Gone Medieval - Leif Erikson

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Matt Lewis dives deep into the life and exploits of Leif Erikson, debating whether he was the first European to set foot in North America. Joined by Dr. Eleanor Barraclough, they explore the sagas of this intriguing Viking figure, the archaeological evidence supporting Norse exploration, and the fascinating cultural legacy that has turned Leif into a symbol of discovery and identity in America.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Great Age of Exploration. Not medieval, you might say. Rubbish, I say. Everything is medieval. Few did more exploring during the period than the Vikings of Scandinavia. They made themselves known from north to south and from east to Wales. In this episode, it's the West that we're going to focus on, and one Viking in particular. You may have heard of Leif Erickson, but how much do you really know about the man, many believe, was the first European to set foot on North America, half a millennium before Columbus?

I'm delighted to welcome back Eleanor Baraklough, who was last here to talk about her incredible book, Embers of the Hands, to tell us more about this enigmatic figure. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Eleanor. Thank you for coming back to see us again. Oh, it's such a pleasure. It's so nice to be here. Thank you for having me. I think it's a good sign.

It can't have been that bad the first time round. You've agreed to come back again. It was an absolute joy. I feel like we're just having a nice chat in the pub or something like that. It's great. Yeah. We're here for another chat in the pub today about one of those people who I think that people will know the name, people will recognise the name, may not know what they know him for,

may not know any detail about him. So we're going to get deep into the life and the exploits of, Leaf Erickson. So could you start us off in a sentence, who is Leif Erickson and why are we interested in him? I'll tell you why we're not interested in him today. I hear there's a really good SpongeBob SquarePants episode featuring him, which I haven't seen. I should probably watch it for research purposes, but every time I mention him, everyone's like, oh yeah, like in SpongeBob. They're not SpongeBob today. All of my questions were about SpongeBob SquarePants. We need to go to a different set. This is going to be awkward. It's all right. We can, I can do Bluey. There's plenty of just not

SpongeBob, yeah. Okay, well, look, let's pivot. It's fine. So Lof Erickson, essentially, we'll break this down. Okay, so he is sort of known for being one possible European who discovered America, or North America. That's kind of, in essence, other than SpongeBob, what he's known for. But we'll go into the truth behind that statement. And one thing I like to ask about a lot of these people from the Viking sagas, was he real? Because there's lots of question about people like Ragnar Lothb. Brooke, you know, was he even real? Is he kind of a semi-mythical figure? Is he an amalgamation of lots of

different figures flung together in a saga? Do we know if Leif Erickson existed? Yeah, I think it's sort of, the answer is basically all of the above. You know, it's, yes, he probably existed. He is probably a historical figure, but it's always that problem. When sagas are your main textual sources, and these are the Icelandic sagas, because they're written down sort of predominantly in 13th century Iceland and they have these long oral tales that kind of take us back in time, it's not that they have no historical value and they don't contain any historical figures. It's more that it just gets more complicated and other things come in that are more to do with, you know, storytelling and ways that people at the time

looked at the world and their place within it that don't necessarily reflect what we would think of as history. And so then the same is true of the figures that feature in it. I mean, some of them absolutely not. And some of them in the story of North Greenland and this sort of series of explorations on the North American continent by the North, plenty there that isn't historical. But in essence, yes, I think we can say Leif Erickson was probably real. Fantastic. So SpongeBob's definitely real. Leif Erickson's probably real. There we go. There we go. That's all we need to know. Done. We can go have another drink. Before we get into too much more detail about him, people might also know him by the epithet Leif the

Lucky. Where does that come from? Why does he get called that? Yeah, so Leif the Lucky are in Hefni. I think it's Eric's Sagas. There are two sagas that we'll be talking about a lot today. One's called Eric Saga Reida, which means the saga of Eric the Reds, Eric being Leifstad. And then there's Greinninga Saga, which is the saga of the Greenlanders. And together they're known as the Vineland Sagers. And the story of how he came to be called Leif the Lucky comes from the sagas. And it's said that essentially he, He's traveling. He's trying to get home to Greenland. And then he rescues a group of survivors who've been shipwrecked in the North Atlantic and says, you know, he brought them home and he

looks after them through the winter. And so because of this, and for various other reasons, he becomes known as Leif the Lucky, which, yeah, just sticks, essentially. Fantastic. And so you mentioned the Greenland sagas, the Iceland sagas. Is that the main way in which we know about Leif in his life? Is that the main evidence for him? Yeah, it is. It is exactly that. And it's really interesting there because the sagas, as I said, they come from these sort of much longer oral traditions, these storytelling and information traditions, genealogical traditions that are passed down the generations. And it's probably worth situating him in time. So he's born in the last decades, you know, maybe, I don't know, 975, that sort of time, something like that. So the last decades of the 10th century, and he's born in Iceland. And of course, that's the place that the sagas are written down in. But very soon, he ends up moving to Greenland for reasons we can get into.

And so we've got to think, okay, that's where the saga, that's where the stories are sort of coalescing in a way. But the two Vinland sagas, Granninga saga, Saga of the Greenlanders, Eric Sagarreida, Saga of Eric the Red, they don't look like they've drawn directly on each other. One of them is not copying the other one's homework, essentially. So what that means is they have shared oral traditions, and that means it's really interesting because sometimes the information in both these sagas is pretty much the same.

