How the Vikings Survived a Winter in America, 1000 Years Ago | History for Sleep

Tonight we spend one whole winter with a Norse family at the northern tip of Newfoundland, around the year one thousand and ten, five hundred years before Columbus. Gudrid, born in Iceland and married in Greenland, comes ashore with her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni and a company of Greenlanders at the old turf halls Leif Eiriksson built years before. Ships left on the sand by the tide, dew on the grass that tasted sweet, salmon bigger than any they had seen, a boat sent south for grapes and butternuts, a cradle by the long fire, a whale on the shore, the first iron ever smelted in the Americas, timber drying on a cliff, and a winter so mild the saga says the grass hardly withered. No ads in the first 30 minutes. After that, ads only fall between chapters. The narration slows down as the winter ends, and the last half hour is the quietest. Chapters 00:00 A Woman of Three Lands 17:10 Leif's Houses 33:00 Dew on the Grass 49:11 Salmon Bigger Than Any 1:04:41 The Grapes 1:20:49 A Cradle by the Long Fire 1:37:06 The Whale on the Shore 1:53:01 The Smithy by the Brook 2:09:07 Timber on the Cliff 2:24:24 A Winter Without Frost 2:40:59 Gudrid Sings 2:57:18 The First Green 3:14:29 Sleep in the Turf Hall Sources The Saga of the Greenlanders, tr. A. M. Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good (1890) Eirik the Red's Saga, tr. J. Sephton (1880) Parks Canada, L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site M. Kuitems et al., "Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021", Nature (2021) Wikipedia articles on L'Anse aux Meadows, the Norse settlements in Greenland and the knarr Gudrid, Thorfinn and Snorri are people of the sagas, which were told aloud for two centuries before they were written down; the two sagas disagree in places, and their small everyday moments here are imagined. The houses, the work and the finds are drawn from the sources above. Images are AI-generated. The narration is produced with AI assistance. Listening from somewhere tonight? Leave your town and the time in the comments. #HistoryForSleep #SleepDocumentary #Vikings #Vinland #OrdinaryLives