D-ARCY-1 ART, David D'Arcy, Eriksson's Millennium: Honoring the Pre-Columbian Explorer, The World & I, December 1991, vol. 6, no. 12, pp. 642-649. As the entire Western Hemisphere prepares to mark the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World, there are naturally those who want to remind the Americas that Columbus was not the first explorer to reach these shores. Many Irish and Irish-Americans, for example, maintain that a certain Catholic monk, Saint Brendan, reached this continent in a boat made of animal hide centuries before the year 1000. No evidence of early Irish settlement in the New World exists, however, nor does there seem to be any celebration scheduled anywhere to honor Brendan's legendary journey during the upcoming Columbus festivities. The Vikings or Norse peoples, however, are an altogether different story. There is definitive archaeological evidence that they reached North America around A.D. 1000 and settled here. There is also reason to believe that they made several voyages along the coast, probably in the eleventh century. The Vikings (made up of Greenlanders of Norwegian and Icelandic background, and their slaves), therefore, do have a claim to have been the first Europeans to have discovered America. But commemorating this discovery at a time most others are honoring Columbus presents a dilemma. Although the Vikings were prodigious seafarers in an era when Italian and Spanish maritime travelers did not extend far beyond the Mediterranean, the Vikings - whom we might laud as discoverers - were the same warriors who ravaged the coasts of England and Ireland, laid waste to Paris, and raped and pillaged their way from the Basque country to the Black Sea. In Europe, particularly in the British Isles, the brutality of the Vikings is far better remembered than their navigational achievements. Retracing the original voyage Marking the anniversary of the Vikings' arrival in North America means reexamining the legacy of the Viking Age (A.D. 800-1200), particularly the Norse expeditions westward across the North Atlantic. In the course of that commemoration, recent scholarship about Viking explorations and everyday life is still being debated as it reaches a broader audience than ever before. Also, that Viking tradition is now being put in the service of projects the Vikings would never have imagined. Last spring, an exact replica of a medieval Viking ship began a transatlantic journey to commemorate the approximate millennial anniversary of Norwegian navigator Leif Eriksson's journey to the New World sometime in the tenth century. The graceful, seventy-five-foot Gaia is commanded by Ragnar Thorseth, a 42-year-old Norwegian writer and explorer. With its huge square sail and a prow that resembles a dragon's head, the new Viking longship conjures up images of warriors in horned helmets (used in motion pictures but never worn by the real Vikings). The wooden ship was built by 31-year-old Ottar Bjorkedal and his brothers, whose family has constructed ships in the town of Bjoorkedalen near Norway's northwestern coast for generations. "We live eight kilometers [five miles] from the sea," said Bjorkedal. "That's where the trees grow. We have always been building boats at our place. We have a small lake there and much good pine. It is always easier to carry the boat down to the sea than to take all the trees down and do the job down there." Written records indicate that Bjorkedal's family has built boats that way since the sixteenth century. The Gaia is a replica of the famous Gokstad longship, one of several now in the Viking Ship Hall in Oslo. The original Gokstad was built in the middle of the ninth century. It was designed for coastal cruising, so it is considerably smaller than some of the seagoing Viking longships that could carry as many as two hundred warriors. Normally a Viking boat would draw only a little over three feet of water - that is, the boat's hull descended only three feet below the surface. That enabled the Vikings to land on virtually any beach and sail up rivers, so they could penetrate into areas that lacked deep-water harbors. The final use of the Gokstad was, oddly enough, on land, as the grave of an unidentified king or chieftain. For one thousand years, the original ship was preserved in blue clay under a larger mound of clay and sand on a farm at Gokstad outside the modern city of Sandefjord on the west side of Oslo Fjord. When that mound was excavated in 1889, several smaller vessels were found, as well as some domestic and nautical utensils, a few fragments of fabric, and the skeletons of a man, a dozen horses, six dogs, and a peacock. The original vessel was built of oak, with an 85-foot-tall tree needed for the keel. A crew of thirty-two was needed to man its sixteen pairs of oars. The replica is built of pine, since oak of high quality is not common in Norway and certainly not on the western coast. The high sweep of the prow and stern and the graceful broadening of the hull amidships led the Norse and Viking expert Magnus Magnusson of