How Did Vikings Find Greenland With No Maps?

What it was actually like to be alive. How did Vikings find Greenland with no maps? It is 985, you are in an open boat in the North Atlantic, and you have not seen land in four days. No chart, no compass, no clock, and no deck to go below because there is no below. What you have is an outstretched arm. At noon you stack your fingers up between the horizon and the sun, and as long as the sun keeps sitting at the same height above the water, you are still on your line. Greenland is not a destination you search for. It is a latitude you hold on to until land arrives. Miss it and you come in on the side of Greenland where the ice is. Miss badly and you are in open ocean with a barrel of water and a following wind. Old Norse has one word for that - hafvilla, sea bewilderment - and when a saga wants to tell you a ship was lost, it does not describe a storm. It says they had hafvilla, and moves on, because everybody listening already knew what happened next. Three moves, and the third is the one nobody expects. One: hold the line with your own body. No degrees, no trigonometry, no theory of latitude - nobody in Norway in the 900s had one. Which means the instrument on a Norse ship is not an object. It is a man, and he has been doing it since he was nine. Two: read everything that is not the sky. Birds that have to be on land by night. A cloud that stands still while the rest of the sky moves. Ice a hundred miles off, throwing a pale glare onto the underside of the overcast. And a raven in a box - the one instrument aboard that can get up high and look. Three: there was a chart for this crossing. It just was not a picture. It was a paragraph, memorised and said out loud - a course and three checkpoints, each described by how much of it you can see rather than how far away it is. It copies for free to anyone who will sit still and listen. What it cannot survive is people stopping saying it. And an honest gap, at length in the episode: the sunstone. The physics works and modern trials have shown it. But there is one medieval text, it is 13th century, and the only crystal anybody has recovered came out of a ship that sank off Alderney in 1592. I would rather hand you the hole than hand you a stone. Then the turn. All of that is a method - deliberate, taught, repeatable - and almost nothing was found using it. Iceland, Greenland and North America were each found by a man who was somewhere else by mistake, and the one who reached America looked at a continent, decided it was not relevant to him, and carried on. The method did not find the new places. Being blown off course found the new places. What it did was harder and less romantic: it let them go back. You have a device in your pocket that knows where you are to within a few metres, and you get annoyed when it takes four seconds. You have never needed to know what the sun does at noon. That is the entire point of technology - it lets you stop knowing things. But somebody had to know them first, and when they stopped saying it out loud it was gone inside a lifetime. CHAPTERS 0:00 An open boat, 985 0:24 No chart, no compass, no clock 1:09 Four fingers between the horizon and the sun 2:34 Hafvilla, the word for it 2:56 Two things nearly everybody believes 3:51 Viking is a job, not a people 4:24 Techniques with no hardware in them 4:51 Three moves 5:17 Move one: find your line and hold it 5:38 The pole star, and the noon sun 6:46 The device you were issued at birth 7:08 The instrument is a man 7:18 Put a modern price on it 7:45 Nobody aboard knew why it worked 8:11 Move two: everything that is not the sky 8:32 Birds, whales and driftwood 9:04 Standing cloud, and ice blink 9:58 The bird in the box 10:10 Floki and the three ravens 11:29 Move three: the chart was a poem 11:40 The sailing direction, word for word 12:11 A course and three checkpoints 13:13 Honest about the sunstone 14:19 A good idea with a hole in it 14:38 Where the whole thing turns over 14:50 Iceland, Greenland and America by accident 16:17 L'Anse aux Meadows, 1960 17:52 What I keep coming back to 18:25 One question for you SOURCES NAMED IN THIS EPISODE The Skuldelev ships, Roskilde Landnamabok, the Book of Settlements - Hrafna-Floki and the three ravens, events of the 870s, written down around 1130 Raudulfs thattr, 13th century - the one medieval mention of a solarsteinn The Alderney wreck crystal, 1592 - Elizabethan, six centuries after the crossings L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland - found in 1960, dated to about the year 1000 The sagas on the 985 crossing - 25 ships west, 14 arrived One honest note, also in the episode: the raven story, the sailing directions and the ship counts all come from texts written down one to three centuries after the events. Hold the exact numbers loosely, but not the shape of it. The last episode was nine minutes; this one is twenty. Say which you would rather have. #vikings #history #norse #greenland