L'Anse aux Meadows: The Saga of Vinland Podcast Episode

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Fred Sheppard: From the 9th to 11th centuries a group of norse people plundered, ravaged and conquered much of Northern Europe and beyond. They were Scandinavian warriors with fleets of ships, who gained the reputation as savage seafaring pirates. And, you may know these people as Vikings. But what you may not know is that one group of Norse explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in North America.

I'm Fred Sheppard and you're listening to ReCollections - The Saga of Vinland.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped what we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In this episode, we're going back a thousand years to The Viking Age, and exploring the first European settlement in North America. Welcome to L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site on the island of Newfoundland.

Now, one thing before we get going, the word Vikings, is not the right word to use for this group of Norse explorers. Viking refers to the act of ransacking villages and conquering lands. In the Old Norse language, Viking translates to something like: “pirate raid.” But, not every Norse person from that era spent their time as a Viking. Most of them were farmers and merchants - only a select few set out to raid and conquer other lands. So, instead of referring to this group as “vikings”, we're going to call them the Norse.

The Norse originated from the area known today as Scandinavia - the European countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Their influence reached its height between the years 800 and 1050, when they established vast trade routes and colonized lands to their East and West, crossing long distances in their ships.

Older history textbooks often mythologized “The Age of Exploration” when Europeans like Christopher Columbus, Jaques Cartier and John Cabot quote unquote “discovered” the New World beginning in 1492. So let's bust that myth: no one can “discover” a place where people have lived for millenia.

And based on evidence from L'Anse aux Meadows, the Norse - who also did not “discover” North America - arrived nearly 500 years before Columbus.

And where the Norse landed was the Northern tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula.

We know this place as L'Anse aux Meadows - a small village roughly 1000km northwest of St. John's - the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador. L'Anse aux Meadows, or L'anse aux Meadeaux is an interesting mix of languages, partially explained by the fact that the region was home to fishing activity by first the French, then the English. To work out the details of this unique name, we got in touch with a local.

Loretta Decker: There's an older map which refers to L'anse aux Medea. So in all likelihood, L'Anse aux Meadows was actually named after a French fishing vessel.

FS: This is Loretta Decker, a Parks Canada interpreter at L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site. Her family has lived in L'Anse aux Meadows since her great-great-great grandfather William Decker founded the village around 1835.

LD: L'Anse aux Meadows was a small fishing community. Everybody fished and at the time. You could go out and boat to various communities if there was no ice. If there was ice or snow, you could go on dog team and if it was in the fall or the spring you had to walk. So, you might walk 23 kilometers to see your girlfriend.

FS: Loretta is one of 16 year-round residents of L'Anse aux Meadows today.

And while it gets a little busier these days during tourist season, it's still the kind of place where you can encounter a herd of caribou - that's what happened to Loretta the day we talked to her!

Since the 1960s, L'Anse aux Meadows has evolved from a boat-access only fishing village into the home of the only officially recognized Norse settlement in North America, which led to a pair of important historical designations - it was named a national historic site in 1968 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978.

But before the Norse made it here, many Indigenous nations lived in the area for thousands of years. Which is why several generations of villagers thought the raised dirt mounds in a nearby field were the remains of an ancient Indigenous camp. It would take a couple of Norwegian researchers to reveal what they really were…

But, why did the Norse ever come here in the first place?

Back in the Viking Age, the Norse colonized or invaded much of coastal Europe, Asia and beyond, eventually establishing a major settlement on the island of Iceland. One Norse explorer, Erik the Red, moved to Iceland with his family when he was a child. In his adult years, he murdered one too many people and was exiled. Now an outlaw, he decided to sail West, eventually establishing a small colony on faraway Greenland. And one generation later, his son, Leif Ericsson, led an expedition to explore even further west.

