 | THE NORSE |
| THE NORSE |
IN CONCLUSION
When I was parking Casey in the car park I noticed a sign giving directions to the Coastal Trail. And here at L'Anse aux Meadows there seems to be a trail running northwards around the coast. Perhaps this is the Coastal Trail that leads back eventually to the car park. It's worth a little exploration - saving me having to climb back over the roof of the visitor centre.
And it's as well that I came this way too because the view over the settlement is really good, especially with a long lens on the Nikon
You will notice that the Norse buildings are set out in an arc around some kind of marshy depression that is separated from the sea by a sandbank. There is a mention in The Saga of Eirik the Red that the Norse set up their camp "by a pool accessible to ships at high tide in an area where the sea is shallow with sandbanks"
From a little further around the headland here there's a shot that takes in a lot more of the bay here. And I still don't like those rocks just offshore.
You can also see what is meant by the meadow that is said to have attracted the Norse to this place and which might have been the key to the mystery - VIN with no stress on the second letter meaning "meadow" whereas VIN with a very stressed second letter means "wine". And modern thought being that with the Norse needing to feed their animals (The Saga of the Greenlanders specifically mentions that the Norse had a bull with them in Vinland and they are not likely to have taken a bull without taking any cows), then the explanation of VIN meaning "meadow" is the popularly-accepted story.
Now you might not think that this grassland looks anything like a meadow to you, but two things need to be considered
Firstly your definition of a meadow depends very much on what you are used to as a form of grassland. A Norse from the fjords of Iceland or Greenland would have a different expectation than a farmer from the temperate zone of Europe.
Secondly this is how the site looks today. 1000 years ago the Northern Hemisphere was in the grip of what has become known as the "Medieval Warm Period", with average temperatures higher than they are even today. And so this bay and this meadow may have looked totally different 1000 years ago.
On this point, there is something well-worth mentioning.
On a previous page I've mentioned Väinö Tanner and his geological surveys of Labrador in 1937 and 1939. He mentions the fact that his surveys indicate that the weight of ice can compress the land upon which it lies, and as the ice melts, the land slowly rises back up - taking thousands of years to regain its shape.
This is today taken as an accepted phenomenon.
Tanner quotes the experiences of the Moravian Missionaries in Labrador whose copious and detailed records over 150 years from the 18th Century indicate that in places the land had risen by as much as 15 feet in a lifetime.
While it's certainly true that the weight of ice on the land here must have been much less, there would still have been a considerable amount of pressure on the land, and so the land must almost certainly have risen over 1000 years. The bay probably looked quite different at the time the Norse were here.
But modern thought tends to overlook the comments made by the ancient historian Adam of Bremen. In the 11th Century he wrote quite clearly in his "Description of the Northern Islands" that
"one island discovered by many in that ocean, which is called Winland, for the reason that grapevines grow there by themselves, producing the best wine"
although it does have to be said that he never actually visited Greenland, never mind Vinland, and based his reports on the gossip that he had heard during a brief stay at the Danish court.
And so the controversy rages unchecked. But one thing is not in doubt. And that is that, without question, the Norse did land here, did settle here, and stayed for a few years as well, whether or not this site is the Vinland referred to in the Sagas. And the preoccupation with iron, the forges and smithies, things that are not mentioned in any of the Sagas, suggests to me that this may well not be Vinland but some other undocumented Norse site. It's significant that not even Ingstad has publicly stated that he considers this to be Vinland.
But this is not surprising.
I mentioned at the beginning that the two Sagas, whilst agreeing with each other in the major issues, disagree considerably in the detail. Take these two examples -
In the Saga of the Greenlanders Thorvald wrecks his ship on some rocks during one of the voyages of exploration from the Vinland base and has to replace the keel. He and his companions erect the keel on a headland.
In the Saga of Eirik the Red Thorvald, sailing to Vinland, discovers the keel of a boat erected on a headland
If it is his keel from a previous journey, why did he not say so to his companions?
And if it isn't his keel from a previous journey, then just whose keel was it?
The thought is running through my mind that rather than these two sagas being different versions of the same events, they are in fact recording two different events that happened over a similar period and that later chroniclers have changed the names, maybe of many unsung and unknown mariners, to names that are much better-known to a contemporary audience, in the same way that many of the events popularly credited to people such as Robin Hood and Davy Crockett actually occurred to other people.
Not only that, there are many recorded Norse Sagas that have been lost over the passage of 1000 years. Whilst we know of their existence from contemporary references, the Sagas are no longer extant. We have no idea of what was recorded therein.
And of course, what of the adventures that were never recorded in any Saga? Especially if the entire crew of a vessel was lost during a return voyage. The survivors of a shipwreck may well have struggled ashore and erected their keel on a headland as a means of signalling a request for help.
But the realistic possibility of there actually being someone passing by to see it in such a remote location must have been negligible and they probably knew that too. Their fate can only be assumed, but there would certainly be no-one left to write a Saga about it.
But do you want my opinion?
I reckon that this is indeed where the Norse landed and settled, but it was some kind of central rendezvous and wintering point for them and I am yet to be convinced that this is the Vinland of the Sagas. Return to previous page Considering the ship repairing - what ships would they repair? Their own longships would be maintained and repaired at their home ports where they had the proper facilities to do so. They wouldn't have carpenters' workshops and smithies just to knock a plank back into the side of a ship on the odd occasion that one became knocked out.
I reckon that in the summer they would sail off to different points on the mainland - fetching the trees from Markland would be one useful service. There's no wood to speak of in Greenland, they need all they can get. It makes sense for them to sail back and to from here, bringing a ship-load of wood on each voyage, trimming it, cutting it and shaping it here in the carpenter's workshop during the winter and then just taking back to Greenland the finished and prepared wood.
Iron of course was in great demand back in Greenland and here there is something by way of a regular supply. Using the waste timber to heat up a forge they could fabricate iron articles for sale and use back at home.
And then there are the butternuts. Traces of butternuts have been found in the Norse remains. They are only found in the southern Maritime Provinces such as New Brunswick. So how did they come to be here? Did they grow here under the effect of the Medieval Warm Period, or did the Norse pick them while they were travelling in New Brunswick looking for useful items to take back to Greenland?
And if they were in New Brunswick, they may well have found the vines and the grapes. I found vines and grapes, or, at least, several wineries along the Sunrise Trail in north-eastern Nova Scotia in 2003. If vines can grow there in these days, there's no reason why they might not have done so 1000 years ago.
The grapes that were discussed by people like Adam of Bremen may well have come from L'Anse aux Meadows, but it's one possibility to suggest that they might have been brought here first from somewhere else in the vicinity either by trade or by the results of a voyage of exploration.
There's no doubt that the Norse' visits here were commercial enterprises, and there is a great deal of discussion in the Sagas about the Norse trading with the Skraelings. The Sagas also mention different parties of Norse wandering off in their boats to explore and to seek articles of value back in Greenland and Iceland. At L'Anse au Loup , just across the Strait of Belle Isle in Labrador, they discovered some holes worked into the rocks at the sea shore - holes that correspond with holes of a similar nature elsewhere and known to have been made and used by Norse to moor their longships. If these are indeed such holes, then that's of significance when it comes to considering any Norse exploratory voyage. They wouldn't go to the effort of making these holes if they were simply stopping for a quick look around.
And don't forget - Icelandic records tell us that in 1347 a storm-wracked boat was washed into an Icelandic port.
On being questioned, the crew disclosed that they were from Greenland but had been over to "collect a load of timber from Markland" but had been caught in a storm and been blow off-course.
The only place where boat-loads of timber could be obtained was from "Markland" - almost certainly the Labrador coast - and so this gives us evidence of continued contact between the Norse in Greenland and what is now Eastern Canada for a period of almost 350 years.
If they had come over for timber - and anything else - on a regular basis, they would surely have needed camps in which to be based. There could be dozens of such camps scattered up and down the Labrador and Newfoundland coast yet to be discovered and L'Anse aux Meadows could be just one of many.
Any why were there no Sagas written about later visits to the New World?
Probably because the Sagas were written about heroic deeds, then going once or twice to the New World might be heroic but if they were doing it on a regular basis, it's no longer noteworthy.
How many songs do you know that have been written about people going shopping in Walmart?
As an aside, when you are walking around these paths and trails off the beaten track in places like this, you never know what you might encounter around the next blind bend. It's always recommended that you make some kind of noise to make wild beasts and the like aware of your approach. There's a good chance that they would slink off into the undergrowth rather than confront you if they know that you are coming towards them. Most (but not all, of course) attacks by wild animals on humans are as a result of the animal being taken by surprise.
But thats never something that I need to worry about. My singing is enough to frighten anyone away.
Before I leave L'Anse aux Meadows I'll just take a photo of the headland and the mouth of the bay, and it doesn't look all that inviting, does it? You can see out across the bay to the Atlantic Ocean and you will note just how open the situation is here. It's completely exposed to the full force of the Atlantic gales.
Another thing that might be puzzling you is the name of the Bay. But if you were with me on our journey along the Labrador Coastal Drive yeaterday, you will know the answer to this.
Newfoundland was originally a French possession but the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 surrendered the territory to the British and expelled the French. However the French fishing rights were not rescinded until 1904 and so the French fishermen had the habit of stationing a "mother ship" in each cove, using much smaller satellite boats to go out and make the catches.
As time went on, these unnamed coves (a cove is translates as Anse in French) - unnamed because the population was very thin on the ground and no-one was living there back in those days - took the name of the ship that was stationed there. In this case, the ship was the Medée - named for the Goddess Medusa - and so the cove became known as L'Anse au Medée - the Cove of Medusa.
In time, this became corrupted to L'Anse au Meduses - Jellyfish Cove, and the name was further corrupted by the English settlers as they moved into the area; our unsung hero William A Munn knew this area as "Lancey Meadows"
One of the enduring phrases in the Sagas concerning the discovery of Vinland was the astonshed exclamation of one of the first Norse visitors (and I can't remember who it was - it was in the late 1960s that I read them)
"and the trees were so tall that you could even make houses out of them"
You might think that you would be hard-pressed to make a house out of these but you need to consider four factors
While we are on the subject of the plant life ... "well, one of us is" - ed ... botanists tell us that this area has 27 species of plant indigenous to Greenland. They continue by saying that this may well be one of the reasons that attracted the Norse to settle here.
But at the risk of stating the obvious, why would the 27 varieties of Greenland plant life be just here where there was a Norse settlement and nowhere else on Newfoundland?
It's tempting to speculate - and I put it no more than that - that the plants may have been brought here by the Norse. Seeds stuck to the soles of shoes, seeds in the droppings of the animals that they brought with them, seeds brought for planting purposes - the list of possibilities is endless.
And that maybe something to bear in mind for the future. As well as sending archaeologists to search for Norse remains in North America, they ought to send botanists too. A good botanist would soon be able to identify plants indigenous to Greenland but growing out-of-place.
Before I finally leave the Norse settlement, just let me mention iron again. There were forges and smithies at the settlement as we have seen, so where did the iron come from?
If you have a look at the water in this peat bog behind the settlement you will notice all of this oily substance over its surface. In fact it is not oil at all but iron ore that has been leached out of the rock by the acids in the bog. It reacts with a trace mineral - either magnesium or manganese, my science is pretty rusty these days - and that's what makes the oily skin.
When there is a thick layer of this oily skin on the surface, it settles like a crust and crumbles to the touch. This is called Bog Iron and it was this that the Norse were smelting.
And so that was the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. I hope that you have learnt a great deal - I know that I have.
And so it's back to the voyage around Newfoundland - I've a long way to go.
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