| abstract
| - It happened so long ago scholars cannot agree on what the word Vinland means. Nor do they agree on where it is, but more on that later. The Northmen did not leave their home country because of wanderlust, although a quest for land probably played a part. It may also have been a result of the still common practice of deeding settled farmland to the firstborn son, leaving younger sons no option but to settle elsewhere. In order to understand these Northmen and the indigenous peoples they contacted in their quest for a new homeland, I offer the following to give perspective to the reader of a time, more than one thousand years ago; in this land we now call North America. We know that Northmen not only reached North America between 997 and 1003,1 they regularly sailed back and forth from Greenland to North America, Iceland, Norway, and perhaps other northern European destinations for about five hundred years. The term Norse, or Norsk, is used to describe all peoples of Scandinavian origin, e.g. Swedish, Danish (including Greenland and the Faeroe Islands), Norwegian, Icelandic, and the Orkney and Shetland islanders. Norse is also a reference to their common language—for in those days they all spoke the same language—and to differentiate them from other Germanic peoples.3 For the purpose of this story, reference will be made to both Northmen and Norsemen in a general and interchangeable sense. They were no longer Vikings, and I will not refer to them as such. When they sailed across the Atlantic, they became something else entirely. The Medieval Warm Period, between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, made these voyages possible. Benevolent weather allowed them first to settle Greenland and later to reach and explore unknown portions of North Ameri ca. The weather was considerably warmer during this period than it is today in North America and Greenland.4 The Northmen, under Eirik Thorvaldsson (Eirik the Red) colonized Greenland. Their sheep, goats, cattle, and horses grazed the lush green pastures while they traded in walrus hides and ivory with their European homeland. However, the fragile environment soon became overgrazed and could not support their domestic animals in viable numbers, forcing a gradual shift from an agrarian to a hunter-gatherer society, as the contents of their middens indicate.5 Wild game was plentiful during the early years, but after a time, the hunting moved farther and farther afield as yak and caribou herds were depleted. Finally no game remained except a few ring seals.6 It is particularly important for the reader to be aware that not a single document originating in Greenland exists. The Norse Greenlanders may have been illiterate for the most part. Everything about their personal history is conjecture because none of it comes to us from the source, they themselves. The runic alphabet they employed did not lend itself to lengthy dissertation. Everything about the five-hundred-year history of the two main Greenland settlements comes to us from sources with no vested interest in telling the true story of these hardy people. In all cases, the information was compiled as long as two hundred years after the fact by saga writers who had never been to Greenland.7 1 William W. Fitzhugh, Vikings The North Atlantic Saga (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2000) 2 Helge & Anne Stine Ingstad, The Viking Discovery of America (Checkmark Books, 2001) iv 3 Fitzhugh, 27. 4 Fitzhugh, 330. 5 Fitzhugh, 328–329. 6 Paul Buckland, The North Atlantic Saga (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2000), 148–149. 7 Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, Archeologists Interpretation of the Vinland Sagas (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2000) 225.
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