Curious, just read a bit of the Viking Sagas and it's really fascinating. They mention a land of flat stones, a long full of huge good trees (that they were known to go to to get timber), and further south (Most people say Newfoundland) a land of wine (Aka vineland, or Vinland).
A viking settlement was found at the tip of Newfoundland ( L'Anse aux Meadows ) ... I can't help but imagine that as with happened in later centuries that these early explorers/colonizers took atvantage of the resources at hand, but this is all speculation.
Is there any evidence of this in the record? Ofc I barely scratched the surface, but am absolutely FASCINATED with this and the absolute powerhouse the Vikings were around 1000 AD; I would like to know primarily why these sites were abandoned. If someone could straighten this out, that would be awesome! Thanks!
Tl;dr: we don't know whether the original [oral] Old Norse tradition of 'Vinland' had had a grape in its component.
The oldest written evidence on 'Vinland' is in fact found in non-Scandinavian text, allegedly based on the hearsay from the Scandinavian [oral] informant:
'He [King Svend Estridsen of the Danes (d. 1076)] spoke 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' (Adam of Bremen, IV-39 (38), in: Tschan (trans.) 2002 (1959): 219).
Adam of Bremen was a Christian clergy who had visited in Denmark and met with the kind of the Danes in late 1060s or around 1070, and wrote his account of the Northern Europe, The Description of the Islands of the North, as a fourth volume of his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen in about 1075.
To what extent of this account could actually derive from the oral tradition of those who had landed it? While Adam specifies King Svend of the Danes as his direct informant, neither had King Svend probably visited in that island in question in person.
The first problem is that the account of that island (yes, the island, not the new land! How many people pay attention to this fact? The story also goes further that beyond that island there are only ice and darkness in addition to the ocean itself.) sound too much like the Christian tradition. While the grapevine seed has recently indeed been found in the archaeological site in the 10th century Denmark (Henriksen, Holst and Frei 2017), I'm sure that the majority of the Old Norse people, especially of Norwegian and North Atlantic settlers, did not see the living grapevine in person. Why those who had found the island could identify the plant as a grapevine at first? Then, it is more likely that the grapevine part of the account might have been added later, based on the alleged etymology of the place name.
The famous etymology of 'Vinland' as an 'the land with grapevine' can also be problematic, however: In Old Norse, while vín with long vowel i means grapevine, vin with short vowel i means a meadow. The false understanding of the Old Norse etymology would easily have mistaken them each other. I don't surprise if either Adam the German or some Danes, including King Svend himself, embellished the episode by adding grapes instead of the meadow on Vinland.
Another problem of Adam's account was it was too well known in early Old Norse writen culture, as I also explained before in Viking exploration rumors?. Even the author of the Book of the Icelanders, Ari Þolgilsson the Wise, used it as a narrative framework of his work, the oldest account of Icelandic history, older than famous sagas of the Icelanders. It also means that the scribes of Vinland sagas were also familiar with this written tradition, deriving from Adam the German and perhaps including this grapevine passage and that they could integrate it with other oral components into the extant narrative of the sagas. In short, we should not regard the extant version of the sagas in later medieval Icelandic manuscripts primarily as an evidence of pure-oral tradition.
As for more details, I hope some of the post I cited together before in Why didn't Columbus/Spain know about Leif Erikson? might satisfy your curiosity.
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