“Viking” North America: The North American Public’s Understanding of Its Norse Heritage

I presented this paper, “Viking” North America: The North American Public’s Understanding of its Norse Heritage at Session 528, 8:30 Sunday Morning in Fetzer 2020 at Western Michigan University for the 2011 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. The conference was, for me, a great success. As I mention in the paper a lot of these ideas I developed in part while working on the article for Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier at the University of Western Ontario, and some I developed while interning at L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site. In this reproduction all the footnotes are left out, so if you are looking for references please look to the paper I did for Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier. I have, however, included my bibliography and all my visual aids.

“Viking” North America: The North American Public’s Understanding of Its Norse Heritage


(slide 1)

I would like to start off with a clip. During the 2010 Winter Olympics this ad ran in the province of Ontario nearly once a commercial break. It was part of a larger campaign for Newfoundland and Labrador tourism, though this was the ad they chose to run most frequently. While you watch, take note of the way that North America’s Norse heritage is being presented.



And once again:
And so they came,
five centuries before Columbus,
fearless warriors out to discover a New World,
the Vikings.
While they left behind their mark, they have long since gone …
… so far as we can tell.
Newfoundland and Labrador.

This summer, as part of my internship for my public history degree, I worked at L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site.


(slide 2: images from summer 2010)

What I can identify as public knowledge about North America’s Norse heritage comes from informal discussions with tourists, from the study of the way that promoters of heritage frame the Norse-North American connection in order to appeal to the public and finally from cursorily studying the historiography. From my research and my experiences I can tell you that this advertising campaign was widely successful. Through talking with people I discovered that a great many of them (I would be so bold to say as one out of three people) had seen the advertisement and had decided to visit L’Anse aux Meadows because of it. For many it was a case of “well we always wanted to come and then we saw that advertisement, you know, with the children.” It was so successful amongst North American audiences that tourism numbers, I can say unofficially, were the highest they had ever been, despite the drop off in American tourism that resulted from the closing gap between the two dollars.

The success of the ad campaign is in part from its stunning images of Newfoundland landscape. However, what brought people up to the northernmost parts of Newfoundland was not just the landscape, since this is stunning, but not remarkably more stunning than other, perhaps more easily accessed, parts of the province. The draw was this emphasis on a medieval European past that genuinely belonged to North Americans. If we listen to the words of this advertisement, in it the province is appealing to everything that makes the ‘Vikings’ popular amongst North American audiences. The advertisement is emphasizing and then reasserting exactly what North Americans think about their own Norse heritage.


(slide three)

I argue that the North American public understands their Norse heritage as part of their origins mythology as a settler/invader nation. This is seen through the continuous coupling of Norse explorers such as Leifr Eiríksson with late medieval European explorers, specifically Christopher Columbus. I would also argue that the North American public’s understanding of the Norse culture can be summed up in everything that is meant by the word Viking and, as in the advertisement, is epitomized by the phrase ‘fearless warriors out to discover a new world.’


(slide 4: image of Christopher Columbus)

Nobody thinks that Christopher Columbus was the first European in North America. Granted, if we are talking about the knowledge of tourists who have made their way to L’Anse aux Meadows, likely if they have made it that far off the beaten path they probably already have an inkling as to why that site is important. However, it has been my experience amongst my friends, family, general adult education classes and pretty much everyone I talk to, that no one still thinks that Christopher Columbus was the first. But he persists as the poster boy for European exploration and colonization in North America and he is the common reference point for the discussion about European arrival to this continent.


(slide 5: images of the manuscripts that contain the Vinland Sagas)

The presence of Vikings, or Norse, in North America was speculated about long before any of the archaeological evidence at either L’Anse aux Meadows or Skraeling Island (just off of Ellesmere Island) was found. The two Icelandic sagas, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, have been dubbed the Vinland sagas because of their descriptions of voyages to Helluland, Markland and finally Vinland by the likes of Leifr Eiríksson and Thorfinnr Karlsefni, amongst others. The presence of a real Vinland is corroborated by other textual references.

The level of descriptors in the sagas has caused scholars to find the places mentioned in the sagas in North American localities since the first translations into Latin, and then Danish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much scholarship since the nineteenth century has been characterized by this desire to find the real places of the sagas, to find the ‘true’ discoverers of America. This is done by locating the ‘real’ Vinland. Some of these attempts have been more nationalistic than others.

One way that the Norse have been used is to indigenize Europeans to the North American landscape, by at the very least giving the Europeans a longer history on the continent, and by at the most appropriating native arts, culture, or artefacts, and attributing them to the Norse instead of to Native cultures. For example, in 1883 Rasmus B. Anderson wrote a new prologue to his book America Not Discovered by Columbus, in which he said of the creation of the “runes” on the Dighton Rock that had been found in the Taunton River:


(slide 6)

I think they were iron implements, and that they were in the hands of a skilled mechanic—a Norseman worthy of the name. I do not know that my opinion on this question is of any consequence, still I have seen work undoubtedly performed by an aboriginal American with flint and stone tools, but the characters were not nicely edged, as these are. I cannot believe they were made by the lazy Indian of Schoolcraft.

Starting in 1940, Reider T. Sherwin wrote eight volumes on The Viking and the Red Man; The Old Norse Origin of the Algonquin Language. In them he went through the Algonquin vocabulary and showed how each word had an Old Norse origin.

In the search for the 'true' first Europeans it is typical to view the Vikings and Columbus as foils for each other, and to show that only one can be the real 'first.' Take for example, as an extreme, Mary B. Shipley, who, in 1877, wrote one of the more overtly nationalistic works concerning the Norse landings in North America. Her book was entitled The Icelandic Discoverers of America, or, Honor to Whom Honor is Due. In it she stated that the founding of America was one of the greatest achievements in all of world history, and if North America ceased to acknowledge Columbus, but instead acknowledged the Vikings, all the corruption of Catholicism and its most devout followers, the Spanish, would disappear from American culture. In short everything that was good, including the self-determinism and self-government espoused by the Norse, would again be emphasized. That is an extreme, though looking at Vikings in America by Graeme Davis, published in 2009, Davis also saw the “marginalization” of the knowledge of the Icelanders as a plot by Columbus, the papacy, and the Spanish monarchy, and persisted in construing the Norse voyages in terms of the American ideal. He stated that “in the Vikings, America finds its first European settlers. Most fittingly these first European Settlers in America were people searching for what we know today as the American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”


(slide 7: Top left corner; 1840s lecture describing Norsemen as first. Bottom right corner; Mary B. Shipley's book. Centre; Publication accompanying 1992 exhibit at the Canadian museum of Civilization. Bottom left; W.A. Munn. Top right; Helge Ingstad.)

