Vikings in America

Icelandic explorer, born around the year 961 in Iceland and died in Greenland in 1020. He has been considered the first European to reach the shores of North America and establish a settlement there.

The details of his life have come down to us through the Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He was also known as Leif the Lucky.
Trip to Norway and conversion to Christianity

Erikson was the second of the three sons of Erik the Red, who around the year 985 founded, after exiling from Iceland, the first Viking colony in Greenland. According to Erik’s Saga, Leif traveled around the year 1000 from Greenland to Norway. The unfavorable winds forced him to make a stopover in the Hebrides, where he spent the whole summer. There he fell in love with a woman named Thorgunna. She, when Leif got ready to leave her, asked him to take her with her, since she was expecting a child of his. But the navigator, faced with the danger of the trip, preferred that he not embark. To help support his future son, he gave her a walrus ivory belt, a gold ring, and a Greenland wool cape. This child, who went by the name of Thorgils, when he grew up traveled to Greenland, where he was taken in by his father. Upon his arrival in Norway he was received with all honors by King Olaf I Tryggvason, who converted him to Christianity. Leif and all of his fellow travelers were baptized. The following year, Olaf ordered him to return to Greenland with the mission of converting the Viking settlers to the Christian faith.

They left at the beginning of summer, accompanied by a priest and several religious, to baptize future converts and instruct them in the true faith. When they were on the high seas, they rescued the crew and the valuable cargo of a ship that was about to sink; thanks to this event he began to be known by his companions with the name of Leif the Fortunate. According to other accounts, on the return trip a storm made him lose his way, which took him to an unknown land with fertile fields and in which there were many wild grapes. This territory was baptized with the name of Vinland. Upon his arrival in Greenland, he settled with his father in Brattahild, from where he began to gain adherents to Christendom; one of his greatest successes was the conversion of his mother, Thjódhid, who built Greenland’s first Christian church in Brattahild. The decisive step for the entire population of the island to embrace the faith was the baptism of Erik the Red, who at first was reluctant to abandon the traditional religion of the Vikings. The idea of ​​the conversion of Greenland by Leif under the auspices of Olaf first appeared in the Life of Olaf Tryggvason, written by the medieval monk Gonnlaug Leifsson, as the earlier sources do not name Greenland among the lands converted by Olaf.
Discovery of America

According to the Saga of the Tales of the Greenlanders, which for many researchers is more reliable than Erik’s Saga, the one who actually sighted the shores of North America was the Icelandic navigator Bjarni Herjólfsson. According to Bjarni’s account, he had seen strange lands fourteen years before, when he had lost his way to Greenland. The information brought by the navigator to Norway prompted sailors to undertake a journey to these new lands, which some had claimed to see from the highest mountains of the island on the clearest days. Leif bought the boat from him from Bjarni and asked him to describe the route he took, in order to set out on the journey in the opposite direction. The navigator proposed to his father that he lead the expedition, but he fell from his horse and broke his leg on his way to embark, forcing Leif to take command of him. When he set out with 35 sailors in the opposite direction to that taken by Bjarni, he was accompanied by most of the Icelander’s crew.
After a few days of sailing he reached a mountainous and bare land, with hardly any vegetation, covered with glaciers. After baptizing it with the name of Helluland (‘Land of Flat Stones’), he continued his journey south. They decided to disembark later on a flat, forested land that the crew said was the first they had seen on Bjarni’s voyage. The coast was devoid of cliffs and there were a lot of white sand beaches; the region received the name of Markland (‘Land of Forests’). Leif continued his expeditions, as he was looking for a more suitable place to spend the winter. After two voyages, and after being pushed by a northwesterly wind, they reached an island located in the north of what appeared to be a continent, in which a north-facing cape stood out. This was a fertile land, with abundant grapes, for which it received the name of Vinland (‘Tierra del Vinor’). Leif divided his men into two groups and sent them out to scout the surroundings. They decided to spend the winter there, for which they built a village of wooden cabins on the shores of a lake, with a large cabin in the center in the Viking style, which they gave the name of Leifsbudr, and which became the first European settlement In America. With the arrival of spring they prepared to start the return trip, and set sail with the arrival of good times that took them back to Greenland.

Researchers have tried to identify the locations discovered by Erikson. Helluland was probably the land of Baffin, and Marklandia would be the Labrador Peninsula. Where there have been fewer coincidences is in the exact identification of Vinland: while for some it would be Nova Scotia or New England, for others it would be Newfoundland. The defenders of this last possibility have based their opinion on the discovery made by archaeologists in 1963 of some Viking ruins in L´Anse-aux-Mesdows, in the north of Newfoundland. Years after Leif’s voyage, his brother Thorvald borrowed his ship to return to Vinland. The latter, after settling in Leifsbudr, began a series of explorations in the surrounding regions. In one such raid, Thorvald met his death in a confrontation with the natives that took place near a lake in the winter of 1004–1005. Erikson subsequently authorized the Icelandic navigator Thorfim Karlsefni to continue the exploration of Vinland. Shortly after his arrival, his father died, and he became the patriarch of the Greenlandic Viking community. When Leif passed away in 1020, he was succeeded by his son Thorkel.
The settlements achieved by Leif Erikson would not last but little more than a decade. Hostile natives, possibly descendants of earlier groups such as the Inuit and Siberians, declared war on him. He soon, he would decide along with the others to abandon the idea of ​​conquering Vinland and they would withdraw in the absence of military force to counter the unleashed attacks.
Erikson’s case is but one of the many stories that tell us about the discovery of the New World, something that the Spanish and Portuguese boast so much today. But even Erikson can’t afford to say he came in first. Chinese, Polynesians, Phoenicians, Egyptians and even Moroccans had already passed through here, and they also left their mark.

