While researching last Monday's post about Christopher Columbus, I spent some time in a section of our collection that hasn't completely made it into the online catalog yet -- our general world history materials. There I found an interesting little book about the Viking voyages to northeastern North America around AD 1000.
In The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen (2nd ed. 1890), author B. F. DeCosta used descriptions from the Icelandic sagas to figure out exactly where the events chronicled in the Norse oral histories might have taken place. Even lacking the archaeological and geological evidence found in the late 20th century, he made some pretty good guesses with the information he did have.
DeCosta's text proposes that the locations described in the sagas fall along Cape Cod and Nantucket / Martha's Vineyard, possibly even as far west as Mount Hope Bay in Rhode Island. It's a pretty reasonable conclusion based on the geography and climate of the area. He also relied on the expertise of prominent Danish scholar Carl Christian Rafn, whose theories about Norse monuments in southern New England were later disproven.
Recent discoveries place the adventures of Leif Ericson and his countrymen farther north along the Candadian coast from Helluland (probably Baffin Island or northern Labrador Island) to Markland (eastern Labrador) and Vinland (Newfoundland, and possibly Nova Scotia). The long spit of land described in the sagas is probably not Cape Cod, but the northern tip of Newfoundland at the entrace to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence; a Norse settlement dating to the early 11th century was uncovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960.
We tend to think of the Vikings as pagans who worshipped Odin and Thor and the rest of the Norse pantheon, but many western Scandinavians of the time, including Leif Ericson and the inhabitants of Iceland, converted to Christianity at the insistance of King Olaf I of Norway. It took more than a century for the majority of the Scandinavian peoples to become Christian and accept papal authority, so it's likely that some of the first European settlers in North America practiced a form of Christianity heavily influenced by their pagan traditions.
For a more in-depth description of current Viking knowledge, take a look at the National Museum of Natural History's Viking Voyage exhibit. It contains some fascinating information about the travels of the Norsemen, the lands and peoples they encountered, and the modern science that is helping connect the legends of the sagas with solid facts.
--Robin
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