My Viking paper from Oxonmoot

[wellinghall]

Introduction:
- good morning everyone
- going to talk about the Viking voyages westward
- in particular, going to Greenland and Vinland
- there might even be one or two parallels with fantasy fiction!

British Isles
- in England, 773 settlement (Croxall, Staffs, placename includes an ON personal name from that year; and Staffs is inland, so unlikely to have been the first place they came to)
- 789 trading (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that three ships of Northmen arrived at Portland in Dorset, and when the local reeve came and tried to lead them to the royal estate, thinking that they were traders, they killed him. "Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English", but these seems doubtful. Myself, I think they had all been apprenticed to be traders; but someone misheard, and they were actually apprenticed to be raiders)
- 793 raiding (Lindisfarne) raiding
- 854 more settlement (army over-wintered on Sheppey)

Faroes:
- "sheep islands"
- 650: Irish: sheep and oats
- 825: Grímur Kamban

Iceland
- drift ice
- Irish (the first viking settlers found Irish bells, books and croziers, "from which it could be deduced that these were Irish men"; hardly Mastermind material; cf Celeborn?; also may have lived in caves
- 874: Ingólfur Arnarson

Greenland
- "it will encourage people to go there"
- 985: Erik the Red
- until c1450

Vinland:
- 1000: Leif Eriksson
- until 1347 or later (annals record a ship from Markland)

Greenland:
- Eastern settlement (not on the east coast, but this caused centuries of confusion, with later Danish expeditions looking in the wrong place; cf Boromir's hunt for Rivendell)
- Western settlement
- Middle settlement (imaginative, eh?)
- Northern hunting grounds (Nordhsettur)
- Inland ice
- all in all, it's beginning to look quite like a fantasy blockbuster map!

Settlement:
- found by Gunnbjorn (of the "Gunnbjorn skerries" fame)
- then by Erik the Red, who left Iceland "because of some killings", in 982
- three years later, settled by Erik the Red and friends: 25 ships set out, 14 got there; undersea earthquake?; so disasters at sea can happen to large fleets of ships anywhere, not just on Belegaer
- possibly 5,000 people at peak
- 60% in Eastern settlement, 30% in Western settlement, 10% in Middle settlement
- so that's 3,000, 1,500, 500
- communication between settlements limited to summer months
- community as a whole may have been viable; smaller communities might not have been
- walrus ivory (and other bits!), gyrfalcons, polar bear fur (dyed red!), live polar bears (including one that went to Rome!), wadmal (warm woolen cloth)

Decline:
- the Middle settlement first, then the Western settlement, then the Eastern settlement
- seems to have been a long, slow process, with a sharp drop, but maybe some left behind after this
- climate change seems to have been the main factor behind the drop
- long-term, and possibly short-term variations too (a few sharp winters in a row?)
- but what caused the sharp drop?
- pirates?
- Norway? Iceland? England / Scotland? Vinland?
- disaster hitting the emigration fleet?
- intermarriage with the eskimos? ("going native")
- NB declining demand for walrus ivory, increasing access to Indian elephant ivory, fewer ships going to Greenland (some years with none), periods with no resident bishop
- new theory: English cod fishery setting up a base station in Labrador; but Labrador is colder than Greenland at the same latitude

America:
- Helluland ("slab rock land"): Baffin Island
- Markland ("forest land"): Labrador
- Leifsbudhir ("Leifs booths"): L'Anse aux Meadowes, northern Newfoundland
- undoubtedly Norse, undoubtedly of the correct period
- further, small size of Greeland colony means that LAM must be LB
- Vinland: somewhere south of there: salmon, self-sown wheat, grapes: New Brunswick? or points further south-west (eg Maine)
- three butternuts, one whorl of butternut wood
- all "Viking" finds in the USA are, ahem, "dubious"
- the Maine penny (Norwegian, 1067-1093; found at the Goddard site, Brooklin, Maine) may probably genuine, but resulting from later trading

Conclusion:
- thank you for listening
- any questions?

North Atlantic Voyages:
http://www.webexhibits.org/vinland/i/map2.jpg

UK counties map:
http://www.worldmaps.co.uk/images/uk_counties_map.png

Greenland Settlements:
http://www.yorku.ca/kdenning/vikings/greenlandmapofsettlements.jpeg

L'Anse aux Meadows:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows_map.png

North Ron sheep:
http://www.veilandtrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/north-ronaldsay-sheep.jpg

Swimming sheep:
http://www.meso.net/asset/filename/762/flash/ui_03_rett.jpg

Temperatures:
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/images/l1_dye3.gif

Greenland buildings:
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/f19g1.jpg
http://www.greenland-guide.gl/narsaq-tourist/img/ph-gardar1.jpg

Vinland:
http://www.zorlo.com/school/images/vinland2.jpg

Canada map:
http://www.canada-maps.org/canada-map.gif

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued (and rather hope they did end up assimilating with the local population rather than starving to death). do you know if anyone has written AU novels of what might have happened had the various colonies succeeded?

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Can I ask some questions?

How far north from the coast were the "northern hunting grounds"?
Why "undersea earthquake"? Wouldn't that amount of lost ships be within the realms of normal action in seas as bad as the north Atlantic? Or does something in a saga suggest this?
Did the Greenlanders move somewhere else or did they just die off? (Or some combination of the two?)
If all the USA viking sites are "dubious" does that mean that all of the Canadian ones you mention are well-attested?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Please do!

1. About 400 miles north of the Western settlement (which was actually the more northern of the two major settlements on the west coast), I think.

2. I believe there's something in (one of) the Icelandic Annals about this, although I haven't read the relevant document myself (my excuse for this being that there are far few editions / translations of it than there are of the sagas).

3. This is a really tricky one. The evidence there is suggests a long, slow decline until the early 15th century; then a sharp drop off in population numbers, but without a corresponding increase in the number of burials; and then with some people staying behind. So it seems like some combination of the two. There is no record of a large migration to either Iceland, Norway or the UK at that time; but there could have been several small movements there; or a move to North America; possibly with some of the emigration fleet being sunk en route.

4. L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern arm of Newfoundland, is very well attested. There is a relatively major settlement, with all sorts of Norse artefacts, from just the right period. There are also items in the Norse stratum there (butternuts, and butternut wood) that could only have been brought from further south; this ties in well with the saga tales of salmon, vines and self-sown wheat, none of which could have lived in northern Newfoundland.

Some Norse artefacts have also been found in northern Canada, although it is less clear whether these were from semi-permanent settlements, temporary camps, or left by Native Americans who might have obtained them by trade (or looting). Places mentioned in the sagas and annals as being visited by the Vikings have been fairly well tied up to locations in Canada (although not as closely as L'Anse aux Meadows has been tied up with Leifsbudhir).

There are lots of "Norse" finds in America, none of which have the slightest shred of real evidence behind them. The partial exception is the "Maine penny", which is a genuine Norwegian coin, but which could have found its way there through later trade (or, like so much else, have been planted fraudulently).

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

I really didn't want to stand you up for Dimitra! Hopefully you'll talk on this again sometime.

BTW Love the swimming sheep!

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Are you still sending it in for Proceedings?