Real Vikings - 8. Promised Lands: Greenland and Vinland

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

Banished from Iceland, a criminal named Erik the Red puts to sea. He will discover new land and found a spin-off colony: Greenland. But it’s his son, Leif, who will push Viking exploration to the limit… arriving on the shores of North America…A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Iain Glen.Featuring Eleanor Barraclough, William Fitzhugh, Davide Zori.Written & produced by Jeff Dawson | Executive Producer: Joel Duddell | Research by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Fact check by Grant Jones | Sound Supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Jacob Booth | Additional editing by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording Engineer: Tom Rouse at Jungle Studios.Get every episode of Real Vikings two weeks early and ad-free by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's spring, 1960. We're at Lans-Omeadows. It's a fishing hamlet on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. A finger of land that pokes up into the Labrador Sea. We're in the company of a husband and wife team, an explorer and an archaeologist, both Norwegian. Their names are Helga and Anstina Ingstad. The name Lens-Ome-Dose is a mishmash of French and English.

It means Meadows Cove, and it is a location of particular interest to the Ingstats. For years, they have been subscribers to a theory one that could turn history on its head, that during the peak of the Viking Age, a thousand years ago, Norseman had landed on this very shore. Solid scientific evidence has thus far proven elusive. There have been well-publicized hoaxes, and all manner. of artifacts dug up, axe heads and such like, presented as authentically Viking. Most will turn out to be Native American. Rather than hearing often a wild goose chase, the Ingstads prefer methodical detective work. That means following the clues in the old Norse

sagas. Despite differing perspectives, these medieval texts remain consistent in one thing. Their descriptions of a land across the ocean, a few, few days sail from Greenland. One they refer to as a land of vines, Vinland. Today you'd be hard pushed to equate Newfoundland with a place where grapes might grow, but in the medieval warm period things were different. Most likely it is a reference to the gooseberries and cranberries which would have been abundant back then. What's more, the legends of the local indigenous people seem to corroborate the Norse accounts. There are tales of tall, bearded strangers who came in vessels with sails that gave them the impression of giant birds.

The Ingstads are convinced that Newfoundland is ground zero for archaeological evidence. They have put out an appeal to local farmers, to anyone who might have a trace of historic dwellings on their land. One farmer responds with words of unusual depressions in his field. It seems just another disappointment in the offing. The place is called Indian Camp. But what the Ingstads find there seems quite out of the ordinary. Firstly, L'Ans-Meados seems a perfect match for the location described in the sagas. It's a shallow bay, with a small river running into it, plus a clear offshore marker,

the rocky outcrop of great sacred island. What's more, the ridges and mounds beneath the grass correspond uncannily to the layout of a Norse settlement. about eight buildings in total complete with Longhouse and Smithy. If it's what they think it is, then here, finally, is the proof that around 1,000 AD, half a millennium before Columbus, explorers from Scandinavia, Vikings, had set foot in the new world. I'm Ian Glenn from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is Real Vikings Part 8.

In a previous episode, we saw how Norwegian emigres, disillusion with the old country, had struck out across the sea for lands anew. For a brief while, Iceland had become a Norse utopia, a land of the free, a place for pioneers to start afresh. Unfortunately, those old world woes, chiefly of the criminal kind, had begun to find their way across the North Atlantic. In 982, a convicted murderer, Eric Tovoldsen, is summoned before his local assembly and has sentence pronounced upon him. In Iceland's enlightened society, there is no death penalty.

Dr. Eleanor Baraklough. Eric subsequently is settled to lesser outlawry, which is a form of outlawry that essentially means you have to leave the country for three years. duly banished Eric Tovotson's only option is to put to sea. A giant of a man with a shock of Obun Hare, Tovotson is known to all as Eric the Red. Norse explorers have set great store in sailing west. There is an unswerving faith in discovering new lands if you point your prow towards the setting sun. It's seen Vikings island hop to Orkney, to Shetland, the pharaohs, and on to Iceland. They've been encouraged by the yarns of mariners blown off course, offering tantalizing glimpses of what might be out there.

