A Brief History of the Vikings (30 page)

Once North America was more than merely a memory of legendary Vinland, Scandinavian settlers established the short-lived colony of New Sweden there in 1638, and the fortress of Elfsborg on the Delaware river in the 1640s. Sweden’s power in the New World, however, was already on the wane, and by 1655 the Swedish possessions were handed over to the Dutch. This, however, did not eradicate the Scandinavian presence – the oldest church in America is the Old Swedes Church in Wilmington (formerly Fort Kristina), Delaware.
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When Scandinavian settlers arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, advertisements for colonists emphasized the new lands to the west, and that they might be reached by rail – by the 1870s, San Francisco was suggested as the ultimate destination. The Allan Mail Line, which had several routes from Norway, Sweden and Denmark to England, also made regular crossings to New York and Quebec. From those destinations, Scandinavian colonists were likely to enter the United States through the Great Lakes, to Chicago, and thence along the railway further west. But many of them did not make it too far, preferring to settle among the lakes and forests in America’s north, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, lands which often bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones they had left.
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Old stories about Vinland soon gained new credence, and the race was on to prove that the Vinland sagas were factual reports. The surge in interest in the Vikings in the English-speaking
world saw a statue of Leif Eriksson unveiled in Boston in 1887, and culminated in 1893 with the voyage of the
Viking
, a full-sized vessel inspired by the design of the Gokstad ship, that successfully made the voyage from Bergen to Newfoundland in an impressive 28 days. Arriving in America as the Norwegian entry in an exposition that was supposed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America, the
Viking
instilled considerably national pride, both at home and among Americans of Scandinavian ancestry. The period also saw a disappointing number of hoaxes and bogus claims. The coin of Olaf the Peaceful, found in Maine, was a verifiable archaeological find. Others were of more doubtful origin.

Olof Ohman joined many of his countrymen as an immigrant settler in Minnesota. He had been farming his land for eight years or so when he uncovered a slab of stone in one of his fields in 1898, etched with what appeared to be runes – an illiterate scrawl from which could be discerned occasional words identifiable with modern Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and English ones. With the same year seeing the publication of the second edition of Samuel Laing’s landmark translation of
Heimskringla
, the American public were ready to hear more about Vikings, particularly if it related directly to them.

The discovery of the so-called Kensington Stone was largely ignored, until it was championed some 20 years later by Hjalmar Rued Holand, a writer in Wisconsin, who argued that it was a sign of a much deeper penetration into Vinland than had been previously thought. If the inscription on the stone was true, the Vikings had not turned back at Cape Cod at all, but ventured along the Great Lakes to Minnesota itself. What were the odds? The inscription, if a translator was feeling very flexible, could be interpreted as reading:

. . . 8 Goths [Swedes] and 22 Northmen on an exploring journey from Vinland westward. We had our camp by two rocky islets one day’s journey north of this stone. We were out fishing one day. When we came home, we found ten men red with blood and dead. AVM [
A Virgine Maria?
] save us from evil. Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days’ journey from this island. 1362.
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Scandinavian scholars immediately dismissed the Kensington Stone as a forgery, but away from the groves of academia, others found Holand’s arguments very persuasive. There were, of course, plenty of reasons for the Minnesotans to want to believe in an earlier visit by their ancestors. The 1893 voyage of the
Viking
had swelled them with ancestral pride, and there was always some mileage to be gained by claiming America to have been discovered by Protestant Norsemen instead of Catholics led by Christopher Columbus. It was not until the 1950s that the hoax was exposed, the mysterious rune-carver established not as a beleaguered explorer from the fourteenth century, but a modern Minnesotan hoaxer with a well-thumbed dictionary of runes.

In 1940, Reider Sherwin published
The Viking and the Red Man
, a misguided attempt to prove that the Old Norse language had made a considerable contribution to the vocabulary of Algonquin Indian. If this were true, it would mean that the Vikings had played a significantly greater part in the history of North America than was previously believed. Unfortunately for Sherwin, his thesis held little water – his book was largely a comparative dictionary of Scandinavian and Native American languages, and demonstrated little grasp of historical linguistics. Many of his supposed cognates are mere coincidences or laughably different, while others can be explained by simple onomatopoeia.

In 1957 an Italian bookseller began hawking yet another artefact around antiquarian booksellers in Europe. It was a battered book,
The Tartar Relation
, purportedly from sometime around 1440, containing a fragment of a report by a Franciscan monk who had visited the court of the Mongols in the 1240s. Friar Carpini’s 21-page account of China was interesting enough in itself, and constituted a rare find, but what interested Scandinavian scholars was the map that accompanied it. It showed the known world of Carpini’s time, including Japan, Tartary, what was known of Africa, and, with increasingly more accurate detail, Europe. Most crucially of all, far to the west of Europe, past Iceland and Greenland, was the unmistakable outline of Newfoundland and Labrador, marked
Vinilanda Insula
– the isle of Vinland. If the map were genuine, it represented conclusive proof, not only that the Vikings had visited America, but also that the discovery had been appreciated and accepted in Europe itself. Such a find would destroy much of the historical achievement of Columbus and his successors.

Some historians were sceptical from the outset. The wormholes on the map did not match those on the rest of the book, nor did the ink used to draw it. If the map was not associated with the manuscript that accompanied it, then its date could not be established, and that rendered its inclusion of a ‘Vinland’ almost worthless. It was, however, regarded as an interesting enough find to be worthy of exhibiting at Yale University, its eventual owner. The manuscript was displayed for a decade, until modern forensics advanced to the stage where it could be examined not just for its content, but also for its material. Sadly for its creator, whoever he may have been, the Vinland Map was pronounced a forgery, with a high ink content of titanium dioxide, not found in inks before the early twentieth century.

