The Northwomen, page 21
Today, we are fortunate enough to have accounts of the voyages that Erik’s children and his extended family made to the northeastern shores of North America. These accounts are preserved in two important Icelandic texts, Erik the Red’s Saga and the Saga of the Greenlanders, which were written down between 1220 and 1280 and are known collectively today as The Vinland Sagas. These two sagas contain somewhat different accounts of the voyages and the events that took place in North America. And while the Saga of the Greenlanders is thought by many scholars to be the most evenhanded account, both contain much valuable information, and archaeological evidence confirms that such voyages took place. In addition, saga experts have reconstructed a probable sequence of the events, which begins around the year 985 or 986.
At that time, a prosperous young Viking trader, Bjarni Herjólfsson, sailed from Norway to visit his father, who was living in Iceland. But when the young merchant landed there, he learned that his father had just left for Greenland with a party of emigrants. So Bjarni and his crew quickly set off to the west after them, hoping to make the best of the good weather at the time.
Three days out, however, their ship was enveloped in thick fog and blown off course by a bitter wind from the north. When the murk finally lifted, Bjarni was unable to get his bearings. He had no idea where they were. Eventually, when the weather cleared, the crew spied land in the distance. The terrain was hilly and forested, and it bore no resemblance to the stories they had heard of Greenland. So Bjarni angled back out to sea. He and his crew sailed farther into the distance, spotting two more points of land. The first was wooded; the second was an island with high mountains and a glacier. But neither looked like the Greenland he had heard about, and the young merchant feared they were pushing their luck with the weather. So they turned seaward. Four days later, they arrived safely in one of the Viking settlements in Greenland.
If the Saga of the Greenlanders is accurate, Bjarni had actually spotted the rugged northeast coast of North America from a distance, though he did not go ashore. Even so, his stories of rolling, forested lands in the West seem to have made a big impression on Greenland’s paramount chieftain, Erik the Red, and his family. Greenland lacked a critical natural resource: timber suitable for shipbuilding. Without it, the settlements would struggle, as they needed timber to construct boats for local travel as well as ships for sailing back and forth to Iceland and Norway. Thus, the possibility of discovering vast new timberlands in the West must have sorely tempted Greenland’s leaders. Certainly, it eventually proved irresistible to Leif Eriksson.
With his father’s blessing, Leif is said to have bought Bjarni’s ship and hired 35 men to join him. When all was ready, the crew set sail, crossing the ice-choked waters that separated Greenland from the Canadian Arctic. Somewhere on Baffin Island, they rowed ashore and found mainly barren rock. They named that place Helluland, meaning “stone-slab land.” Sailing south, along the coast of Labrador, they found a flat, forested coastline with sandy beaches. They called it Markland, meaning “forest land.”
Two days later, they sighted land once again—this time, an island off a large headland in what was almost certainly northern Newfoundland. They sailed into the mouth of a river and arrived at a lake. And there, they constructed temporary shelters with turf walls and cloth roofs and slept in their sea blankets. After taking a look around and catching fish in both the river and the lake, Leif decided to winter there. So he and his crew built sturdy houses suitable for the cold months ahead.
In the spring, Leif sent out half his crew to explore more distant regions, while the other half remained at the camp to guard the ship and the houses. Not long after, a crew member named Tyrkir announced that he had found a place where wild grapes grew. Among the Vikings, grapes were a luxury food, and chieftains were fond of serving wine at great feasts. Eager to lay hands on this fruit, Leif instructed his crew to harvest grapes as well as fell timber to take back home. The following spring, when the work was done, he and his men returned to Greenland, but not before he had given this new southern land a name—Vinland, meaning “wine land.”
At Brattahlíð, Leif regaled his family with stories of the rich new lands in the West. But it was said that he never saw the shores of Vinland again. His father, Erik the Red, died after his return, and Leif became Greenland’s new paramount chieftain. Burdened with new responsibilities at home, he delegated the task of scouting the shores of Vinland to other members of his family, including two famous women: Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, the widow of one of Leif’s brothers, and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, who was either Leif’s sister or half sister. To assist these expeditions, Leif passed on much valuable information and gave his relatives permission to use the base camp he had built.
