The Vikings of Newfoundland

More than a thousand years ago the island of Iceland was a colony of Norway and was inhabited by Norsemen. About the year 986 Eric the Red, one of the prominent men in Iceland, was involved in a quarrel which resulted in the death of two sons of a noble family. For this Eric was banished from Iceland , and having an adventurous spirit, for which the Norsemen were famous, he sailed westward seeking land on which to settle. He discovered an Island which he called Greenland, a name it still bears, and a colony sprang up there which remained until the beginning of the fifteenth century.

About the end of the first Millennium, Leif Ericson, son of Eric, also known as Leif the Lucky, travelled to Norway but on his return to Greenland the following year was driven of course by storms and came to a land which he called Vinland. This caused great excitement among Leif’s friends and the following year others set out to learn more about the new land, but violent storms prevented them from charting a proper course and they were forced to return to Greenland. The following year was more successful and they sighted land which they called Helluland, meaning “the land of flat stones”, probably the land we now call Labrador. Two days later they came upon a place of great forest which they named Markland, and which is now believed to have been the Great Northern peninsula of Newfoundland.

For centuries, history was silent about these lands to the west, and the discoveries of the Norsemen all but forgotten. It was not until 1960 that a Norwegian historian named Helge Ingstad, and his daughter Benedicte, visited L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland , where rectangular shaped mounds had been observed in a grassy field. This was near where Helge believed the Vikings had landed, and he was convinced that the mounds outlined a building in the Icelandic Viking style. The following year, 1961, he returned to the site with his archaeologist wife, Anne Stine, and during an exploratory dig discovered much more evidence including an ember pit, similar to those found at the homestead of Eric the Red in Greenland.

Now certain that the Ingstad’s had unearthed the remains of a Viking village, proving that Norsemen had been in North America 500 years before Columbus, Scandinavian, Canadian, and American archaeologists ascended on L’Anse aux Meadows in 1962, for a full excavation. In 1977 the site was designated a National Historic Site by the Government of Canada, and on September 8 of the following year, it was recognized by the United Nations and declared a UNESCO world heritage site.