Vikings in America (12 page)

Smith has given a hint as to how the kernel of truth may be found within the story of the Zeno voyage. We know that the first Nicolo Zeno did make a voyage to England in 1380, and it is well within the bounds of possibility that he met Wichmann or another of the many pirates operating from English ports, and heard from him of voyages he had made to Greenland, and tales of lands beyond. Zichmni is identified in the account with the places Porlanda and Sorant, places which commentators have struggled to locate in the Orkney Islands, though they may readily be equated with Portland Bill and The Solent, both on England's south coast.

The description of the North Atlantic merges the Faroe Islands and Iceland as the fictitious Frisland, has scant reference to the Shetland Islands, leaves out the Orkney Islands, is sketchy in its account of Greenland, and gives only the haziest of accounts of a land further west. Possibly we are to imagine the first Nicolo Zeno in a south of England port hearing a tale of Wichmann's piratical voyage to Greenland, writing an account of what he had heard, and nearly two centuries later his namesake manufacturing from this a claim that Zeno had himself travelled to Greenland and America.

In the Zeno story and map we have a confused echo of a pirate voyage of the sort which most probably caused the demise of Viking Greenland.

Without Greenland there would have been no Viking America. Greenland is the lynch-pin of the transatlantic route navigated by the Vikings. Certainly they voyaged direct from Norway to Greenland, but there has never been a suggestion that they made the voyage direct from Europe to America. The distance between Europe and America is too great and navigation too difficult for the skills available to the Vikings.

Every story of the New World travelled back to Europe via Greenland. Every Viking visitor and settler to America travelled via Greenland. Greenland provided the mariners' supplies and the workshops to repair ships for the long voyages both east and west, and it offered an opportunity for trade.

Without Greenland there could be no Viking America, and no European knowledge of the New World. The failure of the Greenland colony, presumably at the hands of European pirates, also marks the end of a chapter of European exploration of America. As Greenland failed, instead of the sound knowledge of geography expressed in the mediaeval Icelandic sources we find confused texts like the story of the Zeno voyage. The end of the Greenland colony was more than just a tragedy for the 5,000 or so Vikings living in Greenland, but a tragedy that put back by centuries interaction, cultural and economic, between Europe and America.

THE name ‘Vinland' appears on no modern map. Yet Vinland, part of the east coast of America, was the jewel in the crown of the Viking New World. Today we know of Vinland from two major sources which tell of Viking exploration and settlement of the American east coast: sagas written in Iceland, and the archaeological dig at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a way-station on the route to Vinland. Additionally, there are a host of minor sources. Vinland is not on the modern map, but is a real place nonetheless.

The very earliest source for Vinland is one of the minor ones, the writings of an eleventh-century cleric, Adam of Bremen, who provides the first surviving account of Vinland. A mediaeval chronicler working towards the end of the eleventh century, his book is the
Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum
, in English
Deeds of the Bishops of the Hamburg Church
. The Hamburg diocese – strictly the archdiocese of Bremen-Hamburg led by an archbishop, though Adam is careless in his terminology – had an enormous jurisdiction. The arch-diocese had been entrusted with the Roman Catholic Church's ‘Mission to the North', and as such its jurisdiction included the whole of Scandinavia, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, as well as north-western Russia. The Church's missionary activity was extensive, with all these lands having nominally accepted Christianity, and a process of conversion of the populace ongoing.

Adam of Bremen is an important source for the early mediaeval history of Scandinavia and Russia, and he also provides fragments about Greenland and Vinland. Very little is known about Adam himself. We can say little more than that he appears to have been born in the 1040s in Saxony, to have had the most extensive education available in his day, earning him the
honorific title
Magister
, and to have died in the early 1080s. In 1068 he was invited by Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen to come to direct the cathedral school there, though his subsequent career shows him to be more than just the headmaster. Around 1069 he started his history of the arch-diocese of Bremen-Hamburg, a work he was still revising when he died. His sources for information on the north came from time he spent in Denmark at the court of King Svend Estridson, nephew of King Canute, including specifically information he was given by the king himself. Additionally, he heard accounts from merchants and missionaries who passed through the port of Bremen, and made use of numerous written sources in the library of Bremen, to which he had ready access.