Before the discovery of the archaeological evidence there was a scholarly reaction against taking the sagas as proof of any real place, but that didn’t stop the popular and perhaps amateurish wave of interest in locating the real Vinland. This desire to find the places of the sagas is what lead people like W.A. Munn in 1914, and eventually Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, to the Straits of Belle Isle to look for evidence of the Norse past. By the end of the 1960s it was agreed that the Norse had been to North America, though we will never all agree as to the locations in the sagas, despite the sometimes fine arguments that are made, because while there are many specific details about geography in the sagas there are too many variables and interpretations possible for those details. Halldór Hermansson’s 1909 Vinland bibliography was ninety pages in length and contained 750 entries. By 1997 Robert Bergersen’s Vinland bibliography, Writings Relating to the Norse in Greenland and America, was 400 closely printed pages. And that was thirteen years ago. I think as well the sheer number of treatises and papers written about this subject, and particularly about the geography of Vinland problematizes this division between scholarly and the public, because I think numbers like this indicate that this subject, possibly because of the traditionally nationalistic overtones, has a wide appeal. In the last thirty years many scholars who work on the Vinland Sagas, and even those who work both with the sagas and with the archaeology, have tried to distance themselves from such nationalistic discussions. In fact many scholars don’t care what personage was first, and see the arrival of these individuals as marking larger trends in technology and in European expansion and colonialism movements from different times. However, if one refers to the corpus of recent publications on Vinland it is evident that about as many analyses were published in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus, as there were in 2000, the supposed 1000th anniversary of Leifr’s settlement. Because scholars approach it from this direction, this nationalistic discourse frames our understanding of the Norse voyages to North America.

And its place in our national mythologies is going to ensure that scholars and the public alike are going to continue to be interested in this particular piece of medieval and North American history.


(slide 8: Leif Eiríksson statue erected in 1887 in Boston)

The knowledge about the Viking arrival, “five centuries before Columbus,” as it states in the advertisement, may have trickled in from scholarly (or less than scholarly) work into the general education. However, this Columbus/Leifr Eiriksson debate has occasionally, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, become very public. With the erection of any new public history site, from the Leifr Eiríksson statue erected in Boston 1887 to the recognition of L’Anse aux Meadows as a Norse site in 1960.


(slide 9: Vinland Map, Yale University)

The Vinland map, discovered in the Yale library in 1965, was unveiled a few days before Columbus day and was viewed by some as unseating Columbus once and for all. The map was supposedly from the year 1470, twenty-two years before Columbus’s first voyage. The last time I delivered some of these ideas, someone told me afterwards that one of the people who was really upset by this was Frank Sinatra, who was among those who viewed this as an attack on Italian/American heritage. The map is know largely regarded as a fake, but regardless the existence of a physical map shouldn’t be that different from the oral map that exists in the sagas, though this is a more modern opinion and perhaps a more scholarly one. Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir talks about how the juxtaposition of Leifr and Columbus is politically charged because of the importance of both to the chronology of the North American founding myth, and also because of the importance of having a symbol of unity representative of the Anglo-Saxon race and not of Catholic origin. Leifr Eiriksson day is October 9th. This date was chosen because the ship the Restauration arrived on October 9th, 1825, bringing the first Scandinavian immigrants to the New York harbour from Stavanger, Norway. What is interesting is that Leifr Eiríksson day pre-empts Columbus Day, on 12 October, by three days. The choice of dates is legitimate but also political.


(slide 10: Top left; Runestone museum in Alexandria. Bottom left; Yarmouth Runestone, Nova Scotia. Bottom right; Recreation group at Norstead in L'Anse aux Meadows. Top right; L'Anse aux Meadows.)

So the public understands this Columbus/Viking dichotomy. We can look then at the way that heritage/tourism industries appeal to this sense of ‘who was first.’
There are several locations in North America that celebrate North America’s Norse heritage. L’Anse aux Meadows has the most legitimacy because of the presence of the archaeological site. The arctic sites are important to heritage, but the lack of the tourist gaze in that area of the world has resulted in very little commemoration. Therefore, in that area no one is concerned about marketing the area’s medieval heritage in terms of the public’s interests and understanding. Some heritage/tourism sites gain a form of legitimacy by claiming to be an interpretation of what could have been or are museums to the culture as opposed to any specific events, like Norstead, the living history museum across from the official site at L’Anse aux Meadows. Some institutions house artefacts that could be Norse, and might not be, like the runestone at the Yarmouth museum, and allow visitors to make up their own mind. What is really interesting is that the meagre set of evidence has resulted in the proliferation of interpretation sites all the way from Minnesota and Ohio to the edge of Newfoundland. This helps to represent the place that this history holds in the minds of the public, in that there is an audience for this wide range of sites.


(slide 11: sign erected by tourism association on road into St. Anthony/ L'Anse aux Meadows)

One interesting thing I came across during my time at L’Anse aux Meadows was this sign, which has been placed by the Northern Peninsula tourism association along the road into St. Anthony and L’Anse aux Meadows. The interesting story that I heard, as it was told to me, is that the consultant had suggested putting a sign there that said ‘Is this Vinland?’ Instead, the tourism association were the ones who decided that now was no longer the time to question. The sixties is when they questioned, now was when they marketed this very real and very tangible connection to the medieval.


(slide 12: signs marking the major route, the Viking trail, through the northern peninsula)

The whole landscape of the Northern Peninsula now reflects this rebranding and this reinterpreting in terms of the connection to the medieval, because this is a part of history that continues to resonate with people.

Whether Norse or Viking is a more appropriate term to describe the culture of culture of 750-1100 CE Scandinavia is an ongoing debate. Viking is a word that conjures up images of brutal raiders and pirates, as well it should as the Old Norse word vikingr and the Anglo Saxon wicingas refers to basically pirates. Viking is a reflection of Victorian imaginations of romantic brutality. This is not to deny the brutal aspect of the culture, but it is only one aspect of this largely agrarian and mercantile society. Here a division between scholars and public is a bit more defined, as scholars like the word Norse better. The public has never heard this word. L’Anse aux Meadows archaeologist Birgitta Wallace has this to say about the continuing debate between the use of the two words.


(slide 13)


Historians have substituted the words “Viking” and “Vikings” with Norse, which is a more comprehensive term, corresponding to the Scandinavian norroen, and referring to all Scandinavians of the Viking and Medieval periods. Historians have tended to insist on this more correct term, but references to “Vikings” and “Viking Age” has [sic] become so successful in the promotion of heritage and tourism that most historians now accept these terms.