Around the year 920, an old salt, a man named Gunn Bjorn Ulfsen, returned to Iceland with tales of a huge snowy landmass beyond the horizon, though one too bleak too inospitable to sustain a settlement. Eric the Red has spent enough time in the North Atlantic to know that, should such a land exist, land exist, it is its far side, its west coast, warmed by the Gulf Stream, which will present more favorable living conditions. I mean, what has he got to lose? Professor Davidei. He decides to make the most of his outlawry and goes to explore this land to the west that

Gumburin had found. And so, in 982, with the land. his family in tow, Eric the Red sets sail. He does not know that the land to which he is headed is an island, let alone at 840,000 square miles the world's largest. To him it seems a massive peninsula. But his instincts are correct. Rounding at southern tip, he navigates his way up through the Warren of Coastal Waterways. So Eric does a good job exploring and moves to the West Coast. where he finds these long fjords that go in over 100 kilometers into the land that offer sheltered lowlands with nice pasturage.

Dr. William Fitzhue. They were very fortunate to have discovered that if you go around from the east coast of Greenland to the west coast, you get into an entirely different climate zone. And those deep fjords back there turned out to be terrific farm sites for their flocks and their animals and so forth. As if it were a gift from the gods, and Eric is still a practitioner of the pagan ways, here lies a land ripe for exploitation.

Eric puts a show with his wife, Theodhildur, his three sons, Leif, Tovolt and Torstein, plus an illegitimate daughter from another relationship. Her name is Frades. The family Tovotson settles in. They build a farmstead they call Rata-Hilith on what Eric proudly names Eric's Fjord. He and his sons will use it as a base to explore. Gradually extending their trips, they will sail as far north as the pack ice will allow,

noting the plentiful fish seals and walrus, an occasional polar bear. On one trip, they glimpse in the distance a group of dark, dark-haired strangers clambering over the ice flows. They suppose they may be related to the Karelians of Finland and Russia, the only other people they know to inhabit such northernly latitudes. They will turn out to be paleo-eskimos, hunter-gatherers. There were dorsic culture people who were like pre-Inuit, people had kind of retreated into the northwest beyond

where the Norse, at least initially, were encountered. When his three-year ban expires, Eric will return to Iceland, but he will do so only briefly. Mindful of growing discontent back home, he determines to recruit a fresh set of pioneers and expand his settlement into a full-on colony, an Iceland 2.0, and he will do so with a sales pitch of a brazen real estate salesman. He will give his new territory a catchier, a sexier cell. And so has launched a brand new Viking domain, Greenland. And of course, occasionally this is held up as a piece of rather inaccurate sort of early tourist

board marketing, because when you think of Greenland, you think of this vast ice sheet that covers much of this very large country. But actually, it wasn't such a funny name for Eric to give, because the parts of Greenland where the north settled, which were in. the south-west, were in fact green for much of the year. Eric the Red returns to Iceland. He's quite a salesman and starts talking about the lands being called Greenland. Greenland, because there is plentiful pasturage for cattle and sheep,

he convinces a large group of people from the western part of Iceland to sail to Greenland to start this colony. In 985 AD sold on Eric's promise, 25 ships set sail for the new promised land. He must have been quite an amazing character. In addition to being his nasty Viking self, he really had a sense of how to organize people and he sent off with 25 ships. I mean, that tells you what's going on in Iceland already. The land's filled up and there are all sorts of people who need new territories. It is still tough going.

Life on border Viking ship in the Atlantic Ocean would have been pretty hard. In fact, later textual records tell us that many of the first ships that went out to Greenland didn't actually make it. They were either wrecked or they had to turn back. North ships were incredible. The ones that would have crossed the North Atlantic would have been bigger and sturdier than the ones that we might think of as attacking the monasteries of Britain and Ireland. So they'd have been good for ocean voyages. They'd have been good for transporting whole generations of families together with all their goods and all their livestock.

There are no cabins or lower decks just benches in the open. Sleep is grabbed under blankets made of skin, furs and walls. In rough seas, it is not a lot of fun. One thing that people often ask is how did they go to the loo? And from people who sail in reconstructed Norse ships, they've said, well, probably over the side, you know, if it's calm enough and maybe you have to hold on to someone else if it was choppier. We also need to think about what sort of clothes they'd have needed for the voyage.

