Leif Erikson in North America

The story

Sailors in search of land

The Vikings were the people of Scandinavia, in particular Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, who from the 8th century began to leave their lands to trade, to raid and to look for new land to farm. They had long, light ships, excellent for sailing on the open sea and on rivers. Passing from island to island, they reached the Orkneys, the Faroe Islands, Iceland (around 874) and then Greenland.

Around 985 an Icelandic chief, Erik the Red, exiled for murder, set out to the west and discovered a large land covered in ice, which he named Greenland, “green land”, to attract settlers. In the south of the island two settlements grew up, where a few hundred families lived, with farms and herds of sheep and cows.

Land sighted from afar

According to an account of the time, the “Saga of the Greenlanders”, a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson, while looking for Greenland, was blown off course by fog and saw in the distance wooded, hilly coasts that he did not know. He did not land, turned back and told what he had seen. A few years later, Erik the Red's son, Leif, wanted to check.

Leif Erikson bought Bjarni's ship, gathered a crew of about thirty-five men and, around the year 1000, sailed west, following the route in reverse. The sagas, which were written down two or three centuries later, tell that he found three lands. The first was full of slabs of stone, and he called it Helluland, “slab land”. The second was covered in forests, and he called it Markland, “forest land”. The third, farther south, had pastures and rivers rich in salmon, where, according to the story, wild vines or berries grew: he called it Vinland, “wine land” or perhaps “meadow land”.

Leif and his men spent the winter in that place, in houses of wood and turf, and in spring they returned to Greenland with a cargo of timber and grapes. Other expeditions followed. One, led by Thorfinn Karlsefni, brought some families and livestock; it met some natives, whom the Norse called “skrælings”, and there were peaceful exchanges but also clashes. After a few years the settlers abandoned the settlement.

A discovery in the 20th century

For centuries many thought these stories were only legends. Then, in 1960, a Norwegian explorer, Helge Ingstad, walking along the northern coast of the island of Newfoundland, in Canada, asked a fisherman of the village of L'Anse aux Meadows whether he knew of any ancient ruins. The fisherman took him to a group of small grassy mounds. Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, dug there for eight years.

They found the remains of eight buildings of wood and turf, in Norse style, of a forge where bog iron was worked, iron nails, a bronze pin and a spindle for spinning wool. It was proof that around the year 1000 Europeans had set foot in North America, almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. In 1978 L'Anse aux Meadows was among the first twelve sites placed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List.

In 2021 a group of scientists examined three pieces of wood cut with metal tools found at the site: by comparing the growth rings with those of an intense solar storm that took place in the year 993, they established that the trees were felled in exactly 1021. It remains to be understood whether L'Anse aux Meadows really is the Vinland of the sagas: butternuts, which grow farther south, were found at the site, and perhaps the true Vinland lay in a more southerly area.