Like many nineteenth century romantic medievalisms, the term Viking and all that it evokes has proved so durable a concept, that it is counter productive to disregard this word as a term for that culture. Without it we discard the basic building block for the public’s understanding of this culture. The word Viking carries basic images with it. Likewise, the use of certain symbols in pop culture, for better or worse, can stand in for a description of Vikings. One has only to give a character a horned helmet for the audience to understand that he is meant to be a Viking.


(slide 14: Top; How to Train your Dragon. Bottom left; Hagar the Horrible. Bottom right; Commercial for Capital One. Bottom centre; Commercial for Volkswagen minis.)

I would say that films, like How to Train your Dragon, and popular culture, credit card commercials, continue to use this image not because they are ignorant and because they don’t know any better per se, but because they can skip a lot of exposition about who one is trying to depict by just giving them the helmet. So much is implied by these images because it is assumed that the public understands and has seen these images before. They draw on the public understanding and continue to foster it, misconceptions and all.


(slide 15: images from L'anse aux meadows summer 2010)

Telling visitors that there was no evidence of horned helmets, and that the concept had come instead from Wagnerian opera, was one of the most interesting interpretation tools at the disposal of the L’Anse aux Meadows staff, because in some ways it is challenging the one thing that most of the public believes they know about the Vikings.


(slide 16)

In conclusion, the North American public understands this not as Norse, but as Viking heritage. The culture is known for its violence and its raiding; for being one of ‘fearless warriors.’ And yet, it also gives it a place of primacy in the history of North America. It will continue to be a favourite subject amongst people who write popular histories, because of the emotional and romantic place accorded to these events and to the arrival of these so-called ‘first’ Europeans. Talking with tourists I was able to confirm that the way that the Norse heritage in North America is marketed by institutions like Newfoundland and Labrador tourism both reflects and in turn is further constructing the way the heritage is understood by the North American public.


(slide 17: images from the Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier project)

Many of these ideas are versions of ones that I put forth in my paper “Putting the Vikings on the Canadian Map,” which was published as part of the UWO project and exhibition Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier. A copy of this version of my paper I am going to put up on my blog, but for a more in depth discussion look to this original paper, published by Museum London.

Thank you


(slide 18)

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Wallace, Birgitta Linderoth. “Vinland and the Death of Þorvaldr.” In Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium, edited by Shannon Lewis-Simpson. St John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003, 377-390.

-----. Westward Vikings: The Saga of L’Anse aux Meadows. St John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2006.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. Proceedings of the Vinland Map Conference. Studies in the History of Discoveries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Wawn, Andrew & Þórunn Sigurđardóttir. “Introduction.” In Approaches to Vinland: A Conference on the Written and Archaeological Sources for the Norse Settlements in the North Atlantic, edited by Andrew Wawn & Þórunn Sigurđardóttir, 9-14. Reykjavík: Sigurður Nordal Institute, 2001.

Wawn, Andrew. “Victorian Vinland.” In Approaches to Vinland: A Conference on the Written and Archaeological Sources for the Norse Settlements in the North Atlantic, edited by Wawn Andrew & Þórunn Sigurđardóttir. Reykjavík: Sigurður Nordal Institute, 2001, 191-206.

Wilson, Sir Daniel. The Vinland of the Northmen. Ottawa: Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Section II, 1890.

Wolf, Kirsten. “The Recovery of Vinland in Western Icelandic Literature.” In Approaches to Vinland: A Conference on the Written and Archaeological Sources for the Norse Settlements in the North Atlantic, edited by Andrew Wawn & Þórunn Sigurđardóttir. Reykjavík: Sigurður Nordal Institute, 2001, 207-219.

Woxen, Trond. “Afterword: Where’s Vinland?” In Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium, edited by Shannon Lewis-Simpson. St John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003, 457-458.

New Blog on Active History

Heads up on my recent article for Active History.

Parks Day at L'Anse aux Meadows

July 17th was Parks Day across Canada. In addition this year Parks Canada is celebrating its 125th anniversary, and so this past Parks Day was special for many people who have grown up enjoying our National Parks.

At L'Anse aux Meadows, despite the construction that is still going on in the Visitor Centre, and despite the incessant downpour that occurred yesterday, we were still able to enjoy Parks Day. For visitors we offered our regular tours of the archeological site. Despite the rain and the icy winds many brave souls came out while our interpreters gave them a background on the mounds that they saw in front of them. In fact, yesterday I, who started about a week ago, delivered my first tour of the archeological remains. We deliver tours in both English and French, though our French language tours are largely by request.

L'Anse aux Meadows, along with a newly renovated Visitor Centre, also has a newly groomed interpretive walking trail this year. The trail is 2.2 kms, and takes visitors right along Epaves Bay. At the moment it is also the only means of getting to the archeological site from the main parking lot. Yesterday the site previewed the new tour, From Fog to Bog, that it will be conducting and while no one, because of the wind and the rain, partook of the 11:00 tour there were two hardy souls from Germany that joined Kevin, one of the interpreters, on the 3:00. The new tour is an hour and a half and should prove to be a popular addition once it is added to the site's programming.

A highlight of the day was the Sagas and Shadows encore presentation that was held in the reconstructed longhouse. Michael Sexton, a.k.a Bjorn the Beautiful, enraptured a record 36 attendees with his renditions of several of the Icelandic Sagas. Shadows and Sagas is typically held on Tuesday nights, around 8pm, and usually there is a fee of $22 for the performance, but as it was Parks Day all our events were free. Partridgeberry jam and drink from local manufacturers at the Dark Tickle was provided for the onlookers.

Iceland’s Fury: Vikings, Volcanoes and the Canadian Coastline

Here is a finished article with corrections mad based on suggestions from Canada's History's editorial team.


From the fury of the volcano protect us.

On Wednesday April 14 2010 the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) glacier began to send up an ash plume that would ground the air traffic in Northwestern Europe for six days. Volcanic ash has fine particles of rock and glass that could circulate in the air for months and do serious damage to jet engines or harm to anyone close enough to breathe it. Airports did not open again until late the following Tuesday or Wednesday, despite the fact that the majority of the ash was expelled within the first two days.
On Wednesday, April the 21st, the Toronto Star reported that 102, 000 flights had been grounded across Europe, the loss to airlines had been in the range of 2 billion dollars, and the loss to industries through the disruption in the supply chain was not yet calculable.
. . .

