Come From Away to Come Home : Closing the Circle

When is a Viking Not a Viking? When he's a Norse.

It turns out that the word Viking was only used for Norsemen when they were on a raid. Otherwise they were Norsemen. And Norsewomen. Maybe just Norse would do.

Forget John Cabot, or even Christopher Columbus, the first Europeans to set foot in the new world were Norse, over 1,000 years ago.

And this event, around the year 1000 AD, was hands down THE most significant event in the history of humanity. It closed the circle of migration that had started almost 2 million years ago, when the first humans emerged in Africa.

Mankind started to move from Africa about 1.8 million years ago, slowly, east through Eurasia before breaking into two branches. One of these turned west and north, into what is now Europe. the other branch moved further east, then either northwards or southwards into Southeast Asia, Java and Australia and beyond. The northwards migration crossed into North America via land or sea over the Bering Strait to what is now Alaska and then south all the way to to South America, spreading eastwards through both North and South America continents. The last place that saw humans was the region we are in now, Labrador and Newfoundland, about 7,500 years ago.

So, 6,500 years or so after the first people settled here, they met the Norse of Iceland and Greenland, which closed the migration loop full circle. Such a journey it has been, taking 1,793,500 years, more or less.

And it happened here, near L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, which the Norse called Vinland in the Icelandic Sagas, the existing record. This is where four separate expeditions came over maybe 10 years, although the first one did not actually land, but returned to Greenland with reports of and directions to what turned out to be Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland. Each expedition only lasted a year or so, as they were not designed for permanent settlement, but for exploration and resource collection to trade back home in Greenland or Iceland or on to Norway. Wood for repairing ships was extremely valuable, as Greenland did not have trees. Likewise iron.

It seems likely that they explored as far as New Brunswick as that is where wild grapes grow (to justify the name Vinland), and archaeologists have found evidence of butternuts at L'Anse aux Meadows, which grow in New Brunswick.

Norse dragon looking out at Belle Isle

All three of Erik the Red's children led the three expeditions that landed, with the most impactful being Leif, the first one who landed and who built what still can be seen. Thorvald, Leif's brother died during the second expedition, and the last voyage was made by Leif's half-sister Freydis, which seems to have ended in disaster, Hers was the last. Greenland's Norse population was starting to shrink (it was gone by about 1350), and it was very expensive to mount an expedition, so that is probably why their New World sojourns ended after so few years.

And none of this was known about until 1960!

That's when Norwegian explorer Helga Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine came here on a hunch and asked one of the local fishers if they had seen anything in the area that looked old. Elder George Decker said there were mounds where his cows grazed that everyone called the "Indian mounds" George himself died only 3 years later and is buried just a few metres away from the site.

Those mounds turned out to be Leif Erikson's settlement and proof that the Vikings came here and stayed long enough to leave traces of their lives. The 8 excavated "buildings" have now been left to nature (and tourists can walk all over them!), with 4 new buildings built as exact replicas, using 1000 AD Icelandic building technology.