Dan Snow's History Hit - Vikings in America

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

The Vikings were one of the great exploring peoples of the past. They travelled east along the rivers to the Silk Road, they explored west across the seas to the United Kingdom, they settled Iceland and Greenland and famously reached North America. L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada has been identified as a Viking site, but it seems that this was only a staging post for longer journey's but where they were headed beyond this point we don't know. This leaves open the tantalising possibility of finding further Viking settlement in North America. Gordon Campbell, Emeritus Professor and Fellow in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester joins me on the podcast to discuss the Viking relationship with North America and whether we might one day find a missing settlement.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Stowe's History. You know I love maritime history. I love the collection of Scandinavian seafaring peoples that we refer to as the Vikings. You'll have to forgive me if you object to that term. The Vikings, as we've learned on a recent podcast with Dr Kat Jarman, travelled all the way into the great trading routes of Eurasia, the silk routes from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, travelling down the great trading routes of Eurasia, the silk routes from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, travelling down the great rivers of Russia and Ukraine, possibly establishing those states as they did so. So we know they headed east. Let's not forget they headed west. Britain and Ireland was the nearer broad for the Vikings. They settled Iceland, one of the last great landmasses on planet Earth to be settled by humans, and they went further. Greenland, yes, and even Canada. As you'll hear in this podcast,

we think we've identified one site in Newfoundland, Arso Meadow, which is a Viking site, but it looks like it was just a place where Vikings stopped off on the very tip of Newfoundland before making the long journey either to Baffin Island or Greenland. Where were they going beyond there to the west and the south? We don't know, but one day, one day we may find out, as our guest on this podcast tells me. Gordon Campbell, emeritus professor in Renaissance studies at the University of Leicester has written a book about the Vikings in North America. And he just rekindled my fascination with that story. Are we one day going to find the missing Viking sites in New Brunswick, the St. Lawrence, Maine, New England,

maybe even Manhattan? Well, probably not Manhattan. It is so exciting. So it's lovely to have Gordon on the podcast talking about the Vikings heading west. If you want to listen to Kat Jarman's previous podcast on the Vikings, the best place to do it is probably on our new relaunched History Hit app for your phone or your computer or your TV. You just go to historyhit.tv.

You'd sort it all out. They take out a very small subscription. You subscribe, allowing us to make lots of wonderful podcasts and tv shows we're launching some new podcasts soon thanks to you guys subscribing we've been able to do that different periods different people different voices so thank you for everyone who's subscribing if you subscribe you listen to these back episodes of the podcast but you can also watch the tv shows on there some featuring me most don't you'll be glad to know but we made one with kat jarman on the viking site at repton in england so lots of viking content on there for you everybody and if you particularly enjoy these podcasts you might want to see one recorded live come and check out the

autumn tour around britain history.com slash tour but in the meantime everyone here is the brilliant gordon campbell talking about the vikings in the west gordon thank you very much coming on the podcast it's good to be here with you the norse expansion west across the atlantic i've been to nor churches in Greenland. I've been to the settlement in Greenland. But as we get into Canada, North America, are we entering a world where archaeology, myth, sagas, hearsay, are they in alignment? Ah, they're not at all. There are too many holes in the evidence and gaps. For example, if you think of the sagas, the protagonists of the sagas, that gives you a list of names. If you look at surviving inscriptions in Greenland, that gives you another list of names. They don't overlap in any way. And so there's no

saga character whose historicity is confirmed by archaeological evidence. But it's also the case that archaeology in the Canadian Eastern Arctic is an awfully big place, and the archaeology is far from giving a coherent picture, partly because carbon dating in areas in which the objects under analysis are frozen for half the year skews dates in all kinds of ways, so we have trouble with chronology. And there's also a difficulty that when sites are discovered, there are various reasons why they can't be followed up. At present, the site that shows the most promise is on the south coast of Baffin Island, but for various reasons, the archaeological investigation has been suspended. So there may or may not have been a trading station there,

and until somebody gets back there, we won't know. It's so exciting and tantalising. I went on a completely hapless adventure around Newfoundland a few years ago, looking for Viking sites with various satellite archaeology and things like that, remote sensing. We've dived straight into the archaeology. Don't worry, everyone, we'll come to the narrative in a second. But where are you on the Anse aux Meadows, the very tip of northern Newfoundland, excavated and then reconstructed with great excitement? There's some argument about the historicity of that. Well, the evidence is again complicated. It was Lanslow Meadows that got me interested in all of this in the 1960s when the Ingstads first uncovered the site. It seems to be genuinely Norse, which is to say the iron objects there are made by methods not available to the locals.