Despite such muddying of the academic waters, the twentieth century did see a Vinland finding of undeniable importance, in the small Newfoundland village of L’Anse aux Meadows. Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian Arctic biologist, spent 1959 scouring the American coast north of New England, in search of any island redoubts that could conceivably fit the descriptions left in the Vinland sagas. In 1960, he heard of the Anse aux Meadows site – a series of humps and hollows known to the locals as the ‘Indian Camp’. It had indeed once been a campsite for Indian hunters, but at some point in the distant past, a different kind of settler had briefly occupied the windswept ground. These mystery visitors had stacked turf sods in order to create temporary shelters, presumably roofed over with tarpaulins from their ships.

At the time of its construction, around
AD
1000, the time of Leif Eriksson’s voyage, the Anse aux Meadows site had been a beachfront – the intervening millennium has let a hundred metres of boggy ground silt up in between it and the sea. It was not an obvious place to site a settlement, but would have been ideally suited for the beaching of ships and their maintenance. In a separate enclosure were found relics of a small smith’s workshop, presumably set aside from the living quarters to avoid a risk of accident – and wisely so, since the building had caught fire at least once during its brief use.

In terms of tangible objects, there is not all that much at the Anse aux Meadows site. There is, however, definite evidence of human habitation, very clear residue from metal smithing, cracked flagstones in what appears to have been a sauna building, and a pin designed to hold a Norse cloak. Whoever had lived there had not been Native American, and their habitation had been brief. Ingstad believed that he had finally located the site of Leif Eriksson’s camp, and with it, proof of a Viking visitation.

There was, understandably, some doubt in the academic community that such a fantastic site should be found by a man who was not even a professional (Helge’s wife Anne Stine Ingstad was the archaeologist of the team, Helge more the publicist), but extensive surveys have backed up the majority of the Ingstads’ claims. A later excavation by Bengt Schönbäck determined that the Ingstads had been overzealous in believing that some natural depressions in the ground were ‘boat-sheds’, but that their findings were otherwise sound. In fact, the Schönbäck excavation uncovered even more material of Viking origin – mainly wooden fragments of furniture and household items. It was established to the satisfaction of Schönbäck that the Ingstads were essentially correct in their findings. Europeans of Norse origin had lived at L’Anse aux Meadows for a few years, before presumably departing whence they had come.

In June 2000, on the estimated 1,000th anniversary of Leif’s supposed arrival, crowds flocked to the tiny L’Anse aux Meadows settlement for a double millennial celebration. The replica Viking vessel
Islendingur
led a small flotilla of Norse vessels back to the place the Vikings had left so long before, accompanied by captain Gunnar Eggertsson, a modern descendant of Leif the Lucky. The celebrations were even attended by representatives of the local Native Americans, happy to remind visitors that while the celebration was of the Vikings, the Vinland settlement had been chased away by the Indians, who had ‘discovered’ America considerably earlier than anyone else.

The modern replica houses built near the original L’Anse aux Meadows site are slightly misleading. They are not the turf ‘booths’ of saga and archaeological record, but buildings with stone foundations and turfed roofs and despite their supposed educational function, they give a far more permanent and
lasting impression of the Vinland voyages than is perhaps warranted; they have probably already been occupied for longer than the originals. This willingness of the people of the twenty-first century to adapt Viking culture to their own ends is typical. When the Norse men and women first came to America, there were perhaps no more than 150 of them with their plans for a colony. A thousand years later, 15,000 people, a hundred times the headcount of the original settlers, turned out at L’Anse aux Meadows to welcome the
Islendingur
and its accompanying ships. The empire of the Vikings has faded, but their influence lives on – they are fictional creations today, the creatures of movies and comics, and figures of fun or lurid horror. Our impression of them is created largely through literature – the tales, tall and otherwise, spun by their isolated Icelandic descendants, and the retellings of the sagas by Victorian authors.

Modern research into DNA has established a heavy Viking presence in many places outside Scandinavia. Unsurprisingly, the prevalence of Y-chromosomes with a Danish or Norse origin runs in close correlation to the Norse place names to be found on an English map. The further north one goes in Britain, the more likelihood there is of Viking ancestry, and once into the Scottish isles, Norwegian genes are dominant. Such racial relics are less obvious in other places; the Rus, for example were bands of single men who most often took local wives and concubines, thus swiftly diluting the Scandinavian genes in their descendants.

The Vikings do not,
should not
, exist any more. The last vestige of the Viking spirit can be found in criminals and chancers, and hopefully, that is where it will stay. They are a part of our nature that we would like to deny – robbers, thieves and pirates, that we like to believe are expelled by modern times.

If anything can be learned from more recent studies of history, it is the role that climate and ecology can play in population movements. In the Viking Age and the centuries that preceded it, northern Europe’s unpredictable climate periodically forced barbarian tribes to go in search of new resources. In our supposedly enlightened age, the search for such resources has been sublimated, corporatized, sanitized perhaps, but it has not receded. You did not, I hope, steal this book from someone else. The clothes on your back were not snatched from Irish monks, and you did not appropriate your money by smashing up priceless holy relics, but there is still a perilously thin line that separates you from the hungry and the cold, and from the need to secure food and warmth. Few of us are more than a few months away from bankruptcy. We hand over new forms of
manngjöld
, hoping to shield ourselves against misfortune by paying tax and insurance. Our faith in our governments and welfare systems keeps us from having to consider what we would do if they were not there.