So coarse, thick, woolen garments for insulation, lots of layers. And then there's the question of the food. It would have had to be dried or salted meat or fish. And to drink, you'd have had to have rainwater or perhaps beer or sour milk. In fact, only 14 of the 25. ships make it. But such is life in the world of North seafaring. Fate was a huge factor in the back of everything that you did, and the Viking religion,

you know, was very well suited for this kind of unpredictable life. You know, everything was predetermined. Eric's Fjord will soon be upgraded. Maybe it's the sales patter again, but this burgeoning colony in the West is redubbed, confusingly, the eastern settlement. It's so successful that an overspill community is established 120 miles to the north. It was perched on the very margins of farmable land.

It had shorter summers and longer, harsher winters, but it had its own advantages, particularly hunting and mountains, thereby full of soapstone for making lamps and bowls. and most importantly of all, it was very close to what the north's called the northern hunting grounds, where they hunted especially for walrus, because walrus ivory was incredibly valuable. So in further confusion, the northern outpost will be called the Western settlement. It will be the foundation for the later capital, Godthab, or Good Hope.

In 1979, it will be renamed. in the Inuit language as Nook. Within a few short years, there will be up to 5,000 Norse Greenlanders maintaining around 3 to 400 farms. There is a geographical issue here. Greenland is technically part of the American continent, in which case Eric the Red and Coe are already the new world's first European settlers, the first two to have encountered its indigenous peoples.

In fact, splitting hair, the west of Iceland, beyond the continental divide that bisects the island, is also geographically part of North America. But convention and culture orientate Greenland, like Iceland, towards Europe. One can perhaps state that no European yet has set foot on the American mainland. In the summer of 986, an Icelander named Bianiherjolfsson is sailing home from Norway. Looking forward to reuniting with his father. On landing, however, he hears that Biani Sr.

is just one of the many to have upped sticks, to have cashed in on the Greenland bubble. In possession of a solid ocean-going ship, Biani follows. Unfortunately, an unusual period of calm weather sees him drift aimlessly for days on end. When a thick fog lifts, he finds himself offshore from a land teeming with thick pine forests, and immaculate white beaches.

This, Biani recognizes, is not Greenland. Excited at the discovery, his crew prepares to row ashore. But to their eternal regret, Biani forbids it. He's more interested in picking up a southerly wind and zipping straight back. The land almost certainly is the dense forested coast of today's Labrador, Canada. And thus Biani Herrjolfson, by way of off. obstinacy and a couple of hundred yards denies himself his Neil Armstrong moment. Back in Greenland, Eric is now lording it like a quasi-king.

His farm at Bratelit becomes the political center of Greenland. There is an assembly site that he establishes right next to his farm that Greenlanders meet every year. So right from the beginning, Eric the Red and his family have a level of political control in Greenland. Here, Biani Hurwelsen's tribulations are met less with excitement at the prospect of more land out there than incredulity at his lack of adventure. Eric buys Biani's ship and plans to show him what any true Vikings should have done. Though, probably in his 50s by now, Eric has a last-minute rethink.

A fall from his horse on his way to the jetty confirms it. He's too old for this lark. Instead, he delegates his eldest son, Leif, to lead the mission. And thus, sometime around the turn of the new millennium, Leif, son of Eric, Leif Erikson, sails into the sunset. Now, the sagas describe Leif as promising. They say he was a tall and strong man and very impressive in appearance. He was a shrewd man and always moderate in his behaviour. Leif does appear occasionally in sagas other than the day.

two Vinland sagas. So, for example, in the saga of King Olaf Trigfison, it's King Olaf of Norway who sends Leif off to convert Greenland to Christianity. For their king, bringing new lands into his realm, Christianising them into the bargain, will be a big boost to his beleaguered reign. To this end, Leif will often be presented in imagery with a huge crucifix round his neck. Despite his father's defiant paganism, his mother is already a convert. She's had a church built at Bratahilith. But when it comes to heading west, it seems that Leif's motivation is practical, that never-ending quest for resources chiefly in the form of timber.

In these early years, Greenland was pretty well endowed, but they quickly realized that they're going to have to find more supplies to fix up their boats and build their houses and so forth. So that was definitely something that spurred, you know, Leif's voyages. That and a case of what's in the family blood, a good old-fashioned yen for exploration. The notion of Norseman landing in North America often conjures visions of longboats putting out on an epic 3,000-mile transatlantic journey, an accidental discovery in the manner of Columbus. But it was not like that at all.

