The Vikings Who Reached America 500 Years Before Columbus

Norse sailors from Greenland were felling trees on the coast of Newfoundland in 1021. Tree rings in three pieces of their cut wood prove the year exactly. They built a base, worked iron and sailed south for grapes and butternuts. Then they abandoned the site, and for nine centuries the rest of the world treated their voyages as legend. 0:00 Intro 2:58 The Sea Road West: Iceland and Erik the Red's Greenland 10:14 Two Sagas That Disagree 18:39 Bjarni's Sighting and Leif Erikson's Voyage to Vinland 27:28 A Winter at the Edge of the World 39:19 Thorvald Eriksson and First Contact 47:32 Thorfinn Karlsefni and Snorri, the First European Child Born in America 56:46 The Two Faces of Freydís 1:03:24 Who Were the Skrælings? 1:10:00 Nine Centuries of Doubt 1:17:45 Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad Find L'Anse aux Meadows 1:26:45 What the Ground Revealed: The Forge, the Butternuts and the Year 1021 1:35:47 Why the Vikings Left America 1:42:26 Why the World Forgot THE TEXTS Two medieval Icelandic sagas record the Norse voyages to Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders credits Bjarni Herjolfsson with the first sighting and Leif Erikson with the first landing. The Saga of Erik the Red turns Leif's discovery into an accident during a Christian mission. It also gives the starring role to Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose wife Gudrid gave birth to Snorri on the American shore. The sagas contradict each other on Thorvald's death, on the number of voyages, and on Freydís Eiríksdóttir, who is a hero in one tale and a killer in the other. THE GROUND Turf halls at L'Anse aux Meadows confirmed the sagas in the 1960s. The site held a forge fed with local bog iron, ship rivets, a bronze cloak pin, a spindle whorl, jasper fire starters from Iceland and Greenland, and butternuts from hundreds of miles south. In 2021, a team from the University of Groningen dated the site to 1021, using the carbon spike left in tree rings by a solar storm in 993 AD. That same year, Yale tested the ink of the famous Vinland Map and declared it a twentieth-century forgery. THE VERDICT Greenland had too few people, the voyage was too long, and the colony's trade faced east toward Norway. The peoples of the coast, most likely ancestors of the Beothuk, Innu and Mi'kmaq, were numerous and able to defend their land. Greenland ships still crossed to Markland for timber as late as 1347. SOURCES The Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red Kuitems et al., "Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021," Nature, 2021 Parks Canada and UNESCO World Heritage Centre: L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site Yale University Library, 2021 findings on the Vinland Map