Scotland to describe the Gokstad as "a poem carved in wood." The only ornamentation on the Gaia is a rudder handle in the form of a dragon's head. As he undertook his circumnavigational journey, Thorseth had experience to draw on: Two years before, he had sailed around the world in the Saga Siglar, a replica of a Viking knarr, or cargo boat, also built by the Bjorkedals. Though Thorseth had planned to follow the course of Columbus' first voyage from Spain to the Caribbean, a wealthy Norwegian cruise-ship owner enlisted the support of the Norwegian and Icelandic governments and convinced Thorseth to take the North Atlantic journey to help promote ecological awareness as a new approach to discovery. His voyage began in Norway's Constitution Bay on May 17, 1991. In honor of that theme, the Gokstad replica was rechristened Gaia (earth goddess) on its Reykjav!k stopover during the summer by Iceland's president Vigdis Finnbogad"ttir. It was decided that the Gaia would continue around the world after retracing the Viking's course from Iceland to the Newfoundland settlement site at L'Anse-aux-Meadow, stopping in Washington to celebrate Leif Eriksson Day on October 9. Preconceptions of Vikings challenged Norse historian Helgi Sk#li Kjartansson of the Icelandic National Institute of Education says many of our preconceptions about the Vikings and their travels are challenged by what we now know about these people, starting with the date of Leif Eriksson's voyage to North America. While the organizers of the Gaia's Atlantic crossing claim it's a sheer coincidence that the commemoration coincides with the celebration of Columbus' voyage, Kjartansson suggests that the actual Eriksson crossing may have taken place later than the year 1000. "The traditional dating of Leif Eriksson's voyage of discovery to the year 1000 is based on the notion that he was being sent to Greenland as a missionary by a Norwegian king who was killed in the autumn of the year 1000," says Kjartansson. "This is in all probability a myth based on what we know from other written sources. Leif the Lucky was not necessarily a missionary at all. Genealogies from other people who took part in the Vinland voyages point to a time roughly one generation later." Kjartansson adds that since Leif Eriksson lived in Greenland, reaching North America may have been more an inevitability than an achievement. "Since there was a settlement in Greenland, and there was navigation taking place between Greenland and Europe, those people were bound to discover North America because their navigation was so inaccurate." Kjartansson does not conclude from the Viking presence on Greenland, however, that the Norse voyagers were the first Europeans to reach North America. He allows that the Irish and maybe even the legendary Saint Brendan could well have gotten there first. "The Irish went island-hopping around the North Atlantic," he explains, "and there is nothing inherently incredible about their making the crossing to North America." The construction of the Viking ships enabled the Norsemen to maintain speeds of ten knots and to penetrate hundreds of miles into continental Europe. Once on the open sea, however, the ships were the victims of less-developed navigational methods. "It goes for both the Irish and the Vikings," Kjartansson explains. "They discovered countries and islands they didn't want to find because they didn't find the places they wanted to go to. They didn't have a compass or a reliable clock, and had no way of knowing how far east or west they were. They could roughly tell how far north or south because they had a calendar, and they could record the height of the sun and the moon. Their square sails didn't allow them to sail into the wind, so when they met with a head wind, they lost the course - this imperfect navigation much helped their discoveries." Columbus himself claimed to have traveled to Iceland and to have been familiar with the Vinland sagas, the epic twelfth-and- thirteenth-century stories recounting Viking explorations westward that are still read throughout Scandinavia. "He easily might have known about the Vinland voyages," Kjartansson says, "and if he did, it didn't mean anything for him, because he discovered America in the firm belief that he was not discovering it. He was trying to find the passage to the Far East, to China." Many scholars point out that the Norse were not just marauders. It is generally agreed that most Vikings who settled in Greenland and North America were just that - settlers. Most were farmers fleeing terrorism or taxation, according to Arni Bjornsson of the National Museum of Iceland. "Ninety-five percent of the settlers who came west from Iceland were simply farmers, and they came to live in peace," he says. "Only a few were robbers." There is always a question as to what you mean by the term Viking. It meant originally, "a man from Vik." And vik means "bay," as in Reykjavik, which means "smoky bay." Only later did Viking mean "sea warrior." Although some of the settlers must have been old Vikings, it