Leif Ericssson
Reacting to the tales of one of his countrymen, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had discovered what is generally taken to have been north coastal America quite by accident as he tried to find his father, who had emigrated to Greenland (Bjarni obviously wasn’t the world’s greatest navigator), but who had not bothered to make landfall tehre, being in a hurry and not very interested, Erik’s son Leif decided to retrace Bjarni’s route to see if he could find this strange country. It wasn’t too hard: America lies just over the Davis Strait from Greenland, about two hundred and fifty miles of a journey, a mere popping down to the shops for some tobacco and mead, can I pick you up anything for a Viking. So the tale of his long and arduous journey is in fact a short one, and though he met the natives of this new country, which he called Vinland (not to be confused with Finland, of course) he fell out with them and there were skirmishes, during one of which his brother Thorvald (named, no doubt, for his grandfather) was killed.
Leif’s actual intention in setting out to find Vinland was to convert its denizens to Christianity, which might explain why the denizens replied with arrows and violence, not being in any particular rush to drop their own gods, who had served them very well for millennia thank you, and weren’t you guys only recently worshipping Odin and Thor and all that lot? What happened to them, huh? You like those guys who only support a football team till they start losing and then change your allegiance? Well, not us. The Great Spirit is our man, and we’re sticking with him. Which is exactly what you can do with your god. Stick him, we mean.
Rather darkly amusing, Erik was offered a place in the ship and was all fired up to go, riding his horse towards the vessel and possibly drunkenly yelling “Let’s do this thing!” when he rather unfortunately slipped from his horse and landed on his arse maybe. Although he wasn’t badly injured (you’d be surprised how many people actually died from such accidents; King Richard II came a cropper when he and his horse parted company suddenly. Imagine that: survive the Crusades, battle the Muslims, fight all sorts of exotic diseases, thirst and hunger, make it home to Merry Old England at last, and break your fool neck falling from your saddle. Not much of an epitaph for a king, is it?) the incident convinced him it was a bad omen and he stayed behind. Really bad judgement on his part, as that winter plague swept through the town and did for him.
Leif is believed to have arrived in Canada first, around the Labrador area, and sailing west as winter began to set in, and unbeknownst to him, back home his dad was breathing his last and probably considering his imminent death a punishment from Odin for being such a big girl’s blouse as to be scared of a little old fall from a horse he came across another landmass which he called Vinland, or wine land. This has been more or less identified as having been Newfoundland. After sensibly spending the winter there, Leif upped sticks once the weather turned warmer and headed home, at such a leisurely pace that he even had time for a bit of castaway rescue on the way, earning him the nickname “Leif the Lucky”.
As an aside, there is a possibility that the crew he rescued, captained by one Thorir, may very well also have been to “Vinland”, or America, and obviously if so then Thorir had made it there before Leif. But as the only real accounts we have of this voyage come from personal family sagas, and they all concern only Leif and his family, Thorir doesn’t get a mention. However history may have done him an injustice. Of course, Bjarni was definitely, if we read this correctly, the first, but as he passed by, sort of Mister Burns-like (“Sir, I’ve arranged for the people of Australia to spell out your name in candles for your birthday. If you can just turn your head - BAH! No time!”) without bothering to land, never mind explore, he too is ignored by choniclers, and while he should really be on the top pedestal being awarded the gold medal, as it were, he ends up just a spectator.
For all his discovery of the continent though, it would be Leif’s brother, Thorvald, who would first properly explore it. He headed over there the following year and following his bro’s directions (“Two lefts and a right, then straight on; you can’t miss it”) he arrived in “Vinland” and explored away, unfortunately falling foul of the local population and losing his life, ending up buried in the new world. This did not sit well with Leif, who wanted him interred in his homeland, not some gods-forsaken wild country only newly discovered, and so he sent his son Thorstein to bring the body home. Unfortunately, though Thorvald had found it a doddle to make his way to Vinland, Thorstein had more trouble, exacerbated by a storm blowing up, and ended up being blown around instead to the other side of Greenland, where he rather inconveniently died.
So that was the end of the Norse adventures in America was it? Not a bit of it. Don’t you know these people yet? Adventure flows in their blood, even if it had been thinned by the ideas of men in black dresses who thought everyone should love each other as long as they all worshipped the same god, if not they deserved to burn like evil heretics. Gudrid, Thorstein’s widow remarried and prevailed upon her new husband to check out Vinland. Thorfinn Karlsefni, outfitting a major expedition, headed off. Thorfinn wasn’t fu
cking around though: he didn’t just intend to explore, or gather what resources he could and hightail it back to Greenland, oh no. He wanted to set up a permanent colony on Vinland, and he brought men, women, livestock and supplies, ready to settle the country in the name of the Norse and Leif Erikson.