Their new world is reached according to the pattern. laid down long ago. Discovery by incremental extension. At its narrowest point, the gap between Northern Greenland and Canada's Elzemir Island is just 16 miles. Further south, clear of the ice, the crossing is still only 200-odd miles, about the distance from Bergen to Shetland. Small beer for a Viking. Heading west, leaf traverses the Davis Strait, following the trail of puffins and flightless orcs, a penguin-like bird since extinct. He is fully confident that land will soon be a hoy. After four days, it is, a strand of boulders and rocks corresponding exactly to the location and terrain of today's Baffin Island. He names it

Hellaland, Stone Slab Land, wading ashore affords Leif Erickson and his men the claim, according to interpretation of being the first Europeans to land in North America. Two days sail further south, Leif and his men alight upon the same treeline shore that Biani had seen. Leif names it Markland, Forestland. Two to three days after that, Leaf pulls his ship and on the left bank of a narrow channel. It is today's Bell Isle Strait, the waterway that separates Newfoundland from Laugh, The place now occupied by L'Annes-O-Madows. It's a good spot.

It has a shallow bay, a river for fresh water, as much timber as they could ever have dreamed of. There is peat for fuel, edible wild rice. There is grassland for their animals. And it's easy to find. Identifiable due to a small island in the channel, a handy landmark. It is also strategically placed. Beyond it, the strait widens out into the vast gulf of St. Lawrence.

It is, as they will find, a land of plenty. Leaf splits his 32 men into two groups. In rotation, one party will build a camp, the other will scout the terrain. One of them, a German by the name of Tricker, gets lost. But he emerges from the woods later his arms laden with berries, or grapes, as the Norse refer to them, in a collective term. In the saga of the Greenlanders,

they reach a land where the weather was fine and winters are mild and there's salmon and wild grain and grapes. And this is the place that is then named Vineland, which is roughly translated as wineland. So it's a wineland. And part of the products that are found there are grapes and grapes making wine,

which would have been an important resource for the Vikings. This land also has broad pasturage and has a temperature that allows animals to be kept outside for the winter, which would be remarkable for Scandinavians living in Greenland and Iceland, where animals had to be kept indoors for a good portion of the winter. Vinland will appear not just in the sagas. It will be detailed in the book of the Icelanders. So too the writings of Andreas of Bremen, who records Vinland's name in 1075. Such things inspire later mariners John Cabot, Martin Froebuscher, and most notably Christopher Columbus.

Prior to his own historic voyage, he will spend time sailing the waters around Iceland. Back in Vinland, the fermented berries are used by leafsmen to get roaring drunk, easing their labours as they knocked together some crude wood and turf buildings. The settlement will be called Leaf's berthor, Leaf's booth, suggesting it to be a temporary setup. But Leaf is a chip off the old block. He soon has ideas about starting up another colony. His party returns to Greenland, laden with timber and berries, as salesman samples. Unfortunately, in Leaf's absence, his father, other, Eric, has died. Charged now with having to run Greenland himself, leaf ops to stay put.

It was his one and only visit to the New World. What happens next is still open to conjecture. The Vinland sagas present differing versions of events. They are comprised of two volumes entitled The Greenlanders Saga and Eric the Reds saga. and they suffer as do all Norse histories by being written well after the event. But both agree that that summer, Leif dispatches his brother, Tovolta, to take over where he left off. It's summer in the year 10.03, or thereabouts, some way south of Leif's bertha. The thick forest comes right down to the waterline.

The air is pure, still. The water's crystal clear. Over the past two years, Tovalt has set about developing his brother's camp into a more permanent settlement. Today he and his men have set out on one of their ranging explorations. Here they have put ashore, examining trees hunting for wildlife. When? Up ahead. Further along the beach, they spy what appear to be three mounds. They approach with caution. What they find are upturned boats made from animals.

animal hide, canoes, and there, beside the boats, sleeping in the shade, are nine men. Their appearance is unusual, unlike anything they've seen. They are slighter built and dressed in animal skins. They have long, dark hair and broad features with narrow eyes. And for the moment, snoozing away, they are blissfully unaware of the hulking Norsemen looming over them. Inevitably, one of the strangers is disturbed. He lets out a piercing scream. It will give rise to the derogatory nickname the Norse will apply to all indigenous American peoples.