What he has given us is an extensive history of the archdiocese from 788 up to his own days, a biography of his archbishop, Adalbert, and a geography of the north – this section of his book has the heading ‘Descriptio insularum Aquilonis' and is sometimes referred to by this name as if a separate book. It is here that Vinland is described (IV, 38):

Furthermore King Svend mentioned yet another island found by many in that ocean. This island is called Vinland, because grapevines grow there wild, yielding the finest wine. And crops grow there in plenty without having been sown. I know this not from fabulous report, but through the definite information of the Danes.

Adam, usually a careful scholar, makes important mistakes in these lines. Adam's mother tongue was what we today call Old High German, while King Svend Estridson spoke what today is called Old Norse, specifically the Old East Norse dialect of Denmark. These languages were close enough one to the other for speakers to understand one another, albeit imperfectly. During his brief visit to Denmark Adam would have spoken his Old High German, and been understood imperfectly. Similarly he would have struggled to understand the Old Norse of the king and of the Danes. One mistake is in his use of the word ‘island', where he is translating an Old Norse word that has the meaning of ‘shore'. Adam's sources are not saying that Vinland is an island, simply that it is a shore. The other mistake is with the name Vinland, where both elements of this name mean something different in Old Norse and in Old High German. In Old Norse
vin
means good, fertile land – land which may be cultivated – a meaning emphasised by the
element
land
, which again means farmland. Yet in Old High German
vin
has a completely different meaning – it means wine and is a Latin borrowing – while
land
was beginning to be used to refer to a country. That Adam was told that grapevines grow in Vinland need not necessarily be doubted; his mistake is to link this fact with his wrong interpretation of the name. Vinland means ‘fertile-farmland'; he understood it as ‘wine-land'.

The story of the Vikings in America is also contained within the Icelandic sagas. Taken as a whole, this body of writing is the greatest mediaeval literary survival of any nation and a magnificent contribution from Iceland to world civilisation. The sagas are a superb literary flowering, and we are indeed fortunate that these Icelandic masterpieces have survived the vicissitudes of history in considerable numbers – 1,666 manuscripts now in Reykjavik alone. By contrast England has just four manuscripts of literary texts from the early Middle Ages, plus a few fragments. The whole body of early mediaeval literary texts in English will fit one thick modern paperback. England has the curious story of the hero Beowulf, lyric poetry that is among the best offered by English of any period (but not much of it), finely crafted stories such as
Andreas
, the life of St Andrew, the comedy of riddles, love poetry as
Wulf and Eadwacer
, and the sublime power of
Caedmon's Hymn
or
Bede's Death Song
. England is truly fortunate to have such a superb literature from this period, a literature which ranks with the very best produced subsequently in English, yet sadly so very much has been lost. Regrettably Germany has only fragments from the period. Russia has just one significant poem, the
Lay of the Host of Igor
. There is nothing whatsoever from France or Spain, Italy or Greece, scraps only from Denmark. Yet from Iceland there are these many hundreds of literary manuscripts.