Because they sometimes agree with each other, and sometimes they have different ways of describing stuff, different characterizations of the main people featured in the stories, it's really hard to know exactly what is, what we would think of as history. I think, you know, because what history is is also up for debate, but certainly when it comes to what Leif got up to, you know, in North America and also elsewhere, we're relying on these traditions that it's not that there isn't truth in them, it's just it's really hard to pinpoint which bit is truthful, which is what makes them exciting. It's why I love the sagas. They're just, just when you think you've got a handle on them, like, yeah, I'm just going to pull that rug from underneath you and let's see, let's introduce a zombie or dragon and then you see. And then you see, let's introduce a zombie or dragon. see how you get on as a historian with that. As a body of evidence, what are the Icelandic sagas and why are they important? So, the Icelandic sagas are not saga comes from to say or to tell, say yeah, in Old Norse.

And again, that kind of tells us something about these oral origins of the sagas in that they've been sort of passed down. They've been, their stories told around the fire, the winter fires in Iceland, very long cold. winter night, you know, not very much to do. So it's this idea. They called it the Kvoldwaka, like the evening wake, where essentially everyone's sitting around the fire hearing new stories. And when we're talking about sagas as sources, and it's not just the two Vinland sagas, but when we're talking about sagas as sources for Leif Erickson and North Greenland and, you know, the voyages to the edge of North America, we are really predominantly talking about a group of

sagas that we call the East Leninger-Serg, the sagas of Icelanders. And those sagas are very much based in those early centuries of sort of like the Norse diaspora, the Viking Age, we might say, the settlement of Iceland, which begins in the second half of the ninth century. So those are the ones that are in some ways easiest to work with, kind of from historical perspective. I say that with many, many kind of caveats. But there are other. other types of sagas as well. So they're the King's sagas, the Konigosur, which are predominantly about Scandinavian monarchs, but these monarchs go very, very far back in time to the point where they become semi-mythical or like downright legendary. And then they also, we have sagas of people we know

very well to be historically accurate, or at least historically real, people like Harold Hardrada and Olaf Trigvison, you know, the big kings of Norway. Then we have other kinds of sagas that are much more rooted in that sort of misty mythical past of the Nordic world and the sort of Germanic world going back to the migration age. And those are called the Fornalda Siger, you know, the kind of sagas of ancient times. So it's a real body of source material and it's a body of source material that it has a lot of kind of native sort of influences, obviously coming from Iceland itself and the Nordic world, the diaspora more generally. But we've also got remember that these sagas are written in a context that speaks to sort of continental learning

and medieval Europe and there's also romance sagas, Arthurian sagas, you know, they're called Ridderasurgar, like the sagas of riders, the chivalric sagas. So there's all body of evidence, but luckily we have other sorts of evidence as well for people like Leif the Lucky, or at least the things that he was said to get up to, and that's where archaeology comes in. So valuable but tricky. Exactly that. Valuable but tricky. Valuable but tricky.

And what do the sagas tell us about Leif? In terms of his character, his appearance, what do we actually know about him personally? So both Eriks Saga and the Saga of Greenlanders, they like him. They describe him as promising. They say he, I think it's glanning his saga, says he was sort of tall, he was strong, he was impressive, he was shrewd. This is a very, sort of not a characteristic he would necessarily associate with high praise in this period.

But it also says he was very moderate in his behaviour. And that's important. You know, he was a good guy. He was someone you can rely on. And this becomes important later on. We know about his early life. So he was probably, as I say, was probably born in Iceland.

But there is a good reason he ends up settling in Greenland. And that's because of what his dad gets up to. So should we talk a little bit about Eric the Red? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. What do you know about him? Yeah. Eric the Red, as fiery as his nickname suggests, I think we might say.

So Eric is in Norway. We're talking, yeah, sort of second half of the 10th century. Eric, and I think his dad, possibly don't quite me on that, I can't quite remember, but Eric gets outlawed from Norway because of some killings. And this becomes something of a pattern, because then they move to Iceland, they settle in Iceland, and then lo and behold, he gets outlawed from there because of some killings. But this time it's something called lesser outlawy, which is kind of outlawy light, where you basically have to leave the country for three years. And if you behave yourself, you're then allowed to return.

So this is around the year 9-85. Eric is outlawed and he decides, possibly because he's already been outlawed from Norway, so there's no point in heading east. He decides to head west from Iceland. He's outlawed everywhere in the east. So just keep going west until he finds somewhere that will cope with him. He's like, well, I'll take my chances. I mean, this is it. The settlement of Greenland by the Norse is a really interesting one

because it's sort of the Wild West. You know, these are sort of, not all, but there is a sort of roguish quality to the Norse Greenlandic settlement, which kind of makes sense because this is a place which is sort of quite hard to survive and you have to build everything up from scratch. It can be quite dangerous. So it is these sort of slightly renegade character

that end up there initially. So Eric goes off to Greenland and it's worth saying, and this is always like slightly annoying, it's easier to sort of picture on a map, we end up with the North settlement is on the west coast of Greenland. And there are two main areas they settle in that they call annoyingly the eastern settlements, which is actually further south down the western coast, right? Just got to picture that. And the Western settlement, which is a few hundred miles further up the coast. So thanks for that. North Greenlanders.

