E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-85790-065-4
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Graeme Davis is a specialist in the mediaeval world, its language, literature and culture. Recent books include studies of the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon, Old High German and Old Icelandic cultures. He is a lecturer in the History of the English Language with the Open University, previously a British Academy funded researcher at the University of Iceland, and an enthusiast for the North Atlantic region, where he has travelled extensively.
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Vikings to America
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He had three ships and left from Spain: He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain. SO goes the school-room jingle, and so most people today perceive the dawn of European exploration and settlement of America. Yet it is not Columbus but the Vikings who should be credited with the first significant European exploration and settlement of America. Around five centuries before Columbus, the Vikings both explored and settled in America. The archaeological remains at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland leave no doubt that they established a substantial presence on the American east coast. Today we know for sure that the Vikings were there. Yet in popular perception the story of the Vikings in America remains at the margins of history. As a result the Vikings and their exploration of what they called Vinland is now presented as little more than a footnote in world history. The implicit assumption is that their remarkable achievement had no lasting impact on the history of either Europe or America. The picture is changing. In recent years academics working in many different disciplines have been finding fragments of evidence which taken together tell a far bigger story of the Vikings in America. This is the story presented here. For the Vikings did a lot more than just visit a few places in Newfoundland or elsewhere on the American east coast. From their base in the Viking colony of Greenland – itself strictly part of the American continent – we now know that the Vikings explored in three different directions. A thousand miles south from Greenland is the archaeological site of L’Anse aux Meadows, a staging post on the journey to what they called Vinland, east-coast America. A thousand miles north from Greenland the Vikings reached the High Arctic. Here Viking archaeological remains have been found in some of the most unlikely locations, in lands no-one would have dreamed the Vikings could ever have reached. Today we must accept the evidence of that the Vikings, against all expectations, in fact reached the High Arctic. Furthermore, 1,000 miles west from Greenland in Hudson Bay and its vicinity we have evidence of Viking presence, and can place the Vikings at the centre of the North American continent. Viking Greenland emerges as the starting point for exploration of three widely separated areas of the American continent: the east coast, the far north and Hudson Bay. The Viking presence in America was no brief interlude, but something that lasted as long as the Viking Greenland colony – a little short of 500 years. Most of the voyages to America were made to bring back to Greenland and Europe cargoes of raw materials – but some resulted in over-wintering and some in settlement. Today we must accept that the Vikings played a noteworthy role in the exploration and development of America. Stories of America came back to Europe. Yet for a variety of reasons – largely a mix of commercial sensitivity and bad conscience – Europe turned its back on these stories. This virtual conspiracy of secrecy is the canvas on which was written the fiction of the Columban discovery of America. Yet at a time when Mediterranean Europe was promoting the Columbus myth, northern Europe, particularly Britain, was demonstrating a continuing tradition of sailing directions that went back to the Viking explorers, as shown in the British search for a north-west passage. Without the Vikings, the post-Columban re-exploration of North America would have been very different in its character. In researching Vikings in America I found a great mass of firm evidence, but also an almost equal volume of what may best be described as fiction.1 Ideas that the Vikings reached California or were somehow linked with the Templars or any other Masonic group are, in my view, without any justification, and have not been considered here.2 I have, however, looked at a whole range of doubtful evidence which may or may not give information about Vikings in America. In all cases I have sought to be clear that there are doubts, but also to avoid the temptation to discard theories out of hand. At least some of the disputed materials will, in my view, come to be accepted as reliable. The most controversial legacy of Viking America presented in this book is that the name ‘America’ is of Viking origin. The old view that America takes its name from the explorer Amerigo Vespucci is a tired idea now so totally discredited that it cannot be maintained today – though still taught in many American schools. It may be that in discarding the Amerigo Vespucci hypothesis we should simply say that we do not know where the name ‘America’ comes from. Yet we must also note that ‘America’ is a regular phonological development of a name we know the Vikings used in their Old Norse language for this part of the world. Either the Vikings named America, or by some strange coincidence America gained from an unknown alternative source a name which resembles that used by the Vikings. The Vikings are certainly the first European settlers of America; they may also be the people who named the continent. The Columbus Myth
The established view of history sets out that in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out from Spain with three ships, sailed across the unknown ocean with his sailors in fear of falling off the edge of a flat world, and discovered America. Today we may note that he didn’t know he had discovered America, but thought instead that he was many thousands of miles away in India. For that matter, he failed to establish trade with the lands he visited, or to found any lasting settlements there. Surprisingly – if his role as first European discoverer were to be maintained – the New World is named not after him but supposedly after his contemporary, Amerigo Vespucci. All these limitations on Columbus’s achievement are well known, but do not detract from the central role that history has given him as the discoverer of America. American history pretty much starts with Christopher Columbus – and because we were taught about Columbus in our early school years, we tend to hold to the story almost as an item of faith. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Yet today we know for sure that this is wrong. If we stop for one moment to think about it we realise that no European is the first discoverer of America. Rather the Americas were discovered many thousands of years ago by the Asiatic peoples who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and made their lives in the Americas, the ancestors of the Native Americans who still inhabit the continent. At the very most, the role of Christopher Columbus is that of the first European to reach America. Yet even this more limited role for Columbus we now know is simply not true. For 50 years or so there has been a popular awareness of academic evidence that many Europeans saw America before Columbus. No-one today can reasonably doubt that the Irish made it across the Atlantic and back to Ireland nearly a millennium before Columbus, and told plenty of stories of finding a land to the west across the Atlantic. There is now widespread acceptance that the story of the Irish St Brendan’s voyage in a coracle from Ireland to America and back again is a record of an actual voyage. Probably other peoples made their way across the Atlantic well before Columbus. For example, the supposition that the Basques, in search of Atlantic fishing grounds, ventured ever further west and found America is persuasive. They certainly reached the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks in the northwest Atlantic, just a few hundred miles from the American shore, and it beggars belief that in the hundreds of years that they fished the Grand Banks no ship was ever driven by storms those extra few miles to sight the coast of America. Yet neither the Irish nor the Basques seem to have settled in the new world of America, and their voyages there were sporadic. It is reasonable to conclude that the Irish and the Basques visited America before Columbus, but that they did little more than see the land from the sea, or at most just step ashore. They had no real impact on America. As well as voyages by the Irish and the Basques, we now also know that some Vikings made the journey to America around five hundred years before Columbus, and since the 1950s and 1960s we have had conclusive archaeological evidence of their presence on Newfoundland. The Viking voyages to America have now become a staple of history books. There are no grounds whatsoever to dispute the central idea that the Vikings reached America. As well as the archaeological evidence from Newfoundland and now from elsewhere in North America we have a rich body of stories about the first Viking explorers, preserved in the Icelandic sagas. From these sagas we hear of the Viking adventurer Leif Eiriksson leading a ship of Vikings from Iceland to Greenland to Vinland. Exactly where Vinland might be is a matter for debate, but it is certainly somewhere on the east coast of North America, and equally certainly not Newfoundland. The Vikings established some sort of settlement in what they called Vinland as well as in Newfoundland. This popular perception of Vikings in America is correct as far as it goes, but marginalises the Viking contribution to American history. The conclusion that is drawn is that the Vikings visited America, but did not alter the course of history of America, nor was their discovery much known in Europe so it didn’t influence European history either. Therefore the Viking discovery...