Scrailings, screamers or screeches. The scrawlings try to scramble away, but Torvald's men have got them surrounded. All but one are rounded up. Two Norsemen draw swords and set off in hot pursuit of the lone escapee. who's legged it into the woods. But the man knows the terrain and the thick of the forest he loses them. The Norsemen creep on.

They follow the ground as it rises, not realizing they are now at the top of a giant ridge. The sight before them is a wonder to behold, majestic, mind-blowing, thick, luscious pine trees that seem to stretch on forever. But they see a whisper of smoke rising from a clearing. a settlement, a village, and they sense too that there, deep in the forest, they are not alone. Knowing that the alarm will be raised, they rush back to the beach, they must put to sea immediately,

get the hell out of there. Sure enough, coming round the headland now is a flotilla of canoes, dozens of them, and their occupants are wielding bows and arrows. For the Norsemen, there is no room on their longboat for the eight scrawlings they have captured. On the spot, they are put to the sword. Under a hail of arrows, the Norsemen pushed their ship back into the water and sail away. Out to sea, out of danger, the men relax. The damage seems light.

The Tovolt has been struck under the armpit, it turns out. He hadn't even noticed. The wound will prove worse than it looks. The arrowhead has gone right in, close to his heart and lungs. within hours he will be dead. He's buried ashore in a short Christian ceremony at a landing referred to as Crosser Ness, the place of the crosses.

It's been an inglorious day. The first deaths of Native Americans at the hands of European settlers, the first death of a European at the hand of Native Americans. The sagas lump all these different peoples together and call them Scrilingar, which is not a very nice name.

And their encounters can be quite unpleasant. They can be violent. There are killings. But there is also trade. And so it really mirrors cultural encounters that we see between Europeans and indigenous Americans in the centuries to come. According to the sagas,

the two cultural groups come into contact during the voyages after Leif. They're probably describing ancestors of the Inu of Labrador and the Beautuk of Newfoundland, and then possibly further south, those living in the settlements around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and so that would be tribes such as the Iroquois and the Algonquin.

The Norse, after a third winter, returned to Greenland. Wishing to repatriate his brother's remains, Torstein puts to sea, but he's unable to locate these new lands. When he later dies from illness, his widow, Goodred, remarries this time to a wealthy Icelandic merchant. His name is Torfin Kalsephne. And Torfyn Kalsephny will prove to be the most significant of the North American pioneers.

Embarking in around 1007, Kalsephne and Gudred take three ships and about 160 settlers and sail to Vinland. They make their base at a place Kalsephne will call Stromfier. Where exactly Stromfied lies no one knows? Is it simply an upgraded Levesbuther or somewhere else entirely? What is known is that while there, Goodrich gives birth to a baby boy, Snorri. And in another entry in the annals of history, Snorri will become the first child of European ancestry to be born in the Americas. Kalsephny's colonists will be notable for a far more convivial relationship with Newfoundland's Beotook people.

At least at first. It is a relationship that evolves through barter and trade. The Beotooks are captivated by the Norsemen's colourful clothes, particularly anything red, and their weapons made of a hard, shiny substance unknown to them. The Norse, meanwhile, are amazed that the Beotooks will casually give up sumptuous animal furs for just a small ration of goatsmilk,

It will, in its own small way, lead to inadvertent friction. The Native Americans' lactose intolerance and consequent upset stomachs will lead to suspicion that the incomers are poisoning them. Violence will again raise its ugly head. Carsefni, as a precaution, has banned any trade in weaponry. The indigenous people, on the other hand, they were not people who were concerned with private property, Everything was communal, and these initial contacts looked like they were, you know, pretty good. But, you know, people started borrowing things from the Norse that they didn't want to have borrowed,

and it rapidly, you know, decayed. It is while trying to take a Norse sword, the Tobayotuk youth is killed. Soon the colonists are building a stockade around their camp to ward off indigenous attacks. In one such assault, as the story goes, their assailants are sent packing by the sight of a ball the settlers have brought with them, a creature they had never seen the lights of before. It is compounded by the evidently alarming prospect of Fradus, the Erickson's half-sister swinging her weapon at the enemy, in the manner of an old-fashioned shield maiden.

