Around the year 1000, Norse people from Greenland reached North America, five hundred years before Columbus. The evidence is an archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the island of Newfoundland, in Canada, and the story comes from two Icelandic sagas that call the land Vinland and link it to Leif Eriksson.

The sagas and archaeology confirm each other on the essentials, but differ on many details, and historians still debate what corresponds to what.

What the sagas tell

The Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red were written in the 13th century, more than two hundred years after the events. Both tell that Erik the Red, banished from Iceland, founded a settlement in Greenland around 985. His son Leif is the central character.

The two do not agree on who saw the new land first. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, it was a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson, who lost his way on a voyage and sighted unknown lands without going ashore. Leif, on hearing the account, bought Bjarni’s ship and set out to explore.

In this version, Leif finds three regions: Helluland, the “land of flat stones”; Markland, the “land of forests”; and Vinland. There he builds houses, “Leif’s booths”, and spends the winter.

What the name means

In the saga tradition, Vinland comes from “vin”, wine, because wild grapes grew there. Some linguists argue for another reading: “vin” would have an old sense linked to pasture or meadow, and the land would be the “land of meadows”. The debate remains unsettled.

The site in Newfoundland

In 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad found, at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, the remains of Norse-style turf buildings. Excavations in the following years revealed about eight structures, a forge where iron was worked, and iron boat rivets.

The site was the first, and is still the only, place accepted as a Norse occupation in North America outside Greenland. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

The exact date

In 2021, a study published in the journal Nature precisely dated wood cut at the site, with metal tools, to the year 1021. The method used a radiocarbon spike in tree rings, caused by a solar storm in 993, as a marker to count the rings to the cutting.

The result confirms a Norse presence in North America at least 470 years before Columbus’s first voyage, in 1492. It does not settle, however, whether L’Anse aux Meadows is Leif’s Vinland. Among the remains found at the site were nuts of a tree, the butternut, that does not grow so far north, which suggests that the Norse knew lands farther south.

To sail to Vinland, play Leif’s voyage.

Sources.

• *Saga of the Greenlanders* (13th century, preserved in later manuscripts)
• *Saga of Erik the Red* (13th century, preserved in later manuscripts)
• Kuitems, M. and others, study on the 1021 date at L'Anse aux Meadows, *Nature* (2021)
• L'Anse aux Meadows site, UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 1978)