It is on a site that was previously occupied by indigenous people, but there's no evidence of contact. There are no burials. There's no church. What there is, is three longhouses, three boat crews perhaps, and three storage huts where they could keep supplies and possibly accommodate accommodate slaves. So all the evidence points to some kind of transit place for voyages further to the south. Where they might be, the most tantalizing clue is butternut shells, one of which was carved, and butternuts don't grow in Newfoundland, and they've never grown in Newfoundland, but they grow in the St. Lawrence Valley, they grow in New Brunswick, they grow in New England. The currents don't go in the right direction to carry them there, to Newfoundland, therefore they were collected. And we don't know where, so Lancel Meadows appears to be a transit point for a short-lived colony somewhere where butternuts grew but that's as far as you can go

oh god it's so exciting let's come back to the sagas what do they say about that norse expansion to the west we are iceland first one of the last great islands on the planet to be colonized by humans yes yes although the irish monks appeared to be to be there first. Don't get me started on that little controversy. There's all kinds of things in Iceland. In the National Museum, there are some Roman coins. I mean, how did they get there? The archaeology throws up all kinds of anomalies. The difficulty is that the sagas aren't history books. They're literature. They're read as log books by the literalists who say, if you go for so many hours directly to the West, you will encounter so-and-so, and then they confirm what they're seeing with a detail in the sagas. I don't believe any of it. I think the

sagas are family history, essentially. They're designed to glorify certain people with tales of their ancestors. There's an analogy, if you think of Schliemann at Troy. Schliemann decided that the Iliad was true. It wasn't a made-up story. So he went to this site on the coast of Turkey, and he dug and he dug, and he found some burnt wood. So that showed a fire. That was it. It was burnt.

He found various treasures, gold pieces, which he assembled and said, Priam's treasures, and therefore the story of the Iliad is true. Now, if you believe that, you believe anything. In the case of the sagas, we have characters like Eric the Red, Leif, his son, we know as Leif the Lucky. Did they exist? Well, I suppose there could have been a chieftain called Erik. He might have had a son called Leif, but I very much doubt it. In other words, you have a series of tales that reflect real discoveries because the Norse did go to Greenland. They lived there for almost 500 years. And various fjords that you've visited are named after the founding settlers that are named in the saga. So there's an Ereksfjord now and that kind of thing.

But there's no reason to believe any of that. The real evidence, the hard evidence, is the archaeological evidence, not the literary accounts of early discoveries, which I think are almost entirely fictional. Let's just very briefly, why do the Norse, how are they able to travel, well, perhaps the Romans did as well, to these great islands of the North Atlantic? Is there something about the climate or their boat building, the navigational skills that means that they are able to span this extraordinary stretch of ocean? Well, the Viking ships can cope with the North Atlantic, even though they were open boats. In terms of navigation, they could do latitude quite accurately, navigating both from the stars,

but they were very good at picking out appropriate landmarks and that kind of thing. They could do latitude. But like everyone else, they couldn't do longitude very well. And they didn't do maps. There's no such thing as a Norse map. So they navigated in ways that were different from us. There is in the National Museum in Copenhagen half of what seems to be a compass. Precisely how it worked isn't entirely clear, but it took readings from the sun and enabled them to tell what latitude they were on. In terms of why, there was farmland available in Norway, but there are any number of reasons. The new religion, Christianity, came along.

