Sagas of Iceland · Part 5 · Voyages west · B1
The Vinland Sagas
Part 5 of the Sagas of Iceland: Erik the Red, outlawed from Iceland, founds a colony in Greenland, and his son Leif sails west around the year 1000 to a land of grapes and forests: America, five hundred years before Columbus. And then the evidence: a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland in 1960, and wood cut in the year 1021. Past simple and past continuous, the passive for discoveries (was discovered in 1960), and the language of evidence (prove, suggest, confirm), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we sail further than any ship of our time: west from Iceland to Greenland, and then further still, to a land no one in our world knows exists. The sagas call it Vinland, the land of wine.
Many people thought, for centuries, that Vinland was only a story. Then, in 1960, two Norwegian explorers found the ruins of Norse houses on the coast of Newfoundland, in North America. Tonight you will hear the sagas, and then the evidence.
Two sagas tell the story: The Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red’s Saga, both written down in the 13th century. They don’t always agree, but they tell the same outline. Erik the Red was outlawed from Iceland for killing men in a feud. He sailed west, explored a huge icy land, and called it Greenland, because, he said, people would want to go there if it had a good name. In about 985 he led settlers there.
Around the year 1000, Erik’s son Leif (Leif Erikson) sailed west from Greenland to lands a sailor had seen from his ship. He named them Helluland (“Flat-stone land”), Markland (“Forest land”) and Vinland (“Wine land”), where his men found grapes, salmon and grass that stayed green all winter. Later expeditions tried to settle there, led by Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, but after fights with the native people, whom the Norse called Skrælings, they gave up and returned to…
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