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JAMES STEEVES/ATLANTIC STOCK IMAGES

Leif’s Legacy

A thousand years ago, Vikings made their way from Scandinavia to

North America, establishing a settlement in

Newfoundland at a place we now call L ’ Anse aux Meadows

BY A LLAN L YNCH

spots in Iceland – like

the ends of the earth,”

says Gunnar Marel Eggertsson of

L’Anse aux Meadows in north-

western Newfoundland.

Standing at the helm of the

Viking longship Islendingur ,

Eggertsson recalls the emotion of

seeing L’Anse aux Meadows from

the water for the first time. “I was

touched because there are Ice-

landic houses. And to come to

New-found-land [he pronounces

every syllable like many ‘come

from aways’], to a place like L’Anse

aux Meadows, that’s really some-

thing for an Icelander.”

L’Anse aux Meadows is special

to Icelanders because at the turn of the last

millennium, in the year 1000, Eggertsson’s

direct ancestor Leif Eriksson sailed a Viking

longship into the bay here. Eriksson brought

30 people with him to establish a settlement

on the island almost 500 years before Colum-

bus sailed to the New World.

A thousand years later, L’Anse aux

Meadows can still feel like a land that time

has forgotten. Mossy partridgeberry and bake-

apple plants cover a boggy shelf along the

rocky shoreline. Cow parsnip, which looks

like prehistoric Queen Anne’s lace, stands

as tall as the centuries-old dwarf trees.

The only noticeable sounds are the cry

of seabirds, the wind and slapping

waves on the rock and pebble-strewn

shore. In the shallow water near the

original settlement, rows of jagged

rock jut out of the calm, clear

water like giant ancient teeth

T his year

marks the

1,000th

anniversary of

the arrival of

Leif Eriksson

at L'Anse aux

Meadows, Nﬂd.,

where the

legendary Viking

established a

settlement.

waiting to bite a boat’s underside.

Archaeologists believe the area

of L’Anse aux Meadows looks

much today as it did a millennium

ago, save that the tree line was

closer to the shore in Eriksson’s

time.

It became Gunnar Eggertsson’s

millennium project to return, with

a crew of friends (seven men and

one woman), to Newfoundland as

latter-day Vikings. A boat builder

and licensed fishing captain, not

to mention experienced longboat

sailor, Eggertsson left Iceland on

June 24 of this year. “It took us

only about seven days to sail to

Greenland and then another six

to sail from there to Canada,” says

the 45-year-old Eggertsson, his face reddened

by winds, waves and sun. “So you can see our

ship was really fast. Speed isn’t a problem for

a Viking ship.”

Eggertsson’s project was part passion, part

mission; he wanted to rehabilitate the repu-

tation of the Norse people – technically,

Vikings were Norsemen who went on raids,

although the term “Viking” is often used

more broadly today to include all Norsemen

(the Viking period lasted from AD 800

to 1050). “Not all Norsemen were rapists

and pillagers. They were farmers, they were

settlers, they were really clever people

who were very advanced in their techno-

logical thinking.”

This is not the image that many

people have of them, however,

thanks largely to Hollywood,

which has painted a picture

of wild men in horned hel-

I MPERIAL O IL R EVIEW 27

“It really looked like some

mets terrorizing the world. While it’s true Viking

warriors did raid and terrorize much of coastal

Europe, the Black Sea and Mediterranean, the fact

remains that the majority of Norse were not warriors

but livestock farmers.

There are many Hollywood-created myths

surrounding the Vikings, says Dr. Birgitta Wallace,

a retired Parks Canada archaeologist. For example,

they did not send their dead off in burning ships

to seek Valhalla – by AD 1000, most Vikings had

converted to Christianity and were generally buried

in consecrated ground. “And the horns on the

helmets are a fabrication of 19th-century romantic

ﬁction,” she adds.

The Vikings’ advanced technological under-

standing manifested itself not only in superior ships –

their famous dragon boats were flexible enough to

survive in rough seas – but in innovative tools.

“When you look at their tools, you realize there

was little difference between those used by, say, a

Viking farmer or carpenter and their counterparts in

Europe or North America just 150 years ago,”

explains Wallace.

Just how advanced the Vikings were was made

clear to Eggertsson during the 12 months he

spent building the Islendingur , using as a model an

AD 890 longship, which is now in the Viking Ship

Museum in Oslo. “The Norse were really clever,”

emphasizes Eggertsson. “They thought about amaz-

ing things, like enabling a ship to create air bubbles

in front of it so it would sail more smoothly.”

Viking design allows the ship to ride waves like a

surfboard, rather than sit in the water and push

against them, which is why Vikings were able to

travel as far and as fast as they did.