Far from, then, Columbus and his men being the first white men to arrive in America, Gudrid’s son, Snorri, is said to have been the very first white man born in America, so if anyone owns “white privilege” in America it’s the Scandinavians. But here’s the thing.
There are two family sagas that recount the adventures of the Norse in America, and the one called
The Saga of Erik the Red puts a very different complexion on Thorfinn’s expedition. This one says that, far from being a peaceful and mostly uneventful exploration of Vinland, Thorfinn’s time there resulted in a terrible war with the natives, which led to the death of Thorvald. This directly contradicts the source
The Saga of the Greenlanders, which tells us Leif’s brother died in Greenland of a disease. According to
Erik the Red, not only was he still alive at the time Thorfinn went back to America, but he fought alongside him. And died there. So it’s hard to know which one to take as the right one, if either is. Still, according to the
Erik the Red account, the war with the native population sent Thorfinn back to Greenland, deeming it too much trouble to set up a permanent presence in Vinland, and on his return the Norse shrugged and forgot all about America.
In essence then, both accounts tally in at least the result, that the Norse forsook their attempts to colonise America, though the reason given in
Erik the Red makes more sense than that in
Greenland, as otherwise what was to stop Thorfinn or other Norse returning to Vinland? Only if Thorfinn came back and said “forget it lads, them natives is fu
cking crazy. The land may be fertile but I will be double fu
cked if I’m going back to face them headcases again, and nor should you.” Thorvald’s fate? Well, let’s give him an honourable Viking death, falling in battle rather than the rather ignominious one of dying from a nasty disease in his homeland, huh? He’d probably have preferred that, whether or not it’s the truth.
The fact that they abandoned the idea of a colony there though did not stop other Norse visiting America, and it’s kind of nice in a way to see that even Jesus Christ the Redeemer couldn’t quite redeem the Vikings, as told in the story of Freydis, bastard daughter of Erik, and so half-sister to Leif, who had been with Thorfinn on his ill-fated expedition, and had hatched a plot on her return, roping in two brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, to help her out and return to Vinland where she said there were massive profits to be had, which she would share with the brothers. She left out the rather important fact that neither of them would leave Vinland alive, as, slaying them both and all their men and women, she grabbed all the riches and hied her back to Greenland as fast as her men could sail. But her treachery was uncovered, and left such a stain on the idea of Vinland that no self-respecting Norseman would ever go near there again.
The western world was, as per usual, slow, and very sulkily reluctant, to agree or recognise that men from Scandinavia had been to America almost half a millennium before their darling, and even in the eighteenth century the stories told in the two Sagas were dismissed as myth, fairy tales, made-up nonsense. But history usually has the last laugh, and when actual physical evidence of the occupation was unearthed over a non-consecutive period of ten years (1961 to 1968 and then 1973 to 1976; don’t ask me why the big gap, maybe funding dried up?) they had no choice. The findings were clear: houses, boatsheds, a smithy, a kiln, cooking houses were all excavated in Newfoundland in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows, along with artifacts such as pins, bits of iron, copper and charcoal, all dated back to the eleventh century.
Accounts from Indian tribes, too, speak of men with blue eyes and yellow hair, who came in long boats with animal heads, and who the Indians worshipped like gods. The story is also told of a Viking ship found buried in the side of a mountain in a desert in California, witnessed only by three people we know of, but buried in an earthquake soon after, all trace of it lost. And then of course there are the inscriptions, records of travels and trade supposedly carved in rocks by the Norse, and found from Rhode Island to Colorado. I hardly need tell you that most if not all of these are pronounced fake or too recent by most researchers to be of any help in establishing evidence of the Norse presence in America, do I? In Mexico though, there’s some pretty strong - circumstantial, of course, but still - evidence to suggest the god of the Aztecs, Quetzcoatl, the winged serpent, is based on a Norse traveller who got marooned there and taught the people to turn away from human sacrifice. Yet another theory holds that the legend of the Amazons of South America can be traced back to the presence of Norse women in Paraguay.
Whatever the skeptics want to think, however much they may resist the idea, it is in fact quite impossible, and wilfully ignorant and arrogant to try to deny the Norse explored America in the early eleventh century. Why they did not succeed in establishing a permanent colony is dependent on many factors, not least of which was the hostility of the native population and their being outnumbered, far from home, and with no supply route to maintain a sustained offensive against the Indians. But advancing glaciers which choked the sea with ice, the similar advance of a darker and much more deadly barrier, the Black Death, and a general fight for survival surely took precedence over the need to explore, as Greenland was cut off from the rest of Europe and its population, like that of Europe itself, declined severely.