THE VINLAND SAGAS

The sagas describe how Eirik the Red, outlawed from Iceland late in the tenth century, founded an Icelandic colony on the western coast of Greenland; how a prudent young merchant named Bjarni Herjolfsson, hastening towards Greenland across the Denmark Strait in the wake of the first fleet of colonizers in 985 or 986, was blown blindly past his destination south-west across the Atlantic and there sighted unknown lands; and how some fifteen years later Leif the Lucky, son of Eirik the Red, bought the ship that had survived this voyage and steered it back to the shores of the New World to explore and if possible exploit Bjarni’s chance discovery.

What Leif and his crew of thirty-five found there delighted them: wild grapes in profusion, rolling grasslands, vast stretches of towering timber, an abundance of game of all kinds, rivers teeming with giant salmon, meadows rich with a harvest of wild wheat, and a climate so kind that winter frosts were hardly known; even the dew seemed to them sweeter than anything they had ever tasted before. And Leif the Lucky, exulting in his find, named the country Vínland: ‘Wineland’, the land of grapes.

Other voyages of exploration followed, led by Leif’s brothers. But the explorers now encountered natives whose appearance and habits indicate beyond doubt that they were Native Americans. These voyages of exploration culminated, according to the sagas, in the expedition led by a wealthy Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Karlsefni, Leif’s brother-in-law, whose second name means, appropriately, ‘Makings of a man’. It was he who took the decisive step of attempting to found the first permanent European settlement in America.

These sagas have been a source of enormous controversy for the past century and more. No scholar doubts the authenticity of the central facts of exploration and colonization of the New World, but the accounts in the two sagas conflict with one another at several important points, and there has been endless argument about their relative merits as historical evidence, because the picture of early eleventh-century America they draw is tantalizingly hazy, a series of blurred impressions shot through with vivid details. On the evidence of the texts themselves, it has so far proved impossible to make irrefutable identifications of any of the particular bays and havens visited by the Norsemen, or of the exact location of their main settlement in Vinland. Various and ingenious calculations have been made on the basis of the somewhat equivocal navigational and topographical clues contained in the two sagas, and Vinland has been confidently located by enthusiasts in areas as far apart as Hudson Bay in the north and Virginia in the south. Every one of the theories put forward has had to disregard one or more inconsistencies between the two sagas or even within the sagas themselves; but, generally speaking, the most acceptable interpretation of the elusive information in the sagas suggests that Vinland (if it was anywhere) was in the New England region, and the majority of scholars have inclined to this view.

Until recently, archaeologists had failed to unearth any tangible evidence of the visits by the Norsemen which could lend support to any particular theory. Various alleged relics have turned up from time to time, but none of them has survived expert scrutiny, and many have been shown to be blatant forgeries.

In the 1960s, however, some very interesting discoveries were made in Newfoundland by Dr Helge Ingstad (former Governor of East Greenland and Spitzbergen) and his archaeologist wife. Basing his geographical calculations on the sailing times and directions given in the sagas and on a sixteenth-century Icelandic map of the North Atlantic drawn by Sigurdur Stefansson in 1590 (reproduced on p. 121), he decided to explore Newfoundland as the likeliest location for Vinland. And at L’Anse aux Meadows, a bay in the north-east of the island, he came across sites which have now been conclusively identified as a Norse settlement dating from around the year 1000.

There are seven or eight dwelling-sites in this cluster, and a small smithy where Dr Ingstad found a stone anvil, several pounds of slag and pieces of bog-iron, some nails, and fragments of bronze. The houses seem to have been built to the Norse pattern, with walls of turf and wood, and one of them measures sixty feet by forty-five, comprising a large hall and four smaller rooms; the hall, like the Norse buildings excavated in Greenland, has an ember-hearth running down the centre. Dr Ingstad argued that bog-iron was unknown in the Stone-Age culture of the primitive Native Americans, and that the method by which this particular iron at the Newfoundland site was extracted is unmistakably Norse.

The site was re-excavated in the 1970s by an international team of archaeologists; Ingstad’s identification was confirmed, and in 1978 it was designated as the first UNESCO World Heritage site, and Parks Canada erected a grandiose version of the presumed main building. But there is no proof that this particular site is the Vinland named by Leif the Lucky and Thorfinn Karlsefni. For one thing, it is inconsistent with the sagas at one crucial point – the grapes that gave Vinland its name; because wild grapes, it is believed, have never grown farther north than Passamaquoddy Bay, between Maine and New Brunswick. This automatically disqualifies Newfoundland as the location of Vinland, and no amount of philological juggling with the name (see footnote, p. 58) can wish this away. On the other hand, there may well have been several other expeditions from Greenland to the North American seaboard which these two sagas do not record, and it is by no means impossible that several settlements were attempted.