So the Western settlement is north of the eastern settlement, which is to the south. It's ridiculous, isn't it? So the way I think about it, I just imagine Greenland is a big triangle. Okay, sort of, don't ask me what sort of triangle. There's a reason I didn't do maths. You know, big pointy triangle.

And on the right-hand side of the triangle, that's the East Coast. That's really icy. Lots of polar bears, you don't really want to be there. Occasionally the saga say that explorers get sort of washed up there, shipwrecked there, and it's never brilliant because it is just like incredibly cold. There's a type of wind that comes down from, you know, the ice sheets onto the east coast, which today's Greenlanders they call, I'm not going to pronounce it

in Greenlandic, but that they call it that which attacks you, which just about sums it up, right? So you forget that part of the triangle. We want to go to the sort of left-hand length of the triangle, that's the West Coast. And then you just got to imagine and two blobs, and one's the smaller Western settlement, which is further north toward the Arctic Circle. It's around Nuke, modern-day Greenlandic capital, and then the eastern settlement, which is further down that triangle. Let's go back to Eric the Reds. Eric the Reds goes off, he basically explores that western coast, and he finds, you know,

there's goods hunting grounds. There's actually a lot of good land to settle and farm on that sort of the lower part of the Western Coast line. And it's absolutely true. I've done lots of research out there. Everyone always says, oh, he names it. And actually the sagas say this too. He named it Greenland.

So people would be encouraged to settle there. Yes. The sagas do tell us that. But actually, there was a lot of good farming lands. The problem is that the winters are very, very long, very harsh. And the connections to sort of that wide and north diaspora are, you know, further away, essentially. So it's harder to get the things you need. which sort of suited Eric, I guess, in his circumstances, but it must be quite isolating.

Exactly, exactly that. And so this sort of explains why, after three years, when his lesser outlawies up, he comes back to Iceland. He basically gathers up all his followers and his family and he says, right, off we go, we're going to settle Greenland. And the later texts tell us that of the sort of, I don't know, 24, I think it is ships that set off, about half of them get to Greenland and the other half are either lost in the ocean or driven back to Iceland. And again, that's important. That tells us something about just the sheer distances and the danger in which I think is often quite easy to forget. So, Eric and his wife, Fyodhilder and his children, settle in a place called Bratislith, which sort of means like steep slopes, it's a very nice place. There's a lot of farming land. There's still a farming community there today.

And that is essentially where Leif is situated. That's where he grows up. And, yeah, he has two brothers called Dorstan and Thorvald, and he has a sister, possibly a half-sister, called Freydis. So this is sort of Greenland, North Greenland, in its infancy, just before the year 1,000 or so. And the year 1,000 or so is important because it's around that time, by the time Leif has grown up, that he starts to set out, you know, he's making contacts with the Norwegian king, according to the sagas, back in Norway. and then of course we have these expeditions to the edge of North America and the first one is said by the sagas, although the two accounts do differ slightly as to how it happens, is said to be led by Leif.

And so I guess my first question is, why would he be going even further west? If he's been pushed west and pushed west and pushed west and pushed west and it's got more and more hard living, is he intentionally going even further west just to see what's there? Why is he setting out on the expedition that will supposedly discover America? That's a good question.

Well, I suppose we can look to the sagas again, see at least what they say about it, because there is some disagreement as to who actually, I think, discovers it as if people haven't been living there for thousands of years before the Norse tip up. Do you know what I mean? In terms of the Norse,

the first people to cite it, lands on it, explore it. So in the saga of the Greenlanders, it's actually a merchant, and his name is Biedniew, and he first cites land, very importantly cites, not lands on, land to the west of Greenland. They're blown off course. That tends to be how lands are discovered.

You know, it's usually accidental. He doesn't land there, and the saga is quite critical of that in a slightly passive-aggressive way, and it says people thought he had shown a great lack of curiosity. And so then sometime later, Biyadneu is visiting Eric the Reds. He says, you know, he's seen this land. It says the saga says there was talk of discovering new country. and then Leif buys Bjardini's boat off him.

He goes to explore these new lands. And Eric is meant to come too. And there's this very famous moment. It's basically one last hurrah for the old man. But he's essentially saying to Leif, look, I don't know if I'm out for this. I'm so tired. I'm so much older than I used to be. Leif's saying, oh, come on, Dad.

Come on, we'll go have this adventure together. And Leif is at the boat, and Eric is traveling down on horseback to the boat. And he's actually thrown off the horse. And this is said to be a very bad omen. And he says, look, I'm not meant to discover more countries. I've already discovered this one. You're on your own. Off you go. So Leif then goes off with his crew to sort of go and essentially land on and explore the lands that Biani has cited. In the saga of Eric the Red, it's Leif, who's the first explorer to cite North America. And he's on his way back from Norway to go. Greenland, he's swept off course, and then it says he came upon lands whose existence he'd never suspected, and there were fields of wild wheat and vines and maples, and essentially like one of those Victorian botanists, the saga says, Leif took samples of all these and then headed off home to show everyone what he'd got. So, so one way or the other, the saga tradition is that it's Leif who is involved not by himself. You know, he has a crew and actually in both sagas he has