And we know all of this because of a series of epic tales known as The Icelandic Sagas. These Sagas are stories of the Viking Age passed down for centuries. But like the game of broken telephone, some of the details changed over time. Finally, a couple of centuries after the events took place, someone wrote them down - so while some parts are archaeologically verifiable, many are not. We'll focus on the two that mention North America, collectively known as the Vinland Sagas.

Here is Loretta again - our Parks Canada interpreter with the Vinland story.

LD: There was a trader called Bjarni. And he had been intending to spend a winter with his father in Iceland. When he arrived in Iceland, his father was no longer there. His father had moved to Greenland, so he took his ship and his crew, and he sailed for Greenland. Having never been there, he didn't really know what Greenland was like, but he got blown off course in a storm. And he saw this land and they described the men really wanting to go ashore and he just refuses and they see a number of mythical creatures and things like that too in the sagas. Then they sailed past a long beach and all this wooded area. And you know, there was valuable timber there obviously, but again, he wouldn't go ashore. This is not Greenland. And then finally, they spotted some other land of flat stones. That was a useless land, the saga says. They didn't go ashore. This is not Greenland. But eventually he makes his way back to Greenland and he describes the land that they saw and the resources that they saw there. So Leif Ericsson, who is the son of the sort of self-proclaimed chieftain of Greenland, Erik the Red, he decides that he's going to go. But he said they did better than Bjarni because they actually landed. So when they landed, the sagas talk about the dew from the grass and how sweet it was and the Meadows, and they were brought their sleeping bags ashore.

The sagas describe Vinland as a bountiful place, full of valuable resources to the Greenlanders like timber and fur. And the L'Anse aux Meadows encampment was very likely part of the Vinland region. It was a prime location, with fish, fresh water, and wood....the keys to a successful coastal settlement, but the site had even more going for it.

LD: So the Norse chose L'Anse aux Meadows as the site of their base camp because it had certain advantages that are not always apparent to modern people. L'Anse aux Meadows is on the tip of the great Northern peninsula that juts out into the ocean, there are a number of islands off shore, in fact, four large islands not that far off shore, that are almost like landmarks.

FS: Choosing a location was obvious. Easily described landmarks ensured that the Norse Greenlanders could navigate their way back. They built their settlement on a site overlooking a bay - on a clear day, it's possible to see as far as Labrador. There were rolling hills with long grass and shrubs, a forest nearby, and to the west, a stream running down from a bog to the ocean - today, it's called Black Duck Brook. Given L'Anse aux Meadows proximity to what's now known as Iceberg Alley, there were probably icebergs floating by each summer.

The Norse built 8 longhouses, most of them living quarters, that looked like they sprang organically from the earth, with grass growing from the sharply peaked roofs.

LD: The original sod structures at L'Anse aux Meadows were built in the Icelandic style. And that means it's a timber frame with layers of peat sod, peat walls, peat bricks, essentially. And that's just strips of peat that's cut up from the bog and they're just cut up into pieces about six, eight inches thick and about four feet long.

FS: Peat occurs naturally in bogs and other wetlands, and is made from layers of decayed plants. When harvested and dried, peat can be formed into bricks, which the Norse used for strong, insulated walls.

LD: And they're just laid in the walls. Like you would lay bricks.

FS: All that insulating peat in the walls and roofs, along with an interior fire pit, were important for keeping the Norse warm through a northern Newfoundland winter. All told, this settlement could support around 80 residents.

A couple of the buildings had a bit of a different use. After sailing down from Greenland, the Norse needed to mend their ships - and to do this, they required wood and metal. So, one of the houses was set up to process iron. In this house, the Norse built a furnace and a kiln to make iron tools and nails - nails that were needed to repair their ships.

This settlement was most likely used as a base camp for Leif Ericsson's expedition and others that followed, allowing for further exploration along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was also a place to gather timber, fix their ships, and load them up with resources to bring back to Greenland - hard labour that required strong men.

