Vikings in North America: What REALLY Happened?

Ok, we all know about the mythical Viking colonies of North America. They got to Canada before any other Europeans, they encountered indigenous peoples, they never had horns on their helmets etc etc. But why do people seem obsessed with the idea they got to "America"? And why do people think "America" means "The USA"?

Where did the Norse really get to a thousand years ago? Where is Vinland? Did they get to the US and Canada? What did they leave behind? And how did they end up exploring that side of the Atlantic in the first place?

Join me as we poke at some of these early medieval questions, discuss the real Norse colonies of the New World, and have a look at how this exploration and settlement may have happened.

Yay history!

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[abloopebloo]

Damn okay I actually have something interesting to add as a student! Last spring, I took an anthropology course on circumpolar peoples (focusing later in the semester on the recent history of Canadian Inuit peoples) and we specifically covered the instance mentioned where an initially friendly trading encounter ended poorly. My anth professor mentioned there's oral history on the indigenous side that suggests the norse poisoned them in some way, and if we consider the record which states milk was traded, and the bioanth side wrt the lactase persistence gene, it might have had something to do with the indigenous people suddenly experiencing lactose intolerance symptoms, and thinking they were poisoned. Not a wild conclusion to jump to, all of your people suddenly falling ill hours after you eat the newly traded food, and might explain the responding violence better.

[azteclady]

Jimmy: What a week.
Everyone: ...it's Tuesday.
Me: WHAT A WEEK

[Sincyn]

That first minute makes me feel so seen. Thank you, Jimmy.

[rodrigodepierola]

The "dad comes out of the boat and get embarassingly drunk with wine" has a Noah feel to me.

[haveaballcrafting]

Early European reporting of Australia’s climate sometimes get described similarly - “oh, they said it was green and reminded them of Wales, they must have lied, it’s soooo hot”…but if you were only there for a week mid-winter, you’d definitely say that. And Eric was seeing Greenland at the start of the Medieval warm period. Maybe he was there during warmer seasons and it really did seem like promising farmland at the time. Do people lie? Sure. Do people say “i’m going back to live there, come with me” if they expect to starve and die? Less common.

[VictoriaVague]

Such a treat finding this channel. I'm a former archaeologist and during my degrees I focused on the Vikings. Many moons ago now, but wish I could have remained in the career.

[waltongirl]

I live in Newfoundland, did a degree in Archaeology from '03 to '09 and got to visit L'anse Aux Meadows while working one summer at a nearby dig site-- L'a.M is a beautiful, desolate place. The sod houses are great, and surprisingly cozy (although VERY smokey!).
There was a long term employee there as an interpreter who would character act as 'Bjarni the Beautiful' and he handcarved wood and antler spoons while he told tales and tended the fire.
NL is very proud of it's short Norse history-- it's a helluva drive to get there, but the whole western coast (Gros Morne, Port au Choix) is so wildly beautiful! Recommend!

[Bluebelle]

am I the only one who thinks Erik Thorvaldson, should have been called "Erik the Hot Head"?
He seems to have quite a bit of killing in fits of rage

[Bildgesmythe]

It's necessary to drink in winter, if you're in Newfoundland and Labrador!

[themardbard]

The closeup of the "narwhal" at 5:09 killed me. The smile and the crown, everything about it is so good, I'm losing it... 😂

[derrith]

One of these days I'll go visit L'Anse aux Meadows ...you've only made me more interested in it!

[FennecTheRabbit]

PLEASE talk about Herjolfsnes and those garments PLEEEEAAAASSSEEEE? Pretty please with a cherry on top? (yes I am mildly obsessed with the garment find and a video about that would bring me so much joy)

[snazzypazzy]

That was very interesting!

I loved that you used a map that's more accurate in the poles, because in my brain the distances from Iceland to Greenland and North America are so much larger than they appear to be on a globe. Still a hard trip to make. But it looks more logical.

[kieraoona]

The intro was a mood. I think more people need to see messy blog interludes. Also....Hello from a Canadian!

[zauberkind]

Best. Intro. Ever. Worth watching this video just because of this. :)

[melissamybubbles]

Archeologically greedy. I like that term. I wonder what would've happened if the Vikings had figured out how to live permanently in North America. How would that have changed the ways in which European colonization played out?

[susansamata]

Love watching Jimmy’s face as he switches in and out of Welsh. Only takes him a nano second, but it’s there!
Also love the whole thing!

[meamela]

When you mentioned trading with squirrel skin I immediately started to think about that we in school learned that squirrel skin was used as the first sort of currency in Finland, besides just trading goods. At least that is what they say... And that would have been when Finland and Sweden was one country, so I wonder if it was a general thing in the Nordic countries or just a thing around here.

[justmyselfcn]

i have always been fascinated by pre-columbian transoceanic contact with the americas, one of my favorite stories is actually from the biography of columbus (written by his son, no less!) that said that in 1477, fifteen years before he would do the whole thing he's famous for, he was in galway, ireland, and saw two dead people in a boat which had washed ashore and a crowd of people gathered around them. nowadays there's a lot of speculation that they were Inuit people who had drifted off course, which means that, if true, columbus' own biography contradicts the whole discovery narrative (!) i really love this theory but unfortunately, unless we can find these bodies (assuming they were buried or otherwise not made impossible to find) or the boat, we can't say with 100% certainty that they were or weren't Inuit, but it's a cool idea that the Inuit could have gotten to europe before columbus (even if they died before reaching ireland, they could have stopped in iceland, the faroes, or jan mayen as a rest stop, although this is purely hypothetical.)

i'm also quite fond of the theory that Basque cod fishers reached north america in the 1300s, but that theory is almost entirely based on circumstantial evidence.

[lenabreijer]

There is a lot of wishful thinking in nova Scotia about norse settlement. It does have lots of wild grapes.
There is some also up the st Lawrence where people want to believe they found pictograms of norse ships.
Far more interesting is things found in labrador that suggest that bronze age norse were there trading. Unfortunately the archeologist who was doing this got on the wrong side of Harper who didn't like history and all her documents were trashed when he changed the museum of civilisation to the museum of Canadian history. A very sad moment for museums. He also trashed the Atlantic archives library.