enslaved people with him. In one saga, it's Tirkir, who's his foster father, he's German. In the other saga, it's two sort of Scottish slaves called Haki and Heccia. And in both versions, it's actually the enslaved people who go off and discover, you know, properly, except to it sort of explore the land and come back with the resources that the land has to offer. offer things like wild grapes. But either way, it's very much Leif who is placed at the heart of the tradition of the first Norse exploration of this place, that they then called Vinland, and they call it Vinland because although they've already cited and landed on other land as they go, and we can talk about those, it's Vinland, this name for the wild grapes, which is where

they set up essentially overwintering camps. They call them Laif's Boothier. sort of Lave's booths, Lave's huts, and this is where it's said that they spend the winter. So either way, it's kind of an accident. Either Lave discovers it by accident or he's following someone else who spotted some land that they found by accident as well. They weren't actively trying to find land to the west of Greenland. Exactly. But then you said, well, why would they continue to go? You know, keep going west.

And actually there's lots of reasons. So one of it, you think of what Yardney is accused of, basically lacking curiosity. And there is that. There's something in the Norse sort of cultural DNA, which is you've got to explore, you've got to push back the boundaries of knowledge, you've got to sort of prove yourself. There's definitely that that comes across. It's like, oh, you didn't settle. You saw this amazing new lat?

Oh, you turned around. You know, that's not great. That does not make for a good Viking. And I suppose by this point as well in the Viking tradition, for those that have gone west, obviously there's a lot going on in the east and the south as well. For those who've gone west, they've continued to find stuff every time they've gone. They've made it to England and got incredibly rich from it. They've discovered Iceland. They've gone even further and discovered Greenland.

And okay, that's not the most hospitable place. But there must be a sense of which, how far does this go? That natural curiosity, what else is further west? Exactly. And I mean, I should say in Greenland's defence, that there is farmable land. and there are amazing resources like walruses. And the settlement lasts for sort of 500 years plus in Greenland, almost 500 years. I'm a big fan of North Greenland, so I'm always going to stick up for North Greenland.

But yes, but you've got to think, when, as the saga described, when they reach the edge of North America, Vineland, it starts with this kind of rocky bear land, they call Hetlu land, which is probably sort of Baffin Islands. Then they come down the coast, they find a place they call Markland, which means forest land, probably Labrador and then they end up in Vineland. We've got to think they've already sort of named these lands for the resources. Hettlu land is named because essentially it's like not a lot their land or a lot of stone land. Markland.

Yeah, he's like, but Markland is important because Greenland has very little natural timber of the sort of big chunky sort that you need to make, say, longhouses or shit. So they were relying a lot of the time on sort of smaller, scrubbier trees that grew natively, but then also driftwood coming from, say, Siberia. So you come across a land which has enough trees that you're calling it forest land. Well, that's a signal that this is important as a resource. Same thing again when we get to Vinland, the fact that it's wild grapes, it's vines, it's wheat. They talk about, you know, these enormous salmon they're finding, just like grabble this stuff. and several times in the sagas, again, thinking about the sagas, they say, we found a land of fine resources.

And so it's very much about the resources. We've already said that Greenland is really quite far in terms of that Norse cultural sphere, the North diaspora. It's far from, particularly Norway, becomes increasingly prominent in terms of bringing what the North Greenlanders need to keep their society going. you know, in exchange for what they can trade, these like Arctic resources, like, as I say, sort of walrus ivory particularly, but they're far away. So if they can find alternative resources, like amazing, they don't realize it's a whole continent, right, but still incredible resources just on that little bit. And we know sort of archaeologically that they probably went further south down the coast as well, you know, down to the sort of St. Lawrence River area

because of what we find in this little archaeological site we can talk about Lansomero. But so actually it makes complete sense that they are trying to find more resources, possibly more land to settle. They plan to settle. But of course, it turns out people are living there already and they're not very pleased at the idea of people coming in.

It doesn't normally stop the Vikings, to be fair. Right. But it's a really interesting one this, because the name is not flattering. So in the sagas they call them Skullors. they call them Scrailingar, so wretched ones. And that's essentially a collective name for indigenous populations that they're coming across, both in Greenland, sort of in the far north, but particularly on the edge of the North American continent.

Lots of different people who are living in this part of what is now, is actually Canada. And initially, it doesn't start badly, for the most part. They start trading. And there are some positive encounters, but the sort of mood changes. quite quickly and the people that the Scrialingar are very frightened by, say, a big bull that the Norse have brought with them. They want to trade sort of furs, which they have in abundance, for sort of dairy products that the Norse have and strips of cloth, but also weapons. And the Norse are not keen for that. And it sort of the relationship breaks down fairly quickly. And certainly

the Norse kill some of the people that they've encountered there. And there are also some Norse deaths as well. So when they say, we found a land of fine resources, the next bit of that sentences, but we won't be able to enjoy them. We won't be able to leave. And they're actually saying this as they're leaving when they're realizing that this is not land that they can sort of reasonably expect to settle. Having said that, while the sagas are very very, very much, it's not just Laif, but it's very much around the period of Leif's lifetime and the sort of subsequent exhibitions. It's almost like a family business. Most of them are sort of led by his siblings or his siblings sort of partners, but there's a Icelandic annul. They talk

