Did the Vikings Really Discover America? What We Know

Yes, as the first Europeans we know of: Norse seafarers from Greenland reached North America around 1000, some 500 years before Columbus. The proof is L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where wood was cut in 1021. They found no empty continent, though. Much of the rest comes from two sagas written two centuries later.

That is the answer in brief. If you want to check it, you can answer questions about Vikings, Greenland, and Vinland in HistoryBytes, in the Viking Sagas season, with cards and a quiz, before or after you read the article.

Hardly any Viking question is asked as often as this one: were they in America before Columbus? Among specialists the answer has been undisputed since the Norwegian Helge Ingstad found the remains of a Norse settlement in Newfoundland in 1960. Disputed is everything that comes after: how long they stayed, where the legendary Vinland lay, and whether the finds farther south are genuine.

Anyone who takes the question seriously must therefore separate three things. First, what the dig proves: a base, a date, a visit by people from Greenland. Second, what only the sagas tell: names, quarrels, trade, births, written down long after the events. And third, what proves nothing, namely a map, a rune stone, and a tower that have nothing to do with the Norse. A few weeks after the report on a newly found Norse church in Greenland, which we presented in October, this article shows where the journey went from there.

In 1960 the Norwegian Helge Ingstad searched the coast of Newfoundland for Norse landing places. At L'Anse aux Meadows, at the very north of the island, a local man showed him overgrown mounds. From 1961 Ingstad's wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated there with teams from Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and the USA, and later the Canadian park service worked there too. UNESCO put the site on the World Heritage List in 1978.

The mounds were the remains of eight buildings of turf over timber frames, in the Icelandic manner of around the year 1000: three large halls, a small house, three huts, and a forge in which bog iron was smelted. Finds include iron nails from ship repairs, iron slag that the Indigenous people of the region did not make, a bronze cloak pin of a kind from the Norse settlements in Ireland and Scotland, a soapstone spindle whorl, and a bone needle, which count as women's tools. According to the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace of the Canadian park service, the halls had room for about 70 to 90 people of all ranks. The middens are tiny, and stables and animal bones are missing. It was a base for exploration and ship repair, not a farm.

A single site is little, but it suffices for the core statement: Norse people were in North America, and they were there around the year 1000.

When exactly the Norse were there was long known only roughly. Radiocarbon measurements gave values between 990 and 1050. In 2021 a team at the University of Groningen around Michael Dee and Margot Kuitems, with the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace, achieved a year-exact date. They used an event that struck the Earth in the years 992 and 993: a burst of cosmic radiation that left more radioactive carbon in the tree rings of that year worldwide than usual.

The team examined three pieces of wood from three different trees, two firs and probably a juniper, that had been worked with metal blades such as the Indigenous people of the region did not make at the time. In all three the spike of 993 lay in the 29th ring counted from the bark, which means the trees were felled 28 years later, in 1021. That was the first year-exact evidence of Europeans in the Americas before Columbus, published in the journal Nature.

What the date does not say is just as important. It shows a year in which Norse people cut wood there, but not whether it lay at the start or the end of their stay. Dee stressed that the Norse might have arrived earlier. Wallace concluded from the date that the site may have been used occasionally for about 20 years and not only three, as long assumed. Others assumed a short occupation. The duration remains disputed.

Among the woodworking waste also lay nuts that do not grow in Newfoundland: butternuts, also called white walnuts, and a piece of burl wood of the same tree. The species grows farther south, its northern limit runs, according to the archaeologist Wallace, through the interior of New Brunswick and the valley of the St. Lawrence. Someone must have brought the nuts there, and he came back.

That fits the sagas, in which the Norse go south to fetch grapes and timber. At the same time it limits the proof: there is no second secure site where they were, neither in New Brunswick nor on the coast of the present-day USA. The butternuts show voyages, not settlements.

The story of Vinland stands in two Icelandic sagas, both written down, by the usual dating, in the 13th century, so a good two centuries after the events: the Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) and the Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða). They tell the same story differently. According to the Greenlanders' saga the merchant Bjarni Herjólfsson is the first to sight land without setting foot on it, and Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, later sails there deliberately and gives the lands their names: Helluland, the land of flat stones, Markland, the forest land, and Vinland. According to Erik's saga, by contrast, Leif finds the new land by chance, when a storm blows him off course on the way home from Norway.

The oldest written mention comes from Germany: around 1075 the Bremen chronicler Adam wrote of a land called Winland where wild wine grows, and named the Danish king as his source. That both texts arose centuries after the events and, in the view of research, also served political purposes, for example the fame of families that traced themselves to Vinland voyagers, makes them a difficult source. The excavation confirms the frame. Names, dialogue, and motives remain literature.

Whoever reads the sagas meets figures we know only from them. Bjarni Herjólfsson is said to have seen land around 985 or 986, but whether he existed is not documented. Leif Eriksson, the Lucky, is the first named European to set foot on American soil. His brother Thorvald falls, according to the Greenlanders' saga, in a clash with locals, from an arrow.

The largest expedition is led by the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, with his wife Gudrid. According to the Greenlanders' saga he moves with 60 men, five women, and livestock to Leif's houses, according to Erik's saga it is 160 people. In both sagas their son Snorri is born there, the first European child in America, if one believes the texts. The couple return to Iceland, and the sagas later count several bishops among their descendants, a hint of why this family comes off so well.

