Vikings in America (15 page)

Dating has been made using carbon-14. The occupation dates of
c.
1000 to
c.
1020 have come to be well accepted, though radiocarbon, in fact, permits a date before 1000. Should it be possible to confirm this early date, there will be a need to re-evaluate the saga stories.

It is noteworthy that these Viking archaeological finds are very close to the date of the voyages in the sagas, but tell a story which is substantively
different. While the sagas tell of just six voyages in six different years under different, named leaders and imply that these were the only voyages, the archaeological finds point to many dozens, even hundreds of voyages.

The purpose of the site is still not properly understood, even after years of intensive activity. Most plausibly it was a way-station for Viking voyagers, where it was possible to repair ships, stock up on supplies, spend time ashore and even over-winter. With accommodation for 100–200 people, many of them making just brief visits while passing through en route to somewhere else, L'Anse aux Meadows was visited by thousands of Vikings, perhaps even tens of thousands. Again the contrast with the small numbers implied by the sagas is marked.

No cemetery has been found at L'Anse aux Meadows, and in view of the work that has gone into looking for one it seems reasonable to conclude that there is not one there. Burial at sea was occasionally practised by the Vikings, but usually for disposing of the bodies of people who died while on long voyages in ships which had a full cargo. We know for example that at least one of the prospective first settlers of Eirik the Red's Greenland died on the voyage from Iceland to Greenland, and with nowhere to put the body on a ship laden with people, animals and the raw materials for starting a colony, her body was put overboard. Yet this means of disposal was sufficiently unusual for a rune-stone to be erected to her memory in Greenland, as a focus for grief.

It is possible that on occasions Vikings at L'Anse aux Meadows carried out what are termed ship burials for their dead – strictly ship cremations – yet this can only have been the case for very wealthy individuals. There are records of early Germanic kings being cremated in a ship which was set adrift and set on fire, so that it burnt to the water-line, then sank. The Old English poem
Beowulf
gives a description of this style of funeral, while stressing that it was the funeral of a king. In England at Sutton Hoo we have an interment of an East Anglian king's ashes within a ship which was subsequently buried – a curious mix of a traditional ship-cremation and a land burial. Ship burial anywhere in the Germanic world was rare. The cost of a ship was great, and its wilful destruction infrequent. When it did happen it was as much a symbolic act for a community asserting its identity as the disposal of one body, and a distant echo of this community act is found even today in the Shetland Islands. Every January in Shetland a Viking ship is set alight during Up-Helly-Aa, a festival redolent with Viking spirit by which the Shetlanders assert and celebrate their Viking heritage.

Ship burial at L'Anse aux Meadows, if it happened at all, must have been very rare. By a process of elimination the bodies of people who died at L'Anse aux Meadows must have been taken somewhere else for burial, either a putative settlement somewhere in the vicinity, or perhaps back to Greenland. L'Anse aux Meadows was not regarded as a permanent settlement, and therefore not a suitable place to bury the dead.

The reason for abandonment is similarly uncertain. In part there is an obvious motive in the decay of the turf-built buildings. Turf has a short life, calculated in the Newfoundland climate to be around 20 years, and there is no practical way to repair decaying turf buildings. Rather, they have to be rebuilt. Iceland is full of sites where successive generations have built farms adjacent to one another, and this is a frequent model. But so too is the system of relocating a settlement when its buildings need replacement. In the case of L'Anse aux Meadows, 20 years of depletion of timber in the vicinity and the resultant need to make ever-longer voyages for wood would have been a powerful spur to moving the settlement. The simplest explanation is that L'Anse aux Meadows was rebuilt some miles away, and perhaps a future archaeologist may identify such a site, or even a series of sites for successive settlements.

That L'Anse aux Meadows is not mentioned in the sagas gives us warning that they are selective, telling a limited range of stories that were of interest to Icelanders. This one location was visited by thousands of Vikings at very much the time of the Vinland voyages, yet the sagas are completely silent about it. We cannot rely on them. We certainly cannot extrapolate significance from the non-mention of something in the sagas. The sagas are stories to entertain Icelanders, and anyway only a fraction of what there once was has been preserved.