about how a very small boat has basically washed up on the shores of Iceland and it had come from Markland. And it said it was ancholous. It was obviously it had been tossed in the storms that people were in a very bad way. But still, we have this little spark. You know, it's one that, that lovely thing about history, isn't it? You suddenly, sometimes there's a big light on and you can see everything. And then sometimes it's just this tiny candle. And you can't really see anything around the candle, but you can see there's a light. And I always love that anal entry because it feels like that. So there are still people going to Markland, presumably to collect wood and other materials, who knows, sort of a few hundred years, a couple of hundred

years after Leif has first explored, you know, this edge of the North American continent. And so the story is bigger than the story we know. And that's always quite exciting. It is because I think we have the impression that kind of the Vikings go there, as you say, they have those encounters and they leave and that's the end of the story. But clearly there are people who haven't forgotten that there is some abundance there if you can go and get it safely. Exactly that. Exactly. And there is. So the end of North Greenland is fascinating because essentially it starts to break down lots of different reasons, climate change not least, but also sort of decreasing contact with Norway and Iceland. Is the situation changed out there? We have, you know, Black Death. We have all sorts of

sort of political, economic changes that kind of knock the relationship with North Greenland sort of off-kilter, as it were. And so the last sort of textual evidence we have for people living in North Greenland is sort of 1407, you know, first decade of the 1400s. We have archaeological evidence that can push it a few decades past that, but then past that we don't know what happens. And it's this amazing thing where we have, because of the permafrost in Greenland, we have the last burials, but then someone buried those people. What happened to those people? You know, and in the past, I mean, there was absolutely no evidence, pretty much absolutely no evidence to suggest this is true, but, you know, you can never say never. One suggestion is that the last inhabitants

of North Greenland, when they realised that the jig was up, essentially, they went west rather than east, and they went to North American, that's where they settled. I would like to see some evidence of that before, you know, whereas there is evidence to suggest that sort of people are going back to Iceland, for example. But, yeah, it's exactly as you say, there's this sort of spate of activity we know about around the year 1,000, we know texturally, we know archaeologically. But yeah, there's these little candles in the darkness past that, which I don't know, for me is almost the more exciting thing. It's, ooh, but what was going on? Yeah, because I think it would feel odd if they'd got there, found all of this stuff, and then just gone home and forgotten about it, because

it feels a bit like you're talking about the links to Denmark in that they're reliant on Denmark for some of their stuff. So if you could get that from the West and not have to be reliant on Denmark, there's a degree of independence that they could get out of that. So it would feel odd if they found this incredible wealth of resources and then just gone, oh, it feels like too much effort and gone home again. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, there are reasons there's so closely as the centuries go on and sort of Norway becomes the dominant power. There's reasons why they are so closely connected because Norway in a way is sort of a, of, that, a portal to a whole sort of European world. So it does make sense. And of course, you have other

things in the East that are important, not least things like Christianity. So there's a whole reason that they are culturally speaking facing East. But resource-wise, yeah, it makes much more sense. The interesting thing, maybe we should think a little bit about the archaeological evidence because, yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask what kind of archaeological evidence exists for where we think they got to it and how certain we can be of where they were. Well, this is really interesting because this does essentially fit very closely with Leif and this idea that it's his period of exploration that we're seeing represented in the archaeological material, not just his, but certainly around that time.

And I mentioned these Leif's Boudir, these little huts that they build, right? And then later expeditions, essentially they ask, oh, can we borrow your, say, holiday home? But you know what I mean? It does kind of feel like, oh, you know, just not take it, just borrow it. But there is this incredible sight on the tip of Newfoundland called Lansomero's that was essentially discovered in the 60s by the Ingstads because I don't want to sort of be too, it wasn't just the sagas at all, but it was very much, look, the sagas are telling us that something happened here. Let's try and find the evidence. for this. And people living locally, it's sort of, so there's these mounds over those kind of like lumps in the ground. You might want to kind of dig around there. And what they found was it's so interesting. It's one of those wonderful moments where the archaeology and the textual information, you know, sagas specifically sort of, they don't match up perfectly. Of course they don't. But

when you realize, oh, there is historical truth here. We just have to sort of slightly turn the dial to make them fit together. So what they find is a series of buildings. And some of these buildings look like workshops. You know, they'd have been used for, well, things like mending ships, essentially, which you really would need after a voyage of, what is it, sort of over 2,000 miles from Greenland to Newfoundland. And then others are bigger and it looks like people were living there. And what's really interesting about this is that this isn't a settlement. Now, Whether it was intended to become a settlement in the long term, that's a different question. I don't think we can answer that.

But there are no middens, there are no big rubbish deposits, there are certainly no burials. There's no sense that this is anything other than essentially an overwintering site that's used for a few years and a site that is possibly, we might say, used as a springboard for explorations further south. Now, I mentioned that St. Lawrence River, and the reason sort of it seems very likely that they did, get that far at least when they were exploring further south and the coast is because of these little butternuts that really don't grow as far north as Newfoundland, but they've been found in the archaeological layers in this north site. And so that's a pretty good indication that they're bringing stuff back. And again, we go back to the sagas, remember Leif, the botanist,

essentially collecting all these samples and coming, you know, so similar sort of thing going on, perhaps. There's a really, really exciting piece of a fairly recent research that is the sense that as scientific, sort of techniques advance, it almost feels like we're getting closer to the past, even as we sort of get further away chronologically from it, because this was due with a solar flare. So essentially the sun lets out this big cosmic storm. And kind of big caveat here, I'm explaining this in the best way that I can, but feel free to write in and complain to Matt. Don't complain to Matt, but his guests are rubbish.

