At the top level of society, women’s graves were as rich as those of men – the grave goods of a wealthy woman buried with her servant at Oseberg in Norway included a large and beautiful ship, several horses and many other valuable objects. Such a woman clearly had power and influence to be remembered in this way. With the establishment of the monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden towards the end of the Viking Age, it is clear that queens could have significant influence, such as Astrid, the widow of St Olaf, who ensured the succession of her stepson Magnus to the Norwegian throne in the year 1035.

Urbanisation and Christianity

Another of the major changes affecting Viking Age Scandinavia was that of urbanisation. While trade had long been an important aspect of Scandinavian wealth creation, the development of emporia – town-like centres – such as Hedeby in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway, Birka in Sweden, or trading centres at York and Dublin, provided a new way of life for many.
The town-like centres plugged into wide-ranging international networks stretching both east and west. Towns brought many new opportunities for women as well as men in both craft and trade. The fairly standard layouts of the buildings in these towns show that the wealth-creating activities practised there were family affairs, involving the whole household, just as farming was in rural areas. In Russia, finds of scales and balances in Scandinavian female graves indicate that women took part in trading activities there.
Along with urbanisation, another major change was the adoption of Christianity. The rune stones of Scandinavia date largely from the period of Christianisation and show that women adopted the new religion with enthusiasm. As family memorials, the inscriptions are still dominated by men, but with Christianity, more and more of them were dedicated to women. Those associated with women were also more likely to be overtly Christian, such as a stone in memory of a certain Ingirun who went from central Sweden on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The Viking Age, then, was not just a masculine affair. Women played a full part in the voyages of raiding, trading and settlement, and the new settlements in the North Atlantic would not have survived very long had it not been for their contribution. This mobile and expansive age provided women with new opportunities, and sagas, rune stones and archaeology show that many of them were honoured and remembered accordingly.
Judith Jesch is professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015). You can follow her on Twitter @JudithJesch

A New Lead in the Search for Elusive Norse Settlements

Ancient Origins

By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times

CODROY VALLEY, Canada – A story passed down in my family for generations may be the clue to finding a lost Norse settlement.
The only Norse settlement in the New World thus far confirmed by archaeologists is in L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. But the Norse sagas tell of other colonizing expeditions.
Last summer, archaeologists announced they found evidence of a Norse presence–a hearth used for roasting bog iron ore, which is the first step in the production of iron–at Point Rosee in southern Newfoundland. My uncle, Wayne MacIsaac, was so excited he said he didn’t sleep for three days. He felt vindicated in his long-cherished, but long-ignored, theory that he had found an ancient Norse site in the nearby Codroy Valley where he lives.
His previous attempts to attract the interest of archaeologists to the site had met with failure, but that has now changed. An international team of archaeologists are due to investigate in July.

Wayne MacIsaac stands near what he believes may be the remnants of a Norse fortification wall. (Tara MacIsaac/Epoch Times)

A Strange Boat

My great-grandfather, MacIsaac’s grandfather, used to tell of a strange boat that was found in the Codroy Valley when he was a child. A storm had shifted a sandbar at the mouth of the Little Codroy River, revealing a plank-built boat that did not match any shipbuilding style known to the locals.
Three tall human skeletons were found underneath it, along with a stone arrowhead.
In that day, no one considered preserving it as an archaeological artifact. But when MacIsaac took an interest in the Norse sagas, he began to see astounding parallels between the descriptions of a Norse settlement and the area the boat was found.
Three Norsemen at the settlement were said to have been killed by natives. MacIsaac wondered whether the three skeletons were those settlers. The stone arrowhead could suggest they were killed by native bowmen.
Local natives only made boats of animal hide or birch bark, suggesting the plank-built boat was of European origin. Yet it didn’t resemble anything known by the local French, Irish, Scottish, or English settlers of my great-grandfather’s time.
MacIsaac found that the sagas describe a mountain range extending north from the settlement. The Long Range mountains indeed extend north from the Codroy Valley. The sagas also describe a river that flows into a lake, which then flows into the sea, and a sandbar that could only be crossed at high tide.
All of this, as well as other details in the sagas, describe a part of the Codroy Valley. MacIsaac went to the spot he felt best matched the description and found what he believes could be remnants of the settlement.

The view from part of what Wayne MacIsaac believes to be a Norse settlement, looking out on a sandbar where a boat that may be of Norse origin was found by locals more than a century ago. (Tara MacIsaac/Epoch Times)

The Little Codroy River, with the Long Range mountains in the background and the potential site of a Norse settlement visible in the middle-ground, to the left. (Tara MacIsaac/Epoch Times)

MacIsaac has not disclosed the precise location publicly for fear that amateur archaeologists may disturb the site. But he took me there.
He first showed me what he believes may have been a fortifying wall mentioned in the sagas. After 1,000 years, it would be hard for my untrained eye to identify with any certainty a wall possibly built with organic materials.
What I saw was a long, narrow elevation in the ground that extended for dozens of yards, and was some four or more feet high. If it was once a wall, it has been covered with earth and vegetation to the extent that it was difficult to take a photograph of it that conveyed the shape discernible on site.
We moved to another spot, where MacIsaac had found mounds, and particularly a mound that appears unnaturally square in shape.