L'Anse aux Meadows is – so far – the sole Viking settlement to have been identified on the mainland of North America. Implicitly, many writers have suggested that this is because it was the only one. This thinking does not stand up to examination. The British Isles once contained thousands of Viking settlements. Many of them can be identified by their Norse names, which are still used, or in early written records, but very few Viking buildings have been identified through archaeological remains. There are two major exceptions (the Viking remains excavated in York and Dublin) and there are scattered traces of Viking buildings in the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland. Physical remains of Viking buildings in the British Isles are very rare, despite Viking presence in great numbers for three centuries, including a period when
the Vikings ruled. With a dense population, no areas that can be considered inaccessible, hundreds of years of antiquarian interest and decades of archaeological survey, Britain has been searched with a fine-tooth comb, and yet little has been found in the way of Viking sites. The reason is simple: the Vikings preferred to build from timber, and with rare exceptions timber does not last 1,000 years. L'Anse aux Meadows is situated in an area where timber of a size needed for building was not readily found, prompting building in turf, which is more durable. In addition, the climate and the sparse human settlement in the area have encouraged preservation. It cannot be argued, as some have tried to do, that because we haven't discovered Viking settlements further south they weren't there. Rather, L'Anse aux Meadows had special features which promoted preservation which would not have been present in timber-built structures further south.

The great numbers of people who passed through L'Anse aux Meadows is remarkable. Viking Greenland at its peak supported perhaps 5,000 people. At the time of the Vinland voyages and L'Anse aux Meadows the Greenland population was smaller – almost smaller than the number of people who passed through L'Anse aux Meadows. The resolution of this puzzle comes within the concept of a highly mobile Greenland population. For Greenland, travel was essential for survival. America offered the timber essential for the colony; Greenland offered farmland in an area that was without an indigenous population, and therefore safe. A reasonable hypothesis is that every community in Greenland was sending a ship to America every year for the duration of the Greenland colony. Evidence for this process is seen at L'Anse aux Meadows.

The only undisputed Viking artefact to be found south of L'Anse aux Meadows and within the borders of the USA is the so-called Maine penny. From a dig at a Native American site at Naskeag Point, Penobscot Bay, Maine, a Viking coin was found within the context of a site dated 1180–1235. The coin itself is a Norwegian silver penny, of a sort produced in great numbers and frequently encountered in digs in Europe. It dates from the reign of King Olaf Kyrre (1065–1080), but along with most silver coins was circulated for very many years afterwards, certainly including the period 1180–1235. The identification of the coin is beyond doubt, as is its location within a dated archaeological context.

The simplest explanation of this coin is that the Vikings brought it to that location. The site is by the sea, and in a place that could reasonably have been reached by the Vikings. If it had been found in a European site there would have been little question that it indicated Viking presence there, and this is indeed the most likely explanation for the presence of the Maine penny. However, a higher level of proof is demanded for American Viking finds, and an alternative explanation can indeed be suggested. It is possible that the coin was not brought there by Vikings, but was traded overland from somewhere far to the north, perhaps Labrador or Baffin Island. Finds from the site have been examined to explore the possibility that items were traded from the north, and it has been suggested that one artefact might possibly be from the Dorset Culture, and therefore from Baffin Island. This is just about possible, but the identification of this artefact – a
burin
, or flake of stone with a chisel edge – is problematic, and it is a remarkable claim that an item of scant value would have been traded from Baffin Island to Maine. The support this artefact gives to the idea of trade from Baffin Island is slight. The Viking silver penny would have had no intrinsic value to Native American people, though it may well have been a curiosity. Of course, it is possible that it was traded across many hundreds of miles and through different indigenous cultures, but this is not likely.

