L’Anse Meadows, Newfoundland.

The first tour I booked for this cruise was to L’Anse aux Meadows outside St. Anthony, Newfoundland.  For years people speculated that the Norse had landed in and explored North America.  It was written about in the Icelandic Vinland Saga which told of Lief Erikson’s voyages.  But there was no definitive physical evidence of those voyages. 

I say “definitive” because there was the Kensington Runestone, a greywacke stone found on a Kensington, Minnesota farm by a Swedish immigrant farmer in 1898.  The ruins written on the stone tells of a Norse expedition into what is now Hudson’s Bay, up the Nelson River, through Lake Winnipeg and up the Red River to what is now Minnesota.  The runestone has been the subject of controversy with some people saying it was definitive proof that the Vikings were not only in America but made it to Minnesota before both Columbus and the Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian Batchelor Farmers.  Consensus among historians and linguistic scholars is that the stone was part of a prank.  Prank or not, Alexandria, Minnesota has a museum dedicated to the stone.   

Then in 1960 a Newfoundland fisherman, George Decker, took Norwegian writer Helge Ingstad and his wife Annie Stine to a site he thought was an old indigenous camp at a strategic location on Bell Isle Strait between Newfoundland and Labrador.  Ingstad and Stine realized that Decker had led them to the foundations of a Norse settlement.  They found Norse artifacts more than 900 years old.  And while Newfoundland did not have wild grapes so this could not have been the Vinland of the sagas, it could have been a waypoint.  In the ruins they found butternuts, which grow in New Brunswick, where there are also wild grapes.  It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

A Strategic and beautiful location.

I was a student at St. Olaf College in the mid ‘60s.  The discovery created excitement among the Norwegian Americans and renewed interest in the Kensington Runestone (If the Vikings could make it to Newfoundland, some reasoned, why not Minnesota?) I followed developments at L’Anse Aux Meadows and wanted to go.  Sixty years later, I’m here.

It wasn’t a sure thing.  A couple of days before we arrived at St. Anthony, we got a note from shorex saying the Visitors’ Center didn’t open until June 1.  We arrived on May 28.  We could still walk around the site, but we had the right to cancel without penalty.  I feared many would cancel.  They didn’t.  We got on a school bus.  Parks Canada opened the site early for us.  A commercial Norse attraction, Norstad, (see the next post) also open for us.

The UNESCO site has a visitors’ center where we watched a film. The site itself has the foundations of a large hall, a leader’s hall, three smaller halls, a house for lower status workers and three huts where slaves both lived and worked.  There was a foundation for a forge for turning bog iron, found in streams running through the settlement, into useful iron tools.  All this construction was for a settlement that remained for only a little over a year.  It was abandoned because the area was populated by people better adapted, with better technology, (canoes, kyaks, harpoons) to deal with the region.

These mounds are what are left of the Norse foundations.

More interesting than the site itself is a reconstruction of the buildings adjacent to the site which had a few role playing “Viking” interpreters.   

Parks Canada’s Recreation of the Norse Settlement.

But in the end the most interesting thing was talking with our guide, Bob, driver, Joey, the Rangers and reenactors.  They all sounded Irish in their accent and cadence, were all natural story tellers and great conversationalists.  Newfoundland was largely settled by Irish.  In some ways Newfoundland is Nova Hibernia, sitting just northeast of Nova Scotia.  I got into an entertaining discussion on the Kensington Runestone with some of my Newfoundlander guides.

The Reenactors also had fun with the fact that the fires in the recreated settlement were “Magic Fires” that did not consume the wood they burned. They were gas burners that replaced the wood fires when the exhibits became too smoky.

So the reenactor/storytellers were not real Norse . But the Norse who briefly settled in L’Anse Aux Meadows may have had more than a touch of the Irish in them themselves.  There have always been similarities between Irish and Norse art and artifacts.  Some scholars believe that Gaelic literature influenced the Icelandic sagas which give us the outline of Norse forays into what is now Canada.  Theories of Celtic influence on Icelandic and Greenlandic culture and literature are reinforced by recent DNA research showing 63% of female and 20% to 25% of male Icelandic DNA is Celtic. DNA shows Icelanders are nearly as Celtic as they are Norse. 

So, in more ways than one I went looking for the Norse and found the Irish.