While Eggertsson had to make some compromises

to the original design (adding sleeping quarters, two

engines and communications devices) before ofﬁcials

would let him leave Icelandic waters, he and his crew

were still able to experience sailing as Leif Eriksson

and his shipmates did, encountering challenges

Eriksson might have and using their wits to overcome

them. “We were stuck in ice for 10 hours because of

black fog and an inaccurate weather forecast. It told

us that the ice was about 35 nautical miles out from

Cape Farewell [Greenland], but the ice was actually

about 60 nautical miles out. We were really lucky

to get the ship out of the ice ﬁeld in one piece.

There were heavy currents, strong winds and,

that night, the fog. Everything was just about as

difﬁcult as it could be for sailors.”

While the Islendingur was equipped with

modern navigational equipment, Eggertsson

and his crew did at times use a húsasnotra , or

sun-shadow board, the 1,000-year-old sextantlike

instrument on which the Vikings relied. A simple

wooden disc with two wooden rings positioned on

an arm, the instrument, Eggertsson explains,

“tells you the height of the sun, and from that

you can ﬁnd, pretty well, your latitude.” Determin-

ing longitude, he says, would have been more

difficult. (A precise way to measure longitude

was not found until the late 1700s, when the

Englishman John Harrison invented the marine

chronometer.)

“At night, they had the stars and the moon,

birds, currents, sea and winds,” says Eggertsson,

explaining that Eriksson’s crew would have

used these environmental elements to deter-

mine location and the optimal route. “The Norse

were very clever at this,” he emphasizes.

R elics

such as a

Viking helmet

(above), anchor

(below) and

spinning

tool (right,

bottom)

give clues to

Norse life.

This summer

the longship

Islendingur

sailed from

Iceland to

L'Anse aux

Meadows,

site of the

reconstructed

Viking settle-

ment (right).

LIKE ALL ICELANDERS, EGGERTSSON GREW UP HEAR-

ing the old Viking sagas. “Every Icelandic child

knows these,” he explains. “We are proud of our his-

tory and of being Icelanders.”

It wasn’t until 1837, when the sagas were

published in Latin, that scholars outside Scandinavia

learned that Vikings had come to North America.

A year later, when the stories were translated into

English, curious Victorians embraced the mystery of

the Vikings and where they had gone in the New

World. “Everyone had a theory,” chuckles Wallace.

Fuelled by the speculation, people began looking

for evidence. An old stone windmill in Rhode

Island, for example, was thought by some to be a

Viking tower – it had, in fact, been built in the 17th-

century by a governor of the state. There were other

misinterpretations and even hoaxes, but, neverthe-

less, the idea of a Viking expedition to what is now

North America survived in the public imagination,

and the search continued.

Like detectives reading a crime scene, explorers

and archaeologists pored over the sagas, looking

for clues to the whereabouts of Norse settlement

on this continent. Wallace has studied 79 possible

sites – only L’Anse aux Meadows could be authen-

ticated, although other evidence of a Norse presence

in North America has been uncovered. A coin

found in Maine, for example, has been identiﬁed as

a Norse penny from between AD 1065 and 1080.

Also, there are some 100 objects dating from the

late 13th century that were found at a Thule site

(the Thule predated the Inuit) on eastern Ellesmere

Island. While authentic in themselves, however,

these do not provide conclusive evidence that a

settlement existed at the location – there may, for

example, simply have been a shipwreck.

In 1978, the United Nations Educational, Scien-

tiﬁc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named

L’Anse aux Meadows the ﬁrst World Heritage Site, a

designation recognizing “the exceptional universal

value of a cultural or natural site that deserves

protection for the beneﬁt of all humanity.”

28 W INTER 2000

Currently, there are 630 such sites, including the

pyramids of Egypt, designated in 1979, and the Great

Wall of China, designated in 1987.

Outside the visitor centre at L’Anse aux Meadows,

there is a plaque that states: “The Norse travelled

here around 1000 AD. The archaeological remains

of their sod buildings are the earliest known Euro-

pean structures in North America. Their bloomery,

or ironworks, is the site of the first known iron

working in the New World. The site itself is the

base from where they launched expeditions

resulting in the first contact between aborigi-

nal North Americans and Europeans. L’Anse

aux Meadows ranks among the major archaeological

properties of the world.”

FINDING THE LOCATION OF VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN

North America meant much more than solving one

of the earth’s mysteries; it represented the identifi-

cation of the last link in the human encirclement of

the planet. Scientists believe the human race origi-

nated in Africa. Between 150,000 and 250,000 years

ago, some tribes travelled to eastern Asia, while others

went west and north to Europe and Scandinavia.