looks as if they might have viewed Iceland as something of a retirement home. It is absurd to think Iceland was a Viking colony - there was nothing to rob. There were no royal palaces, no monasteries, and on the other hand, Iceland was too far away to function as a military base. "When I talk about Vikings," Bjornsson explains, "I mean people from the Viking Age. I do not mean sea warriors. Many of these people were merchants; they were salesmen, they were craftsmen. People think that everyone from the Viking Age was a sea warrior, and this part of them has become popular because of the literature. We wrote exciting literature in the thirteenth century, just as we do today. Because this was written in the thirteenth century as an entertainment, people today think that's the way all people behaved at the time. But this is just romance." According to historian Erik Wahlgren, the notion of Vikings wearing horned helmets is "absurd" and the misconception would have come from pre-Viking eras, from the "age of gold in Scandinavia" (A.D. 400-800), or from even earlier periods. This is not to say that the Vikings were any less brutal than the accounts of their pillaging might suggest. Historians point out that some of those accounts may be exaggerated, such as the story retold in Marc Bloch's Feudal Society (1961) of the archbishop of Canterbury's being pelted to death with the bones of animals he had roasted and served to Viking guests. Other accounts, far more harrowing, of rape and mass murder, show that these exaggerations may be strongly rooted in fact. "Fortunately, Vikings are a thing of the past," Kjartansson says. "Present-day Scandinavians are just Western people. Vikings were robbers, pirates, certainly. But the term has been used to characterize an entire civilization, the whole of Scandinavian culture over a span of centuries. Only a minority were professional pirates or rapists and mainly during the first part of the Viking Age. "The westward expansion was perfectly peaceful," Kjartansson maintain. "The settlement of the Faeroes, of Iceland, and Greenland was a peaceful undertaking by people who, perhaps, were even seeking to get away from the disturbed Viking Age in Europe. And the attempted settlement in North America had nothing warlike about it. In fact, it failed, probably because it met warlike Indian tribes in America." Norse settlement site studied Scholars now agree that the Viking's first contact with North America was on the islands just west of Greenland. They also agree that the first long-term Viking settlement was at the northern tip of Newfoundland near the site of what today is a small fishing village called L'Anse-aux-Meadows. That settlement and its excavation have been the lifelong project of Helge and Anne Ingstad. The Ingstads have uncovered in a flat, grassy field near the shore the ruins of eight sod buildings that closely resemble structures Norse explorers built in other long- term settlements that have been excavated. Carbon-14 dating of some objects found at the site assigns the artifacts to Viking days. The current controversy among scholars over the Norse settlement of North America emerges from the Ingstad's contention that L'Anse-aux-Meadows was, in fact, Vinland, that land, celebrated in sagas, where grapes grew wild. The Ingstads maintain that the place name referred to a land of meadows rather than to a land of grapes. Vin, pronounced like "vinn" in English, is the ancient Norse word meaning "meadow," or "grassy place." V!n, pronounced like "veen" in English, is ancient Norse for "wine." In a misreading of the early accounts of the voyages, a description of a land of pasturage was misread as a land where grapes grew, the Ingstads argue. Therefore, they say, since L'Anse-aux-Meadows is surrounded by vast areas where the settlers, who came with farm animals, could have grazed their flocks, this was in fact Vinland. Wahlgren and a sizable number of experts disagree. For one thing, they point out, the grapes referred to in the Vinland sagas are called by other words as well. So the conclusion that Vinland was a land of grapes and wine is borne out by more than the mere word v!n. Besides, these experts maintain, those grapes could not have grown as far north as L'Anse-aux-Meadows. The sagas describe the place called Vinland as being near a bay with tremendously strong tides and a river rich in salmon. Experts speculate that these probably were Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy and the Passamaquoddy River, which separates Maine from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Vinland, then, was probably the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic coast of the United States. That scholarly debate matches one group of legitimate experts against another, albeit that the supporters of the notion of Vinland as a land of grapes generally are considered correct. (Ironically, the Viking ships' current voyage around the world has been organized by supporters of the Ingstad theory.) For more than 150 years, however, amateur