There you go. Thanks very much. My pleasure. So, right, let's try and get this right. So this. My email address is eleanor.baraclough at. There we go. Right.

Okay, so really trying to get this right now. Okay, so big cosmic storm, whom, sends out a lot of energy. Okay? that means that the trees and sort of the growth generally, they have this kind of extra bit of growth. It's like getting a bit more food. And what this then looks like is a bigger tree ring.

Okay, because so we can see the date on the trees. We know that the cosmic storm took place in the year 993. Okay? So what you have to do to work out when, say, a piece of wood has been chopped down is count forward from that spike you can see on the tree ring, count forward the number of years and that tells you when, you know, basically the tree stops growing because it's been cut down. Okay. So the really wonderful thing is, and I just love how, in a way, how mundane this evidence is,

is that on this Norse site, Newfoundland, Lansomero's, you've got wood that has been chopped down by Norse at the site. And some of this wood bears the mark of this cosmic storm. And so the research was basically counted up, and they came to the year 1021. Now, that is a little tiny bit later than when Laif's expeditions are meant to have happened, just saying. So it's not an exact match. But that means that 1021 becomes a year when we know that the North are on the edge of the North American continent chopping down some wood. And I don't know why, but I just find that. absolutely fascinating because it's it's this moment where all these points start to match up

and you're just, do you know what I mean? You're suddenly then. So you're talking about cosmic storms. It's someone that the stars are lying. You've got these lumps in the ground that people know need to be investigated. Why don't you go and look at that? You've got this bit of paper from a thousand years ago that says, Life sailed over here and did this. And then you've got some scientific evidence that says at virtually the same time, there are Norse people cutting down trees and building buildings here. And it's just, it all comes together to almost all proves itself. Because if they're chopping that wood down in 1021 and they're building buildings,

that probably suggests to me that's not the first time they've been there because you don't immediately arrive somewhere and say, right, they'll build a house. That suggests they may be going back and back and thinking eventually we should build an overwintering camp here. Exactly, exactly. So it's not saying this is when they arrive, definitely not. It's just this moment of there is someone from, you know, North Greenland, probably, at that moment, in that year, chopping down a piece of woods on the edge of what they don't realize at that point is like a vast continent. And I just, yeah, the whole, I love it. The further west you get in the North Diaspora for me, the more interesting it gets partly because the picture gets blurrier, it gets misty.

And then when you do get the evidence, it's like, oh. okay, that was going on. So I love it. And I love Leif within that context, because I think what happens now is, you know, we have Leif Erikson Day and everything like that, and I'm sure we'll talk about this. Leif sort of gets attached to a lot of different traditions. And his meaning becomes sort of, it's almost like he's, you know, suddenly onto this figure whom we actually know so little about, really, you have all this extra cultural and historical weight. and all these sort of arguments about identity and being hung on this figure. And I mean, that's fascinating in itself. You know, I've done research. I've written papers on, you know,

Sherlock Holmes. I may write a monograph on that one. It's very much that kind of very niche. But I think it's incredible what people do with that myth of Leif Erikson sort of and the myths and the stories and the truths of the Norse Expedition, as to the edge of the North American continent, what they do with that, say, in the 19th century in America, it's fascinating. But it's almost like, I don't know, maybe you can think of a better way of describing it. It's almost like we've got two laifs there, you know, and it's not like there's no connection between the two, but the real one is much shadowy air. Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking, and it's almost like if we could speak to him today

and explain all of this stuff that we're talking about today, you know, we're talking about him a thousand years later and having done all of these things, I imagine there's part of him that would think, that's brilliant, I'm a legend, that's awesome. And then the bit inside him that would be thinking, I was just a guy who was looking for some trees. Yeah. Well, this is embarrassing. How did this happen? Well, because there are other sort of stories. They do seem to be more sort of storytelling rather than history, or certainly we don't have any evidence for them historically, past the sagas.

There are other traditions that get attached to him, like the conversion of Greenland to Christianity. So it's said that he goes over to King Olaf Trigfusson, who's said that he goes over to King Olaf Trigfusson, who's one of the big Christianising kings of Norway. And Olaf basically says, right, off you go. I want you to convert Greenland to Christianity for me. And sort of linked to that story is also another story. He ended up in the Hebrides and he sort of hooks up with this really cool witch figure and they end up having a child together.

So there's all these rather, well, conversion isn't quite as cool as they're hooking up with a witch. I mean, that's more my sort of story today, right? Leave in the witch. It sounds like there's a book in there somewhere. If there isn't, there really should be. Yes, I would read that book. Yeah. But exactly. So there's all these sort of other traditions that build up around Leif, the figure, this sort of the legend, the man, the myth, essentially. And again, I always feel a bit sorry in that context. For example, if we think about the conversion of Greenland to Christianity, there's a much more interesting character who's Eric Redd's wife, the Othilder. And she's really cool. So, She converts to Christianity, the saga say, and then it said a couple of things. One, she builds a little church, which is, I'll come back to you. But the other is, essentially, she realizes, oh, wait, I'm married to this big, hairy pagan

who has absolutely no intention of converting to Christianity. So she puts him on a sex ban. And there's this wonderful line in the saga that's just like, and Eric was not pleased about this, which I just feel like there's a sort of mat cartoon there or something, isn't it? You know, just grumpy Eric being kicked out of the marital bed. So I just love that because it's so much more human than sort of king sends off young, noble Norse to convert. You do it.