The finding of a penny in Maine in a well-dated archaeological context does not absolutely prove beyond all doubt that the Vikings were definitely in Maine, but this is by far the simplest explanation.

No account of the Vikings in America can avoid an assessment of the Vinland Map. This is either one of the great documents of Western civilisation, or a very clever fake. At the time of writing the pendulum has swung firmly in the direction of it being a fake, but scholarly views have changed so many times that there can be no certainty that it will not one day come to be regarded as genuine. The traditional disciplines of the humanities tend to favour the view that it is genuine, while recent scientific analysis tends to the view that it is a fake. Neither discipline can produce a conclusive result, though the twenty-first century has considerable faith in the powers of the scientists, and the respectable academic view is to assert the primacy of the scientists' opinions.

The map was discovered in 1957. It was bought by Yale University, which formally pronounced it genuine in 1965, and it remains there, though in
recent years it has not been on public display, presumably reflecting the embarrassment at seemingly being duped by a forgery. The announcement that the map was genuine, made on Columbus Day 1965, offended Hispanic sensibilities to the extent that it provoked a serious riot on the streets of Yale's home town, New Haven, Connecticut. In a nutshell the announcement set out the view that the Vinland Map is a fifteenth-century world map showing part of the coast of North America, as well as Greenland and Iceland, and containing the name Vinland. Two great inlets are shown into the coast of America, one apparently Hudson Strait with the inland sea of Hudson Bay, and the other the St Lawrence River. Thus the Vinland Map, if accepted, would be a most remarkable document. If genuine, the map demonstrates European knowledge of the existence of North America and some features of its geography around 70 years before the Columbus voyage. However, over the years the most severe doubts have been expressed as to the map's authenticity.

If the map is genuine, it is assumed to have emerged from the Nazi looting of libraries and archives towards the end of the Second World War, and therefore to be a document which had lain unclassified for centuries in one of the many manuscript repositories of Europe, probably in Italy. Its owner, who introduced it to the world in 1957, was Enzo Ferrajoli, an Italian manuscript dealer and a known rogue, who later served a prison sentence in Spain for stealing manuscripts from a library there – perhaps the sort of person who may have acquired some Nazi war loot, or indeed who may have been involved in passing off a fake as a genuine document.

When the map was first presented to the scholarly world it was as an unbound document, though it was clear from binding marks that the map had once been bound within a book. Subsequently, two manuscript books appeared on the market, both believed to originate from Ferrajoli, and which are produced from the same parchment, with the same watermark, and with the same style of handwriting. Worm holes in these two books and the Vinland Map match up, demonstrating that they were once bound together. The two books are the
Tartar Relation
and the
Speculum Historiale
, neither of which bear a direct relationship to the Vinland Map or to one another (a situation very common in mediaeval binding, where two or more items were often bound together in order to economise on binding), though a world map would complement the
Tartar Relation
. Presumably Ferrajoli separated the three in order to gain a greater price than he thought possible through selling the three together. However the support that the
Tartar Relation
and the
Speculum Historiale
give to the Vinland Map, and therefore to its value, is such that the decision seems to be self-defeating. It might seem that Enzo Ferrajoli did not realise quite what he had in the Vinland Map.

The handwriting of all three documents is a particular style, known to handwriting specialists as
Oberrheinisch Bastarda
– Upper Rheinland Cursive – a style used in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Oberrheinisch Bastarda
had a wide distribution in Germany and Switzerland, as well as being common in Flanders and eastern France, and in northern Italy. Some have sought to identify the handwriting specifically with documents produced for the Council of Basle in 1440, and while this attribution is plausible, it is far from proved. It is very likely that all three manuscripts were written by the same scribe. While seeking to weigh up the likelihood of the Vinland Map being a forgery it is important to note that no-one has ever been able to suggest that the
Tartar Relation
and
Speculum Historiale
are forgeries – if the Vinland Map is fake it has been produced specifically to correspond with these two genuine volumes.