archaeologists seeking to extol the navigational achievements of the Vikings have brought forth "evidence" that the Vikings penetrated far beyond the coast of Maine and reached the interior of the American continent. One of these sites is a stop in the Gaia's circumnavigation: the "Viking Tower" of Newport, Rhode Island. This turret, thought to have been built out of stone in the seventeenth century, was identified by some scholars as a Norse structure from the twelfth century. The ruin came to the attention of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had a long interest in things Scandinavian, and is said to have influenced the poet's famous 1841 ballad, The Skeleton in Armor. The skeleton, which Longfellow assumed to belong to a Viking, was in fact that of an Indian. The armor that gave the poem its title was made of ornamental copper medallions and, according to Wahlgren, was acquired in trade through exchanges with Indians of the Midwest, who used copper. The Vikings wrote their language of Old Norse in runes. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, all sorts of inscriptions, found from Yucatan to Labrador, have been alleged to be Norse runes of crucial importance. And because the Vikings moored their boats fixed to iron clamps, hammered into stone, a number of rocks have been said to bear Viking mooring holes. The most notable archaeological find considered to be of Viking origin is the notorious Kensington stone, an inscribed object found in 1898 on a farm near the village of Kensington in Douglas County, Minnesota. In 1949 a Smithsonian official publicly called it "probably the most important archaeological object yet found in North America," and American archaeologists chimed in, concluding that it was carved "by white men who had traveled far into North America, long before Columbus' first voyage." The inscription purports to chronicle an ill-fated Viking expedition in A.D. 1382 to what is now Minnesota. By the 1950s, however, the stone had been discredited as an elaborate but unquestionable hoax, in spite of thousands of supporters who still insist on its authenticity. Even today, objects alleged to be inscribed with Norse runes continue to be "discovered" and brought to the attention of local newspapers and television stations, particularly but not always in regions of the United States with substantial populations of Scandinavian origin. No doubt many more will come to light on the occasion of the Gaia's visit to the New World. Experts tell us that the Viking settlement known to have existed on Greenland was followed by the sudden disappearance of birch, willow, and elder trees, chopped with Viking axes, according to Wahlgren. Either they were cleared to make way for pasturage or consumed by the fires of a community never larger than a few thousand. The Norwegians who settled Iceland a century earlier with the help of slaves brought from Ireland similarly denuded the forests that originally stood in the southwestern part of that island, where most of the population concentrated. The Viking ships functioned so well at sea that the basic ship design remained in use in Iceland and Norway until the eighteenth century. But while he recognizes the achievements of that design, skipper Thorseth also acknowledges the daunting power of nature. Even though sailing conditions ten centuries ago were better than today's, says Thorseth, crossing the ocean carried less than a fifty-fifty chance of success. "When Erik the Red [father of Leif Eriksson] arrived in Greenland," says Thorseth, "it was at the end of a mild period, with not so much ice, with more grass. [Thorseth arrived at L'Anse-aux-Meadows last August amid a number of towering icebergs.] These guys were 50 percent farmers, 50 percent hunters and trappers. So life conditions would have been better and sailing conditions also. But again, it was not all that easy to sail to Greenland at that time, either. We know that when Erik the Red left Iceland for Greenland there were twenty-five ships sailing. But only fourteen made it across." What may be more sobering, says Kjartansson, is that although some of those settlers later reached North America, initiating what we now celebrate as the age of discovery, the settlements they made lasted only a generation or two. (The settlements in Greenland lasted longer, perhaps even to the end of the fifteenth century.) In fact, Kjartansson argues, the very achievement of Norse explorers reaching the New World before Columbus points to the far-greater historical importance of the process Columbus helped set into motion five hundred years later. "It's nice to hunt for firsts," Kjartansson admits. "It can be of great antiquarian interest. What is of historical importance is when a development really gets going." The Vikings may have got here first, but Columbus' voyages really got things in the New World going. (This article appeared in the DECEMBER 1991 issue and is reprinted with permission from The World and I, a publication of The Washington Times Corporation, copyright (c) 1991.)