THE MODERN NORSE SAGA or REFUSING TO ADMIT WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW

When attempting to write about the city of Victoria I couldn’t help but delve into the history of the place. Doing so inevitably resulted in diving into the details about who arrived here and from where they came, something far more messy and complicated than you might imagine. Then, far enough down the road into discussion of ships from Spain and Russia (with crews from Asia, Oceana, the Americas, and Africa) plying the west coast of North America, it seemed worth mentioning the history of the Norse in North America — a history that researchers, institutions, and governments seem almost allergic to.

THE NORSE IN NORTH AMERICA

After a chapter spelling out how new discoveries keep changing the going hypothesis for how and when people first arrived in the Americas from across the Pacific, I touched on the first known arrivals from across the Atlantic. I got into the Norse habitation found in Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadow, which I learned nothing about in school and still appears in no elementary or high school curriculum I can find despite the an abundance of the strongest possible evidence along with National Historic Site designation going back to the 1960s and World Heritage status since the ‘70s. I noted how social studies and history courses in this country, and even the university-level Canadian history and anthropology courses I took, make no mention of the Norse while highlighting virtually every other culture and their arrival in and contribution to this place, even very recent arrivals.

I commented on how, most weirdly, we fail to notice the Norse while pretending that Columbus was, instead, the first to cross the Atlantic or that Cabot was the first to arrive by boat to what is today Canada or Newfoundland, events that transpired many centuries after we know, and have known for certain for generations, the Norse landed, worked, traded, and built seasonal outposts and even permanent settlements here. I considered how, in fact, though the time of Columbus seems in the distant past today, as much time has passed between his sailing to Guanahani and OpenAI’s release of GPT-5.5 as had elapsed between the Norse arrival in North America and Columbus making the trip. And I spelled out this site on the northern tip of Newfoundland was no overnight picnic site. How the location was thoroughly excavated 60 years ago, contains at least eight Norse structures, but possibly more, and there being evidence of iron smelting, a forge, and iron tool production, and other workshops, whetstones for sharpening metal tools, bronze items, and more, as well as it being thought to be home to 50-100 people and for a significant amount of time. All of this is rather unlike what was created and used by those who were in the area prior to or since Norse arrival.

I noticed how the reality if this site and its absence in formal education shatters the common narrative that modern Western civilization (particularly academics, the legal system, and, thus, government) discredits oral history out of some weird bigotry based on race or against what it sees as primitive cultures, or something. Why? Well, because since their arrival here Norse oral and written history has recorded their finding, mapping, and naming of different sites as well as their living here and their children being born in these lands, too. Seemingly everyone granted the Norse sagas status as myth prior to discovering a wealth of physical evidence of their presence in the lands to the west and south of Greenland.

I also mentioned how folks are even quieter about, and even less interested in, other potential Norse sites and artefacts. How stones more recently unearthed deep into the continent, from around the east coast through to the Great Lakes, carved with Norse and proto-Norse runes have all been declared fraudulent, often even without anyone really investigating them. To my mind it’s almost ridiculous to think the Norse made no trips along the coast into to Hudson Bay or down the St Lawrence in their small, shallow hulled watercraft. Not only were they clearly capable of crossing vast swaths of open ocean, spent centuries in the region, with their population (2,500-5,000 in Greenland alone) far exceeding that of the first century or so of French or British habitation but there’s pretty good evidence suggesting they may have travelled far beyond their residence in northeast Newfoundland. Wood found at L’Anse aux Meadow, a species known as butternut or white walnut (Juglans cinerea), is not native to Newfoundland and does not even tend to grow along the Atlantic coast but mostly in more interior regions. This appears to point to exploration much farther south. It could also indicate raw lumber trade with the locals (though you then have to explain how and why the Beothuk, Innu, or Mi'kmaq were getting and transporting raw butternut logs these same distances but without the larger sailing ships of the Norse…)

COSEWIC assessment of butternut range. Found at: www.canada.ca/...

What’s interesting is that the northernmost location of this species is often said to be New Brunswick. But even there these trees are not found anywhere near the sea or even in the north, but only roughly 100km into the southern interior, around the bogs and lakes of that province and closer to present day Maine and the Bay of Fundy. And the trip there, to New Brunswick, would require at minimum covering 100km of open ocean, from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia perhaps. To me that makes the common claim that New Brunswick was the source rather implausible, especially given the species range also stretches into the St Lawrence River in southern Quebec (and Ontario, all around the Great Lakes, and all the way down to South Carolina, stretching west to the Prairies, though not along the coast but most dominant throughout the Appalachian region.) It seems to me far more likely the wood came from a site somewhere in Quebec, maybe near modern day Quebec City. This is roughly the same distance as to the butternut in New Brunswick, but with only 20km of open ocean to cover from their home in Newfoundland and then just following the land straight along the coast to where, far more conveniently, this tree species may be found along the St Lawrence river and thus easily accessed, processed, and hauled away by boat without the need for hiking inland for days in either direction. That said, I’m the only source for this hypothesis it seems as folks do not, DO NOT, want to place the Norse in mainland North America — especially given all their “debunking” of so many regular finds of what look like Norse runes and imagery carved into stone found all over the east of the continent. They’d rather entertain almost anything or even, as it appears, pretend they were never here…

