Greetings all.

For some reason, this question has been attracting a raft of joke answers, hyperbole and completely baseless speculation. Just a reminder of which subreddit this is: it's /r/AskHistorians, where respondents are expected to have some expertise in the topic, answers are in-depth, and based on solid source material. Take a moment to review the rules for answering before posting an answer here.

Thx!

The tl;dr is that they did. Here are a bunch of posts on the extent of knowledge in Europe (assuming we're ignoring the Norsemen themselves across Scandinavia)

• Is there any evidence that Christopher Columbus (and other 15th century explorers) knew of Lief Erickson's travels and the Viking settlements in the New World?

• Did word of the New World discovered by Leif Ericson ever get to the Western Europeans?

• Did the rest of Europe know about the Vikings' discovery of America?

• Are any of the pre-Columbus maps of America real?

• How did the Nordic countries react to the 1490-1500s New World discoveries? - i.e. versus what they already knew

If you have follow-up questions on any of these threads, just post them here & mention the user's username so they'll be auto-notified.

edit: removed a post containing duplicate info

It's important to avoid the mistake of assuming knowledge which at the time was not known. Today we know that North and South America form a huge hemisphere straddling double continent. That knowledge was not known in Europe until well into the 16th century. And that very much colors the perception to information about Newfoundland.

On the one hand you have our modern understanding, in which we know that Newfoundland is just the tip of the Americas. In that context, making a trip from Europe to Newfoundland is a "big deal", because it represents transcontinental travel, and it potentially offers opening up the entirety of the Americas to transit from Europe.

On the other hand, you have the understanding of post 10th century Europe, which had no conception of the Americas. Knowledge of Newfoundland would be contextualized along with the knowledge of Iceland and Greenland, as being just another island in the North Atlantic.

Even had the existence of the land mass of the Americas been known it may not have drawn an enormous amount of attention prior to the 16th century. Columbus' journey was an expensive one and one which was financed only because of the potential vast return on investment of finding a shorter trade route to East Asia.