Canada’s coastline is connected to the Scandinavian countries by an ocean, by currents and by other geographical anomalies. Such currents bring much to our shores from Iceland besides ash clouds and economic fallout. They have also brought people. Scandinavian populations have played a great role in the settlement of the Canadian landscape, particularly in the prairie provinces. But to get there they had to breach the Canadian coastline, and so they have played a role in the history of this area. There is one group, originating in Iceland, who landed on Canada’s shores and who hold a special place in the North American imagination.
The ancient Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland was discovered in 1961 Helge Ingsted and Anne Stine Ingsted, with the use of literary evidence, the work of a handful of previous like-minded amateur and professional archaeologists, and some local help. Archaeological evidence found here helped support the claims that the Vinland Sagas depicted places in North America.
The saga tradition originated in Iceland. One genre of sagas, commonly called the Sagas of Icelanders, or Family Sagas, are about the early inhabitants of Iceland. The Vinland Sagas were written in this tradition. There are two sagas about Vinland, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eirik the Red. The texts tell the same story, but tell it in very different ways. Both sagas can be tracked to an earlier oral tradition.
While these two versions disagree about a great many things they do agree that sometime around the year 1000 A.D. Leif the Lucky, son of Eirik the Red, set sail for a new land to the west. First he came to Helluland – the land of caves, then to Markland – the land of Forests, and then to Vinland – the land of vines and grapes. He established a settlement on the shores of Vinland and then returned to Greenland. The two sagas disagree about how many of Leif’s relatives made subsequent voyages to Vinland, but they agree that Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Guthrid came to Vinland to explore. Their son Snorri was the first person to be born in the new land. When they returned home Karlsefni and Guthrid became the progenitors of a long-line of noble Icelanders. So the story goes.
The veracity of the sagas has been a subject of debate for at least two hundred years. The sagas contain a lot of geographical details. So many, in fact, that it has been a preferred pastime of scholars and amateurs since the nineteenth century to try to ground the saga in the reality of the North American landscape. In the 1960s we proved that the Norse came to Newfoundland. In the 1970s and 80s Peter Schledermann and his team also proved that the Norse were in the Canadian arctic, as artefacts (though no signs of settlement) have been found around Ellesmere Island. For most people this has been enough proof that we have found the Vinland of the sagas.
For others, like Magnus Magnusson, the connection is not necessarily concrete. At the international conference held at L’Anse aux Meadows in 2000, the thousand year anniversary of Leif’s arrival in Vinland, Magnusson pointed out that “the Vinland that we are celebrating so rapturously this year may not have existed at all in the strictly physical, geographical sense – … it was essentially an intellectual concept, not a place on the map.”
But for many, including long time L’Anse aux Meadows archaeologist Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, the Vinland Sagas cannot but detail a small part of Canada’s early history. At the same conference Wallace, in her paper ‘Vinland and the death of Þorvaldr’ says “my view is that the archaeological evidence at LAM [L’Anse aux Meadows] combined with recent archaeological, anthropological, and demographic research on eleventh-century and medieval Iceland and Greenland can help to define the actual events behind the sagas.”
The popular image of the Norse, or Vikings, is of brutal plunderers whose legacy upon a landscape is violence. In fact the word Viking has this meaning worked right into it. It is derived from the word vikingr, which translates to pirate or raider. This picture of destruction is not necessarily wrong, but it is not the whole picture. There is a preconceived notion of the ‘fury’ of the Norse, just as when the word ‘volcano’ is mentioned our imaginations provide us with certain images of destruction.
Our understanding of the Norse culture is based on the nineteenth century construction of ‘the Vikings.’ And these nineteenth century scholars based their conclusions on the monastic construction of the Norse cultures. The first documented Viking raid was on Lindisfarne Abbey in England in 793 A.D.. The raid was described in horrific and brutal terms. We have no reason to doubt the brutality of the raids, but it should be kept in mind that the accounts were written by monks. Raiding was common among enemies, but for many (English) monasteries it was somewhat unusual. Monks would remember the Norse attacks because, as pagans, the early Norse would not hesitate to raid a Church. Icelanders did not convert until the year 1000 A.D., around the same time as the Vinland voyages.
The raids may have been often, and they may have been horrific, however the violence and ‘the fury of the northmen’ was built up and exaggerated to the point of exclusion of other aspects of the Norse culture. In fact the prayer, ‘normannorum libera nos domine - from the fury of the northmen deliver us oh lord,’ is a perfect example. Supposedly this is a prayer said by ninth century English monks who were fearful of the continuous raids of the northmen, or Norse. The problem is that the original of this prayer has never been found. Most scholars, including contributors to the official website of Lindisfarne Abbey (the site of the first recorded Viking attack), doubt it ever existed. This prayer is probably a late adaptation of a general prayer said for protection against raids by an enemy – any enemy.

…

On Monday April 19th, 2010 at St. John, Newfoundland’s airport many passengers were likely praying that their flights wouldn’t be cancelled. Several outgoing flights were cancelled when Transport Canada and Nav Canada reported a 30 percent chance of ash over the St John’s airspace. Air Canada, one of the airlines to cancel flights out of St John’s, stated that flights to and from Gander and Deer Lake, Newfoundland could experience delays or cancellations. Newfoundland was the only province whose flights were shut down because of a direct threat from Iceland’s volcanic ash. The rest of Canada was affected only indirectly. Air Canada reported on that same Monday that they had cancelled all flights to London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich, Geneva, Rome and Tel Aviv until further notice. The airlines were hit financially, and Canadians at home and abroad found themselves stranded.