But women also had important roles in Norse society at the time, cooking, mending clothes and keeping up with the washing and cleaning - and the sagas mention some women joining at least one of the journeys to Vinland. With all the work of keeping the settlement running and exporting resources, it was probably a lively and busy place. But, after a few decades, it seems like the Norse abruptly abandoned their North American camp and never returned.

Use of the Norse settlement area continued after they left, this time by First Nations groups, including the ancestors of the Beothuk. Innu from Labrador occasionally came to the area to hunt and trap, and Inuit from Labrador came to trade.

Beginning in the early 1500s, French ships came seasonally to fish for cod. In the late 1700s, year-round settlements with families began popping up around the Northern coast of Newfoundland, including the village of L'Anse aux Meadows. By the 20th century, 900 years after the Norse left, the search for Viking outposts had become a popular pastime for some adventurers, historians and archaeologists.

In the early 1900s, a Newfoundland businessman named William Azariah Munn studied the sagas and the coastline of Newfoundland and Labrador, trying to find traces of the long lost Vinland. He published a theory in the St. John's Daily Telegram in 1914 that the L'Anse aux Meadows area was the location of Leif Ericsson's encampment, but it took another half-century before any conclusive evidence was found. Enter: Helge Ingstad.

Helge began his career in Norway as a lawyer, but he had greater ambitions and a thirst for adventure. After selling his law practice, he spent several years as a trapper in Canada's Northwest Territories, and later became the governor of a region called Erik the Red's Land - a part of Greenland that was briefly annexed by Norway in the 1930s. Shortly after, he was named governor of Svalbard.

In 1941, Helge married archaeologist Anne Stine Moe. Together, they explored the remains of ancient Norse outposts along the western coast of Greenland that corresponded to the sagas. Their adventures led to a search for Vinland, using a map created by an Icelandic scholar in the 1500s and Munn's pamphlet from 1914 as references. Helge and Anne Stine spent the late 1950s scouring the Canadian coast by boat, plane and foot to find the fabled locations of Helluland, Markland and Vinland.

HELGE INGSTAD: And there was disappointments all the time

FS: This is Helge telling a documentary crew from the National Film Board of Canada about the search.

HG: And when I asked people about the ruins, many of these fishermen in Newfoundland, they kind of shake their head and thought the man was crazy, hunting for such a thing instead of doing some honest work. The very last place I came to, that was a place called L'Anse aux Meadows. It was a very isolated place, there was no roads, they lived all by themselves. And there I met the very fine old timer, George Decker was his name. Yes he said right away, here's some ruins. There was a terrace close to a little creek called Black Duck Brook, beautiful thing. On this terrace you could see very very fine outlines of something that must have been houses.

FS: If the name ‘Decker' sounds familiar, you're right. George Decker, was another relative of Loretta Decker.

LD: My grandfather was George Decker and he helped lead the Ingstads to the site. So he showed them where there were obvious remnants of buildings, you could follow the outlines of walls. And for generations, people knew that at some point Indigenous people had occupied that land, they knew nothing of the Norse of the Vikings. They had no reason to speculate it was anybody other than Indigenous people from some time in the past.

FS: Over the next eight years the Ingstads, working with a team of archaeologists, uncovered the secrets of L'Anse aux Meadows - work that Parks Canada later continued. All the archaeological material excavated during this early period belongs to the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Birgitta Wallace: My name is Birgitta Wallace and I was first staff archeologist, then later senior archeologist.

FS: Dr. Birgitta Wallace is now retired from Parks Canada, but was one of the lead archaeologists during the early excavations .She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with her husband, who she met while working at L'Anse aux Meadows. Her involvement began when she met Anne Stine at a conference. They realized they shared a passion for Norse history and archaeology and Anne Stine hired Birgitta to assist with the excavations in 1964. Birgitta left her job at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and traveled to the small village of L'Anse aux Meadows.

BW: There was no electricity in L'Anse aux Meadows. There was no road to it, as I said. It was really isolated.

FS: Even in the 60s, L'Anse aux Meadows was still a very small town with no hotels, so Birgitta stayed with a local family.