The Vinland Sagas tell us a great deal about Gudríd, who was an early convert to Christianity and who was later known as Gudríd the Wide-Traveled. Born around 990 in Iceland, she journeyed to Greenland as a young woman and was warmly received into the home of a prominent Viking farmer there. She was said to be as wise as she was beautiful, and she soon caught the eye of Erik the Red’s son Thorstein, who proposed marriage. But not long after their wedding, Thorstein fell tragically ill and died. So the young widow went to live at Brattahlíð. There, tales of Vinland and its riches had electrified the family, and Gudríd, a spirited woman, was swept up by the excitement. When a wealthy Icelandic trader, Thorfinn Karlsefni, asked to marry her, her guardian and former brother-in-law, Leif Eriksson, granted his permission.
Gudríd soon urged her new husband to lead a new expedition to Vinland, and Thorfinn, who shared her enthusiasm for exploration, threw himself into preparations for the journey. The following spring, he and Gudríd set sailed west with a crew of 60 men and five women. According to one of the Vinland Sagas, Leif’s sister or half sister, Freydís, and her husband, Thorvard, also joined them.
Thorfinn, Gudríd, and their crew seem to have spent a quiet first year in the camp that Leif had loaned to them. They fished and hunted game, picked wild grapes, and felled trees for timber. But the following summer, they received a surprise visit from a party of Indigenous men who carried packs containing furs and animal skins to trade. These guests wanted iron weapons. But Thorfinn stopped his men from trading any arms, offering the visitors milk and other dairy products from the expedition’s small herd of cattle instead. Satisfied by this, their callers left valuable furs, and departed content. It was a peaceful encounter. But the sudden appearance of the men worried Thorfinn. His wife was pregnant, and the camp lacked fortifications, so he instructed the crew to build a wooden palisade. Not long after this, Gudríd gave birth to their son, Snorri.
As Thorfinn feared, the camp eventually received another surprise visit from an even larger party of Indigenous warriors. But this time, the encounter erupted into a violent, pitched battle. Thorfinn and his men were badly outnumbered, and they were on the verge of retreating upriver when Freydís, Erik the Red’s daughter, suddenly hustled onto the battlefield. She was heavily pregnant at the time, and when she saw what was about to unfold, she flew into a rage. She began taunting the Viking fighters, goading them to greater efforts. “Had I a weapon,” she yelled, “I’m sure I would fight better than any of you.”
Thorfinn and his men ignored her. They fled into the forest, and Freydís followed, trying to keep up as best she could until she spotted the body of one of Thorfinn’s men on the ground. Leaning down, she grabbed the dead man’s sword. Then she turned to face the attackers alone. Yanking back her chemise, she held up the sword and began slapping the flat blade against her bare breast. She seemed utterly fearless at that moment—a wild woman of the woods—and she so cowed the Indigenous warriors, it seems, that they melted back into the forest and paddled away.
According to the saga, Freydís had won the day, but the attack greatly troubled Thorfinn. The expedition that he and Gudríd had mounted could not hope to hold off a large, sustained attack by Vinland’s many warriors. So the following spring, when the weather improved, the expedition set sail for Greenland. And months later Gudríd and Thorfinn returned to Iceland with their infant son, abandoning their dreams of exploring the new land.
But not everyone was ready to give up on Vinland. In Greenland, Freydís began quietly organizing a new expedition to Vinland, capitalizing on her high rank as the daughter of Erik the Red. She recruited two Icelandic traders as business partners, offering to share the expedition’s profits with them, and the trio obtained two ships and hired a suitable group of men and women for the new venture. But Freydís did not trust her new partners. Contrary to the agreement she’d negotiated, she took five more men on the expedition than they did, ensuring that she would have a larger force at her command.
Sure enough, the partnership soured. The two Icelanders arrived in Vinland before Freydís, and they moved into the base camp that Leif had loaned to her, expecting her to make do elsewhere. But the chieftain’s daughter would have none of it, insisting on her rights. So the Icelanders and their party were pushed out and forced to build new lodgings of their own, a move that sowed much ill will between the partners. And when the long, dark winter set in, the tensions mounted.