Dr Ingstad himself said that he thought it not unlikely that other sites might be discovered, even though he failed to come across any others during a careful 4,000-mile sea search of the littoral north from New England right into the Gulf of St Lawrence. Certainly, this discovery has done nothing to quench interest in the whole subject of these pre-Columban Norsemen in America. The Vinland Sagas have long been a battle-arena for hosts of scholars and enthusiasts intent on championing a cause or proving a conjecture, and no doubt the speculations will continue or even increase as a result of Dr Ingstad’s discovery.

Already, more has been written about these Vinland Sagas than about any other Icelandic saga; but so much of it has been ill-informed or speculative that it has tended to stimulate scepticism about their real value.¹

It is time that the sagas were once again allowed to speak for themselves. Too often they have been served up to the public in filleted versions, with their texts emended or cut or adapted or even conflated into a single uneasy narrative in an attempt to gloss over their inconsistencies. The sagas themselves have become obscured rather than illuminated by editors who arbitrarily selected textual variants to suit their own theories. In the mid twentieth century, research was done into the relationship between the two sagas and their manuscripts, and this enabled scholars to make some far-reaching reassessments. Many previous editions and translations can now be shown to have been based, partly at least, on discredited texts or mistaken assumptions; the purpose of this present volume is to provide a modern translation of the two sagas, entire and unabridged, in the context of this academic research, and to restore them to their proper position in the vast saga literature of medieval Iceland.

The decisive moves towards the west were initiated by the Viking raiders of the last years of the eighth century. They came prowling across the North Sea in their longships and struck the first violent blows against the western kingdoms, hammer-blow assaults on the wealthy and undefended coastlines that earned them an imperishable reputation for viciousness and rapacity. Viking marauders attacked England, Ireland, and France, while other groups were busy overrunning the islands of the north – Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, and the Faroe Islands; and these attacks increased in weight and organization throughout the ninth century.

No obstacles of land or sea could halt this race of farmer-sailors, it seemed. They rounded Spain and fought in the Mediterranean, in Italy, in North Africa, in Arabia. They hauled their boats overland from the Baltic and made their way down the great Russian rivers and into the Black Sea. They sailed north round the Scandinavian peninsula and reached the White Sea.

But although the so-called Viking Age persisted right into the eleventh century, the nature of the invasions was already changing in the ninth century; many of the raiders were now sailing west with the intention of settling down and establishing communities and kingdoms of their own, spurred on from behind by overpopulation at home and the unwelcome growth of royal power in Scandinavia. Land, not plunder, became their primary aim; and in the latter half of the ninth century, just when the land-hunger of the Scandinavian emigrants was at its keenest, the Norsemen reached Iceland. In retrospect, this was hardly surprising. The northern seas were now swarming with sturdy ocean-going boats which, although remarkably seaworthy, were often at the mercy of contrary winds. They were not the lean predatory longships built only for coastal waters, but highstemmed and broad-breasted cargo boats propelled by one large rectangular sail and steered by a long rudder pinned to the starboard quarter. The men who sailed them had neither compass nor lodestone; they could hold course accurately on a latitude, by observing the sun and stars, but they had no way of reckoning longitude. Their ships, in good weather, were perhaps the fastest craft in the world at that time (it has been estimated that they could make about ten knots); but, more significantly for this story, they were unable to sail very near the wind, and often had difficulty in holding course in a crosswind.

It was this vulnerability to adverse winds, according to the early Icelandic historians, that led to the first Norse sighting of Iceland by storm-driven sailors on their way west from Scandinavia about the year 860. It is, however, just as likely that the Norse discovery of Iceland was no mere accident, as the existence of the country had been known to geographers in Europe long before the Viking Age dawned. The island of Thule, which is mentioned by certain Greek and Roman geographers like Strabo and Pytheas of Marseille, may possibly have referred to Iceland, although it should be borne in mind that the designation was also applied to Scandinavia, Shetland, and even the Faroes. But in Anglo-Saxon England the existence of Iceland was well known to the learned writers of the period; in several works, Thule is described as ‘the farthest land northwest of Ireland’ (Orosius), ‘known to few people because of its remoteness’ (Boethius), and ‘six days’ journey across the sea’ and in the works of the Venerable Bede (672–735), the term Thule unmistakably refers to Iceland, as can be seen from the latitude he assigns it to.

These Anglo-Saxon references probably owe their origin, ultimately, to Irish sources. In the sixth century the Celtic Church in Ireland was a centre of remarkable missionary activity. Irish missionaries moved relentlessly up the western coasts of Scotland, founding centres such as Iona and Applecross. The missionary impetus carried them as far as Orkney and Shetland. But in addition to organized missionary expeditions, Irish anchorites were quartering the northern seas in their frail curraghs in search of empty islands where they could cultivate solitude, and shortly after 700 they reached the then-uninhabited Faroes – the last stepping-stone on the way to Iceland.

