Columbus and the Vikings: The Discovery and Exploration of Greenland

Five centuries before Christopher Columbus discovered the Caribbean islands in 1492, the Vikings had established a colony in Greenland and discovered Canada.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Viking raiders left Denmark, Sweden and Norway to attack the British Isles and northern Europe. They established colonies in the Orkney and Shetland Islands above Scotland and as far down as the northern coast of France (now Normandy). Viking raiders then explored further west across the Atlantic, discovering Iceland (Thule) and settling it between 860 and 874 C.E. They displaced Irish monks who had previously explored the northern Atlantic.

Iceland soon filled up with colonists, prompting some restless Icelanders to explore further west. In 984 C.E., two Icelanders, Erik the Red and his son Leif, discovered Greenland (Ultima Thule). They named it "Vinland". At the time, the Medieval Warm Period made the northern Atlantic much more habitable than today.

Though farming proved difficult, the explorers made a decent living on pasturage, while trading walrus ivory and hides, furs and falcons back to Europe. The colony did not exactly thrive, but it turned enough of a profit that the Greenlanders could continue to explore west and south.

How far west and south they went remains highly controversial. They probably explored down the Labrador coast and at least the northern coast of Newfoundland. But stories that they made it as far south as New England or even the Caribbean remain unproven.

The sudden climatic cooling that began in the late 13th century spelled the end of the colony. The annual supply ships (called the "royal knarr") could not get through as the pack ice formed earlier and melted later each year and the climate became untenable for any kind of farming or even pastoralism. The settlements might have survived if they had adopted the much more successful tactics of Inuit explorers who had spread across Canada from Alaska. But the settlers were contemptuous of the Inuit and their hunter-gatherer culture, calling them "Skraelings" or "wretched" people.

Even so, some Icelanders may have joined the Inuit after the supply ships failed. The last attempt at contact in 1341 by the Bishop of Bergen's emissary, Ivar Baardson, showed only abandoned settlements. A century and a half before Columbus, the first known European culture in the New World had failed.

Jun 11, 2006 2:29 AM

Holly Ingraham :

Thule and Ultima Thule seem like odd names to bring up--after all, they were Classical names and there's a lot of argument whether Thule was Norway or Denmark or Iceland, the description is so vague. (Recently re-read Casson's <i>The Ancient Mariners.</i>)

Also, what source calls Greenland "Vinland"? In all my Viking reading (background for writing the histfy Hristssaga), I have never seen Greenland called anything but Greenland, including in Eirikssaga and the Karlsefni (I think that was the one with the tale of the attempted American settlement and its failure). Vineland is always the land farther west, in its southern portions, after passing Stoneland and Woodland.

Quite right as to the importance of the climate then to the northern expansion. They could grow crops where there's only ice, now. Also, water levels ran higher, so they could sail up rivers that later were too shallow.

I've heard it as general theory that the Vinland colonial attempts failed because, unlike Renaissance Europeans, they didn't have the technological advantage of firearms to make up for the numeric advantage of the Skraelings. Swords vs. poggamoggins was not enough.

Interestingly, as knowledge of Pacific archaeological dates improve, the Polynesian expansion in the east now seems to have happened in the same time period, but entirely in the tropics. Can't be climate factors: must be coincidence. But an amusing one.

If the surviving Greenlanders merged into the Inuit, one might consider another matter, further west: the tendency of the Lakota/Sioux to have members who were blond or even red-haired. They didn't call their children Yellow Hair because, as one authority who has never looked at human hair claimed, "their black hair had yellow highlights." Black hair <i>never does</i>, before beauty shops. As I recently said, "A little Viking might have gotten in there," and my half-breed DH corrected, "No, probably a big Viking."

After all, in the sagas we only have the stories of those who returned whose stories were sagafied and then survived to be written down. There might have been a number who disappeared into the west and were forgotten.

Jun 13, 2006 11:07 AM

Paula Stiles :

Hi, Holly (good to see you online again),

The insertion of Thule and Ultima Thule was in reference to Enterline's discussion of their placement in medieval maps from points further south in Europe (he, too, discusses what those terms mean in various maps. It's a very interesting historiographical debate overall). I'm not surprised that such Latin terms didn't catch on with the Vikings since they were above the northernmost expansion of the Roman Empire and were mainly pagan until quite a late period (for Europe, I mean).

In a way, I'm not sure that the traditional medievalist way of seeing the Vikings from the same culture as Europeans is quite right--there were some huge differences early on that led to all of the raiding and wars during the eighth to eleventh centuries. Sure, the Vikings probably had more in common with other Europeans than they did with the Inuit. But that's kind of a no-brainer since they'd had much more contact with other Europeans than the Inuit up to that point.

I like Enterline's theory that the Inuits' tech was more appropriate to the colder climate than the Vikings'/European tech and therefore, they were more competitive in that area. Just because it's made of stone, wood and bone instead of metal doesn't make it primitive. It's not as though we're making great inroads populating the Arctic today with modern tech. Did you catch those posts I made on OWWW about the radioactive lighthouses the Russians built in Siberia? [shiver]

Also, the whole "guns versus bows and arrows" argument ignores two things--1. the Vikings did *very* well against Europeans on the same (and in some places, higher) technological level as they were. So, to say that they didn't persist in Greenland because they had primitive technology in comparison to later Europeans (as opposed to in comparison to the Inuit of the time), seems very simplistic in a "Guns, Germs and Steel" kind of way. The Vikings may have been as savage as contemporary accounts say (or not), but they weren't technologically primitive.

2. Blunderbusses, for all their smoke and noise, weren't exactly highly competitive against the Native American weapons of the time. Everywhere that Europeans prevailed and colonized, huge pestilences preceded them and eliminated the competition before they had to do any real fighting (and where they didn't prevail, they got creamed, guns or no guns). I doubt they would have done any better than the Vikings did initially if they had not brought