Biography
The Norse sagas (Landnámabók, Íslendingabók, Sagas of the Vinlanders) (texts of the 12th-14th centuries) form the medieval Icelandic corpus from which comes almost everything we know about the Scandinavian settlement of the North Atlantic. A saga is a prose narrative, written in Old Icelandic, which relates the history of families or of kings according to a tradition long carried by word of mouth. These texts tell of the peopling of Iceland, of the establishment in Greenland, and of voyages towards a land lying further west, called Vinland.
Iceland is settled by Scandinavians and by captives from the British Isles between roughly 870 and 930. It adopts Christianity around the year 1000, and with it the Latin alphabet, which makes it possible to set down in writing what earlier generations had passed on from memory. The priest Ari Þorgilsson, known as Ari the Learned, composes between 1122 and 1133 the Íslendingabók, or Book of the Icelanders, a brief chronicle of the settlement, of the founding of the laws and of the conversion. Ari appeals to witnesses whom he names, and his text is the oldest written history of the island; it is known only through late copies.
The Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, lists in systematic fashion the first occupants of Iceland, several hundred names, with the land each one took, his kin and his descendants. The original version has not survived, only reworkings from the 13th and 14th centuries: the Sturlubók of the lawspeaker Sturla Þórðarson, who died in 1284, the Hauksbók of the lawspeaker Haukr Erlendsson, who died in 1334 and who declares that he is combining two earlier versions, and the Melabók, of which only fragments remain.
The two Vinland Sagas recount the same events in different ways. The Grœnlendinga saga, or saga of the Greenlanders, is preserved in the Flateyjarbók, a manuscript copied between 1387 and 1394. The saga of Erik the Red appears in the Hauksbók and in a 15th-century manuscript, the Skálholtsbók. Both begin with Erik the Red, banished from Iceland and founder of the Greenland settlements around 985, and follow the crossings of his son Leif, then those of Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir towards three regions named Helluland, Markland and Vinland. They describe encounters, often violent, with inhabitants whom the Scandinavians call skrælingar. The number of the expeditions, their chronology and the part played by each figure vary from one text to the other.
Historians treat these accounts with caution. They were written two to three centuries after the events, they bear the mark of the genealogical interests of the families who commissioned them, and they borrow motifs from the literature of their own day. One outside clue nevertheless exists: around 1075, the German chronicler Adam of Bremen mentions an Atlantic island called Vinland, on the strength of information gathered in Denmark.
Material confirmation came from Newfoundland. In 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad noticed at L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of the island, irregularities in the ground which his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated from 1961 to 1968. The site yielded eight turf buildings of Scandinavian type, a smithy, and objects of iron and bronze. Listed as World Heritage in 1978, it remains the only authenticated Norse settlement in North America. A study published in 2021 dated the felling of several timbers there to the year 1021, relying on a peak of cosmic radiation recorded in the tree rings of 993.
