Viking Discovery of America

By Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad

Faced with harsh conditions in their Greenland home, a group of Vikings took the reins of fate into their own hands. With incredible luck, skill and fortitude, they discovered lands filled with a profusion of wood, wild game and fertile land. In the sagas that grew from this discovery, the lands were given names that resonated with hope and promise. Almost 1000 years later, a husband and wife team united their talents. Intrigued by allusions in the ancient sagas to fabled Vinland, they considered the scholarship on Viking culture and technology; they studied maps and they researched intensively the prominent theories on Vinland's location. And finally their efforts bore fruit when a remote Newfoundland peninsula yielded up a soapstone spindle-whorl, a Viking ring pin, and what had to be the overgrown remnants of over a dozen Viking buildings.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550811584
• ISBN13: 9781550811582
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Breakwater Books
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.3" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Amazing what a gifted amateur can acomplish!

Until Ingstad came along in the late 1950s, there was a principle operating among most U.S. historians which Charles Michael Boland called NEBC: "No Europeans Before Columbus." Then Ingstad, a trained lawyer and natural outdoors and explorer with a wife who was a professional archaeologist, looked again at his astute analysis of the Greenlanders' Saga and Erik's Saga, combined that with his extensive travels in the Arctic, and came to the conclusion that Helluland *had* to be Baffin Island, Markland *had* to be the mid-Atlantic coast of Labrador, and Vinland therefore *had* to be somewhere in the upper part of Newfoundland. To top it off, he was convinced that "Vinland" referred to meadows ("Vin" with a short "I"), not grapevines ("Vin" with a long "I"). In this popular but very informative treatment, he takes the reader step-by-step through his thought processes and explains in an entirely convincing manner why all this *had* to be so. Then, of course, he went out in a small boat, retraced the path Leif had taken (which itself was the reverse of the path Bjarni had taken), and when he got to the tiny, isolated village of L'Anse aux Meadows on the Strait of Belle Isle, he stopped and asked the local fishermen if they knew of any ruins in the area. "Sure do," they replied and the Ingstad spent the next eight years platting and excavating the foundations of a cluster of turf houses, plus a smithy, a kiln, and a row of boathouses on the creek that ran through the meadow. It's a fascinating story and this edition is beautifully illustrated. If you're interested in the Norse, or the history of discovery, or Newfoundland, or archaeology, you'll want to read this book.

Discovering THE Norse site yet found in America

This account of Norse explorations in America by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, focuses on the ruins they found and excavated, left by Norse settlers near the present village of L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, somewhere around 1000 AD according to carbon dating. Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian, wrote most of the text of this well illustrated 199-page large-format book. His archeologist wife, in charge of the actual diggings, wrote the chapter on their meticulous uncovering of the ruins of eight turf buildings during the course of seven seasons from 1961 to 1968, the largest of which, House F, contained six main rooms separated by turf walls. Much smaller but of key importance was House J, a working "smithy" in which local bog iron was smelted. The three houses A, B, and C, closely clustered together, have since been restored to original condition to form the core of a Canadian national historic park established in 1977 and open to visitors, complete with "re-enactors" dressed in Old Norse costumes. The site's second-largest house, A, is a longhouse about 75 feet in length with four rooms. Much of the described detail of the actual digs will probably be lost on many general readers, but this chapter does convey a sense of the incredibly slow and painstaking efforts involved in any important archeological dig. No doubt of greater interest to the non-archeologically inclined will be Helge Ingstad's chapters on the background of the Norse Vinland ventures in the region, including an illuminating analysis of the two pertinent sagas. Of these, the one long believed to be the more authentic ("Erik the Red's Saga"), presumably because of its more sophisticated literary style, many now consider factually the less reliable. Its Icelandic compositor in likely about 1260 seems to have had a copy of the less polished but more sober, matter-of-fact and much more nautically aware "Greenlanders' Saga" in front of him, composed probably at least 60 years earlier and likely by a Greenlander. The redactors of "Erik's Saga" are now thought by many, including Ingstad, to have modified the story to reflect more credit on Thorfinn Karlsefni of a distinguished Icelandic family, while greatly reducing Leif Eriksson's role to that of an accidental discoverer storm-blown clear across the ocean from Norway (against the prevailing westerly winds of these latitudes, I might add as a geographer.) In his assessment of the two sagas Helge Ingstad is basically in agreement with those of Carl Sauer and Erik Wahlgren, though both have strongly disagreed with his contention that the Newfoundland structures are the ruins of Leif Eriksson's houses. The site might have been an outpost occupied for a few years at this strategic location by a group of Norse unrecorded by any extant saga, about four-fifths of the saga material having in any case been irretrievably lost. (See my reviews of the Sauer and Wahlgren books by clicking on the above link). Be that a

A "must" for Viking history buffs

In The Viking Discovery Of America, Helge and Anne Ingstad relate the fascinating and informative story of the excavation of a Norse settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and what this archaeological survey mean for our understanding of Viking explorations of the Western Hemisphere. With a meticulous scholarship, the Ingstads united the Viking sagas of discovery with engaging details about shipbuilding, navigation, culture, and lifestyle. The Viking Discovery Of America combines scholarly detective work with ground breaking archaeological confirmations to overturn centuries of historical assumptions and documenting Viking contact with the New World centuries before Christopher Columbus. The Viking Discovery Of America is an enthusiastically recommended addition to academic and community library collections, as well as a "must" for Viking history buffs and New World archaeology students.