A square mound believed by Wayne MacIsaac to be evidence of a Norse structure. (Tara MacIsaac/Epoch Times)

MacIsaac said that, while some of the mounds in the area could be natural, some, including this one, lead him to believe Norse structures existed there. He asked local elderly residents, in their 80s and 90s, whether they knew of any structures built in the area since the Scottish and French had settled there in the early 19th century.
They said the land hadn’t been used, suggesting any remnants of structures on the site are not modern.

Contradictory Interpretations

Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, investigated the Point Rosee site last summer and talked to MacIsaac at that time. He was intrigued by MacIsaac’s theory.

 “There may be a Norse colony in the Codroy Valley (more work definitely needs to be done),” he wrote to me in an email. “But I wouldn’t base that on the saga descriptions. They’re too vague and contradictory,” he said.

MacIsaac said of the sagas: “There are several different versions and different translations, some of them have details the others don’t have.” The details he found to match the Codroy Valley site were picked out of various versions.
The settlement the sagas describe was started by Thorfinn Karlsefni (980–1007), who led a colonizing expedition to the New World following its discovery by Leif Eriksson.

A statue of Thorfinn Karlsefni in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (public domain)

Karlsefni’s settlement is described in the Saga of Eirik the Red:
Karlsefni headed south around the coast, with Snorri and Bjarni and the rest of their company. They sailed a long time, until they came to a river which flowed into a lake and from there into the sea. There were wide sandbars stretching out across the mouth of the river and they could only sail into the river at high tide. Karlsefni and his company sailed into the lagoon and called the land Hop (Tidal Pool). There they found fields of self-grown wheat in the low-lying areas and vines growing on the hills. Every stream was teeming with fish. They dug trenches along the high-water mark and when they tide ebbed there were halibut in them. There were a great number of deer of all kinds in the forest.
This passage is from the Keneva Kunz translation in the 1997 Hreinsson volume, Bolender said, which is the main account of Karlsefni’s secondary settlement.

“People have used this text to situate the colony almost anywhere on the American east coast,” Bolender said. “Carl Refn placed these spots in Cape Cod and Rhode Island back in the 1830s. Others have placed them near Boston, in Maine, Nova Scotia, and even on the Pacific coast in British Columbia!”

He also noted that the vines mentioned in the story refer to grapes, which don’t grow in Newfoundland.
I asked botanists at the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre what they thought of the grape reference. Could it have described a plant existing in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago, particularly in the Codroy Valley area?
Botanist David Mazerolle replied via email: “Our native grape (Riverbank grape, Vitis riparia) does not occur in Newfoundland and, in my opinion, it is highly unlikely that the species would have occurred there 1,000 years ago.

“A few months ago, I heard of a similar theory, concerning that same mention of a [Norse] settlement in a river valley which had ‘grapes.’ The theory was that this may have been in New Brunswick’s Miramichi River Valley, which does support Riverbank grape.”

Botanist Alain Belliveau added to Mazerolle’s response: “Groundnut (Apios americana) is another vine from Atlantic Canada that was an important food source for First Nations and would’ve been grown in river valleys, but its distribution is similar to that of Riverbank grape and it’s highly unlikely that it was in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago.”
MacIsaac awaits further investigation by archaeologists this summer. He would like to see satellite imagery used in the investigation.
That is how the Point Rosse site was identified. TED awarded archaeologist Sarah Parcak a $1 million prize to use satellite surveillance to discover and monitor ancient sites.
I asked MacIsaac how he will feel if the Codroy Valley site turns out not to have been a Norse settlement after all. He replied: “I will be very disappointed, but I’m trying to be prepared for that, because it is possible it is not what I think it is–despite all the parallels in the sagas, despite the evidence that I see on the site itself, and despite its close proximity to what’s been pretty much confirmed as Norse iron-working.

“Maybe it is just natural formations, but I really don’t think it is,” he said.

If it turns out to be a Norse site, it would have a substantial impact on the Codroy Valley, a town of some 2,000 residents. Archaeological digs would certainly stir up this small town, and the find could draw tourists.

“I want to see all of that. I have no problem with that whatsoever,” MacIsaac said. “Archaeology is my main interest, but … this place could certainly use some economic spin-off from [tourism].”

Top image: Norse explorers. ‘Summer on the Greenland coast circa year 1000’ by Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen (1841–1893) (public domain)
The article ‘A New Lead in the Search for Elusive Norse Settlements’ was originally published on The Epoch Times and has been republished with permission.