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Viking Tales

Roughly 1,000 years ago, the story goes, a Viking trader and adventurer named Thorfinn Karlsefni set off from the west coast of Greenland with three ships and a band of Norse to explore a newly discovered land that promised fabulous riches. Following the route that had been pioneered some seven years before by Leif Eriksson, Thorfinn sailed up Greenland’s coast, traversed the Davis Strait and turned south past Baffin Island to Newfoundland—and perhaps beyond. Snorri, the son of Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid, is thought to be the first European baby born in North America.

Thorfinn and his band found their promised riches— game, fish, timber and pasture—and also encountered Native Americans, whom they denigrated as skraelings, or “wretched people.” Little wonder, then, that relations with the Natives steadily deteriorated. About three years after starting out, Thorfinn—along with his family and surviving crew—abandoned the North American settlement, perhaps in a hail of arrows. (Archaeologists have found arrowheads with the remains of buried Norse explorers.) After sailing to Greenland and then Norway, Thorfinn and his family settled in Iceland, Thorfinn’s childhood home.

All the detail about Norse trips to Vinland (as the Norse called North America) comes from two accounts: The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders. These epic Viking tales were probably first written down around 1200 or 1300 by scribes who either recorded the oral stories of elders or worked from some now-lost written source, says Thor Hjaltalin, an Icelandic scholar who oversees archaeological activities in northwest Iceland. The two sagas give similar accounts of Thorfinn’s trip to the New World, but they differ on some significant details about his return to Iceland. In Erik the Red’s saga, Thorfinn moves back to his family estate in Reynisnes, while in the Greenlanders’ saga, Thor-finn settles down in Glaumbaer, after his mother proves less than welcoming to his wife. In a key passage from the Greenlanders’ saga, Thor-finn sells some of his Vinland spoils in Norway, then comes to “north Iceland, in Skagafjord, where he had his ship drawn ashore for the winter. In the spring he purchased the land at Glaumbaer and established his farm there.” It goes on: “He and his wife, Gudrid, had a great number of descendants, and a fine clan they were. . . . After [Thorfinn’s] death, Gudrid took over the running of the household, together with her son Snorri who had been born in Vinland.”

At first, Iceland offered a paradise to these ruggedly independent Vikings. The lowlands had forests of birch and other trees that had never felt the ax. In just 60 years the population jumped from zero to 70,000. By 930, the Norse had established one of the world’s first parliaments, the Althing, where chiefs met to settle disputes.

There was just one sore point to this idyllic life. Settled and organized though they might have been, the Vikings were also some of the toughest warriors who ever lived. A slighted Norse was not the type to turn the other cheek. The resulting bloody duels reverberated far beyond Iceland. As Stefansson put it in 1930, writing during Prohibition, “The eventual discovery of North America hangs upon a fashionable practice of the day, that of man-killing, which, like cocktail shaking in the later America, was against the law but was indulged by the best people.” He was referring to a few unreconstructed manslayers like Erik the Red, who overtaxed even the Norse tolerance for conflict and was exiled more than once by his fellow chiefs. Erik was first forced to relocate to Iceland’s west coast and was then banished from the island altogether.

According to the sagas, Erik eventually set up a farmstead on the west coast of Greenland. The incongruous name for this barren, frigid island dominated by a vast ice cap comes from the outcast’s attempt to lure other settlers, demonstrating “a genius for advertising that made him prophetically American,” Stefansson wrote. Erik heard tales of strange lands to the west from a Norse sailor blown off course en route to Greenland, and it was his son Leif who led the first expedition to the New World. Another was led by Erik’s son Thorvald (who died in Vinland from an arrow wound). Thorfinn Karlsefni led a third.

Thorfinn’s assumed lineage is distinguished: one ancestor was Aud the Deepminded, a queen from the British Isles, and another was Ugarval, a king of Ireland. Thorfinn had grown up in Iceland on a farm not far from Glaumbaer. A wealthy merchant notorious for his cleverness, Thorfinn was also a good leader. On a trading voyage to Greenland, he met and married Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the beautiful and charismatic widow of Erik’s son Thorvald. (A history of Iceland written around 1120, as well as scattered church records, back up the genealogies and dates in the sagas.) During the winter of 1005 at Brattahlid, Erik’s manor in Greenland’s eastern colony, Thorfinn played board games and planned his trip to Vinland. Erik the Red’s saga makes the planning sound boisterous and somewhat haphazard, noting that various other Norse chiefs decided to join the expedition seemingly on the spur of the moment.