…

In 1000 A.D. Leif, Karlsefni and their followers were not out raiding. However they did crash upon the Canadian shore with all the fury we have come to associate with the Norse, making our conception of ‘the Viking’ relevant. It has been difficult to evaluate the impact that the Norse had on the landscape because when they came they did not stay. Their arrival did not initiate waves of settlement like the fifteenth century explorers’ arrival, and proving continuity of knowledge about North America from the time of the Norse voyages has been extremely problematic.
It is the indigenous populations who felt the impact of the Norse. The sagas call them Skraelings. In 2008 Canadian archaeologists Max Friesen and Charles Arnold determined that the Skraelings were definitely not the Thule Inuits, as the Thule settlement patterns indicated that they were nowhere near the Newfoundland area in the year 1000 A.D. Nations that are still candidates, assuming that we associate Vinland with Newfoundland, include the ancestors of the Beothuks and the Innu.
The two sagas give very different accounts of the Norse interactions with the Skraelings, though the tales overlap in several places. According to the Saga of Eirik the Red the Skraelings “were short in height with threatening features and tangled hair on their heads. Their eyes were large and their cheeks broad.” There is no such description of them in the Saga of the Greenlanders. This is due in part to the fact that the Eirik is a fuller tale, with more details supplied by the author to complete the story.
In Greenlanders the Norse are always the aggressors. In this saga when the Norse first come upon the Skraelings, they discover nine men who are sleeping. They capture and kill eight of these men. The one lucky Skraeling returns with his compatriots and attacks the Norse in their fortress, killing one and wounding several others. In Eirik there is a similar incident, except it happens at the end of their journey instead of the beginning. In addition, the saga writer tried to give the Norse some moral justification for their actions; “sailing north along the shore, they discovered five Skraelings sleeping in skin sacks near the shore. Beside them they had vessels filled with deer marrow blended with blood. They assumed these men to be outlaws and killed them.”
In the Saga of Eirik the Red their first encounter with the Skraelings is while trading. This scene is repeated in the Saga of the Greenlanders. The Skraelings approach the Norse camp with trade items, so the Norse, partly because of the number of their opponents, agree to trade. In both sagas they refuse to trade weapons with the Skraelings. In Eirik the Skraelings are content to trade their furs for some red cloth that the Norse brought with them. “This went on for some time, until there was little cloth left. They then cut the cloth into smaller pieces, each no wider than a finger’s width, but the Skraelings gave just as much for it or more.” Likewise, in Greenlanders the Skraelings trade their furs for milk products. This saga also seems to think that the Norse got the better end of the deal; “trading with the Skraelings resulted in them bearing off their purchases in their stomachs, leaving their packs and skins with Karlsefni and his companions.”
In both tales, there is an incident while trading that brings the two groups into open conflict. Once again in Greenlanders it is because of an act of aggression on the part of the Norse. While trading one of the Norse killed a Skraeling because the Skraeling had tried to take the weapon from him. The Skraelings run away, but come back in greater numbers to fight with the Norse at the settlement. In Eirik the battle is caused by the Skraelings, who, frightened by the bull at Karlsefni’s camp, return the next day armed to attack the Norse. During the course of this attack the Norse find themselves overpowered and begin to flee to the woods. There is a great incident that occurs at that point, which turns the tide in favour of the Norse. Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eirik the Red, had decided to accompany Karlsefni and Guthrid on this voyage. When the Skraelings attack the camp she is slow to retreat, as she is, at this time, pregnant:

She called, ‘Why do you flee such miserable opponents, men like you who look to me to be capable of killing them off like sheep? Had I a weapon I’m sure I would fight better than any of you.’ They paid no attention to what she said. Freydis wanted to go with them, but moved somewhat slowly, as she was with child. She followed them into the forest but the Skraelings reached her. She came across a slain man, Thorbrand Snorrason, who had been struck in the head by a slab of stone. His sword lay beside him, and this she snatched up and prepared to defend herself with it as the Skraelings approached her. Freeing one of her breasts from her shift, she smacked the sword with it. This frightened the Skraelings, who turned and ran back to their boats and rowed away.

In both stories the Norse triumph over the Skraelings, but at the end of the tale the Norse leave. In Eirik it is obviously because of the threat posed by the Skraelings; “the party then realized that, despite everything the land had to offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its prior inhabitants.” Throughout both sagas the supposed ‘fury’ of the northmen is manifested in their actions towards the other - towards the Skraelings. When they came to Canada, just as when they raided the British Isles and the coast of the European continent, the Norse, or Vikings, brought with them a tradition of honour, intrepid spirit and violence. To say that they were not destructive would be to deny much of what has been put down in the saga. Yet, while in Greenlanders the Norse are certainly the victors, and the stronger people, it should be noted that in Eirik the Skraelings seem to give as good as they get.

…

Just like the magma that began to be visible on April 19, 2010, it is Eyjafjallajokull that brings this history back to the surface.
There are remarkable similarities between the volcano and the Vikings, not the least of which is the perceived level of destruction. Both terms, with reason, conjure up images of an unstoppable destructive force. For the Vikings their impact on Europe was monumental. For the volcano the economic toll could be staggering and there is no way to measure the rising level of passenger frustration across the globe. And yet, both Vikings and the volcano have their destructive powers exaggerated. Eyjafjallajokull is linked ideologically to previous eruptions, so any damage that has been caused by volcanic eruption in the past is conjured up again by this new source. In addition the Toronto Star reported on Wednesday April 21 that some sources were saying that the physical destruction caused by the volcano had been overemphasized, unduly causing the economic and passenger frustrations. With the Vikings too, the threat was real, but not necessarily as deadly as has been imagined. The Norse were as much farmers as they were marauding pirates, and on the shores of Canada they were trying to make a settlement. It was punctuated with violence, but that is not all that the settlement was about.
For Canadians, the impact from these separate Icelandic furies has been similar. In the end the impact was fleeting, with no lasting direct effects, but with an important legacy.
The wrath of the volcano resulted in several thousands of stranded people and several billion dollars worth of damages. However, for Canadians, our airspace has been touched only slightly, and alternative methods for travel are possible, if inconvenient. The damage does not approach that of other natural disasters, or even other famous volcanic eruptions.
The Norse left their mark on the Canadian landscape. They were here, they settled, and they traded and fought with the indigenous populations. But the effects were not lasting and the destruction they wrought does not compare to the destruction, or settlement, that later European explorers would bring.
The comparison between the reach of the volcano and the reach of the Vikings shows us how much geography influences our history. The volcanic ash and the Vikings directly touched the same province because it is at this location that Canada is most accessible to Iceland. The same winds were employed to blow the ash and the ship across the ocean, so we are not surprised that they end up in the same place. And while they - the volcano and the Vikings - may have touched other parts of the Canadian coasts it is in the province of Newfoundland that we feel the effects most profoundly.


Megan Arnott

Canadian Conceptions of the Viking/Native Conflict: Imposing Canada on the Narrative

This paper was presented at the Trent-Carleton Graduate Student Conference in Canadian Studies, (Dis)Arming Canada: Protest, Conflict and (Un)Steady States, at Trent University in Peterborough Ontario on November 14, 2009. I chose to focus on the conflict between the Vikings and the Skraelings (natives) in the texts, and what tools historians have used to interpret this conflict. The issue of the historical content in the Vinland Sagas is one of the most discussed historiographical issues amongst North American scholars of the Viking Age. Many of these ideas will be further flushed out and expanded upon next semester for "Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier", the UWO Visual Arts Graduate seminar with Prof. Kathy Brush.

. . .

