Made by the National Film Board of Canada in 1984, this short documentary depicts the search, discovery and authentication of the only known Norse settlement in North America – Vinland the Good. Mentioned in Icelandic manuscripts and speculated about for over two centuries, Vinland is known as “the place where the wild grapes grow” and was thought to be on the eastern coast between Virginia and Newfoundland. In 1960 a curious group of house mounds was uncovered at l’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland by Drs. Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad of Norway. Added to the United Nations World Heritage List, l’Anse aux Meadows is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.
Made by the National Film Board of Canada in 1964, this short film documents John Cabot’s quest to discover a westward route across the sea to the Orient in 15th-century Europe. The resulting story is one that explores the geography of the Renaissance world as well as its social and intellectual character.
Three Sources of Textual Evidence of Columbus, Crypto Jew
By Estelle Irizarry
Published Online (2006)
Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to add new material, based on Columbus’s writings, to the large body of historical research and forthcoming scientific analysis of DNA intended to shed light on Columbus’s origins, specifically regarding indications of his identity as Crypto Jew. We address only textual sources from Columbus’s writings, for as we have shown previously, he was a prolific and talented writer and he wrote in Spanish. The keys to his religion are to be found in the Book of Prophesies, the Diary of the First Voyage, and in Columbus’s triangular autograph. Another key, the influence of Ladino or Jewish Spanish on his expression, will be the subject of another paper.
The intense Columbus of the voyages, diaries, and petitions to the royal monarchs had another side that showed through when he undertook an ambitious spiritual and literary project he called The Book of Prophesies, from 1501 through 1503, between the letters of his last two voyages, with the stated purpose of helping to recover Jerusalem for Christianity.
Columbus opted to keep the text in the original Latin, gathering selections from 44 books of the Old Testament–mainly psalms and prophetic texts–, along with the four Gospels, 23 Epistles, and some passages from classical authors. The work involved selecting and copying the Latin texts, without translating the originals. The book also contains several poems and marginal notes attributed to Columbus or in part to his younger son Fernando. This was Columbus’s first openly “literary” venture in that it had no immediate practical purpose. It is a contemplative work that responded to his deepest spiritual needs, among them, his religious faith.
The Vinland Map: Real or hoax?
Narrated by Simon Welfare
(2004)
Is the Vinland Map a unique historical document, worth millions of dollars, or is it a fake?
Its possible importance and value reside in the depiction of a curious island named ‘Vinland’ on the western edge of the map, for this lies where North America appears on modern charts. Text nearby makes an astonishing claim: that two Viking sailors found their way to Vinland almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus, the explorer that history books credit with the discovery of the New World.
Some experts believe that the map was drawn in around 1440, and that the information it contains was passed down from Viking adventurers who had made landfall in Vinland. Others claim that the map is a hoax, forged in modern times.
Whether the Vikings and Christopher Columbus used a chart to find North America or not, the rest of us after nearly 40 years of dispute certainly need a guide to help us evaluate the arguments for and against the authenticity of the Vinland Map and here it is.
The map is owned by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in the US and is kept in the Beinecke Library there. Pictures of it are posted on the website hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York a scientist from there helped to carry out the carbon-dating of the map.
Could the Vinland Map have been based on information gathered by Viking seafarers? The following documentary, produced in 2004, examines the issue:
What did the Viking Discoverers of America Know of the North Atlantic Environment?
By Thomas Haine
Weather, Vol. 63:3 (2008)
Introduction: In discovering and colonising Iceland, Greenland, and Atlantic Canada, Norse explorers displayed remarkable resilience to the harsh North Atlantic environment 500 years before Columbus reached the New World. Given such widespread exploration of the subpolar North Atlantic ocean and such close exposure to the environment it is interesting to speculate about Norse knowledge of oceanography, meteorology, and climate. Is it possible that they posessed a relatively advanced knowledge of their environment, albeit without any basic understanding? This article addresses this question.
Leif Eriksson’s arrival in Newfoundland in 1000AD marked the culmination of Viking expansion west from Scandinavia that began two centuries before. The early eighth and ninth century voyages from the homeland fjords of southwest Norway left permanent Viking settlements in northern France and the British Isles. Settlers arrived in the Faeroe Islands around 825AD and reached Iceland by around 870AD; the oldest archaeological remains there lie immediately above the tephra from the large 871AD volcanic eruption of the Vatnaldur fissure in southern Iceland. These farmers established permanent settlements that survived to the modern era.
Colonial occupation of southwest Greenland began in 985AD when Erik “the Red” Thorvaldsson led an expedition of 25 ships from Iceland to the vast new territory he had optimistically named himself. The total population of the two primary Greenland settlements peaked at a few thousand, but eventually disappeared in the fifteenth century and European knowledge of their existence was lost for many decades.
Two important written accounts of oral history describe exploration further west to what the Norse called Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. These Icelandic sagas about Erik the Red, his family, and followers (principally Erik the Red’s Saga and Greenlander’s Saga) explain how Leif Eriksson, Erik the Red’s son, established a settlement in Vinland in 1000AD. Although the Norse only stayed a few years, unequivocal evidence for their presence in North America was discovered at present-day L’Anse aux Meadows (Newfoundland) in 1961. The sagas provide unique insight into details of the Norse activities, the places they visited, and their contact with the indigenous Indians (the “skraelings”, with whom they skirmished). There are only occasional and indirect references to their environmental knowledge. The uncontroversial evidence is therefore meager, but there are hints that the Norse did indeed appreciate many facets of North Atlantic oceanography, meteorology and climate.
The Norse in Newfoundland: L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland
By Birgitta Wallace
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, Vol. 19:1 (2003)
Introduction: One thousand years ago, the Old World and the New stood face to face in the Strait of Belle Isle. The landing of the Norse on the shores of North America was not the result of a sudden journey but the endpoint of a step-by-step expansion stretching over two centuries. This expansion began in southwestern Norway, where chieftains and minor kings jostled for power over a growing population. In such a competitive context, migration across the North Sea to the Scottish Isles and the Faeroes was an attractive alternative to staying home. The contemporary development of seaworthy ships, capable of safely crossing open oceans and transporting people, their worldly belongings and livestock, made emigration possible. Note that the term “Norse” refers to all inhabitants of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, not just those of Norway (Webster 1988). Danes and Swedes were part of the migrations of this period, aptly named the Viking Age (c. 750-1050). Although they drastically affected the map of Europe, their role in the Norse ventures to North America was minor, and is therefore not discussed here. The term “Norse” is preferred here to the more popular “Viking”, which really refers to pirates or raiders. Although many men of the Viking Period would have been vikings at some time in their lives, women and children were not.
By Nancy Marie Brown
Harcourt, 2007
ISBN: 978-0151014408
Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.
Transatlantic Encounters: Eyewitness Testimony and Spain’s First American Possessions, 1492-1536
By William D. Phillips
Medieval Encounters, vol.13:1 (2007)
Abstract: We have eyewitness testimony from scores of the participants in the four voyages of Christopher Columbus as they gave depositions in the famous series of lawsuits between the Spanish crown and the Columbus family. Through these accounts, we can see a slowly developing picture of the lands and shores the witnesses had seen. We can observe the ceremonies the Spaniards used as they claimed possession of the lands they reached. We also catch glimpses of the reactions of the people they encountered in the Americas. The depositions also provide information about the later lives of the witnesses, many of whom left Europe and settled in the islands of the Caribbean, becoming citizens of the first European towns in the Caribbean and on the mainland of the Americas.