BW: The daughter in the house Mildred, the 14 year old girl, laughed at me because I didn't know how to operate a kerosene lamp. There was of course, no running water or facilities of any kind. The actual excavation was rough. The weather was mostly really cool and wet that summer. We had a little hut on the site at the time where we could make coffee, actually, we made tea. And we lived from tea break to tea break, digging, freezing. So the actually digging was pretty miserable really, but we laughed a lot

FS: The team spent the next few years excavating the remains of buildings, looking for conclusive evidence that the site was Norse. Birgitta, though, was confident.

BW: I knew it was Norse because I had seen identical type ruins in Iceland. However, in 1964, when I was there, Anne Stine had asked me to dig a trench just outside the biggest house. But with me that year, was a young boy whose father had been active in trying to support work on the site and he dug and he found things. He kept saying, holding up a stone, is this something, or is this something. And then he held up a stone, which was a little donut shaped soapstone piece with a hole in the middle. And he said, Birgitta is this something?And I recognized that it was a spindle, a Norse type of spindle whorl, a kind used in the Viking period. And I said, Oh, Anne Stine, come here! And she came over and she said, are you crazy? And we hopped and danced.

FS: This spindle whorl was a common European tool used for spinning wool into thread, an artifact that could definitely be linked to the Norse, useful for creating cloth for clothing and sails for ships.

BW: So, that was actually the first really diagnostic item found. And that was a great consolation to all of us, I think. That was really exciting.

FS: Further into their excavations, Birgitta and her team found a broken needle made of bone. Both the spindle whorl and needle - important tools for making and repairing clothing - lend credibility to references in the sagas about women in Vinland, including the story of Gudrid, who gave birth to a baby named Snorri. If true, Snorri may have been the first recorded European born in North America. The excavations also turned up a bronze cloak pin. In the day before zippers, bronze pins were commonly used to fasten two ends of a cloak together. A wool cloak, like a short cape, draped over one's shoulders was a way to keep warm in cold climates. One of the most interesting finds, however, was a single, intact iron nail.

BW: We were really excited to find a whole nail and in such a condition. You could see that it was hand forged, but otherwise it looked just like a modern nail.

FS: Iron was essential for the Norse and their way of life. It was the raw material needed for tools that allowed them to farm, hunt, build ships and more.

LD: So iron was very important to the Norse people because it helped them build ocean going ships. The boards for the ships were overlapped and nailed one on top of the other. And then those seams were caulked with tar and sheep's wool and provide the watertight seal. And that ship would have required the iron nails to make that ship technology work.

FS: It's worth noting that Norse boats also used trunnels, which are essentially wooden nails that fared better in damp ocean environments. Instead of rusting, like iron nails, the cold, salt water preserves the wood. Now, iron artifacts are hard to date, making it difficult to place the found nail to the proposed Norse settlement timeline. But there are clues that indicate the nail was made by the Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows.

BW: If it hadn't been where it was, about depth of fifty five centimeters or so, way below the surface and among artifacts that we knew were Norse, we would have thought it was a modern nail. But it really made us think, this nail probably was made right here.

FS: The creation of iron is a big undertaking even with modern technology - and for the Norse, it was an extremely laborious process. Essentially, the Norse had to collect iron, in the form of bog iron nuggets, from nearby Black Duck Brook and the surrounding bog. Bog iron looks like brown rocks, and forms in peat bogs. All the decaying plants decompose and produce tannic acid, which extracts iron from the bedrock below creating something like an iron soup. When the iron forgewater starts flowing into the stream, it meets oxygen, and a chemical reaction creates iron oxide, in the form of lumps of bog iron. These lumps are collected and smelted, which is a process that involves roasting the iron at high temperatures to remove impurities. The concentrated iron is removed and the leftovers - called slag - are discarded. Bars of iron are later forged, super-heated and hammered into a shape like a nail or a knife.

