Vikings were felling trees in America in 1021. How can anyone know the exact year?

Voyages west

Six

Who sees America first

Bjarni Herjólfsson, by accident, without landing

The dashed line stops where the saga stops naming places.

In this version the first European to see America sees it by mistake and refuses to go ashore. Bjarni Herjólfsson, sailing from Iceland to join his father in Greenland, is blown off course and passes three unknown coasts. His crew ask to land; he says no. When he tells the story later at the Norwegian earl’s court, it counts against him — he had, the saga says, no report to give about these countries.

Leif Eiriksson buys Bjarni’s ship, takes thirty-five men and goes looking for the lands on purpose. He meets them in reverse order: a country of flat rock and ice mountains, which he names Helluland; a low wooded shore with white sand, which he names Markland; and a third country where the party builds a house and winters. A German named Tyrker comes back one evening saying he has found vines and grapes, and from its produce Leif names the land Wineland.

Four more voyages follow, all of them to the same camp, which this saga calls Leif’s booths. Thorvald explores the coast and is killed by an arrow. Thorstein sets out and never arrives. Karlsefni brings settlers and livestock. Freydis, Erik’s daughter, goes last, and has her partners in the venture killed.

Voyages west

Three

Who sees America first

Leif Eiriksson, blown off course on a mission for the king of Norway

Keelness, Wonder-strands, Streamfirth and Hóp are descriptions, not positions. None of them is on this map.

The second saga has no Bjarni Herjólfsson in it at all; its only Bjarni is Bjarni Grímólfsson, one of Karlsefni’s shipmasters, who gives up his place in a leaking boat and drowns. Leif sails from Norway to Greenland carrying King Olaf Tryggvason’s instruction to bring Christianity to the settlement, is tossed about on the ocean and comes upon lands he knew nothing of. He finds self-sown wheat, vines and maple, picks up shipwrecked men on the way, and that is the whole of his discovery: no named coasts, no winter camp, no second crossing.

The long voyage here belongs to Thorfinn Karlsefni. He passes Helluland and Markland, names a headland Keelness after a ship’s keel found on it and a shoreline Wonder-strands because it takes so long to sail past, and winters at a place he calls Streamfirth. The next season the party splits: Thorhall sails north beyond the Wonder-strands, Karlsefni south to a place called Hóp.

The hand that wrote it

This is the by-name in the manuscript itself, four lines down folio 97 recto of Hauksbók, written in the early fourteenth century — roughly three hundred years after the voyage it describes.

leifr hinn heppniLeif the Lucky

Erik the Red’s saga gives Leif the by-name for rescuing shipwrecked men on his way home, not for finding a new country.

So one saga has six voyages and one camp, the other three voyages and two camps, and they do not agree on who found the country or how. Neither survives in anything earlier than a copy made three centuries after the events it describes. Holding the two accounts apart, rather than merging them into one tidy story, is the only honest way to read them.

What it proves

Norse people built, lived and worked iron here

What it does not prove

That this is any place the sagas name

One square, one certain position: 51°36′ north, 55°32′ west.

In 1960 Helge Ingstad was working his way up the coast looking for Norse landing places when a resident of L’Anse aux Meadows, George Decker, took him to a group of overgrown ridges. Over the next eight years Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad uncovered eight buildings there: three dwellings, one forge and four workshops, timber frames roofed and walled with turf cut from the bog beside them, built the way houses were built in Iceland and Greenland around the year 1000.

The objects say who lived in them. A bronze ring-headed pin, of the sort used to fasten a cloak, lay in a cooking pit. A spindle whorl, a bone needle and a small whetstone came out of other buildings — a woman’s kit, in Parks Canada’s description, and the reason it is known that the party was not all men. But the find that settled the question was neither: it was the slag left by smelting and working iron, together with a large number of iron boat rivets. Nobody else on that coast was making iron.

What the ground does not give is a name. Vinland, Leifsbúðir, Straumfjörð and Hóp are descriptions in a text; no object dug out of this soil carries a place name, and no excavation can match one to the other. UNESCO’s citation says the remains correspond with the voyages in the sagas, which is a careful phrase. What is established is a Norse base camp on the northern tip of Newfoundland, used to reach places further south.