From Iceland to the Americas

Vinland and historical imagination

Tim William Machan, Jón Karl Helgason

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526128775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson's visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the chapters not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.

1

Vinland on the brain: remembering the Norse

Tim William Machan

In 1875 the Victorian scholar-adventurer Richard Burton, reflecting on a century of English engagement with Iceland and its natural wonders, observed that the ‘travellers of the early century saw scenes of thrilling horror, of majestic grandeur, and of heavenly beauty, where our more critical, perhaps more cultivated, taste finds very humble features’. For in their enthusiasm, early visitors like Ebenezer Henderson, George Mackenzie, and Henry Holland had created a dilemma for those who followed: to embrace their predecessors’ calculated zeal and possibly reproduce its extravagances, or to effect a more measured response and hazard the criticism and even rejection of their own peers. ‘They had “Iceland on the Brain”’, Burton continues, ‘and they were wise in their generation: honours and popularity await the man who ever praises, the thorough partisan who never blames’.¹

Iceland on the Brain – an evocative phrase that describes an experience transformative if also ominous. It calls to mind an external force that, whether desired or not, imposes itself on an individual’s character and thought processes. And, in fact, it is not an inapt way to describe what Britons and other European visitors experienced in Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Buoyed by the first wave of romantic musings like Bishop Percy’s Five Pieces of Runic Poetry and Thomas Gray’s ‘The Descent of Odin’, early travellers witnessed a spectacular but menacing landscape of volcanoes and glaciers, vistas unlike any to be found in Great Britain. William Morris, an Iceland enthusiast writing at nearly the same time as Burton, nonetheless described the island as ‘an awful place: set aside the hope that the unseen sea gives you here, and the strange threatening change of the blue spiky mountains beyond the firth, and the rest seems emptiness and nothing else; a piece of turf under your feet, and the sky overhead, that’s all’.² With intense if conflicting sentiments like these, it is hardly surprising that some travellers praised the aching beauty of Iceland’s waterfalls and geysers, even as others came to regard the constantly unstable volcano Hekla as the Hell-mouth and the Snæfellsnes Glacier as an entrance to the centre of the earth.

This is a book about a related strain of brain fever, one whose earliest cases can be diagnosed about two centuries ago. Its symptoms have included poems, novels, travel books, translations, inscriptions, artefacts, archaeological digs, legislation, films, comic books, video games, statues, restaurants, music camps, racism, and even a theme park. Having gripped Canada, the United States, and South America, the fever now has spread across the globe. To paraphrase Burton, it might be called Vinland on the brain.

Vinland, of course, is the area that Norse sagas and other medieval Nordic records designate as the Western Hemispheric place where Norse travellers from Iceland and Greenland made land, encountered hostile indigenous peoples, and established brief settlements. Certainly in North America and probably lying more northerly than southerly, the precise location of Vinland, despite decades of research and the strong convictions of many researchers, may never be known, if only because, in accordance with Norse geography, Vinland never had a precise location. Thingvellir, the site of the annual Icelandic parliament and social gathering, very much was and is a specific place. But Vinland as well as Markland and Helluland, respectively the forested and rocky areas also mentioned in medieval sources, would have been relational terms rather than locations with exact geographic coordinates. Vinland, then, was neither Markland nor Helluland, and it was the last and furthest south of the North American places first visited by the Norse. It must also have been far enough south for grapes to have grown there, since the first element in the Norse form of the name seems incontrovertibly to have been vín (wine) and not vin (meadow), as some critics have argued.³ That quality would probably rule out Newfoundland and any place north of it, but doing so still leaves a lot of land to the south, in present-day Canada, the United States, and, in theory, Central and South America. Outside these generalities, the Norse sources offer only tantalising details that do little to narrow down the geographic possibilities.

As vague as the specifics of Vinland might have been, however, there is no doubt that Icelanders and Greenlanders did at least step onto the North American continent sometime around the year 1000. The longhouses at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, discovered and excavated by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad in the 1960s, offer unarguable proof of this. Not only their architectural style but also their layout and positioning are characteristically Norse and, concomitantly, would be uncharacteristic for the culture of either the Thule Inuit or the Dorset, the first peoples who lived throughout the region and who would have been the first North Americans to encounter Norse visitors. The presence of smelted iron and several artefacts could have come only from the Norse, and a spindle whorl could have come only from a Norse woman. Occupied for at most ten to twenty years, the eight buildings, which might have accommodated as many as fifty men and women at any one time, by themselves provide evidence neither for why they were erected where they were nor for why they were abandoned, although the site seems by design to have been more of a place to stage shipping than a genuine farm or settlement. The only other possible (if still unlikely) Norse sites in North America are on Baffin Island and at Point Rosee on the southern end of Newfoundland.⁴ Outside of L’Anse aux Meadows, genuine Norse artefacts – shards, smelted iron, fragments of tools, carved bones, figurines, boat nails, chain mail, and so forth – have been found across Greenland and Arctic Canada, as well as in Maine. Such finds might be the remnants of an actual on-site Norse presence, but they also could imply the existence of trade networks by which goods moved from Iceland and Greenland into North America or even contact between indigenous peoples and the Norse in Norse Greenlandic settlements.⁵