One night, Freydís woke up her husband, Thorvard, telling him that her partners had physically abused her during an argument. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, this was a lie, but Freydís demanded that Thorvard avenge her. Unable to calm her, he finally agreed and instructed their men to take the Icelandic traders and their party captive. Freydís then ordered her men to execute the prisoners. Reluctantly, they did as she wished, but they drew the line at slaughtering the traders’ women. So Freydís stepped in. Asking for an axe, she killed the women herself. Then she threatened to do the same to anyone who spoke of what had happened on their return to Greenland. At home in the settlements, the story slowly leaked out. And long after that, Freydís and her children were apparently feared and shunned by their neighbors.
The Vinland Sagas have fascinated generations of readers, and I confess that I am one of them. But the accounts of these Viking voyages were written down more than two centuries after the events were said to have taken place, and this, as well as the exaggerated and sometimes fictional elements in the sagas, have long raised doubts about their accuracy. In hopes of shedding more light on the matter, enthusiasts roamed eastern North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, searching for Viking camps, runestones, and artifacts. But they turned up very little reliable evidence.
Then, in 1960, a celebrated Norwegian author and outdoorsman, Helge Ingstad, and his 16-year-old daughter journeyed to the east coast of Canada to find the landscapes and Viking settlements described in the famous sagas.
Ingstad was a man with a restless spirit. After studying law in Oslo, he gave up his law practice in his mid-20s to become a trapper in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Bitten hard by the adventure bug there, he spent a good part of his life traveling to remote parts of the world and writing popular books about the Indigenous people he encountered there. During a sojourn in Greenland, he became fascinated with The Vinland Sagas, and in 1958 began drawing up plans to travel to northern Newfoundland and Labrador to search for traces of the Viking explorers.
Ingstad made a detailed study of The Vinland Sagas, taking careful note of the many small geographical details mentioned in them. He was particularly interested in locating the base camp built by Leif Eriksson, so in 1960 he and his daughter, Benedicte, set off by boat along the northern tip of Newfoundland, searching for spots that matched places described in the sagas. As they nudged along the coast, stopping in the small villages, they chatted with local fishermen and farmers. At one stop, a man mentioned some old ruins at a nearby place called L’Anse aux Meadows. Intrigued, Helge arranged transport to the site, and he and Benedicte set off to investigate.
When they arrived, the property owner took them to see the spot. Father and daughter were stunned. There was a large meandering brook, a beach where a Viking ship could be hauled ashore, an open grassy meadow, and several ridges whose raised contours eerily resembled the walls of Viking longhouses. Nearby lay a small peat bog. In Iceland and other parts of the Viking world, farmers and blacksmiths routinely processed iron from bog deposits to make a metal suitable for weapons and tools. All in all, L’Anse aux Meadows looked like a superb spot for a Viking base camp. “Everything about the place had a ‘Saga’ feeling to it,” Benedicte later wrote.
Helge returned the following summer with his wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, who had recently completed a master’s degree in Nordic archaeology. Anne Stine was particularly struck by the raised contours at the site that seemed to conceal the walls of a Viking longhouse, and by the close resemblance of the site to the saga descriptions of Leif Eriksson’s base camp. Impressed by the potential of the site, she and Helge hired a few local workers to assist with small test excavations. At a rectangular-shape contour near the river, the small team discovered remnants of turf-brick walls, a type of construction that Viking settlers had used extensively in their homes in both Greenland and Iceland. Elsewhere on the site, the team found a few Norse artifacts.
A few months later, in October 1961, the Ingstads held a press conference in Oslo, announcing their discovery of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. And in the seven field seasons that followed, Anne Stine and an international team of researchers unearthed much compelling evidence of Viking seafarers at the site. Later, under the management of Parks Canada, scientific investigations at the site continued into the early 2020s, as Swedish Canadian archaeologist Birgitta Wallace and a series of other archaeologists directed additional fieldwork.