And after comparing the properties of the slag piles found around the site to the properties of the nail, archaeologists found a perfect match, concluding that the nail was forged using bog iron found at L'Anse aux Meadows. This is exciting because it means this nail represents the earliest known evidence of iron smelting anywhere in North America.

One question that remains unanswered is: did the Norse and Indigenous peoples of the area ever meet? There isn't much evidence, but one group of artifacts found at L'Anse aux Meadows may provide a clue: three butternuts and a burl of butternut wood. A butternut is a type of walnut that's native to Eastern North America - but not to the Island of Newfoundland, perhaps serving as evidence that the Norse continued their explorations further south where butternuts grow, or that they traded with Indigenous peoples.

For at least 3000 years, many different Indigenous cultures, including pre-Inuit groups such as the Groswater and Dorset peoples, and First Nations peoples such as the Beothuk and their ancestors have lived on the coast of Labrador, the island of Newfoundland and around the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. To understand more about the Indigenous history at L'Anse aux Meadows, we spoke to Dr. Jenneth Curtis, an archaeologist for Parks Canada who has studied the excavations of Indigenous sites at L'Anse Aux Meadows and the surrounding areas.

Jenneth Curtis: So we find essentially the remains of their campfires, the fired rock and charcoal and heated soils that are left behind as traces of that. And along with that, some of their tools that were left behind and some of the evidence of tool making activities. So one of those objects was a wooden harpoon shaft, which is a really interesting find, and it's very unusual to find a whole harpoon shaft made of wood. And that is on display at the L'Anse aux Meadows visitor center.

That harpoon shaft carbon dates to 3000 years ago, during the habitation of the Groswater people. But, closer to the time of the Norse…

JC: So, the Indigenous people who were likely living in the area around 1000 years ago would have been the ancestors of today's first nations, the Innu of Labrador and the Beothuk who were living on the Island of Newfoundland, and those groups were engaged in a seasonally mobile pattern. So at L'Anse aux Meadows, regularly coming by in the summertime to hunt birds, collect eggs, access wood resources.

FS: As to whether the Norse and any of these people met, it's a bit unclear.

JC: So we've said that we don't have direct evidence of the Norse meeting Indigenous peoples onsite, but one of the things that I find really interesting is that they must have known that other people were there before them. When they arrived on the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, they would have seen the remains of a large cooking pit on the terrace that the First Nations had dug a couple of hundred years previously, and actually situated one of their sod houses right next to that, that big hole on the terrace. So certainly the Norse would have known that someone was there before. Likewise, the Indigenous peoples who came by the site after the Norse had been there, they would have seen the sod houses, the remains of the wood and other artifacts that the Norse had left behind when they were there.

FS: There are several possible explanations for why the Norse did not stay at L'Anse aux Meadows. Their population in the Greenland Settlements was small, so leaving for Vinland Voyages meant fewer hunters and farmers at home. Greenland was already a long way from their trading partners in Iceland and Norway, so they may have only wanted an outpost for exploring Vinland and exporting resources. Conflicts with at least one group of First Nations peoples may also have influenced the decision not to return.

We might never know the true reason why they left, but evidence of their stay has intrigued researchers and visitors alike for decades.

If you're lucky enough to visit L'Anse aux Meadows, it's worth taking a few minutes to imagine just how different the Canada we know today would look if the Norse had stayed. And if you're not yet convinced that a visit should be on your bucket list, let's hear from someone who calls the place home.

LD: L'Anse aux Meadows is a very special place for me and always has been. And I feel like that's where I belong. I'm most comfortable and most at ease and happiest by the water in L'Anse aux Meadows.

FS: There are also some truly epic sunsets, delicious berries like bakeapples and partridge berries, and even the occasional iceberg drifting by.