Lots of them thought that was a thoroughly bad idea and wanted out. There were feuds between chieftains that made people leave and migrate to find a new place. And there's a series of staging posts across the North Atlantic from the Faroes to Iceland to Greenland. But there's no destiny in America. There's nothing drawing them to the great American dream. And part of my interest is that whereas the north going west become thinner and thinner, Greenland didn't have more than two and a half thousand people living there in the settlements. L'Anse aux Meadows didn't have more than 60 people living there. So it's a case of overextended supply lines, if you like, so that if they did touch the coast of North America and encountered unfriendly locals, they didn't have the capacity to stay,

even though they had the navigational skills and the ships that would enable them to go back and forth. You listen to Dan Snow's history, I've got Professor Gordon Campbell on, talking about the Vikings in North America. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week and they didn't happen upon wonderfully productive, rich farmland. I mean, it's Newfoundland. You can farm, of course, in Greenland and Newfoundland. But the vagaries of the Gulf Stream means that it's a different climate at a very similar latitude. That's right.

And the Greenland climate has changed, of course, just as it's in a warm period now. So when they arrived in the late 10th century, it was part of the medieval warm period, but it started to get cooler. And as it got cooler, the upland pastures became problematical and farming became more challenging. They could never do a lot. They appear not to have had bread, for example, in Greenland because they couldn't grow the appropriate grains to make it. So it got harder and harder there. But that said, we have an image of Greenland as frozen all over. But as you will know, you have visited, the summers are perfectly good for farming and the winters, they're more like Scotland than they are like New York or Toronto. They're not bitterly cold because of the Gulf Stream, as you say. What they did need

on the North American mainland was timber. They had some driftwood in Greenland. There are references to going to what is presumably Labrador below the tree line to harvest wood, which they needed for their houses and which they needed for their ships. But as yet, another issue in the archaeology, there's not a single piece of wood in Greenland that has been shown to come from the Labrador coast because of the currents. The wood that is there has come from Siberia, from Siberian rivers. Wow. It's a settled issue for you, is it, that they would whip across to Labrador and Newfoundland? I mean, this is not something that's controversial. We just don't have a

huge amount of evidence for it. That's right. The account of it, which is quite late, it's in the 14th century, is describing a voyage there in a completely matter-of-fact way, as if it had been going on forever. And on their way, they went to Markland and collected timber and came back. There was no sense of a discovery or a new resource or anything like that. So it would appear that that's not unlikely. And if you think of the distances, it's not very far across to the Labrador coast. Certainly for people who had come from Norway and Faroes and Iceland, it wasn't a perilous or a particularly long journey. The suggestion, is it butternuts? Yes.

Yes, butternuts. It implies they had knowledge of more temperate climes further south and west. Precisely so. Do we know why they didn't attempt to colonize? Did they colonize there? Why have we lost that evidence? And was it just too far? It's just there's not enough bodies and you couldn't get enough logistical support. That may be the reason it didn't last. As to it being established, it seems that if Newfoundland-Lanso Meadows was a transit site, it was a transit site to somewhere.

Meadows was a transit site. It was a transit site to somewhere. And the missing piece of the archaeology is somewhere on the eastern seaboard. There is an abandoned Norse colony which has not been discovered. And much of that coast is forested. It would be looking for a needle in a haystack. There are various contenders that have been offered, but not a shred of archaeological proof. So that's what remains to be found, the place beyond Newfoundland where they tried to establish a colony and presumably failed. And is part of the problem political fragmentation in the Norse world. You won't approve of this, but I can't help comparing it to Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries

and wondering what was different and what was similar. And obviously there's all sorts of differences, but particularly climate and latitude. But Spain as a kingdom had just been unified in the Iberian Peninsula. It was riding high. There was quite established. Aragon and Castile had come

together. The Moors had been expelled. Yeah, in early modern terms, it's quite a functional state, right? It is. And is the problem that you don't get that ability to project force or some imperialism colonization in any states in the Baltic world at this time? Well, it's a very interesting point because Greenland, until the mid-13th century, wasn't a state. It wasn't attached to Norway. It was simply a group of chieftains who weren't organized in a way that we could think of as a nation-state. That made it very poorly placed to do anything beyond feed themselves and bits of trading. But you're right that in the northern states, we know that borders came very late. 1648, the Treaty of