Fladis Eric's daughter was one of the children of Eric the Red, In the saga of the Greenlanders, she's a really dark, like, scary figure. Fredis picks up a sword from a dead warrior, and at this point she's very heavily pregnant. The saga tells us that she turns to face the attackers. She bears one of her breasts, and she slaps it with the sword, which terrifies the attackers, who then run away. After a third winter in North America, Carlsefni's colony, just like Tovolts, is disbanded. It is Freidus herself who will lead a fourth and final attempt at securing a foothold in Vinland. Unfortunately, she has inherited her father's nose for trouble.

In an infamous episode, Fradus will stir up a conflict between two factions of settlers which will result in the mass murder of one half of the colony. Axe in hand, she will slaughter the womenfolk personally. Or so they say. say, there could be a reason behind Fredis's bad rep. The story of Vinland will later be rewritten almost like a biblical parable. Fradis is the pagan savage, the convenient scapegoat blame for the colony's demise, and then there are the wild berries, the wine, with its communion relevance, enabling Finland to be promoted as a saintly paradise, a garden of Eden.

until the heathen tempterus came along. Interestingly, an old Norse Vin with a shorter, a sand doesn't mean grapes at all. It means pasture. Vinland could have been the land of grass all along. In the long term, the Vinland colony was always doomed. When Carlsephone was there later on, he departed, and they all said, well, you know, this is a wonderful land,

but there's too many scrawlings that's already occupied. So that was the first time that they ended up with a real social problem in the new lands that they were trying to settle. What's more, any produce Finland has to offer, trees, fish, seals, deer, fur, can also be found much closer to home in places like Finland and Russia. The prized walrus ivory, too, used throughout Europe and church ornaments will soon be rivaled by elephant tusks from Africa. Not that interactions with North America do not continue.

In 1978, a coin that had been uncovered in a Native American site in coastal Maine 20 years earlier is determined to be of Norse origin. The main penny, as it is known, had had a hole punched in it, worn as a pendant. So the penny is remarkable because it's dated to, 1065 to 1080, which is seven, eight decades after the Vinland voyages took place. So it's a very clear evidence that the Vinland Norse were still, you know, visiting Labrador and Mark land and looking for wood and so forth, but not trying any longer to settle. So they traded with the native people, and some of those trade goods, you know, work their way further south.

And there's also a very large number of Norse materials that have been found in Inuit sites in the Canadian Arctic as well. Likewise, Native American artifacts, arrowheads and such like, have been discovered in Norse dwellings in Greenland. One Viking grandeur there was found buried in his prize possession, a buffalo skin cloak. He can only have originated from America's western plains. It's August the 13th, 1876. We're in Beiroid, Bavaria, at the Thespielhaus Opera House. The audience is on Tenderhugs, ready for the premiere of Richard Wagner's new opus, Der Ring Des Nebulugan, the Ring Cycle.

It's a work that took 26 years to write, and at 15 hours running time needs four whole nights to perform. Mounted on an extraordinary scale, it is a rip-roaring exercise in pagan romanticism, Germanic, Norse. It features Odin, Loki, Freya, Valhalla. It has its bombastic showstopper number, The Ride of the Valkyries. And it is climaxed on the fourth night, the Gauta Dameron, with the proverbial fat lady singing. The buxom, pig-tailed soprano, Brunhilde. bedecked in a horned helmet the very source of Viking misrepresentation. Wagner is not the first to cash in on this newfound veneration of the Volkish or folkloric.

He is merely riding a wave. It is an aesthetic being channeled by nationalistic movements in Scandinavia, one that has been especially evident during the recent unification of Germany. Later, it will be pursued to sinister, cataclysmic extreme, in the racial politics of the Nazis. It was in 1830 that a modern version of the Vinland Sages was published by a Danish antiquarian, Carl Christian Raffin. This kicked off a rediscovery of the Vikings and Norse culture.

