Viking exploration rumors?

by Dinger651

We know the Vikings/Norse discovered the new world long before Columbus. Was there rumors in the time between the Norse and Columbus of a possible new land based from Norse trade and such?

y_sengaku

I also wrote this post for a similar question thread for a while ago:

  • The oldest source that mention Vinland is actually not Norse, but continental (German) one, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen by Adam of Bremen (IV-39 (38)): 'He [King Svend Estridsen (d. 1076) of the Danes] spoke of also of yet another island of the many found in that ocean. It is called Vinland because vines producing excellent wine grow wild there. That unsown crops also abound on that island we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relation of the Danes [i. e. King Svend]' (Translation is taken from (Tschan & Reuter (trans.) 2002: 219).
  • Thus, though probably only a small number, some Danes and Germans certainly knew about the existence of Vinland in the end of 11th century. According to this description, however, Vinland was otherworldly, but only one of many lands in the (Atlantic) ocean, not a brave new world or something like that. Neither know we to what extent this description actually derive from the mouth of the first discoverer(s), and to what extent King Svend or Adam fabricated the original story of 'Vinland' (the provenance of the name itself certainly is Old Norse).
  • A textual/ intellectual transmission from Germany to Iceland made the situations further complicated: the work of Adam was, so to speak, a forefather of almost all the historical writings of Old Norse world, at least all those in Iceland (including sagas), just as Adam became the ultimate ancestor of all the human beings in biblical history (Sawyer & Sawyer 1992). The oldest historical writing of medieval Iceland, the Books of the Icelanders, is also in fact a history of the Christianizatiion as well as Icelandic church, taking the work of Adam as a model (Mundal 1994; Ead. 2011). The scribe of famous Vinland Sagas was no exception: He almost certainly employed the description of Vinland together with some oral traditions that had quickly lost into oblivion even in Norse Greenland to reconstruct the representation of Vinland that we know well of.

Thus, our famous (notorious?) knowledge of Vinland had already been not solely monopolized by the Norse-Vikings from the beginning.

On the other hand, in contrast to Iceland and Greenland (see the linked post above), the knowledge of Vinland did not disseminated out of the work of Adam, and just forgotten without attracting any attention from later authors. It was perhaps just like one of the fables of otherworldly places for continental Europeans and seemed nothing special to them.

 

References:

  • Adam of Bremen. History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis J. Tschan, with a new introduction & selected bibliography by Timothy Reuter. New York: Columbia UP. 2002.
  • Gísli Sigurðsson. The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.
  • Mundal, Else. 'Íslendingabók vurdert som bispestolskrønike'. Alvíssmál 3 (1994): 63-72. (in Danish).
  • ________. 'Íslendingabók: The Creation of an Icelandic Christian Identity'. In: Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European Periphery, ed. Ildar H. Garipzanov, pp. 111-21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.
  • Sawyer. Peter & Birgit Sawyer. 'Adam and the Eve of Scandinavian History'. In: The Perception of the Past in 12th Century Europe, ed. Paul Magdalino, pp. 37-51. London: Hambledon, 1992.