Then in 825 the Irish monk Dicuil, who was associated with the court of King Charlemagne, wrote a geographical treatise in Latin (Liber de mensura orbis terrae) in which he gives an interesting description of Thule based on information given him by three Irish monks who had gone there in 795 – just about the time of the first Viking assaults on Ireland. Dicuil’s Thule is quite clearly Iceland; the presence of a few Irish monks in Iceland when the first Norsemen arrived there in 860 is confirmed by the early Icelandic historians, and the existence of place-names like Papey and Papyli corroborates their evidence.

Whether the first Norsemen to set foot on Iceland discovered the country by accident or had learned of its existence previously in Ireland is a debatable point; but their reports of a new country in the north inspired other men of enterprise who came on voyages of planned exploration to size up the prospects of settling there. In 870 a Norwegian named Ingolf Arnarson, impelled to take hasty leave of his homeland because of a killing, became Iceland’s first permanent settler, making his home on the site of the present capital, Reykjavik. A host of immigrants of Norse and Celtic stock followed him, and within sixty years the Age of Settlement, as it is called, was over. By 930, it has been estimated, Iceland had a population of perhaps 30,000 and had developed into a nation; in that year there was established a parliamentary commonwealth which lasted for more than 300 years, a unique republican system of aristo-democratic government based on a national assembly (the Althing). This was a judicial and legislative body controlled by thirty-six (later thirty-nine) chieftains (goðar) whose authority was both secular and religious; but their status was ultimately dependent on the voluntary allegiance of the individual free-holding farmers who were the core of the community.

Once a stable political pattern had evolved in Iceland, it was not very long before this island which had once been an outpost of the Scandinavian sea routes became itself a centre of further exploration: so much so that less than a century later the Icelanders made a treaty with King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway (1014–30), in which they stipulated that Icelanders who were on exploring expeditions and happened to be blown off course to the shores of Norway should not have to pay the customary tax imposed on those entering the country (landaurar). And in the next century, Spitzbergen was discovered by sailors on their way from Iceland to Norway, some time before 1170; and Jan Mayen Island, according to the Icelandic Annals, was discovered in 1194.

The young, growing nation of Iceland never cultivated isolation. Right from the start, it was very much part of Europe; the sea was a road rather than a barrier. Iceland had limited natural resources, and had to depend largely on foreign trade, with Norway and England as its main customers. From the earliest days, Iceland exported wool, tweed, sheepskins, hides, cheese, tallow, falcons, and sulphur in exchange for timber, tar, metals, flour, malt, honey, wine, beer, and linen.

But Iceland also had a very important ‘invisible’ export at this time – court poetry. From the tenth century onwards, every single known court poet in Scandinavia came from Iceland, and Icelandic poets could also trade their songs of praise to the earls of Orkney and to princes in England and Norse-speaking Dublin, such was the linguistic affinity of the nations of northern Europe of the time.

Eulogies were sold to fame-hungry kings for hard cash; but the many travelling poets of Iceland also brought back to their country an intimate knowledge of foreign parts. It is indeed one of the striking features of early Icelandic literature how soberly and often accurately northern and western Europe is described. Many of the sagas are partly set in foreign lands, and on the whole they present a plausible picture of even the farthest peoples and places. It is a misconception to think of these Icelandic sources as being primarily ‘legendary’ or ‘fantastic’. Those who are inclined to doubt the authenticity of the voyages described in the Vinland Sagas overlook the fact that we are dealing with a literary genre where the geographical setting of the stories was particularly important, because one of the functions of the sagas was to enlighten their audiences about the past and the present as well as to entertain them.

The Icelandic geographers of the early Middle Ages showed an astonishing sophistication in their image of the northern world. This is how it is described in an Icelandic Geographical Treatise preserved in a MS. dating from about 1300, but evidently based on a twelfth-century original:

This picture of the north and far west in relation to Europe is drawn with considerable knowledge. In particular, the descriptions of the Arctic regions (stretching from Russia to Greenland) and the eastern seaboard of the North American continent are nowhere to be found in contemporary geographical textbooks elsewhere in Europe – in which they were to remain terrae incog-nitae for a very long time. Nor was there anything esoteric about this geographical knowledge. It was based on the actual experience of Icelandic sailors; another geographical sketch from the twelfth century enshrines the current navigational practices in the northern seas of that time. It is found in the Prologue to Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), which describes the settlement of Iceland during the period A.D. 870–930 and was originally compiled in the twelfth century: