VINLAND

the wooded land in North America that was visited and named by Leif Eriksson about the year AD 1000. Its exact location is not known, but it was probably somewhere along the Atlantic coastline of what is now eastern or northeastern Canada. The most detailed information about the Vikings' visits to Vinland is contained in two Norse sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red. These two accounts differ somewhat. According to the Greenlanders' Saga, Bjarni Herjulfsson became the first European to sight mainland America when his Greenland-bound ship was blown westward off course about 986. He apparently sailed along the Atlantic coastline of eastern Canada and then returned to Greenland. About 1000 a crew of 35 men led by Leif Eriksson set out to try to find the land accidentally sighted by Bjarni. (The Saga of Erik the Red presents Leif himself as the first to sight Vinland.) Leif's expedition came first to an icy, barren land which they called Helluland (Flat-Stone Land); sailing southward, they encountered a flat, wooded land which they named Markland (Wood Land). Again they set sail southward, and the warmer, wooded area that they found they named Vinland. There they built some houses and explored the region before returning to Greenland. In 1003 Leif's brother Thorvald led an expedition to Vinland and spent two years there. In 1004 (or 1010, according to other historians) Thorfinn Karlsefni, encouraged by Thorvald's reports of grapes growing wild in Vinland, led a colonizing expedition of about 130 people (or 65, according to one saga) to Vinland. By the time they had stayed there three years, the colonists' trade with the local Indians had turned to mutual warfare, and so the colonists gave up and returned to Greenland. About 1013 Erik the Red's daughter Freydis led an unsuccessful expedition to Vinland and soon afterward returned to Greenland. So ended the Norse visits to the Americas as far as the historical record is concerned. The Norsemen's name for the land they discovered, Vinland, means Wine Land. Thorfinn reported that he found wine berries growing there, and these were later interpreted to mean grapes, though the Norsemen referred to any berry as a wine berry, and it is probable that they had actually come upon cranberries. This fruit evidently proved disappointing to Thorfinn's colonists, for when they became disgruntled during the third year of the colonizing expedition, they made a grievance out of not having seen much of the wine banquets that had been promised them. Nevertheless, the Vinland name was retained by the Scandinavians, and it was as a wine land that the North American continent entered the literature of continental Europe, almost certainly first in 1075 through the History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam, head of the cathedral school of Bremen (see Adam of Bremen). Adam mentioned Vinland on the authority of King Sweyn II Estridsen of Denmark, who told of Iceland, Greenland, and other lands of the northern Atlantic known to the Scandinavians. Adam says of King Sweyn: He spoke also of yet another island of the many found in that ocean. It is called Vinland because vines producing excellent wines grow there. In the 1960s Helge Ingstad adopted the view of the Swedish philologist Sven Sderberg that Vinland did not mean wine land but rather grassland or grazing land. Ingstad discovered in 1963 the remains of house sites and other artifacts of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Dating techniques have conclusively proved that the remains date from about 1000 ADi.e., the time of the Norsemen's reputed visits. Further evidence of Viking exploration came in 1965, when the Yale University Press published a medieval map showing the outlines of continental Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, the latter being described in a notation on the map as Island of Vinland, discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company. The authenticity of this map, however, has been sharply debated.