Viking Sagas

They tell of the Sagas, when men were men and women were to be feared.

When Clayton Coulbrooke was a small boy, living in L'Anse aux Meadows at the very northern tip of Newfoundland, his mother would tell him to play outside. He and his buddies would climb over the old Indian ruins, he thought they were, and pretend to be killing Indians. In the little brook that ran through the land, he said he would take a pitchfork to catch the salmon as they ran up the stream.

It was 20 years later that a Norwegian couple, came to his village by boat (for there were no roads here then) and began excavating the ruins. They dug for several years but were hard put to find the definitive item that proved this was no Indian mound but a village settled by the Vikings.

But Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad persisted and she had her “Eureka” moment. She came upon a small bronze pin, used by the Norsemen and women to fasten their clothing. By this time (1974), Clayton was old enough to be a helper and a digger on the site and he remembers Anne finding the pin. “She tried to put into a context we fishermen would understand,” he said. “She said it was like landing the biggest salmon.”

That pin is the lynchpin to the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows. Clayton walked with us on the boardwalk over the bog, explaining each of the indentations in the peat ground. He showed us the largest home and workshop, built and used by Leif Ericsson, he believes.

Leif was the son of Eric the Red who left Norway and settled in Iceland. Later, because he was a bit of a troublemaker – well, actually he killed a few fellow Norsemen – he was told to clear out of the settlement in Iceland and he sailed his open boat to the west and found Greenland which he named with a fetching name to try to entice other Norse lads to come over and join him. They did and the Sagas report he got into more trouble and set out and sailed a bit farther west, across what is now the Davis Straits to Labrador. He was blown south and seems to have made a landing on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

There were a handful of women who made the journey, all described in The Icelandic Sagas. Several voyages were made 500 years before Christopher Columbus sailed his ocean blue. The belief is this lonely outpost was only a way-station for the Norsemen for about 10 years. They pushed south to a place where grapes grew, hence their reason for calling the new land Vinland. There is no possibility that grapes grew in this cold, inhospitable piece of rock. Quite amazingly, though, butternuts (the size of walnuts) have been uncovered here in the houses. They can be found down in what is now Connecticut. In addition, a special kind of flinty stone which is only found here has been located in Saybrook, Connecticut. There is no proof, however, that Leif and the boys made it all the way down there. It is possible that the indigenous Dorset people, now extinct in these parts, traded their chips for butternuts. Who knows?

We sat in the rebuilt houses whose six-foot-thick walls of peat kept the chill out and listened to the re-enactors tell of the early days. The women sat by the fire and knitted on a single needle while Bjorn told the stories of the journey. I asked him about the women, their role, and what mark they made. He smiled and told me about one who was an illegitimate daughter of Leif who became a leader in her own right. She was one tough chic, by the sound of it. When trouble brewed between the 25 men and the five ladies after three years in the settlement, this woman ordered her husband to slay the ladies. He wouldn't do it (would you if you were sitting out at the end of the world on a piece of rock with a bunch of stinking men?) so she took up her sword and slew them all by herself.

We visited the forge and learned that the Vikings made iron nails from the ore that is found about a foot down in the peat. They smelted 10 kilograms of ore into 1 kilo of iron at 1200 degrees C and used their new nails to replace their rusty nails on their open sailboats. Only a single “new” nail was found on the site of the forge. But numerous broken and old nails of Norse iron ore were found at the boat shop they built.

The site is the only authenticated site for Norse presence in the new world. I met up with Clayton after the tour and complimented him on bringing the site alive. He beamed and said, “You've made my day.”

Later in the evening, we returned to the peat houses for a Sagas and Shadows program in which other re-enactors recounted the sagas by firelight and entertained us with the long-ago stories. The little hut was filled to overflowing from folks who came from across the world - China, Japan, France, Spain and even one from Newfoundland.