Especially different is Freydís, the daughter of Erik the Red. In Erik's saga she stands pregnant before the attackers and scares them off by striking her breast with a sword. In the Greenlanders' saga she has two Icelandic brothers and their men killed and kills the women herself. Which picture is closer to the real woman, we don't know.

The Norse called the people they met Skraelings, a word that probably means "wearers of skins." That was their term and not these people's name, and the sagas show them only through Norse eyes. At L'Anse aux Meadows itself nobody lived during the stay, but Indigenous people had camped there for millennia, before the Norse and after. Wallace suspects that the people in the south, at the place Hóp, were ancestors of the Mi'kmaq.

The sagas report trade and violence. The strangers exchanged furs and wanted to buy weapons, which Karlsefni forbade. In Erik's saga they desire above all red cloth, from which the Norse cut ever narrower strips. Then fighting breaks out, and the Norse are not the innocent ones: in the Greenlanders' saga they kill eight men sleeping under their boats, and in Erik's saga they take two boys to Greenland. The reason for leaving stands in Erik's saga: Karlsefni saw that life there, despite the good land, would be full of fear and unrest.

The finds show that the base was left in an orderly way, without signs of battle. The reasons lie, according to Wallace, partly on Greenland's side. The colony began with perhaps 400 to 500 people and later grew to at least 2,000, enough for individual expeditions, not for a second settlement. The building of L'Anse aux Meadows tied up, by her estimate, 60 to 90 workers for weeks.

Added to that was an economic point: Vinland offered timber, grapes, and nuts, but not what the Greenlanders needed from Europe, such as flour, salt, sword blades, or fine cloth. And what Europe wanted from Greenland, walrus and narwhal ivory, came from the north and not from the south. The voyages to Markland nevertheless went on: an Icelandic report mentions for 1347 a ship that was driven from there to Iceland. Then Greenland too ended, the Western Settlement was abandoned around the middle of the 14th century.

Every Vikings-in-America question comes with finds that don't exist. The Vinland Map surfaced at Yale in 1965 and was supposed to date from about 1440, with an island "Vinlanda Insula" west of Greenland. In 2021 a Yale team examined the entire map with X-ray fluorescence and Raman microscopy and found everywhere in the ink a titanium compound first produced from the 1920s. On the back a Latin note was overwritten in modern ink, probably to tie the map to a genuine 15th-century manuscript. The curator Raymond Clemens said: "The Vinland Map is a fake." A study in 1973 had already found modern ink.

The Kensington Runestone, which a farmer claims to have found in Minnesota in 1898 and whose text gives the year 1362, has long been regarded by specialists as a forgery of the 19th century. About Point Rosee in southwestern Newfoundland, which the archaeologist Sarah Parcak had spotted from satellite images, the Canadian Press reported in 2018 that the digs of 2015 and 2016 had refuted most signs of Norse activity. The Newport Tower in Rhode Island and similar structures have nothing to do with the Norse either. The Vinland Map is, as one expert says, irrelevant to the understanding of Norse travels west of Greenland.

First, the duration: how long L'Anse aux Meadows was used ranges from a few years to about 20 years with interruptions. Second, the place: where Vinland lay is disputed. Wallace sees in it a region around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, L'Anse aux Meadows would then be the northern base. The southern site Hóp has not been found, and a secure site in the present-day USA is missing.

Third, the name: all medieval sources that explain it trace Vinland to wine. A minority, proposed by the Swedish philologist Sven Söderberg in 1898 and championed by Ingstad, reads the word with a short vowel as "meadow land." Philologists have not accepted it, and the butternuts show that the Norse reached regions with wild grapes. Fourth, the people: whether Bjarni, Karlsefni, and Freydís acted as the sagas tell is open. Fifth, the number of voyages: the sagas name up to six expeditions, archaeology can document only a single site.

To wrap up, everything at a glance, with fact and story kept apart.

The journey west shows how much lies in a single question. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Leif Eriksson as a person, L'Anse aux Meadows as a place, the voyage of 1021 as an event, the question of what discovery means when people already live there as an idea, the bronze cloak pin as an object. That's how the Viking Sagas season builds the whole picture of a world that was thought and sailed from the North Atlantic.

The Norse were the first we know of to come from Europe to America, and they came five centuries before Columbus. But they found no empty land, they did not stay, and their voyages did not change Europe. That does not make their story smaller. It makes it more exact: one base, one year, a handful of nuts, and two sagas that disagree. Everything else is conjecture or forgery. Whoever keeps that apart has understood more about the Norse in America than most legends show.

Margot Kuitems, Michael Dee et al., "Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021," Nature (online 2021, in print 2022); Birgitta Wallace, "The Norse in Newfoundland: L'Anse aux Meadows and Vinland," Newfoundland Studies (2003); Parks Canada and UNESCO on L'Anse aux Meadows; the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red in the English translation by Arthur Middleton Reeves (1890); Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis, around 1075; Yale News, 1 and 2 September 2021, on the Vinland Map, with NPR (30 September 2021). This page is updated when new finds are published.