Raving Ravens

The Last Viking in America

Did the Vikings ever make to the American continent? Might there still be one left here?

Yes, Leif the Lucky had a brother who wasn't quite as lucky. Like Leif he sailed to "Vineland" in search for a place to settle. But to his bad luck, he got struck by an arrow from the natives and died from his wounds. His body was buried on a peninsula according to the sagas and left there. My mission is to find that grave.

 

Why do I want to find an old grave?
I have a personal relation to these events as Gudridur Thorbjarnardottir, one of the first settlers in America and the first European to give birth in America was my ancestor. I can trace my family directly to her. I grew up listening to the Viking sagas, not only this one, but also local ones. In the recent years archeological excavations have been proofing those sagas to be very accurate in their descriptions with graves and battlegrounds being found where they were said to be. 

This is of significant historical importance. It has been debated for a long time how far the Vikings actually did sail. The sagas tell us they sailed all the way to mainland America and in my mind there is no doubt. But physical evidence is lacking. A Viking camp believed to have belonged to Leif has been found in Newfoundland but that doesn't fit the descriptions of the settlement. So I'm going to try to find physical evidence of their arrival on the mainland.

 

What are my chances?
To increase the chance of finding the grave I will attempt to put myself into the mindset of the Vikings. To do that I will not only study the sagas from the old manuscripts, but also investigate Viking farms and graves that have been excavated in Iceland and Greenland and interview experts in the field. The descriptions of the Sagas will be followed as we sail a 60 foot ketch the same route the Vikings took from Iceland to Greenland and onwards to Canada.

Accompanying me will be the Canadian film-maker Evan Warner who worked on the award winning film People of a Feather. I have created a project on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter (http://kck.st/Lp28Km) where people can back the project by pre-purchasing the film, memorabilia or even become co-producers. You can also see examples of our earlier work.

The ketch has already left Ireland and set sail to Iceland where it will arrive June 15th. I only have 60 hours to raise the money needed so all support is very much appreciated, both financial and in spreading the word and getting media publicity. If all my readers chip in just a couple of dollars, we can make it :)

Thanks!
Hjörtur 

Viking Navigation Tools - The Sunstone

Long before the magnetic compass reached Europe, the Vikings were sailing across oceans to both the east and west, discovering new lands in the west such as Iceland and Greenland and even discovering America. 

Many have wondered how they managed to navigate across the ocean with no land in sight. Of course they used the sun and the stars for navigation, but in the summer time you see no stars this far north, and on a cloudy day, you see no sun either. 

In the sagas you can read about something called a Sunstone, a magical stone that could help navigators find the sun even on a cloudy day. In the Hrafns Saga it says: "the weather was thick and stormy . . . The king looked about and saw no blue sky . . . then the king took the sunstone and held it up, and then he saw where [the Sun] beamed from the stone." So when the traditional methods failed, the sunstone was the magic tool good navigators used.

In 1967 Danish archeologist Thorkild Ramskou put forward a theory about the sunstone as being a natural crystal used for the polarization of the skylight. Crystals that could be used for navigation this way with 5° accuracy are found in southern Norway and in Iceland you can find a common calcite crystal called the Icelandic spar, that can be used for navigation with 1° accuracy. Ramskou's theories were widely accepted in the beginning but no evidence has though been found to support it. Crytical voices have therefore become ever more louder.

Yesterday, researchers led by Guy Ropars from the Rennes University in Bretagne, France, published a study in the journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical & Engineering Sciences" where they claim to have discovered what crystal they used and how.

"The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen," study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. "The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary."

I used to play with these crystals as a kid, seeing how the light polarized going through them, reading double when I laid them over text and so forth. But I never realized they could be used as a compass as well. When held up against the center of the sky, the sunlight would get polarized into an ordinary beam and extraordinary beam. By seeing how these two beams line up according to the angle of the sun, it can be used to locate the sun even though it is not visible. While there is sunlight this works, even though there are clouds blocking the sun or though it has gone a few degrees below the horizon. That would have been particularly useful as the sun goes just below the horizon during the bright summer nights, leaving no stars visible but yet no direct sun.

No evidence have yet been found in Viking settlements of the use of this crystal, but a suncompass with a an Icelandic crystal was discovered in a ship wreck from 1592 in the English channel. One thing that supports that this crystal was indeed a sun compass is that on board that ship was a large metal cannon that would have distorted a magnetic compass. 

The study group created a prototype of a Viking sun compass using this crystal, that turned out to work particularly well as a navigation tool when the sun is beyond the horizon, and even after the stars come out (see image above). 

Hjörtur

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Map from webexhibits.

Who Discovered America?

Who discovered America? Columbus? Leif Eriksson? The answer was known for almost 500 years before Columbus got there as the tales of the Viking voyages to the lands in the west were preserved in both oral tradition and written down in the Icelandic Sagas.

Written in a language still spoken here in Iceland, my native language, the sagas have preserved the knowledge of the discovery of America, the Viking voyages to the new lands in the west, Greenland, Helluland, Markland and Vineland. In the last decades, archeological finds have been confirming the sagas, proofing they are not just myths but tales of true events. Some theories say that Christopher Columbus came to Iceland and possibly Greenland as a young man and heard the stories of Leif's discovery of America long before he set sail himself to explore the new world.

This is an interesting documentary "Vikings - Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson" about the Viking voyages and Leif Eriksson's discovery of America, which I highly recommend watching.

 

Who discovered America is of course a question that isn't really important. What is important is to acknowledge that people have been able to travel over the ocean for centuries and communicated across cultures, lands and oceans even though those voyages didn't all make it to the history books. An interesting point made in this documentary is that the verification of Leif's discovery of America completes the world round trip of human mankind.

I proudly add, that I am a direct descendant of Guðríður Þorbjarnardottir, the woman who gave birth to the first European on American soil :)

Hjörtur

- Who Discovered America? -

 

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