THE STUDIES AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL REMAINS THAT SUPPORT WHAT IS ALREADY A REALITY

The text in runic letters seems to attest to a Viking expedition of 1362 in North America, which ended in tragedy: “when we returned to the camp we found 10 men red with blood and dead,” says one excerpt. Found in Kensington, Minnesota in 1898,

In Heavener, Oklahoma a stone with a runic inscription. Probably made by Vikings who ascended the Mississippi River between AD 600. and 900 AD Its meaning is: “Valley owned by Glome”. The Choctaw Indians discovered the eight mystery symbols.

On the shores of Lake Spirit Pond, Maine (USA), 3 stones with runic inscriptions were found in 1971, dating to around 1200 BC. Although they have not been completely deciphered, it would be the story of a Viking naval expedition. In the image known as “of the inscriptions” and “map”.

In Berkley, Massachusetts, on the banks of the Taunton River, on a 3.40 m rock. long, possible Viking inscriptions. Others attribute them to Phoenicians, Portuguese, Chinese or natives. Photograph taken in 1893.

In the Yvityrusu and Amambay mountain ranges, there are numerous rock manifestations interpreted as runic inscriptions

Figures with Nordic features, possible Viking footprint on the central coasts of Chile

In the 1970s, the French historian Jacques de Mahieu defended the thesis that the region would have been founded by Vikings. Seven Cities in the northeast of Brazil is composed of seven groups of heterogeneous rocks. Each group of rocks represents a city. Rock inscriptions are scattered throughout the complex.

The discovery of five blonde mummies in Peru indicates that 700 years ago there were subjects with Nordic characteristics in America. Only the ancient indigenous traditions made us suppose something like that. For example, the one that describes Viracocha as a “tall, strong, white man with a full beard.”

For five decades, scientists excavated northern Canada in search of evidence that would reinforce the theory of the Norse colonization of the American continent. His search finally yielded results on Baffin Island.

IN 1999, Patricia Sutherland, an archaeologist at Memorial University of Canada, came across two unusual ropes during a visit to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Quebec. They had been found on Baffin Island, in the north of the country, and she catalogsgiven as a work of the Dorset culture, native to the Arctic. But the researcher strongly suspected that the true authors of it came from the other side of the Atlantic. Not only that. Soon, they became the clue I was looking for to locate the second known Viking settlement in America and, incidentally, confirm a theory that scientists had been handling for five decades: the Vikings were the first Europeans to arrive in America after the original settlement and they did it 500 years before Columbus set foot on the island of San Salvador.
In the 60s, a Viking settlement known as L’Anse aux Meadows, dating from between the years 989 and 1020, had already been discovered on the island of Newfoundland. between 500 AD and the fourteenth century — visited the American coasts long before the Spanish conquerors, for years no evidence emerged that their presence was not the product of some fortuitous expedition.
Examining the ropes, Sutherland noted that the filaments bore little resemblance to those used by Arctic hunters. The technique used for weaving was more like that used by Viking women in Greenland in the 14th century. It was with that conviction that in 2001 she began excavations at Baffin.
New excavations

It was not the only thing. Shortly after the discovery of the ropes in the Canadian Museum, the expert found more Viking traces on the shelves of the enclosure. “I noticed that there were many articles discovered in the 60s and 70s that had not been recognized or cataloged,” she tells Trends. For her, the objects corroborated that the Vikings arrived on Baffin Island and supported a popular Icelandic saga that tells how, around 1000 AD, the Viking chief Leif Eriksson reached Helluland Island, the name that the Vikings gave to this island. Canadian island.
For his excavations, she chose the Tanfield Valley, on the southeast coast of the island, where in the 1960s an archaeologist found the base of a construction whose origin she described as “difficult to interpret”. Sutherland suspected that Viking sailors had built it, because it bears a striking resemblance to some buildings in Greenland.
At the site, she Sutherland found solid new evidence: shovels made of whale bone similar to the ones Vikings used in Greenland to cut grass; large stones cut in the same style of European masonry, more ropes and many stones used to sharpen your weapons and metal tools.
And it was these sharpening stones that ended up confirming her thesis. Sutherland took a score to the Geological Commission of Canada, where a careful analysis detected microscopic veins of bronze, brass and cast iron, clear evidence of European metallurgy and unknown in pre-Columbian America.

Commercial settlement
Why did this town, famous for its warrior, explorer, and merchant zeal, go to the trouble of establishing a permanent settlement in Baffin? According to Sutherland, the findings prove that the Viking presence was not an accident, but was intended to create a strong transatlantic trade network alongside the North American aborigines of the Dorset culture.
The expert says that among other artifacts that she found in the Museum of Civilization, for example, there are wooden beads that the Vikings used in their transactions. In addition, there are historical antecedents such as the story of the Viking merchant Ohthere, who visited King Alfred the Great of England (849–899 AD) and offered him fine walrus ivory that was used to make pieces of art.

“From the historical accounts of the Arctic resources, we know that the area gave the Norse what they wanted: walrus tusks, hides and skins for their trade in Europe. The way to obtain these products was through commercial exchanges with people who hunted these animals, ”says Sutherland. In addition, it is highly probable that the Vikings offered scraps of iron and other metals as barter.