As quickly as they came, they left. Stories of Vikings in North America tell of mysterious
lands and foreign tribes known only as Skraelings. It was 1,000 AD. For nearly
12,000 years, the Americas had been cut off from Eurasia. Civilizations developed on
each side without knowledge that the other existed. Nearly 500 years before Columbus
sailed the ocean blue, the Vikings journeyed to the Americas from Greenland and Iceland,
possibly multiple times. And it wasn’t very peaceful. Welcome back to Nutty History. Today,
we’re examining the Viking fingerprints in North America,
their clashes with the Native Americans, and why they disappeared almost as soon as they arrived.
By around 980, Erik the Red had begun a movement to colonize Greenland. And it wasn’t exactly
by choice. Erik was a wild man, and had been banished from Iceland for three years because
he’d eliminated someone. He then named the pretty cold and inhospitable piece of land he found while
exploring “Greenland” to entice people to move there. It worked. A few thousand Vikings ended
up settling down and calling Greenland home. Erik then heard of strange lands to the west from a
merchant sailor who had been blown off course on his way from Iceland to Greenland. Erik’s son,
Leif Erikson was fascinated by the story. So, sometime around 1000 AD, Leif set sail with 35
men to find out if this mysterious land existed. Apparently it did. Leif and his men set up camp
somewhere in what’s thought to be Newfoundland. There, his foster father, Tyker, was said to have
gotten pretty tipsy on wine-berries. It’s thought that Tyker’s drunkenness could have come about
from eating fermented cranberries, gooseberries, or squashberries, all of which grow wild in the
region. Leif and his crew didn’t stay very long, though. They eventually left and headed back to
Greenland. There are no accounts of encounters with Native Americans during Leif’s brief visit
to the New World. The Viking Greenlanders had probably met some Native Americans in Greenland,
however. There’s evidence that they traded with the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit.
Ivory carvings of Norsemen have been found at Thule archaeological sites, as well as iron and
bronze tools that the Thule weren’t capable of making themselves. It’s thought that the
Viking name for the Native Americans, Skraelings, probably originated from the Old Norse word skra,
which means “dried skin,” most likely a reference to the animal pelts worn by the Inuit ancestors.
In any event, Lief’s brother Thorvald ended up making a second voyage west a few years later.
Thorvald and his men set up shop for the winter at the camp Leif left behind. In the spring,
the Vikings came across nine natives sleeping under skin-covered canoes and attacked them,
eliminating all but one. The one who survived, ran to get reinforcements. A battle ensued,
and Thorvald lost his life to an arrow. Despite tense relations with the Native Americans,
the Vikings ended up staying another winter before heading back to Greenland. A few more years would
pass before another Norseman made the journey to the New World. This time, it was Thorfinn
Karlsefni. Thorfinn was a wealthy merchant with a distinguished lineage. He organized a far larger
expedition than either of the Erikson brothers had, with three ships, between 160-250 men and
women, and livestock. Thorfinn’s expedition ventured farther south than either Leif or
Thorvald’s. They ended up settling in a place called Straumfjord. There, they encountered
more Skraelings. It started off peacefully enough. The two groups bartered with each other,
with the Native Americans trading furs for red cloth and a wondrous liquid called “milk” that
came from the cattle the Vikings had brought over. But then things took a turn. The Viking colonists
lived on a knife’s edge with the Native peoples, and there were increasing instances of hostility
and outright fighting. It all came to a head when, according to one account, a bull from the Viking
camp got loose and frightened a group of Native Americans. They fled, but came back in greater
numbers, ready to fight. They attacked the Vikings with catapults and a legendary battle ensued. It
could’ve been the last straw for Thorfinn and his prospective colony. They abandoned the site and
returned to Greenland. No European would attempt to settle in the New World for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence or archaeological finds able to back up
the presence of Vikings in the Americas. There are few however, such as L'Anse Aux Meadows in
Newfoundland, which might be one of the most intriguing archaeological sites in the world.