It was Raffin who popularized the notion of Norsemen arriving in America. This resulted in a flourishing of Norse folkloric societies in the United States too, and it led to all manner of bogus Viking artefacts. being offered up for public consumption. A stone tower in Rhode Island was eulogized as a genuine Viking relic, even though it was built in the mid-1600s. And in 1898, in Kensington, Minnesota, a farmer of Swedish stock caused a sensation

when purportedly unearthing a tablet of Norse engravings. It suggested Vikings had arrived in the American Midwest via the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes. It was inscribed with a date, 1362. The Kensington Roonstone, as it became known, was soon exposed as an elaborate hoax. Much of it is just wishful thinking on the part of the large Scandinavian diaspora in the American Midwest, an attempt to claim a stake in their new nation's identity. No doubt some of it is manipulated to political ends.

Columbus was very much part of the origin story of European America. And actually, he was possibly a little bit too Catholic for the liking of Protestant American citizens. And so Vikings were somewhat conflated with Anglo-Saxons to imply some sort of ancestral link to sort of modern white Americans. And of course, that very dangerously contributes to a racial myth of white Anglo-Saxon colonizers, bringing their superior abilities and civilizations. The World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 was meant to celebrate the Columbus Quadranial. It had become an orgy of Viking pageantry,

complete with longship sailing across Lake Michigan. In our present day, the Midwestern embrace of its cultural legacy seems more a case of local passion, most famously evident in sport. This is the pride of the folks out there in Minnesota, the Viking football team and this kind of stuff. So there's an awful lot of that interesting social phenomena, which indicates, you know, the Viking story is not over. You know, it's still being created and still being carried on by Scandinavian descendant peoples who are looking towards this history and reveling in it. In 1914, a more scientific quest for proof begins.

An amateur historian, William F. Munn, hones in on Newfoundland as a potential location for a Norse landing. He's followed by a Danish archaeologist, Jorne Melgor. He starts a more organized, though ultimately fruitless search there. They, like the Ingstads, are inspired not just by the sagas, but by the resurfacing of a chart that had been drawn up in around 1570. There is a map called the Skalholt map, which is a very famous map, because it shows this northern promontorium, which is called the Promontorium Wynlandicum,

and it's exactly where the Norse Viking site turned out to be. And so using partly this as his guide, Instead went and landed at that in that location, And as soon as Ingstads saw the shape of the houses, he knew exactly that this had to be the long-lost settlement of Finland. Atlors or meadows, it's not just the buildings the Ingstads uncover. There are the telltale shards of Jasper that the Norse typically used as fire starters. When the remains of the eight turf structures at Lanza Mettas were first discovered, the typology of the buildings looked Scandinavia. It took a little while before the community, the scholarly community, accepted it.

And really, the overwhelming evidence was the discovery of a bronze ringpin of a Scandinavian Celtic type that became popular in the North Atlantic, which dates the site to this 10th-11th century period. The full excavation, led by Anne Ingstad, will take eight years. it will afford a valuable insight into the life of the people who, as carbon dating confirms, had travelled to these shores a thousand years before. An abundance of nails, rivets, and the presence of a smithy suggests the site was ultimately used as a shipyard, somewhere to pull in for repair, or to restock supplies on the way to somewhere else. So archaeologists found the remains of some larger halls, which were probably for living in,

and others that were smaller and may have been workshops. There seem to have been boat repairs and carpentry and textile production in those smaller places. There are also, intriguingly, plenty of butternut husks. And what's interesting about that is that butternut only grows further south. Butternuts do not grow in Newfoundland and only come from the area to the south of the Bay of St. Lawrence. So we know from the archaeology that they would have explored at least as far as places like New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The layer of ash within the site shows that the settlement was in use for around 10 years and that it was eventually burnt down, perhaps as a farewell ritual by its inhabitants,

or more likely on the part of hostiles. Before the discovery, it was widely believed that these stories could be. fancy. After the discovery of Lance of Meadows, it seems that at least the core of the stories recorded in Eric's saga and Greenlanders saga are based on historical events. I think we can believe a core historical accuracy in the sagas as a result. In the sagas, Kalsafni also mentions a settlement further south which he calls Hop. It translates as tidal pool, another bay or natural harbor of some sort. One of the main differences is Greenlander's saga only describes one settlement, and that is