None of this evidence, in any case, suggests a sustained Norse presence in the Americas after the beginning of the eleventh century or, perhaps, ever. Nonetheless, memories of Vinland persisted in Iceland and the Nordic regions for several centuries. In the 1060s Adam of Bremen relays that, while he was at the Danish court of King Svein Estridsson, the king told him of an island named Vinland on which wine grapes and other crops grew abundantly.⁶ The Icelandic Annals of 1121 notes that Greenland’s Bishop Eirik Gnupsson went to Vinland, although whether he went expecting to find a colony or no one at all depends on how one translates the Old Norse verb leita.⁷ But if this source is to be believed, he at least did go there. Another twelfth-century geographical treatise mentions Helluland and Markland as well as Vinland, and in the same period the Icelandic historian Ari Thorgilsson says that his uncle Thorkel Gellisson had told him of Vinland and that Thorkel had got his own information from one of Greenland’s original settlers.⁸ Another well-known Norse reference to North America occurs in a later entry in the Icelandic Annals, this one from 1347, which records the arrival of a small craft carrying seventeen men ‘who had been on a voyage to Markland and later had been driven by gales to this land’.⁹

Of course, the most familiar and detailed accounts of the Norse in North America – so detailed, in fact, that they have often been accepted as factual, serving as roadmaps for Norse activity – are The Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) and Eirik the Red’s Saga (Eiríks saga rauða), both from the thirteenth century. Blending credible historical detail (like skin-boats, or canoes) with phenomena that recall contemporary accounts of the wonders of the East (like unipeds), the sagas in particular would seem to verify a Norse presence. But, again, they do not indicate the exact location of these landings, much less the possibility that Norse settlers, besides those ultimately associated with Leif Eiriksson, might have journeyed elsewhere in the area. And the Vinland sagas are not dispassionate historical records but crafted pieces of prose in the tradition of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), with all of their events and characters shaped by the works’ narrative designs.

All of these later accounts were written down well after the events they describe, and just what their terseness meant is not easy to say. Perhaps by the late Middle Ages Vinland had become just a dim memory, or perhaps trips there were so common as to merit no elaboration. Then again, it might be that any such trips were marginal and essentially inconsequential in the late medieval North Atlantic experience. In the centuries after the settlement period, indeed, as well as in the later saga accounts of this period, Icelandic writings emphasised larger, culture-defining matters like the landnám (settlement) itself, family and district history, and the conversion to Christianity, especially as these matters helped define Icelandic–Norwegian relations.¹⁰ From this perspective, Vinland would have been irrelevant.

After the Middle Ages, Nordic references to Vinland and even Greenland become still more erratic and even cryptic. In the early fifteenth century, the Dane Claudius Claussøn Swart described Greenland as an island that is connected by a land-bridge to Karelia, across which, as he claims himself to have seen, ‘infidels’ daily attack in huge armies. He may have imagined Vinland to be attached to this land-bridge as well, though he does not mention the place by name.¹¹ A papal letter from the century’s close expresses concern that no outsiders had been to Greenland in eighty years, during which time, according to the rumours that reached the Pope, many Greenlanders had abandoned their faith.¹² In the seventeenth century, at Iceland’s bishopric Skálholt, according to Finnur Magnússon, Bishop Gísli Oddsson saw an anonymous Latin manuscript that referred to North America. This manuscript stated that in 1342 the Greenlanders willingly abandoned their faith and converted themselves to the people of America (‘ad Americæ populos se converterunt’),¹³ and it was for this reason that Christians now stayed away from Greenland. North of both Iceland and Greenland, the document claimed, lay a region named Jötnaland (giant land) or Tröllbotnaland (troll-bay land).Magnússon goes on to reference several trips to Greenland or attacks perpetrated on the Norse Greenlanders by skrælingjar (skrælings or ‘weaklings’, the Norse word used in reference to Native Americans and Inuit alike).¹⁴ But even if these references are historically accurate and not fabrications, they, like Swart’s description and the papal letter, reveal nothing about the status of Vinland, other than that seventeenth-century Icelanders believed that Greenland at least was well inhabited in the fourteenth century, and that nineteenth-century Icelanders and Danes, in turn, believed them.

Perhaps the most intriguing post-medieval Nordic reference to Vinland comes from the 1520 testimonial of a parish priest in Fet, Norway, who claimed that an abandoned farm named Birkefloten belonged to the vicarage. Rather inscrutable is the role played in this affair by one Olaf Byrien, who testified that he was born and married in Vinland, and that he had dwelt there for some time. Apparently, Byrien’s nativity and upbringing somehow disqualified him from any claim to the Norwegian farm.¹⁵ It should go without saying that he had certainly never set foot in Vinland, and so the truly remarkable thing to me (again) is the dispassionate way in which all this is announced, as if claims of a Vinland origin were commonplace for sixteenth-century Norwegians. That, or Byrien’s assertions are so outrageous – the medieval equivalent of alien abduction – that they require no comment. Indeed, while post-medieval references to Greenland persist into the early modern period, Vinland generally drop...