While Leif Eriksson is the Viking name most familiar to Americans, the sagas devote as much space to Thorfinn and his voyage. Steinberg’s discovery supports a long-held theory that Thorfinn was the principal teller of the sagas. (That would explain why he plays such a major role in them.) Steinberg notes that knowing the source of a text helps historians weigh the assertions.

If in fact Thorfinn and company traveled as far south as Gowanus Bay in New York Harbor, as asserted by the British scholar Geoffrey Gathorne-Hardy in 1921, they would have sailed past some of the greatest stands of primeval hardwoods on the planet, not to mention grapes—treasured by Norse chiefs who cemented their status with feasts accompanied by copious amounts of wine—and unlimited fish and game.

Why would the Norse have abandoned them or similar inducements farther north? Perhaps the Vikings’ Vinland was like Alexander the Great’s India: a land of fabulous wealth so far from home that it was beyond the limits of his ability to impose his will. Both Norse sagas have Thorfinn beating a retreat north after some humbling battles with Native warriors. (See “Why Didn’t They Stay?”)

Thorfinn never went back to Vinland, but other Norse subsequently did. Evidence continues to accumulate that Norse traded with both Inuit and more southern tribes for skins, and that they regularly brought back wood and other items from the New World. Over the years, various accounts have placed Norse colonies in Maine, Rhode Island and elsewhere on the AtlanticCoast, but the only unambiguous Norse settlement in North America remains L’Anse aux Meadows.

Icelanders, for their part, need no persuading of the Viking’s preeminence among Europeans in the New World. Asked who discovered America, 8-year-old Kristin Bjarnadottir, a third grader in Holar, Iceland, answers with complete confidence: “Leifur,” naming the celebrated Viking explorer. She and other Icelandic kids often play a game called Great Adventurer, in which they take on the roles of the saga heroes. Steinberg’s ongoing investigation of the turf house in Glaumbaer and other structures could well give Kristin and her friends rich new exploits of their Viking ancestors to act out.

The Viking presence in North America had dwindled to nothing long before Columbus began island hopping in the Caribbean. Why did the Norse fail where other Europeans succeeded? After all, Vikings were consummate seamen and peerless raiders who populated marginally inhabitable Greenland and who would push their way into the British Isles and France. And with their iron weapons and tools, they had a technological edge over America.s indigenous peoples.

Several explanations have been advanced for the Vikings. abandonment of North America. Perhaps there were too few of them to sustain a settlement. Or they may have been forced out by American Indians. While the European conquest was abetted by infectious diseases that spread from the invaders to the Natives, who succumbed in great numbers because they had no acquired immunity, early Icelanders may not have carried similar infections.

But more and more scholars focus on climate change as the reason the Vikings couldn.t make a go of it in the New World. The scholars suggest that the western Atlantic suddenly turned too cold even for Vikings. The great sailing trips of Leif and Thorfinn took place in the first half of the 11th century, during a climatic period in the North Atlantic called the Medieval Warming, a time of long, warm summers and scarce sea ice. Beginning in the 12th century, however, the weather started to deteriorate with the first frissons of what scholars call the Little Ice Age. Tom McGovern, an archaeologist at HunterCollege in New York City, has spent more than 20 years reconstructing the demise of a Norse settlement on Greenland. In the middle of the 14th century, the colony suffered eight harsh winters in a row, culminating, in 1355, in what may have been the worst in a century. McGovern says the Norse ate their livestock and dogs before turning to whatever else they could find in their final winter there. The settlers might have survived if they had mimicked the Inuit, who hunted ringed seal in the winter and prospered during the Little Ice Age.

With sea ice making the routes from Iceland to Greenland and back impassable for Norse ships for much of the year, the Little Ice Age probably curtailed further Norse traffic to North America. Iceland also fared badly during this time. By 1703, weather-related food shortages and epidemics of plague and smallpox had reduced Iceland.s population to 53,000, from more than 150,000 in 1250.

It’s worth pondering how the history of the West might have differed if the weather had remained balmy. Norse populations in Iceland and Greenland might have flourished, and the Vikings might have remained in North America. If the temperature had been a few degrees higher, some of North America might be speaking Norse today.

The Vikings: A Memorable Visit to America

Exploring the New World a thousand years ago, a Viking woman gave birth to what is likely the first European-American baby. The discovery of the house the family built upon their return to Iceland has scholars rethinking the Norse sagas

• By Eugene Linden
• Smithsonian magazine, December 2004

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