Known and suspected Norse sites from Iceland to Newfoundland

Spelling some of this out was all the detail I could reasonably go into without transforming the book I was trying to write into one about the Norse or European exploration. But, since writing that book, I’ve done a bunch more reading on the topic and there’s much more to note. The most important point is that that there are many other sites, elsewhere in the north, that were uncovered around the same time as L’Anse aux Meadow, but given even less attention and in recent decades seemingly rendered anti-interesting, with researchers expelled from their work sites, prevented from accessing the artifacts they discovered, and even popular public interviews and essays on the topic appearing to have been purged from the internet or made difficult to access.

FINDINGS

Moreau Maxwell (1918–1998), professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, started researching Baffin Island's prehistory in the 1960s and carried on through to the 1980s. His life’s work is synthesized in a monograph titled Archaeology of the Lake Harbour District, Baffin Island published in 1973 and in the work he gifted the world upon his retirement in 1985, titled Prehistory of the Eastern Arctic.

The most pertinent site to this discussion is a location referred to as Nanook, found at Cape Tanfield on the south coast of Baffin Island, just 150km across the Hudson Strait from Quebec. Maxwell uncovered there a highly complex and confusing site yielding all sorts of curious artefacts. Unsure what to make of it all, he attributed the totality of the site to the still-mysterious Dorset (the original, pre-Inuit inhabitants of much of what is today referred to as northern Canada.) Patricia Sutherland followed in Maxwell’s footsteps and began working in the north in the 1970s, on Ellsemere Island, north of Baffin Island and to the northwest of Greenland. There Sutherland found a metal artifact she would only later come to learn was a business tool, a folding balance scale, of the type carried by Norse traders. With that experience and experience excavating Dorset sites, she would take up work at Maxwell’s digs in the south of Baffin Island after his retirement.

Extended research into four locations in the region became part of the Helluland Archaeology Project, an initiative from the Canadian Museum of Civilization exploring Norse presence in the area. Helluland (Flat-stone-land) is a name found in Norse oral and written history, their sagas, and refer to the lands to the west of Greenland, commonly believed to be Baffin Island. Also named are Markland (Forest-land), thought to be Labrador, and Vinland (Wine-land), often thought to be roughly near Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, as these are the northernmost spots where wild grapes, riverbank or frost grape (Vitis riparia) and fox grape (Vitis labrusca). The Saga of Eric the Red tells of 40 or so Norse travelling far south, to where the winters are mild, which must have been far indeed, to Vinland and them building a settlement there. They called the place Hóp and noted the land being abundant in grape, or perhaps currant, as well as wheat. Safe to say that, if anything like what is described, Hóp is nowhere near the site at L’Anse aux Meadows and probably more than 1,000km south. In the 1500s Icelanders speculated that this visited section of Vinland was roughly Chesapeake Bay or Cape Cod Bay (and they also guessed that the coast of Vinland wrapped south all the way around and eventually connected up with Africa.) Of course, if they made it to Cape Cod that would be more than 3,000km from their settlements on the west coast of Greenland and farther than a trip across the Atlantic from Denmark to Greenland...

In 2005, the Helluland Archeology Project gained enough significance that Sutherland was hired as Curator of Archeology for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, to become the first woman in that role, and got busy developing a major Norse module for the museum. In 2007, as a world-leading expert on Arctic peoples and history, Sutherland became a lead researcher awarded the International Polar Year grant to continue this work and in 2008 was appointed to be Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archeology, at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

Over more than a decade of continued research, with many excavations and artefacts uncovered, Sutherland became convinced that the Nanook site was unlike anything known to be representative of Dorset culture and was, rather, a Norse site and perhaps a key trade hub frequented by the Dorset hunters and traders. While the Dorset tended to be nomadic and resided in tents in the summer (constructed with skins weighted down with a ring of stones) and shallow, dugout, communal longhouses (with more robust oblong stone bases for surviving the harsh winter), what is found at this site is far more suggestive of a Norse-style building. The structure is a permanent one built with straight stone walls, a stone-lined floor drain (never found in Dorset or Inuit sites), and turf roofing, all similar to what is found in Greenland, Iceland, and northern Europe from this time. Other evidence for Norse presence includes:

• A stone crucible used for melting and casting metal objects (not done by the locals)

• Long, bar-shaped whetstones used for sharpening metal tools (found embedded with fragments of smelted metals and alloys not made by locals)

• Tally sticks like those used by the Norse to record trade transactions (commonly found in Norse sites across the north Atlantic)

• A whale bone spade of the sort used by the Greenland Norse

• Spun cordage made from European sheep and goat wool as well as fur from Arctic fox and hare said to most strongly resemble that crafted by the Greenland Norse

• Fragments of European rat pelts (most plausibly arriving not on driftwood from Belgium or Ireland but, of course, aboard Norse ships)

There are at least five sites bearing such materials stretching across the region, from the confirmed Norse village on the northern tip of Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadow, to the Avayalik Islands site in northern Labrador, Willows Island in Frobisher Bay on the southeast of Baffin Island, and Nunguvik in the far north of Baffin Island, locations disbursed over more than 1,500km and roughly the same distance in either direction from the closest Norse settlements in western Greenland.