In Iceland the freedom of spirit which drove the Viking Age produced a literature which stands comparison with the very greatest of the European tradition. It is the independence of the Icelandic vision which ensured its survival. In 1235 the Vatican had its own library destroyed, then the most important library in Europe, and embarked on a programme of worldwide destruction of books which did not conform with the papal ideology. The four English manuscript survivals are accidentals which escaped the Church's bonfires. Thus for example the Vercelli manuscript was preserved in the library of St Andrews cathedral in Vercelli, Italy, described as an old book in
an unknown language, and seemingly overlooked for destruction because noone knew what it was. England once had thousands of literary manuscripts. In the poem
Widsith
we have what is virtually an index of stories, which gives us a hint of what was destroyed. England lost almost all of a great literature, and with it a history, a culture and even an identity. Thus to the English world of the Early Middle Ages tales of men like the hero Ingeld were part of the everyday currency, and known to everyone. Yet today we know Ingeld only as a name, and no longer know his story. We have no more than a record of a monk reprimanded for telling the story of Ingeld – asked
Quid Hinieldus cum Christos?
– What has Ingeld to do with Christ? In England, and throughout the continent of Europe, the writ of the Roman Catholic Church was obeyed, and literature which was not approved by the Church perished. In Iceland it was different. The literature of Iceland existed not in a library, but widely distributed around Iceland. Literacy was a relatively common accomplishment, in marked contrast to anywhere else in Europe. Most Icelanders would have known the runic alphabet, the northern alphabet of letters made up of straight lines that was so well suited for carving on wood, bone or stone. For example, a group of Viking crusaders returning to Iceland via Orkney broke into the ancient burial mound of Maeshowe,
¹
and there many of them amused themselves vandalising the interior of this structure by carving their names and other snippets of grafitti. One even boasts that his knife was once owned by Gaukur of Stong, a famous farmer of southern Iceland who was killed in a duel fought over a woman. Icelanders knew their runes, and from this it was a small step to knowing the Latin alphabet, and using this to read and write the northern tongue, the language we today call interchangeably both Old Norse and Old Icelandic. Many farmsteads had manuscripts. For example on the tiny island of Flatey – Flat Island – in the middle of Breithafjorthur – Broad Fjord, a great bay on the west coast of Iceland – was preserved the
Flateyarbok
, one of the major sources of information for Viking exploration of Greenland and America. Were it not the case that every Icelandic farmstead had people who could read and write there would be no
Flateyarbok
, and no Icelandic source for Vinland.

It is the sagas that provide the human detail of the Viking voyages to America. There are two major sagas – known in English as the
Saga of the Greenlanders
and the
Saga of Eirik the Red
which together make up
The Vinland Sagas
.

In approaching them we need to remember that they are not histories. As their name states, they are sagas. They have the sort of accuracy that a
Hollywood film has when it tells a story of the Second World War. The Hollywood story is, of course, based on a true story – but changed to meet the artistic needs of the director and the sensibilities of the audience. Certain events become magnified as cameos illustrative of the war, while others are forgotten. Much of what people today in Britain or America know about the Second World War is filtered through Hollywood. In the same way Icelanders knew the story of exploration of Greenland and America through the Hollywood of their day, through the sagas. In these we hear of the brave deeds not of Greenlanders or Vinlanders, but rather of Icelanders who visited Greenland and Vinland. The two major protagonists in these stories are Eirik the Red, and his son Leif Eiriksson, nicknamed The Lucky, both of whom could be claimed to be Icelanders. In Iceland the character of Eirik underwent a transformation. This is the man who was exiled first from Norway and then from Iceland for his violent behaviour. Yet today in Iceland children play at being the hero Eirik the Red, while the Icelandic genetic record raises the intriguing probability that every single ethnic Icelanders living today is a direct descendant of his. The sagas recognise his achievement is discovering, exploring and colonising Greenland, and applaud his free spirit as a Viking; they gloss over his expulsion from Norway ‘on account of some killings', and are similarly forgiving on his misdeeds in Iceland. His son Leif Eiriksson is remembered in Iceland today because he is an Icelander, and commemorated by an impressive statue outside Reykjavik's biggest church. The sagas tell stories of Icelanders, of the first Icelanders to visit Greenland and America, and they aim to tell a good yarn rather than a history, without worrying over-much about facts which might spoil the flow of their story. The emphasis on story-telling rather than accuracy results in contradictions in the sagas, and statements in the sagas which we know now must be wrong.