The descendants of the east Asian tribes are the

indigenous people of North America; the Vikings’

I MPERIAL O IL R EVIEW 29

Gunnar Marel Eggertsson Voyage

upon. The ﬁrst was said to have been “Helluland”

(Bafﬁn Island) and the second “Markland” (central

Labrador). As in the story of Goldilocks, the third,

Vinland, proved just right, with sweet-tasting, dew-

covered grass, salmon bigger than the Norse had ever

seen and a place where no winter fodder would be

needed for livestock because there were no heavy frosts

and the grasses stayed exposed (research suggests that

areas of the northern hemisphere were at the time

experiencing a warm period, which lasted several

hundred years and saw agriculture expand northward).

While explorers had been searching the coastline

of North America from Rhode Island to the Arctic

since the mid-1800s, looking for evidence of Viking

settlement, it wasn’t until 1960, when George Decker,

a Newfoundland fisher, showed the Norwegian

explorer Helge Ingstad the strange mounds on which

local children played, that anyone realized these

could be the remnants of Leif Eriksson’s camp.

Lloyd Decker chuckles as he recalls Ingstad’s

words when the explorer saw the mounds for the ﬁrst

time. “ ‘George, you make sure no one touches

these,’ he said to my father when he realized what

they were,” explains Lloyd.

“ ‘This is Crown land,’ Dad replied. ‘I don’t have

any authority to stop people from coming here.’

Ingstad looked at him and said, ‘It won’t be long

before you’ll have authority.’

“The next day, Dad got a telegram. It was from

Joey Smallwood, who was premier of Newfoundland

then. ‘Site Ingstad believes to be Viking, don’t let

anyone trespass.’ This was Dad’s authority. Joey’s

word was law.”

Lloyd went to work for Ingstad in 1961, cutting

and rolling up sod and cleaning off the top layers of

dirt from the site. Also working on the team were

Anne Stine Ingstad, Helge’s archaeologist-wife, and

Birgitta Wallace. Clayton Colbourne, a Parks Canada

guide at L’Anse aux Meadows who played at the site

as a child, says, “When Dr. Ingstad started digging

here in 1961, nobody believed he was right about the

site. I was 13 years old, and I can remember the cyni-

cism. People thought he and his team were a bunch

of fools just digging around in the muck.”

But with every sliver of nonindigenous wood, evi-

dence mounted and local cynicism was dispelled as

one of the world’s great stories of discovery, adven-

ture and reunification unfolded. Eventually, the

archaeologists reconstructed the settlement, piecing

together a picture of the life and culture of the

Vikings in North America.

Gunnar Eggertsson reﬂects on why his ancestors

might have chosen to settle at L’Anse aux Meadows.

“It’s a beautiful land, Newfoundland,” he says sim-

ply. “It doesn’t amaze me that they were fond of it

1000 years ago.” ❒

Greenland

Scandinavia

Iceland

North

America

• L’Anse aux Meadows

North

Atlantic Ocean

Europe

arrival in Newfoundland represents the ﬁrst time the

two arms of the human race reunited.

According to Birgitta Wallace, L’Anse aux

Meadows was inhabited for only a few years and was

not meant to be a permanent colony but merely a

convenient outpost from which Leif Eriksson could

explore what would be known, more than 500 years

later, as the New World. Weather conditions dic-

tated that the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans

were only open to Eriksson for a few months each

year. Having a western settlement gave him more

time for exploration. All summer, groups of Vikings

would explore the region along the coast of New-

foundland, Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Each fall, they would return to L’Anse aux Meadows

to wait out the winter in their tiny community,

which included three steep-roofed halls (the largest

of which could house 20 to 30 people as well as store

provisions); three huts and a small house, which

together probably quartered slaves and people of

lower rank; and a smithy. All the dwellings were

timber frame and sod-covered.

Wallace says the Vikings followed the classic

immigration model. “People established bases, and

looked for and made inventories of resources,” she

says. “The French did this too – they were looking

primarily for coal and lumber.” The Norse came in

search of lumber, which they found in abundance.

They also found wild grapes, which appealed to

them so much that they named the area encompass-

ing the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Prince

Edward Island, New Brunswick and eastern Quebec

“Vinland.” Wine, a great luxury that only those of

high rank could afford, had to be imported by the

Norse into Greenland, Iceland and all of Scandi-

navia from the Rhineland and France.

A map shows

the route

followed by

Gunnar

Eggertsson

(above).

A bracelet

(below) was

among the

artefacts found

at L’Anse aux

Meadows.

ACCORDING TO THE VIKING SAGAS, VINLAND

was the last of three areas the Vikings came

30 W INTER 2000

Vinland

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