The two texts, Grœnlendinga saga or The Saga of the Greenlanders, and Eiriks saga rauða, or Eirik the Red’s Saga are among the Sagas of Icelanders, a collection of texts about the history of the Icelanders. <1> They are meant as legendary histories for the early settlers of Iceland. They are preserved in written form around the last half of the thirteenth century. These two texts are known as the Vinland Sagas because they detail the history of Eirik the Red and his family, who discover and name the lands known as Helluland, Markland, and Vinland among others around the year 1000 C.E. These events occurred at least 250 years before the sagas were written. There is evidence that suggests they were based in traditional oral histories. It is unlikely I will have to tell a room of Canadian historians et al. about some of the difficulties, despite the necessity, of using oral stories as history. However, the result of this tradition is a tale of several Viking expeditions that land in what we like to identify now as Canada. In the texts, when they arrive in Vinland they trade with, and ultimately come into conflict with the indigenous population. This is in fact the first conflict of which there is a written record that we can claim as a Canadian conflict. But historians have traditionally had difficulty with this source, because so many aspects of the documents call into question the truth of the tale. However, many who have believed these to be historical events have defended the texts passionately. One of the best tools to prove that these sagas are historical documents has been to take things that we know about Canada, or more broadly North America, and make that fit the text to show how it could have actually happened. This includes, most typically, imposing our geography on the geography described in the text. It also includes comparing the encounters, or conflicts, between the Skraelings (the Old Norse word for the indigenous people) and the Vikings with other encounters or conflicts recorded by the early 16th and 17th century European explorers. Unlike most of the conflicts that will be discussed here today, the actual conflict that occurred had little to no impact on the way that Canada or its people developed as a nation. Instead it is our conceptions of early Canadian conflicts, and of the geography of Canada which influences our understanding of this conflict.

Eirik the Red’s Saga and The Saga of the Greenlanders both tell us the story of the Vinland expeditions. Both tales involve many of the same characters, and they are about the same events, the same expeditions to Vinland, but there are some radical differences in the narrative, including different events and discrepancies in the number of trips made. The Saga of the Greenlanders is shorter, but it breaks the voyages into four distinct trips, while Eirik the Red’s Saga is longer and is more stylized, combining the same four voyages into two. <2> There is a lot that has been written about why this might be, and how that affects the history as it is represented in the text. However, for the purposes of this paper we are going to focus specifically on how each of them represents the interactions between the Skraelings and the Vikings, though much more could be said about the voyages at large as well as the historiography. <3>

Because it is less stylized, and includes fewer of the fantastic elements much, though not all, of the recent scholarship has seen The Saga of the Greenlanders as being more ‘historical.’ <4> In this particular text the first encounter with the Skraelings is during the second voyage which landed in Vinland. It is headed by Thorvald Eiriksson, Leif’s brother. To the west of Leif’s camp, which was established during the previous voyage, “they did find a wooden grain cover, but discovered no other work by human hands.” <5> Then they head east of Leif’s camp

[Thorvald] then spoke: ‘This is an attractive spot, and here I would like to build my farm.’ As they headed back to the ship they saw three hillocks on the beach inland from the cape. Upon coming closer they saw they were three hide-covered boats, with three men under each of them. They divided their forces and managed to capture all of them except one, who escaped with his boat. They killed the other eight and went back to the cape.

<6>
They then see that there are more settlements further up in that particular fjord. A voice warns Thorvald and his companions of an impending attack, so they prepare themselves. In the ensuing battle Thorvald is the only killed. The other members of the expedition go home. <7> Then Thorfinn Karlsefni, who is connected to the family by his marriage to Guðrid, who is under the protection of Eirik, makes the fourth voyage to Vinland. They too ran into the Skraelings;

after the first winter passed and summer came, they became aware of the Skraelings. A large group of men came out of the woods close to where the cattle were pastured. The bull began bellowing and snorting very loudly. This frightened the Skraelings, who ran off with their burdens, which included fur pelts and sable and all kinds of skins. … Neither group understood the language of the other. The natives then set down their packs and opened them, offering their goods, preferably in exchange for weapons, but Karlsefni forbade the men to trade weapons. He sought a solution by having the women bring milk products. Once they saw those products the Skraelings wished to purchase them and nothing else. The trading with the Skraelings resulted in them bearing off their purchases in their stomachs, leaving their packs and skins with Karlsefni and his companions. This done, they departed.

<8>
The second winter the Skraelings visit again but in greater numbers. During this time Guðrid is visited by a supernatural mimic, with pale skin and large eyes. When Guðrid is distracted by a noise the mimic disappears with a crack. “At that moment one of the Skraelings had been killed by one of Karlsefni’s servants for trying to take weapons from them, and they quickly ran off, leaving their clothes and trade goods lying behind. No one but Gudrid had seen the woman.” <9> They then make plans to ward off a Skraeling attack, using their bull as a scare tactic. During the course of the battle, one of the Skraelings picks up an axe, and uses it on one of his compatriots, killing him. The leader of the Skraelings takes it and throws it into the sea. It is then that the natives flee. After that winter the Vikings decide to go home.
Many of the episodes in Eirik the Red’s Saga are similar, however, the four expeditions are conflated into two, and it is Leif who merely investigates and Karlsefni that does all the exploring and naming of the new lands. When Karlsefni is at Hop, one of the bases they establish in Vinland, “early one morning they noticed nine hide covered boats, and the people in them waved wooden poles that made a swishing sound as they turned them around sunwise.” <10> They discuss what this means and decide that it means peace. The Vikings row to shore. The Skraelings “were short in height with threatening features and tangled hair on their heads. Their eyes were large and their cheeks broad.” <11> The next day they go back and there are many Skraelings waiting for them. There is a trading scenario nearly identical to that in The Saga of the Greenlanders, except that they trade increasingly small amounts of red cloth instead of milk. In this text also they forbid the trading of weapons with the Skraelings. Karlsefni’s bull then frightens the Skraelings away. The next day the natives come back, their paddles waving counter sunwise. This is a prelude to the battle, similar to the one in the Saga of the Greenlanders between Karlsefni’s men and the Skraelings. The Skraelings are much more menacing in Eirik the Red’s Saga; they “saw the Skraelings lift up on poles a large round object, about the size of a sheep’s gut and black in colour, which came flying up on the land and made a threatening noise when it landed. It struck great fear into Karlsefni and his men.” <12> An interesting part of this battle is the character of Freydis, who had her own voyage in the Saga of the Greenlanders. She follows the fleeing Vikings, but is slower since she is pregnant.

