L’ANSE AUX MEADOWS

Almost fifty years before Helge Ingstad proved that the Vikings had landed at L'Anse aux Meadows around 1000 AD, a local historian had pointed out the same place as the likely landing point.

W.A. Munn was a businessman in St. John's, Newfoundland, who wrote a lot of articles on local history. He became intrigued with early North American voyages and became obsessed with the thought that Leif Ericson could have set foot in Newfoundland. He travelled to Viking sites in England and around the Mediterranean, conduct ed research at the British Museum, and had the Sagas and other relevant material translated into English.

In 1914 he self-published the pamphlet "Winland Voyages, Location of Helluland, Markland and Vinland" (now available as a reprint for CAD 7.95 from the Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, P.O.Box 5542, St. John's, NF AI C 5W4, Canada, Ph.1-877-753-9262).

"It was only after many attempts to find the locality that I came to the conclusion it must be in the straits of Belle Isle," Munn writes about the Vinland location. "I now figured on Pistolet Bay and everything fell into its right place, just as you find it does when you get the correct meaning of the most complicated puzzle."

Munn pinpoints Milan Arm in Pistolet Bay, declaring "They went ashore at Lancey. Meadows, as it is called today, where there is plenty of grass" and goes on to predict that "the man that does find them will make a name for himself'.

Munn's conclusions were right. In 1980 L'Anse aux Meadows was designated a world heritage site under the auspices of UNESCO and Helge Ingstad who came up with the final proof that the Vikings had landed here did indeed make a name for himself.

For the last century and longer historians and local enthusiasts have argued about Vinland's location somewhere between Cape Harrison in northern Labrador and Cape Hatteras in Virginia, U.S.A. Although no-one can disregard the significance of :Anse aux Meadows as a first settlement, many still want to place Vinland or Wineland in New England.

In the Sagas Leif Ericson describes his landing in an area of ample pastures, grapevine and salmon. The northern limit for wild vine is in Maine and the southern limit for salmon is in Rhode Island. Unfortunately there are no archaeological finds to back up any Norse settlements in New England (except for a few proven fakes that you can read about in Erik Wahlgren's The Vikings and America, Thames and Hudson, London 1986). If Vinland indeed refers to vines, then an educated guess would locate Leif's settlement Leifsbudir to the Passamaquoddy, Bay area right at the USA-Canada border.

Leif's brother Thorwald spent two summers at Leifsbudir and encountered a band of natives that he killed, resulting in his own death in a later attack. In all, the Icelandic sagas detail six trips to Vinland, but without any archeological finds in New England, most scientists weave their Vinland theories around the proven Norse settlement in :Anse aux Meadows in Labrador where no vines are known to have existed.

Scandinavian Press, Issue 3, 2000