Did the Vikings really visit America before Columbus: Scientists present new evidence

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Mentions in the Viking sagas of the country across the ocean, to which their ships sailed, have long agitated the minds. Especially the Scandinavians were pleased to know that their ancestors were probably the first Europeans in the New World - long before Columbus. But proving these guesses and legends was not easy.

Two sagas about going overseas

In the eighteenth century, two discovered recorded Icelandic sagas were first published in print. One was called "The Greenlandic Saga", the other - "The Saga of Eric the Red." They were composed centuries ago - by modern estimates, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - but retelling in poetic form simple oral family traditions of even more ancient events. Events somewhere in the eleventh century.

Both records spoke of the Viking campaign in the land of Vinland (land of grapes) beyond the last sea after Greenland. And after Greenland, if you sail from Europe, there was already North America! True, it is not entirely clear why it was called the land of grapes, because the Vikings could only swim as far as the description in the sagas to the harsh North American shores.

On the other hand, one might just as well wonder why the cold, eternally ice-covered Greenland is called the Green Land. A matter of chance - at the moment when the discoverer was looking at her, the slopes of the fiords were just covered with grass. Perhaps in Vinland a plant accidentally reminded the Vikings of grapes. Maybe leaves, maybe those that hung in lashes, or maybe the shape of berries.

From the sagas it is known that several Vikings died in the new land, and that for some time Europeans lived there, building a house and keeping cattle with them. This means that some traces of their stay should have remained. In addition, there is always the possibility that the Scandinavians left traces in the local gene pool, and enthusiasts began to extract real or false evidence that among the Native Americans brought to Europe as trophies were fair-haired and fair-skinned.

Attempts to colonize new shores were, in any case, three, the last was headed by the daughter of Eric the Red, and at least one expedition should have left something.

Runestone

In 1898, an American farmer named Olof Eman, an ethnic Swede, claimed to have found a stone covered in signs by uprooting a poplar. It happened near the city of Kensington, in the state of Minnesota. Eman thought that he saw before him some kind of "Indian almanac" - or said that he thought so. The size of the stone was 76 centimeters in length, 40 in width and 15 in thickness.

Deciding that they saw the Greek alphabet in front of them, the local authorities sent the stone to a specialist in ancient Greek. He, however, redirected the slab to his colleague Olaus Brad, a connoisseur of Scandinavian letters. Brad decided that this was a fake, but nevertheless he carefully copied the inscriptions and sent a copy to the linguists of Scandinavia - let them be curious. They agreed with the fake version.

The stone itself was sent back to Eman, and he just used it like any other large slab - he made a step in front of the door, very convenient! So that the signs did not confuse the guests, the stone was laid with the smooth side up. Later, the stone was literally dug up again and during several checks it was recognized as a) real, b) fake. In general, it cannot be considered reliable evidence of the presence of the Vikings in America.

Houses from the Bay of Medusa

Medusa Bay is a village in Canada, on the island of Newfoundland. The French who came here for the first time heard about the Indians that somewhere nearby - you can swim - there is a country in which is full of gold (which aroused the enthusiasm of the French in their search). In addition to gold, the country of Saguenay, which the Indians talked about, was inhabited by people with white skin and blond hair. The French combed all the islands off the coast of Canada, but did not find the mysterious country. Then in honor of her - just like in honor of a local legend - a city in the province of Quebec was named.

Already in the sixties of the twentieth century, another expedition of the spouses Helge and Anne Stein Ingstad in search of traces of the Vikings discovered traces of a European forge in the village of Medusa Bay. There were eight foundations around the forge, and bronze fasteners and several other items were found in this unnamed ancient settlement. All found artifacts could be confidently dated to the eleventh century.

In 2012, the expedition of Patricia Sutherland managed to find a second Viking settlement, beyond the Arctic Circle. In the ruins of the building discovered by archaeologists, there were, for example, whetstones with traces of bronze - an alloy that the inhabitants of the Arctic never used, unlike the Vikings.

The find was not accidental. Sutherland, visiting the Museum of Canadian Cultures in 1999, saw, among other exhibits, two pieces of rope and drew attention to the fact that they are woven from threads, not sinews. Native Canadians did not spin, meanwhile, the ropes were ancient and were found in the Baffin land. Sutherland checked several more museums, and found other ropes, as well as wooden rulers and whetstones. Almost everything was found in Baffin Land, and Sutherland organized an expedition. She was lucky relatively quickly - a careful search led archaeologists to the remains of a building made of stone and turf.

I must say that a number of Native Americans from the northern continent were familiar with similar buildings, so the find might not mean anything. But inside the buildings were found the very stones with traces of bronze, a typical Greenland whalebone shovel, remnants of yarn and … pieces of rat skins. The latter were interesting because they belonged to European, not local, rats.

The third settlement was found already in 2016 - using satellite imagery. Sarah Parkak, an American, studied many images and figured out the most promising site for new excavations - south of Medusa Bay. On the spot, they conducted an initial survey with a magnetometer and revealed the presence of a large amount of iron, which was very encouraging. Already the first excavations yielded pieces of artificially fused ore. The scientific world is waiting for new findings from the site.

Contacts of Europeans and Americans

The very first contact between the Greenlanders and the Americans was very typical for the Vikings: the Europeans attacked nine people in three canoes, some were killed and some were taken into slavery. Some escaped, and the avengers came to the Viking settlement. Thus began the war between Europeans and Americans, because of which the Vikings had to eventually return home.

However, they did not return empty-handed. A massive genetic study of the Icelanders revealed the presence of eleven descendants of the same woman from the Old World among them. Some of the Vikings brought with them an American woman who was captured as a wife or children from her. And it is not surprising: there were much more men than women on Viking expeditions. In such cases, the Vikings always tried to get hold of local wives or concubines.

It is possible that the Vikings captured and forced many more women into cohabitation, but everyone else was thrown on American shores - and possibly pregnant. In this case, there is also a possibility that the children of these American women were born, survived and gave birth to offspring. But to find their traces is possible only under two conditions. First, that the American descendants of the Vikings did not fall under the genocide of the indigenous population, which was staged by other Europeans later. Second, there will be a large-scale genetic study of indigenous people in western Canada and the United States.

The Vikings were an extremely expansive community. From America to the Caspian, from Greenland to Africa: How the Vikings almost conquered half of the land.