L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site operates daily from June to October. To get there, you can fly into St Anthony Airport or drive 4 hours north of Gros Morne National Park along route 430, the Viking Trail. Visitors can tour the archaeological site and spend some quality time with the Norse re-enactors at the reconstructed sod huts of the encampment. To see the amazing archaeological objects we talked about, drop in to the Visitor Centre or if you're in St-John's, stop by The Rooms, the Provincial museum of Newfoundland and Labrador.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to Loretta Decker, Darrell Markewitz, and Dr. Jenneth Curtis. An extra special thank-you to Dr. Birgitta Wallace for helping with this episode and for her lifelong contributions to Norse history and archaeology. Her tireless efforts have brought this fascinating chapter of history to the world stage, and in 2015 her work was recognized with the Smith-Wintemberg Award, from the Canadian Association of Archaeologists, their highest honour.

Also, a big thanks to the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador for the use of their archaeological collections and the National Film Board of Canada for the audio clips of Helge Ingstad. I'm your host, Fred Sheppard.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with artifact imagery and maps of the area, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

Journal Articles and Books

• Bowles, Graham, Rick Bowker, and Nathan Samsonoff. “Viking Expansion and the Search for Bog Iron.” Platforum 12 (2011): 25–37.
• Krauskopf, Konrad B. Introduction to Geochemistry. New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1979.
• Kristensen, Todd J., and Jenneth E. Curtis. “Late Holocene Hunter-Gatherers at L'Anse Aux Meadows and the Dynamics of Bird and Mammal Hunting in Newfoundland.” Arctic Anthropology 49, no. 1 (2012): 68–87.
• Larsson, Mats G. “The Vinland Sagas and Nova Scotia: A Reappraisal of an Old Theory.” Scandinavian Studies 64, no. 3 (1992): 305–35.
• Stanton, Mark R., Douglas B. Yager, David L. Frey, and Winfield G. Wright. “Formation of Geochemical Significance of Iron Bog Deposits.” Chapter E14 of Integrated Investigations of Environmental Effects of Historical Mining in the Animas River Watershed, San Juan County, Colorado, edited by Stanley E. Church, Paul von Guerard, and Susan E. Finger. U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 1651, 2007. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1651/downloads/Vol2_combinedChapters/vol2_chapE14.pdf.
• Thomson, Ornolfur, and Bernard Scrudder, eds. The Sagas of Icelanders. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 1997. Accessed at: https://archive.org/details/sagasoficelander0000unse
• Wallace, Birgitta. “L'Anse Aux Meadows and Vinland: An Abandoned Experiment.” In Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of North America, edited by Patricia Sutherland, 207-238. Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2003.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “L'Anse Aux Meadows, Leif Eriksson's Home in Vinland.” Journal of the North Atlantic 2, no. 2 (2009): 114–125.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “The Norse in Newfoundland: L'Anse Aux Meadows and Vinland.” Newfoundland Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 6–43.

News and Magazine Articles

• Martin, Douglas. “Helge Ingstad, Discoverer of Viking Site, Is Dead at 101.” The New York Times, March 30, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/30/world/helge-ingstad-discoverer-of-viking-site-is-dead-at-101.html.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “Viking Farewell.” Beaver 86, 6 (December 2006/January 2007): 16-24.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “Finding Vinland.” Canada's History (February 2018): 20-37

Films

• Maud, Ralph, dir. The Man Who Discovered America. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1981. https://www.nfb.ca/film/man_discovered_america/
• Pettigrew, William, dir. The Vinland Mystery. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1984. https://www.nfb.ca/film/vinland_mystery/

Government Documents

• Rick, John. “The L'Anse Aux Meadows Site, Newfoundland.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Agenda Paper 1968-40, 109-110.
• “L'Anse Aux Meadows - an Archaeological Review and Status Report.” HSMBC, Agenda Paper 1967-5, 79-81.
• Stopp, Marianne. “The Norse Greenlandic Navigator.” Heritage Conservation and Commemoration Directorate, Parks Canada, 2014.
• Stopp, Marianne. “The Norse Greenlandic Shipwright - Resource Notes.” Heritage Conservation and Commemoration Directorate, Parks Canada. 2014.