Current findings to date suggests to some that the Norse were these sections of northern Canada for as long as four centuries, beginning a thousand years ago or so, and probably establishing these and other sites as permanent residences or seasonal outposts, extending their presence far beyond their better-known villages in Greenland. That makes sense because, though Greenland and Baffin may seem like close neighbours, for scale, we know that the Norse island hopped from Denmark and Sweden to the Shetland and Orkney islands and northern Scotland to the Faroe Islands and then on to Iceland and eventually Greenland. The greatest stretch of open ocean there (as the crow- or, rather, arctic tern flies) is the distance between Denmark and the Shetlands, at roughly 650km. Even going straight from Scotland to Iceland is less than 900km and the Faroe Islands to Greenland, bypassing Iceland altogether, is less than 1500km. So these distances in Canada are significant and show a real, sustained interest and commitment to the region’s sources of walrus ivory, fox and polar bear furs (the kind of thing gifted to kings), and wood (of which there is very little on Greenland or Iceland, with no large native trees, and driftwood otherwise being an essential resource and recycling it a critical survival strategy.)

Sadly, radiocarbon dating for the materials found in these sites are all over the temporal map. In large part that is because key locations are sitting in water and contaminated with marine mammal fat processed on site in ancient times that tend to distort radiocarbon dating, making pinpointing a time rather difficult. Still, dating efforts for what appear to be Norse artefacts at the Nanook site have returned results of around 870 CE, which would be roughly a hundred years prior to Norse arrival in Greenland; so, much more needs to be done and an assortment of techniques used to actually nail down when the Dorset and Norse were first and last at this site — a precision recently accomplished at L’Anse aux Meadows, where they were able to date wood found there, using the effects of cosmic radiation from solar storms documented in tree rings, as having been felled in the year 1021 CE (exactly a thousand years prior to the dating.)

DE-FINDINGS

While she was working for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Southerland’s decade of fieldwork and research and her wealth of findings were celebrated. Scientific journals and popular publications, from The New York Times and National Geographic to CBC’s The Nature of Things and other influential sources cited or highlighted Sutherland’s work. Season 52, episode 5, of The Nature of Things, for instance, is titled “The Norse: An Arctic Mystery.” The episode revolves around Sutherland’s work, the Nanook archeological site, Norse arrival in North America, and what seems like their centuries-long trade with the Dorset.

Things soon took a turn, however. Around the same time as Sutherland’s research was starting to make real waves, the Harper government decided, weirdly, to spend $25 million rebranding the museum, the most popular museum in the nation, by replacing civilization with history, while engaging in a more stealthy and unilateral transformation of the institution’s mandate. Southerland and other archaeologists were concerned about what they perceived as a shift in funding priorities and focus, away from a broader human scope inclusive of the pre-history of this place and extinct cultures and toward emphasis on more modern British exploration and recent Canadian political and social history (to reduce Dorset and Norse exhibits and research, for instance, to make way for ones including war heroes, hockey stars, and cancer victims…) Even the Canadian Archeological Association was unhappy about what was happening, offering:

We are concerned that the new mandate places a disproportionate emphasis on Canadian history after confederation at the expense of the human history and our cultural achievements as a whole, and particularly those of the peoples who have occupied these lands since time immemorial. We are also concerned that the apparent de-emphasis on research and the management and acquisition of collections undermines the museum’s ability to facilitate the production of knowledge about Canada’s past.

From there, Sutherland and six others stepped over a line when they signed a letter challenging the museum’s acquisition of artifacts from the Empress of Ireland wreck, arguing the purchase violated ethics guidelines. When she went further and, as a federal employee, spoke to the media about her research and mentioned her concerns about the museum without first getting government approval, she found herself quickly fired. Sutherland was just one of thousands of scientists who were booted from their jobs at this time. You might recall this government crackdown on what those government employees considered to be long-standing reporting norms and probably a violation of their rights to free expression but the Harper crew saw as insubordination and a clear breach of new government policy. Simultaneous with all this drama, Sutherland’s husband, Robert McGhee, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and emeritus curator specializing in western Arctic archaeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, was also stripped of his emeritus status. Both he and Patricia were formally accused of “harassment” and prevented from accessing museum collections and resources, though the museum refused to share details with the public, claiming they needed to protect their people and the integrity of their internal investigation, or something.

And, as far as I can tell, it looks like not much work, if any, has transpired at these sites in the far north, certainly no major discoveries or further confirmations of Norse presence, in the decade since Sutherland and others were fired from their jobs. Tragic.