It's like it's much more human. It's much more real. And again, when we're talking about that sort of matchup or potential matchup, this one you know, we've got to be careful with, but of textual sources and archaeology. Really wonderful thing is, the archaeologists found a very, very early, say, church, more like little chapel at the site that's almost certainly Bratelith, which is, you know, where Eric and Theodhilder and these children settled. And so, you know, it's called Theodhilder's church and the sense that she's got potentially this little chapel.

Again, we can't say for sure this was built sort of because Theodhilder wanted it to be built and said it. We can't say that. But the fact there is such an early Christian site, really teeny-weeny one, at the site where there is a very, very good chance that Theodhilder and Eric were living and Leif himself. Well, that's a better story in my book. Do you know what I mean? It's that's, I find that. I mean, I've been there a couple of, in fact, when I was there, so they, for the millennium, because obviously it's a thousand years since sort of the official conversion,

they built a replica of this, of the Othielder's sort of church at Bratelith. But it was, they had to bring a load of Icelanders over to mend it. And these Icelanders were just like, it was amazing. They were just Vikings reincarnated. And they invited me inside and they were like all singing these kind of folks. songs and all of these huge beers and, you know, they're tools for building the turf, rebuilding on the, it just felt like going back a thousand years. I was just like, there is, there's no doubt you are the descendants of the people you set off on these long ships and just thought,

yeah, let's see what we find. Yeah, what could go wrong? We'll just, we'll just give it a, it was, I've never felt such a strong sense of essentially kind of time travelling. And yeah, it was just wonderful. Incredible. Has there ever been any suggestion that in going West life was on any kind of Christianising mission, or is that a bit of a stretch? I think it's a bit of a stretch, yeah. I think so by that, would we be sort of assuming that Leif was trying to kind of convert the people who were already living there? If he might have been tasked with introducing Christianity's Greenland or he's seen it

introduced there, they've found people in the West and some land in the West. So the reason that I'm kind of sort of hesitating before I answer this is because, again, you can give your email at the end of this program. So all complaints were going straight to you. To my knowledge, I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. And my feeling there is that, well, when they first went there, they are, I mean, there is this kind of story. But I think this is linked to Greenland where they essentially kidnapped two young. It's not Laf though.

They kidnap two young children from the sort of native populations and take them off. And, you know, there's definitely things like that. But I, yeah, I think it's much more, my understanding, my kind of interpretation of the sources, it's much more about resources and exploration and possibly settlement. They're not, if anything, they're just a bit pissed off to find other people already living there. Yeah, and it sounds like from what you said in the sagas, they kind of give up on those people anyway. It's not like we should go back and try harder with these people. It's like, we can't work with them.

No, exactly. And there's also this very interesting thing. because the North are a very sort of far-travelling culture, right? And they come across all sorts of different other cultures and people living in the world. And some of them, they settle amongst. Some of them they subdue. Some of them, you know, they sort of in time become like. There's all sorts of different ways. It's not colonialism, as we might think about it from a sort of 19th century perspective. Okay. So, but what's really interesting is that in the West, the people they find that, and this is true of the people they come across in Greenland,

the people they come across the Native North America, they're almost like human but not quite human in terms of how they're presented in the saga. There's this horrible description of the people they find, which they also call Scralinger, wretched, puny ones, in the north of Greenland. And they say when you cut them, if it's only a little bit, they don't bleed. And if it's a lot, then they bleed and bleed and bleed. It's that sort of, it's like, How did you find that out? What were you doing? And there's very much that. And the sagas, when they describe when sort of relations break down with the people they are sort of engaging with, interacting with in North America, there's an element of magic. There's an element of, you know,

suddenly these people disappear or they are capable of doing really strange things and, you know, making magical illusions. And so these are people who are not like us. It's almost like here be, almost here be monsters. There's also at one point, there's the description of, from a Norse point of view, what is presented as a uniped, you know, kind of like the medieval Mapermundi style uniped, you know, that we, sort of, that they've inherited from the classical world. And so it's more that, yeah, and we've got to think as well, the sort of, the conversion is still very new in Greenland at that point. And, you know, Eric's sort of sulking out the back in the cow shed because he's on his sex ban and everything.

So it's not established enough to then be a missionizing religion in its own right, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And just to round off Leif Story, what do we know about what happens to him in the end? Oh, well, okay, so in terms of what happens to him in the end, so it's not very exciting. It's not that, but he kind of essentially goes back home and settles is the really not very exciting. way of putting it. So there are other little bits and pieces, really small bits and pieces of his life and sort of life in Norse Greenlands during his lifetime that we can pick up from other sagas. And there, the sense is very much, you know, he goes back home, he goes back to

Bratelith, and in time he takes over his father's farm, and he becomes sort of, you know, a great leader and he's probably dead by, I think it's sort of like 1028 is when there's a saga reference to his son now being essentially the local chieftain and living at Brathleth. And so, yeah, it's basically that. He has his youthful peregrinations and all this excitement and he's like, no, I'm going to do some farming. Thank you very much. And then he dines out on that for the rest of his life with his feet up in front of the fire.