She followed them into the forest, but the Skraelings reached her. She came across a slain man, Thorbrand Snorrason, who had been struck in the head by a slab of stone. His sword lay beside him, and this she snatched up and prepared to defend herself with it as the Skraelings approached her. Freeing one of her breasts from her shift, she smacked the sword with it. This frightened the Skraelings, who turned and ran back to their boats and rowed away.

<13>
Many of the Skraelings were slain, though only two of Karlsefni’s men perished. The text says the multitude of Skraelings had been an illusion. There is then a similar episode to the axe episode in the previous text, however the Skraelings take turns trying to axe on wood, and instead they throw it away when one of them tries it on stone and the axe breaks. In this saga the text points out how the Vikings would always be under attack from this party, and it is for this reason that they decide to depart for home. There are a few interesting interludes on the way home however, including stopping to kill five Skraelings whom they find sleeping, because they guessed that they were outlaws. They also, as they sail along the shore, come across a one legged man, who darts down to the ship and kills one of the Vikings. Then “they soon left to head northwards where they thought they sighted the Land of the One-legged, but did not want to put their lives in further danger,” so decide not to land. <14> The very last interaction between the Skraelings and the Vikings, in Markland, one of the lands named by Karlsefni, they come across five Skraelings, and manage to kidnap two boys. The Skraelings are able to tell them a bit about the region, including the presence of a pale faced people who lived across from their own land. The two boys are brought to Greenland, and spend the winter with Eirik the Red. <15>

The similarities in the text are actually more striking than the differences between the two, and have more to do with the oral traditions of the texts. <16> It has been suggested that it could be two competing oral traditions stemming from the same source, or one could be based off the other but trying to accomplish a different aim. <17>

Some problems with using this text as an historical document are obvious. The history is compromised by the distance between the events and the writing down of the story. The texts themselves seem also to have a moral goal in mind, for instance the Saga of the Greenlanders, it has been argued, is a Christian exemplum for the descendants of Guðrid and Karlsefni. <18> This compromises the history in the text, because the events are slanted towards the moral goal. But there are more obvious problems, like the fantastic elements in the tales. In The Saga of the Greenlanders, Guðrid’s supernatural other is not real. Likewise in Eirik the Red’s saga the encounter with the uniped detracts from the other interactions portrayed in the text. In addition, when Freydis bears her breast to the attackers, this is clearly contrived. At the same time, they are less literary than other well known Sagas of Icelanders, like Njal’s Saga or Egil’s Saga, and so by comparison they seem more ‘historical.’ Because of this people have often tried to overcome the historical flaws in the Vinland sagas and to ground them in the Canadian, or more broadly the North American, historical tradition as well as the Medieval European historical tradition.

There are two major periods to the historiography of Vikings in North America. Really they have been as influenced by general trends in historical thought as any other subject, but there is a divide between pre and post discovery of the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows by Helge and Anne Ingsted. Before that there were a lot of false Viking discoveries in North America, but that is largely the only one that has been academically accepted as a true discovery. Therefore the scholarship is divided between that with and that without concrete proof, or the very early scholarship. Now we have a point of reference in the saga for the history that it purports to represent. However, the ways in which we use the evidence to prove that there were interactions with our native populations has not changed all that much since the discovery.

In fact it further complicates our interpretation of the historical grounding of these particular conflicts. As Birgitta Wallace points out, at L’Anse aux Meadows there is no evidence of there ever having been domesticated animals, which is a large part of this element of the story, particularly in The Saga of Greenlanders, where they trade milk with the natives. <19>

There are several ways in which our conception of Canada, or North America is used to interpret this as an Early European/Native conflict. Before L’Anse aux Meadows was discovered historians used the presence of indigenous populations in Canada and North America to point out that the tale is likely true. There was definitely someone here, so if you accept that the sagas are describing landings in North America the Skraelings are not an invention of some saga writer. The geography described in the Vinland Sagas is extensive, therefore it has been the most discussed point of historicity as people try to identify the places described with actual locations. Likewise for these conflicts historians use the surrounding description to try and identify the locations in which these conflicts took place. They then try and extrapolate what the actual nation, or which nation’s ancestors, the Skraelings might be. Even with the point of reference in Newfoundland there is a lot of debate about locations, so it is hard to define the people as well. The word Skraeling was used indiscriminately for different Native nations; it is mentioned in at least one other text, where it refers to the Inuit. <20> In this case, Richard Perkins argues that the Vikings may have not gotten further south than Labrador, which means that the nation they may have come into contact with would have been the Beothuk; but if the Vikings got as far south as the Gulf of Saint Lawrence then they may have run into the Mi'kmaq. <21>

Points in the story which seem similar to texts of early exploration are also used to justify the historicity of having met the native population here. The early accounts of Beothuk said they had a predilection for red cloth. Also, the story of the two boys who were kidnapped, parallels accounts like that of Jacques Cartier, who after his second voyage returned to France with Native captives. <22> It is also noteworthy that the people inferred in this way have no domesticated animals like the ones that the Vikings are said to have brought which scared the indigenous populations. In addition, their fascination with the axes is similar to later accounts of Native fascination with metal objects and European weaponry. This sort of reasoning is used before and after the discovery at L’Anse aux Meadows.

It is interesting because the location of Vinland in the scholarship often depends on the nationality of the scholar, determining whether it falls in modern Canadian borders or dips down behind the American border. I said before that the conflict had no direct impact on the future development of Canada. This was not entirely true when you think of the impact the landing made on the debate about the meaning and breadth of our own history, and its impact on our sense of self. It is easy for the pursuit of the history of this conflict to be driven by our impulse for nation building through the identification and exoneration of heroes, especially in the early historiography. For instance, from 1890, Marie Shipley tries to define the importance of the Norse accomplishments; “following out this conclusion, if it is indeed a matter of no importance whether the Norseman discovered America or not, it becomes equally unimportant whether Columbus discovered America or not, and the discovery of the western continent ceases to be one of the greatest of events.” <23> It may be that we use these interpretive tools too loosely as we try very hard to ground the saga, and the story of these early Skraeling/Viking interactions, in the Canadian historical tradition. Richard Perkins says “the fact that the perceived importance of Norse landings in America for the history of the continent has been enormously exaggerated, and the fact that it was argued that the Norseman (rather than, say, Christopher Columbus) discovered America, have led to unseemly dispute fuelled more by nineteenth- and twentieth-century-style nationalism than by scholarly debate based on any mature, long-term view.” <24> He does point out, however, that without this drive and notion of personal history not as much of the scholarship and varying debate and opinions would be left for us. <25> Historians would not want to discount the evidence of the sagas, especially in light of the archaeology at L’Anse aux Meadows and any other true archaeological finds in North America. Therefore, the closest we will come to understanding this conflict is by using these tools, this conception of other aspects of Canada including our history and our geography, which will if nothing else, tell us in what ways the tale could be true.


