Paul H. Chapman. The Norse Discovery of America. One Candle P, 1981.

in 1841 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a poem titled “The Skeleton in Armor.” It was a fictional narrative poem about a viking who had sailed from the Baltic Sea to Rhode Island before dying in what today is New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was based on what many American knew back then—that the Norse had explored North America during the Middle Ages.

Longfellow’s poem was inspired by the discovery of skeleton in viking armor that had been unearthed in New Bedford and the common knowledge that a stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island, predated any traceable European settlement there and was built in the Norse style.

The Norse Discovery of America does not mention the New Bedford skeleton; fire destroyed it a few years after Longfellow wrote his poem. However, it does discuss the Newport tower. Indeed, the tower shows up on a map made by Mercator in 1569, over sixty years before the first European settlers would come to Rhode Island in modern times.

The Norse Discovery of America presents a pretty thorough examination of various Icelandic sagas that detail the Norse exploration and settlement of Greenland and lands to the west. Like Ulysses Airborne or The Brendan Voyage, the author takes the sailing directions and descriptions in the sagas literally and makes a pretty good case for where Leif Ericsson and others sailed to the shores of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The sagas tell of a total of five voyages by descendants of Eric the Red to the west of Greenland. Here we learn something about all of them. We also learn of other earlier accounts of Norsemen either sailing west or being blown off course and ending up in America.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the story of Gudlief Gudlaugson, an Icelandic merchant blown off course while returning home from Dublin, Ireland, in 1029. They find a “good harbor” in this western land where most of the people were speaking Irish. Their elder was a tall old man with white hair who spoke Norse.

This elder asked Gudlief if he knew a certain Kjartan of Froda and his mother Thurid. He gave Gudlief a sword and ring for them and told him that it would be dangerous for himself to return.

Gudlief returned to Iceland and delivered the articles and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had come from Bjorn Asbrandson who more than 30 years before had been a frequent visitor to the home of Thorodd and his wife Thurid of Froda. (65)

Chapman notes numerous other references in Norse writings about visits to the New World. He also notes that the well-documented Norse settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, does not correspond to any location for which we have sailing directions. Carbon dating of relics there suggests of the materials there may be from as early as A.D. 610 (640±30) and probably no later than 1150 (1080±80).

Chapman notes that Brendan the Navigator likely explored North America earlier, and that some of the Norse writings speak of a West Ireland or Greater Ireland to the west of Greenland. While that is the subject of another study, it does seem that the Irish at one point had settlements in North America such as the one Gudlief Gudlaugson encountered.

Chapman is pretty careful about not taking things too far. His case is well documented. He was a navigator for the Army Air Corps in World War II and flew between Newfoundland and Greenland. He knows the area he writes about. While he thinks the runic Kensington Stone found in Minnesota in 1898 is likely genuine, he only mentions it in passing to say, “The author recommends that it now be reexamined” (113).

Ericsson and others referred to the land to the west as Vinland. Norse records tell us that is was “discovered by many” (63). He notes also that no Native American group used bows and arrows until around A.D. 800, after Europeans like Brendan were known to have visited the Americas.

What about Vinland? Virtually every record describes wild grapes growing there. That is how it got its name. Newfoundland is too cold for grapes now. We can recall that grapes for wine grew in England in the early Middle Ages, but as the climate cooled in the late Medieval “Little Ice Age,” they died out. Newfoundland is at about the same latitude and parts are warmed by warm currents. Probably the same thing happened to grapes there as happened in England.

Yes, there are some unanswered questions and some things that we may never know. But there is a preponderance of both physical and documentary evidence that the Norse visited North America on numerous occasions, and until the climate changed, they continued to do business with Europeans as well as native settlements there.

Documentation includes Icelandic sagas, but also Norwegian, German, and Vatican sources. The photos, maps, and charts in The Norse Discovery of America contribute to the account as well. This is a pretty thorough work.