I mean, wouldn't you? It's great. It's like, I discovered a continent. Thank you very much. Mic drop. You know, you don't. I feel like my work is done. Right.

Exactly. Burner rest. And just to end with you, you mentioned that there is a Leaf Erickson day. What would you say is his legacy, particularly in America. And what role does he play in shaping perceptions of America and being American? This is a really interesting one. Because in a way, it's almost disconnected from the North. story. And that in itself, I think it's a whole other layer of history and sort of humanity

going on there. So, Lefe Erickson Day is the 9th of October. There is no significance to that date in terms of, you know, go back to the sagas. We don't get dates that precise anyway. And certainly nothing particularly exciting seems to have happened. The reason it was chosen was because in 1825, this was the date that the first sort of major ship carrying Norway, and immigrants arrived in New York. So that's what they're hanging it with. You know, it's not actually about any sort of medieval or Norse or Viking Age legacy. It's about modern Scandinavian immigration.

And that's really important because, and this goes back to what I was saying about, you know, this layer of sort of 19th century history, which actually isn't history at all in the sense of being sort of historically accurate. in the way it looks back at the Norse medieval Viking past. But it is in itself a really fascinating sort of history. So what you find is in areas, this is no coincidence, but in areas that have been heavily settled by sort of Scandinavian immigrants in the 19th century, you find amazing pieces of evidence

suddenly turning up that tell us things about, you know, the Norse Greenlanders, the Norse in this part of America. amazingly, because actually we have absolutely no evidence to suggest that they reached what we, you know, would now be the United States. It's very much sort of a Canadian thing going on there. And it's very much not really a Norwegian United States connection. It's very much sort of North Greenland, Iceland, and Canada. You know, if we're talking about modern national borders and how they map onto this history. But you find, for example, runestones, fake run stones saying things like, oh, you know, we all made it here and we got attacked and many of us

got killed. Leif was here. Yeah, it basically is. Leaf was here. Exactly. And it's fascinating because those ideas then trickle into the sort of national cultural consciousness. And we see that. So I think it's in, is it in Boston, you have the amazing bridge that's got sort of like Viking ships on it. So Rick Warden, you know, who does the amazing Percy Jackson young adults, and he also does the even more amazing in my book, obviously I'm going to think this, Magnus Chase series. And he is part of the reason I absolutely love what he does is because he's playing on these ideas. And what he's doing is he's taking these areas that essentially Americans, 19th century,

particularly, 20th century to some extent, decided were of Viking Norse historical significance because essentially it's about their identity, right? And he's saying, it's all true. Look at this. Actually, the whole of America is full of Norse gods. All this crazy stuff is true. But the joke and the cleverness of that is because everyone is not true. You know, we know that's not true. And so Leif, in terms of Leif Erickson Day and SpongeBob Squarepants and all the rest of it, what he represents through that is actually, it is history. But it's a different history. And it's about identity and it's about exploration. It's about settlement. But it's not about a Viking slash north slash medieval layer of that. It's very much about something that's much more modern. I love that. I think, I mean, that that in itself is an incredible story,

but they are just like we had two Leif Erickson's. They are too connected, but definitely different or distinct stories. Yeah. It sounds a little bit like it's kind of a bit of 19th century with a maybe a still empire imperial edge to it of people migrating to North America and seeking to say that they already have roots there. You know, we were here first, you know, constantly ignoring the indigenous population, but almost like, you know, we were here for, we have roots here that go back further than your roots. Yes, exactly that, exactly. And it is no coincidence that Leifarickson

Day is sort of a counter to Columbus Day. Because of course, for sort of northern European Protestant immigrant population do you really want a southern European Catholic to be your sort of immigrant origin story well no you don't really

so again there's something going on there in terms of exactly is it claiming heritage claiming belonging yeah because I guess Columbus is Italian for an Italian American population he came from Spain for a Hispanic

population and this is a way of the Norse Scandinavian population being able to say, actually, we see your 1492 and we trump you. Yes, exactly that, exactly that. And I do, I mean, I think that's incredible in itself. It says something about how humans construct identity through history, you know, and there's a whole other program or several many programs to be made there, right? We could be chatting in our podcast pub, as it were, for hours on. you know, what's the point of history, what's people do with history?

But this is a really interesting example of that. Yeah, fascinating. It's been absolutely incredible to try and get a little bit closer to Leaf Erickson, whether he's real or imaginary or whichever one it is that we're going to go with, the leaf who was looking for some trees or the leaf who was looking for a whole new world. It's been great to speak to you again, Eleanor. Thank you so much for coming back and joining us. I hope to see you again in the future.

Oh, yes, please. Yeah, back in the park. Definitely. Get the pints lined up. I'll get the first one in. Thank you, so much. Thank you. You can find Eleanor's previous visit to Gone Medieval all about how to live like an ordinary Viking in our archive. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history.

Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts add free at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. What are you waiting for? Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.