Endnotes


<1> Because of the intended audience for this paper I have chosen to use the anglicized versions of the names and titles in the sagas.
<2>Erik Wahlgren. ‘Fact and Fancy in the Vinland Sagas.’ Old Norse Literature and Mythology. ed. by Edgar C. Polomé. Texas: University of Texas Press (1969), p. 28. These are the four voyages that actually land in Vinland. There are more voyages that never make it to those shores.
<3>In this paper I use the Vinland Sagas edited by Halldór Hermannson, and the translation of Keneva Kunz. However, because translating Skraeling as Native is in itself an interpretation, I changed all the mention of ‘natives’ in the text back to Skraeling, so that there is a further distinction between the literary people and the actual nations that lived in Canada at that time.
<4>Wahlgren, p. 28.
<5>Keneva Kunz ‘The Vinland Sagas: The Saga of the Greenlanders; Eirik the Red’s Saga’, in The Sagas of Icelanders Toronto: Penguin Books (2001), p. 642. “fundu þeir kornhjálm af tré. Eigi fundu þeir fleiri mannaverk” Halldór Hermannson ed.. The Vinland Sagas. Islandica Vol. 30 New York: Cornell University Press (1944), p. 53.
<6>Kunz, p. 642. “hann mælti þá: ‘Hér er fagrt, ok hér vilda ek bœ minn reisa.’ Ganga síðan til skips ok sjá á sandinum inn frá hǫfðanum þrjár hæðir ok fóru til þangat ok sjá þar húðkeipa þrjá ok þrjá menn undir hverjum. Þá skiptu þeir liði sínu ok hǫfðu hendr á þeim ǫllum, nema einn komsk í braut með keip sinn. Þeir drepa hina átta ok ganga síðan aptr á hǫfðann” Hermannson, p. 53.
<7>Kunz, p. 643.
<8>Kunz, p. 647. “Eptir þann vetr inn fyrsta kom sumar. Þá urðu þeir varir við Skrælinga, ok fór þar ór skógi fram mikill flokkr manna. Þar var nær nautfé þeira, en graðungr tók t belja ok gjalla ákafliga hátt; en þat hræddusk Skrælingar ok lǫgðu undan með byrðar sínar, en þat var grávara ok safali ok alls konar skinnavara … Hvárigir skilðu annars mál. Þá tóku Skrælingar ofan bagga sína ok leystu ok buðu þeim ok vildu vápn helzt fyrir; en Karlsefni bannaði þeim at selja vápnin. Ok nú leitar hann ráðs með þeim hætti, at hann bað konur bera út búnyt at þeim; ok þegar er þeir sá búnyt, þá vildu þeir kaupa þat en ekki annat. Nú var sú kaupfǫr Skrælinga, at þeir báru sinn varning í brott í mǫgum sínum, en Karlsefni ok fǫrunautar hans hǫfðu eptir bagga þeira ok skinnavǫru. Fóru þeir við svá búit í burt.” Hermansson, p. 57.
<9>Kunz, p. 647. “ok í því var ok veginn einn Skrælinga af einum húskarli Karlsefnis, því at hann hafði vilijað taka vápn þeira. Ok fóru nú í brott sem tiðast, en klæði þeira lágu þar eptir ok varningr. Engi maðr hafði konu þessa sét utan Guðriðr ein” Hermansson, p. 57.
<10>Kunz, p. 669. “Ok einn morgin snemma, er þeir lituðusk um, sá þeir mikinn fjǫlða húðkeipa, ok var veift trjám á skipunum, ok lét því líkast sem í hálmþúst, ok var veift sólarsinnis” Hermnasson, p. 24.
<11>Kunz, p. 670. “váru svartir menn ok illilegrir ok hǫfðu illt hár á hǫfði. Þeir váru mjǫk eygðir ok breiðir í kinnum” Hermansson, pg. 25.
<12>Kunz, p. 670. “[Þat sá þeir Karlsefni,] at Skrælingar fœrðu upp á stǫng knǫtt stundar mikinn því nær til at jafna sem sauðarvǫmb ok helzt blán at lit ok fleygðu af stǫnginni upp á landit yfir lið þeira Karlsefnis ok lét illilega viðr þar sem niðr kom. Við þetta sló ótta miklum á Karlsefni ok allt lið hans” Hermansson, p. 26.
<13>Kunz, p. 671. “gekk hon þó eptir þeim í skóginn. En Skrælngar sœkja at henni. Hon fann fyrir sér mann dauðan; þar var Þorbradr Snorrason, ok stóð hellustein í hǫfði honum. Sverðit lá bert í hjá honum. Tók hon þat upp ok býsk at verja sik. Þá koma Skrælingar at henni. Hon dró þá út brjóstit undan klæðunum ok slettir á beru sverðinu. Við þetta óttask Skrælingar ok hlupu undan áskip ok reru í brott” Hermansson, p. 26.
<14>Kunz, p. 672. “þeir fóru þá í brott ok norðr aptre ok þóttusk sjá Einfœtinaland. Vildu þeir þá eigi hætta liði sínu lengr” Hermansson, p. 28.
<15>Kunz, p. 673.
<16>Kunz, p. 631.
<17>Wahlgren, p. 28.
<18>Geraldine Barnes. Viking America: The First Millenium. Cambridge: D.S Brewer (2001), p. 32.
<19>Birgitta Linderoth Wallace. ‘L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland: An abandoned Experiment’. Contact, Continuity, and Collapse; The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic. ed. by James H. Barrett, Studies in the Early Middle Ages; Centre for Medieval Studies University of York, V. Belgium: Brepols Publishers (2003), p. 222.
<19>Richard Perkins. ‘Medieval Norse visits to America: millennial stocktaking’. Saga Book: Viking society for Northern Research, 28 (2004), p. 60. The other text is by Ari Thorgilsson, and it describes the discovery of Skraeling artifacts in Greenland. Perkins suggests they are the Dorset Inuit.
<20>Perkins, p. 60.
<21>Perkins, p. 61.
<22>Perkins, pp. 60-61.
<23>Marie Shipley. The Icelandic Discoverers of America or Honor to Whom Honor is Due. New York: John B. Alden (1890), p. 2.
<24>Perkins, p. 30.
<25>Perkins, pp. 29-66.









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