Vikings in North Americas

by theodsaga

Does anyone know if when the small number of Norse/vikings that landed in North East America had any contact with the local Indigenous Native Americans or Not ?....

I have read accounts giving two contradictory answers this far. One was a yes & the other No.

Any answers appreciated...

Platypuskeeper

There's no definite answer on that. The Scandinavian settlers of Greenland definitely did have some contact with the Skrælings as they termed Native Americans (both in the Vinland Sagas and in Greenland) who belonged to the Dorset, and later Thule cultures.

The first reference to Vinland is in Adam of Bremen's chronicle. It's not much beyond a mention of an island in the ocean where wine grows. And the latter bit might just be something Adam inferred from the name (reading it as 'wine-land'; Adam may have been prone to that as he also writes about Amazons in northern Scandinavia, now thought to be a misreading of the land of the Kven people as kvænland or 'woman-land')

Now, what we know for sure is that a Norse site has been found at L'Anse-aux-Meadows at the very northernmost tip of Newfoundland. It does not indicate any native contact, but that doesn't necessarily disprove any such contact. What might speak against it is the fact that the settlements were only inhabited for a a fairly short time (perhaps for ship repair and as a base camp for further exploration until the project was given up).

On the other hand we have the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red (collectively the 'Vinland Sagas') which speak of a journey to Vinland, beyond Greenland. Which is now identified with Newfoundland. (They also speak of Markland and Helluland, tentatively identified with Labrador and Baffin Island) As /u/y_sengaku explains here, one problem here is that these sources may be based on or deriving from what Adam wrote, as they're written far latter.

Like many Sagas, the Vinland Sagas are not highly regarded as historical sources. They're written long after the events they purport to describe, and they contain a large number of fantastical elements. As I pointed out in that thread, Fridtjof Nansen wrote a book where he pointed to many parallels of the Vinland stories with other mythical islands. However at the same time I also point out that there are at least as many if not more fantastical elements in the saga of Ingvar the Far-Traveled, which is also a journey that definitely did happen in some shape or form.

So it's hard to asses the truth of the accounts of the interactions with Skrælings in these sagas. There are a number of interactions described and native hostility is cited as one of the reasons they left Vinland.

Personally I find one anecdote rather compelling, about a Skræling who is curious about their axes, as they don't have metal, and picks it up and is impressed with how it chops wood. He then tries it on a rock to see if it could cut stone as well, and finds it useless since it couldn't, and discards it.

Besides the fact that it sounds like the kind of anecdote you might read in a 19th century explorer's travelogue, it's interesting that they're correctly described as lacking metallurgy. It my be easy for us to imagine stone-age societies, but it's not as obvious Vikings would imagine that since they didn't have contact with any culture that lacked metallurgy. (except the Skrælings of Greenland; but that contact isn't known to have been made prior to when the saga takes place)

On the other hand we have the 'one-foots' on another island who attack and kill one of the Norsemen with arrows. Obviously there's no one-footed native population of Canada. But it does have some similarity to the mythical one-legged Sciopodes written of by Saint Augustine and in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville (making it a pretty common knowledge creature in Medieval Europe). So as you can see, the descriptions of native cannot possibly be entirely correct.

However, when it comes to Helluland (cliff-land), archaeology (primarily by Patricia Sutherland) within the Helluland Arcaheology Project has found indisputable evidence of Norse artifacts there; such as bits of woven cloth and spun cordage, tally sticks and whetstones. Here it's not so much a question of presence as a question of whether it was only that, or a temporary trading post or something, or even a more permanent settlement. However, these seem to date from around the heyday of the Greenland colonies, in the 13th-14th centuries, and not the Viking Age, so it is not 'Viking' contact in that sense, although it is absolutely pre-Colombian European contact with what's indisputably North America. There's not really anything that suggests more than sporadic contact though, and an Icelandic chronicle records an attack on the Norsemen by Skrælings in Greeland in the 14th century. (the last Greenland colony was abandoned under unknown circumstances by the early 15th century)

So if the question is "Did Scandinavians of the European Middle Ages interact with Native Americans?", the answer is that they absolutely did. If it's "Did Leif Eriksson run into the Beothuk of Newfoundland?" Then that's far less certain.