In all, the extensive excavations revealed the ruins of eight Viking buildings, from spacious halls to tiny pit houses and huts. All were constructed in the Icelandic style adopted by the early settlers of Greenland, with thick turf walls and a sod roof. The largest of the turf-walled buildings, which archaeologists call hall F, sprawled over more than 1,720 square feet. It possessed three rooms for living and sleeping, a kitchen area, two impressive storage rooms, and a shed. Clearly, it was built for the leader of a Viking expedition—perhaps even Leif Eriksson himself. But the settlement also included accommodations for other important people, ordinary crew members, and even slaves. Taken together, the evidence showed that the site could have housed as many as 90 people at any one time.
In 2021, an international research team precisely dated the Viking presence at L’Anse aux Meadows via an ingenious new scientific method. The team focused on three discarded logs that the Vikings had worked with their iron tools at the site. By studying the annual growth rings visible in cross sections of the logs, the scientists found a distinctive “time stamp” caused by a massive, once-in-a-millennium solar radiation event in A.D. 993. The resulting study, published in the journal Nature, revealed that all three of the trees were alive at that time and had absorbed that massive burst of radiation nearly three decades before they were worked by the Vikings. This dated their presence at the settlement with extraordinary precision to A.D. 1021, proving that Viking seafarers were the earliest known Europeans in the Western Hemisphere, preceding Christopher Columbus and his crews by 471 years.
Moreover, decades of detailed analysis of the architecture and finds at L’Anse aux Meadows indicate that it was no typical Viking settlement. Its founders chose an unusual site for their home base: an exposed shore on Newfoundland’s northern coast, where cold, battering winds regularly blow in off the water. It wasn’t exactly prime land for a farm. In Iceland, for example, the earliest settlers had chosen sheltered inland areas near the mouths of big rivers for their homes.
What’s more, the archaeological teams found no trace of barns for keeping livestock warm in winter, although such structures were common in both Iceland and Greenland. Nor were the researchers able to identify conclusively any bones from sheep or other types of livestock, or find any evidence of grazing by animals in the surrounding area. Instead, all the animal bones that could be identified at L’Anse aux Meadows belonged to codfish, seals, and whales. The inhabitants apparently dined largely on bounty from the sea.
L’Anse aux Meadows, it seems, was never envisioned as a farming settlement. It was a base camp, pure and simple. And it would have served a valuable logistical purpose for Viking explorations. A Viking crew could not sail from Greenland to Vinland in the spring, scout for resources and harvest timber all summer, then get back home to Greenland before the weather deteriorated in the fall; the sailing season was just too short. The Viking expeditions to Vinland had to overwinter in Vinland, and the warm, sturdy halls at L’Anse aux Meadows were clearly designed with that in mind.
Moreover, the location of L’Anse aux Meadows was well suited for scouting expeditions to the south. The site faced the Strait of Belle Isle, which led to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and a range of valuable natural resources. Walruses, for example, have long abounded in the gulf. Indeed, one scientific paper published in 2014 noted that more than 100,000 of these marine mammals frequented the waters there before Europeans began hunting them extensively in the late 18th century. “You did have large herds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, even in New Brunswick, at one time,” Birgitta Wallace tells me when we speak by phone, “but they were wiped out.”
Was it possible that the Viking scouting parties from L’Anse aux Meadows searched for walruses and their valuable ivory as they voyaged south of Newfoundland? The question is hardly out of my mouth before Wallace replies. “Yes,” she says. “Definitely, definitely.”
Indeed, tantalizing evidence of these scouting trips to the south has come to light at L’Anse aux Meadows. While excavating carpentry debris outside one of the halls, archaeologists discovered a small handful of butternuts, as well as a burl of butternut wood cut with an iron knife. The butternut tree, known by the scientific name of Juglans cinerea L., does not grow in Newfoundland or places that are above the 47th parallel. But it does thrive in parts of the St. Lawrence River Valley, and along the banks of the Miramichi River in eastern New Brunswick, nearly 500 miles southwest of L’Anse aux Meadows as the crow flies. In all probability, that’s where Viking scouts found the nuts and cut the burl.