Back in the 1960s, a Norwegian couple, Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad,
began scouring the northeastern Canadian coast hoping to find archaeological evidence for the
places mentioned in the sagas. On the northern tip of Newfoundland, they found it. L’Anse Aux Meadows
has become the only confirmed Viking Settlement in North America. The site includes the remains
of eight sod houses, evidence of iron work that couldn’t have been done by the Native Americans,
and a boat building frame. Experts think the site could have possibly been a ship repair center,
partly because of the physical evidence for boat building, and partly because the settlement sits
at a perfect spot for hopping across the North Atlantic to Greenland. A final piece of evidence
confirming that L’Anse Aux Meadows is indeed a Viking settlement is a small but significant
little pin. The bronze pin with a ring at the end was likely used to attach a cloak around the neck,
and it is most definitely Viking. There have been others just like it found at various Viking
archaeological sites in Scotland and Ireland, and they’ve all been dated to between 920 and 1050 AD.
One of the only other pieces of hard evidence for Viking presence in the Americas was found
farther south on a beach in Brooklyn, Maine. One day in August of 1957 an amateur archaeologist
named Guy Mellgren discovered a curious old coin. At first, he suspected it was
a Medieval British penny. But then, in 1978, experts identified it as a Norse coin that was
minted between 1065 and 1093. The site where the coin was found, called the Goddard Site,
includes a huge number of arrowheads, leading some to speculate that the arrival of the coin
coincided with the arrival of archery among the Native Americans in the region. Were they taught
by ancient Viking visitors? The Goddard Coin was met by a significant amount of skepticism by
historians and archaeologists. There had been some fakes in the past regarding the Viking
discovery of America, including a hoax map and a fabricated rune stone with Norse inscriptions
found in Minnesota. However, the Norse coin has been held up to scrutiny by experts,
who agree that it is original and that it had all the wear and tear of a coin buried for centuries.
We don't know a lot about the vikings settling in the Americas for periods of time, but we do know
of three expeditions to the New World because of two sagas – The Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga
of the Greenlanders. Together, they’re known as the Vinland Sagas. Both were written down a couple
hundred years after the events that they relate from around the year 1000. They differ in some
respects, but tell the same basic stories about Viking settlements in North America. However,
there’s mystery surrounding where exactly they landed. The sagas mention three main places:
Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. Helluland was the farthest north, and means “land of flat
stones”. In the middle, there was Markland, which means “land of forests”, and farthest south was
Vinland, which means “land of wine”. There’s lots of speculation about where exactly these places
are based on how their landscapes are described in the sagas. Some think that Helluland could be
Baffin Island in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. Markland has been hypothesized to
be Labrador farther to the southeast, and Vinland is thought to be modern-day Newfoundland. Another
mystery surrounds the location of Thorfinn’s camp, Straumfjord. In the sagas, Straumfjord is
described as having strong currents with high tides, a bay that acted as a natural harbor,
craggy rocks in the distance, a winter where the sun rose by mid-morning and set in mid-afternoon,
and so many birds nesting that it was hard not to step on eggs. Various places along
the northern coast of North America have been proposed for the location of Straumfjord based
on these descriptions – from the Bay of Fundy and L’Anse Aux Meadows in Canada,
to Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, and even as far south as the Long Island Sound in New York.
A final piece of the Vikings in America mystery has to do with why they didn’t stay. Why couldn’t
these fierce warriors survive in the Americas for more than a few years? Why didn’t they set down
roots? Why doesn’t a significant portion of the population in North America today speak Norse?
Lots of people have speculated about the reasons for this. Maybe they didn’t bring enough people
and supplies with them on their expeditions. Maybe they were driven out by hostile Native Americans.
But one of the leading theories has to do with the weather. During the 11th century, Leif and
Thorvald Erikson and Thorfinn Karlsefni led their expeditions to the New World, the climate was
warmer. It’s known as the Medieval Warming Period, and because of it there were warmer summers and
less Arctic sea ice. But then it got colder. Starting in the 12th century, what’s become
known as the Little Ice Age caused temperatures to drop and ice to accumulate, making many of the sea
routes impassable. It also made life on Greenland and Iceland very difficult for the Vikings.
Evidence points to food shortages and plague. Between 1250 and 1700, Iceland’s population fell
from 150,000 to just 50,000. The Viking stint in North America was brief. What we know about it
has been reduced to legend, told through sagas that could be historical fact or mythological
fiction or a combination of the two. The physical evidence includes just one small settlement,
a pin, and a coin. Yet it’s fascinating to think what could’ve happened if they stayed. Let us know
in the comments what you think. Did the Vikings ever step foot in the Americas? As always,
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