Leif's Boots. Eric's saga, on the other hand, describes two sites. The first one is Throne Fuhrer, Streamfure, the second one is called Hull. And we cannot reach agreement about whether there are three sites, two sites, or one sites in reality. All archaeology has provided us with is. is one archaeological site. Some suggest Hock may lay down at Cape Cod, Massachusetts,

perhaps even as far as what is now New York Harbor. We shall never know. Ultimately, Vinland was unsustainable because of what was happening in Greenland itself. The North Greenlanders were farmers like in the rest of the North diaspora. And even in good times, that meant they were locked into a really delicate balance

of hunting and farming. If you're there in the summer, it can be really lush and really green. And then when it comes to September, the days grow very short, and the fjords freeze, and then the long and very, very harsh winter is on its way. And that meant for the Norse Greenlanders,

if they had a few bad farming years or a hunting disaster, or the merchant ships failed to arrive from Norway or Iceland, then life would have got very difficult. very quickly. By the late 12-100s, the temperature was also falling. The northern hemisphere was entering the little ice age. Life that was already tough was becoming near impossible.

So the problem is that the Norse had their heyday expansion during this medieval warm period. Then when the downturn came, it was a huge problem for keeping their animals alive. they would have to carry them out, you know, from the buyers in the winter. At the end of the winter, they were too weak to be able to stand on their own feet, to feed and so forth. Politically, Norway had also turned inward, racked by civil war. Greenland, its harbors increasingly icebound, was a remote outlier. People who were financing the voyages were no longer willing to take chances, sending votes to Greenland. So, you know, things went south really quickly.

Disease, too, had found its way across the North Atlantic. There were instances of the plague in Iceland. Though in Greenland, malnutrition was the biggest killer. Male skeletons unearth from the last days of the Western settlement reveal an average adult height of just five feet. So much for your strapping Viking. Half of all adult males did not make it to 30 years of age. Such was the desperation to survive, that the old and the sick were routinely thrown off the cliff tops.

And we see then that the more marginal Western settlement disappears, maybe in the middle of the 14th century. Contacts with the East become increasingly sporadic, even more so when the Black Death hits Norway and then it hits Iceland just after 1400. And by the end of the 15th century, the colony of Norse-Greuthers, Greenland has vanished. So it really appears that there was kind of like a, you know, a full-scale evacuation of Greenland. The withdrawal had come ominously on the back of further raids by so-called scrawlings, this time the Tully people, forerunners of the Inuit who had migrated across from Alaska. One of the successes of Viking culture had been its ability to adapt,

but that was back in the pagan days. The Christianizing of Greenland cast the scrawlings as heathens, not peoples with whom the Norse should interact. The Norse clung to a pastoral farming method. They never fully embraced the life of the latitudes, like hunting for seals or whales. It all came walloping down, you know, very quickly, partly because, you know, the church began to be taking tithes, sucking a lot of the wealth out of the Greenland economy. me as well. With Vinland and Greenland gone, Iceland became the end of the line. The search for evidence of a Viking presence in the Americas goes on.

There have been purported ruins found etched near Toronto, claims of evidence of Norse copper mining near Lake Superior, and many more incidents besides. There are ancient legends of blonde, blue-eyed warriors in Central America, in the Andes of Peru of longboats sailing up the Amazon. To date, Lanzo Meadows is the only Norse site that has ever been uncovered.

And it's not for lack of trying. Many archaeologists have wasted field seasons and broken their backs looking for Scandinavian sites in Canada, including me. And it's a bit of a needle in a haystack to try to find another Scandinavian archaeological site in North America, I am pretty confident that one will at some point be found, and probably it will be found with the use of new technologies. Time will tell. Either way, the site in Newfoundland

remains conclusive proof that for a while, the Viking realm had spread not just across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It spanned the hemispheres. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the link between civilizations was complete. In the next episode, back in England, Ethel read the Unready attempts to purge Norsemen from his realm. Military intervention sees Viking kings being placed on the Anglo-Saxon throne. Under Canute the Great, England will become part of a vast, sprawling dominion, one that spans cultures and continents, the North Sea Empire.

That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Real Vikings right now, without waiting and without ads, by joining Noysa Plus. Click the banner at the top of the feed, or head to Noyser.com forward slash subscriptions to find out more.