Westphalia, and until then, the only country that had borders, the only nation state that had borders in all of Europe was Iceland. And it was because it happened to be an island in the middle of nowhere. So for everywhere except Iceland, rulers didn't rule geographically defined places. They ruled peoples, including peoples who live some distance from them. So it was a different notion of the nation from the idea of the nation state that we have now. And in those kind of proto-states that do form, and Norway, Denmark, have you found any discussion around, like, should we invest in a Western strategy? You know, should we be trying to push colonists and push our reach in that direction? That doesn't happen until the Reformation, because there was an established church in Greenland, which was Catholic. And after the Reformation, people in Norway in particular said,

I wonder if those people in Greenland have been converted to the new religion. Has anyone told them? And that's when missionary ideas were born. And when they were exported eventually with Hans Egge in the 18th century, that's when you get the sort of link-up that you're talking about. But the wish to hold on to Greenland as part of a larger state, if you like, the beginnings of colonisation. And we should obviously finish the story of the Greenland colonisation. There was the medieval cooling period.

We're not up at the 17th century catastrophe, are we? So there was a medieval cooling period, and that just strangled their way of life. Yeah, that's the most sensible. The abandonment of North Greenland isn't documented in any way. And the total lack of evidence, of course, has led many narratives to be put in. When Hans Egede arrived in the region, there was nobody there, as far as he could see. And then he found some Inuit, but where were the Norse? And that led to the story of the abandonment being framed as a kind of Marie Celeste mystery. Here was this society and suddenly it has disappeared. We don't know what made them leave. It could be any number of things. The fantasists, of course,

want them to be moving to North America and establishing a colony that lasted for several hundred years. But it's a small population. And if there were, for example, some kind of catastrophe at sea, which has happened in villages in England and Scotland in the 19th century, where half the male population of the village was suddenly wiped out in a storm. An incident like that, unrecorded, because all of these things are unrecorded, could easily have made what remained of the settlements unviable. So the evidence is of a methodical departure. There's no sense of abandonment. And they went home, whatever home was, to Iceland and indeed to Norway, because the Black Death, which we in Britain exported to Norway, wiped out a large proportion of the population and left lots of farmland. So the

Norse Greenlanders could easily have gone back to Norway, but nothing is recorded. So we don't know why they left, and we don't know when they left. The last farmstead, which also appears to have been a trading post, had a huge cache of clothing. And the clothing has been carbon dated as late as the 1430s, and may have been much later than that. I mean, it's possible, but possibly stretching the evidence to think that Columbus arrives in the Caribbean in 1492 and the last Norse Greenlanders were just packing their bags to leave, passing the baton to him. It's just so tantalizing and exciting. Will we live to see that lost Viking settlement found on the eastern seaboard? Who knows?

We have no idea. We do know that a huge number of Americans, often of Scandinavian origin, think that there's already proof. found all kinds of proof in the way of runestones and ruins that they're convinced are Norwegian that simply demonstrate that the Norse were there long before Columbus and established a colony there that lasted for 300 years, some of them argue. You don't sound particularly convinced. I think it's bonkers. But the interest is in why evidence should be misconstrued. I mean, there is, for example, a building in Rhode Island that is identified by true believers as a Norse church. In fact, it's a windmill. It's a copy of one near Leamington Spa. And there's a direct connection between that site and the site in Rhode Island.

But evidence never gets in the way of true believers. And of course, if you're short of evidence, you manufacture your own. And there's been a lot of that. I believe nowadays, Gordon, we're calling these people ethno-nationalists. Yes, that's a term we normally use of people in the Balkans. But that is the case. It runs on a spectrum from the entirely harmless, you know, my surname is, I don't know, Lazenby, and therefore I must be of Norse extraction. And that's fine. I mean, family history is harmless. other end, it runs into a sense of racial superiority and a rather sinister form of racism. So all of these can be placed somewhere on that spectrum from the harmless to the deeply malevolent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, talking about your wonderful book. Gordon, what's it called? Tell everyone they can buy it. Yeah, it is called Norse America, the story of a founding myth. Wonderful.

Thank you very much indeed. Okay, thanks Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work on and finish.

I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give

it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.