Leif Erikson Discovers America by Hans Dahl
"Now I know what you're thinking. 'But OverSimplified, Columbus didn't discover America. The Vikings did.' And you'd be partially right."
For centuries, the conventional wisdom was that Christopher Columbus's 1492 expedition was the first time Europeans reached the Americas. Icelandic settlements in Greenland were well documented up until their abandonment in the early 1400s, but the only records of Vikings going further west than that were some family sagas of dubious accuracy, that spoke of an ill-fated expedition to a place called "Vinland".
Interest in pre-Columbian Norse exploration of America was renewed toward the end of the 19th century, coinciding with a wave of Scandinavian emigration to the US and Canada, but it was still considered highly speculative and lacking in evidence, and many of the "artifacts" of Viking exploration offered up in this period were of dubious authenticity (see Hoaxes below). Then in the 1960s, archaeologists found genuine Norse artifacts on the island of Newfoundland, Canada, that were dated to the early 11th century, predating Columbus by nearly 500 years.note Suggesting that The Vinland Sagas were based in some grain of truth after all.
This prompted a new wave of fascination with the Old Norse seamen and speculation that they could have ventured further into North America. This speculation became fuel for a number of stories. It might be a case of Historical Fiction where characters are Vikings attempting to colonize America, it might be a modern setting where something (or someone) the Vikings left behind becomes relevant to the plot, or it could even be an Alternate History where the Vinland colony persisted to the present day.
Note that at the time of writing, there's no evidence that Vikings set foot in what is now the USA, or even the Canadian mainland. However, due to Creator Provincialism the United States of America are a popular setting for these stories.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Vinland Saga is a manga retelling of the Saga of Erik the Red, focused on Thorfinn's attempts to recreate Leif's voyage to Vinland.
Comic Books
- Asterix and the Great Crossing: Asterix and Obelix accidentally discover North America. They meet stereotypical Vikings, who mistake them for natives.
- The Golden Helmet, a 1952 story by Carl Barks, has Donald Duck, working as a museum watchman, discover an ancient map which turns out to be the private records of Olaf the Blue, a Viking explorer who reached Labrador in 901 AD and claimed the newfound continent for himself, burying a golden helmet as proof of his discovery. What's more, as Olaf's property claim is found legally valid, anyone who has the helmet can now claim to be Olaf's heir and thus, the legal owner of all of North America. Cue Donald, the nephews and the museum's curator racing to Labrador to secure the helmet before villain Azure Blue, a man who claims to be descended from Olaf the Blue, can do so.
- Jour J: In one book where Spain is still Moorish, Columbus' expedition lands on continental North America where they run into the descendants of the original Viking settlers, who expanded further south.
- Thor: Vikings: In the year 1003, warlord Harald Jaekelsson and his band of ruthless vikings are cursed by a wise man for destroying a Norwegian town and murdering its inhabitants. They then set off to the New World which they have heard to lie west of Greenland. The curse not only causes their voyage to last a thousand years, it also transforms them into nigh-unkillable zombies who sail into New York harbor and proceed to kill everything in their path. Subsequently Thor has to assemble a team of warriors from different time periods to help him destroy the undead vikings.
Film — Live Action
- The Mask: The film version of the titular mask has ties back to the Norse god Loki. A Deleted Scene showed that Leif Erikson's journey to the Americas was to get the thing as far away from the motherland as possible.
- The Norseman, a 1978 Lee Majors vehicle, where a Viking prince heads off to Vinland to rescue his father from a group of skraelings. Notable for its shameless amount of Artistic License – History: its Vinland scenes were shot on the sunny beaches of Florida (!), and the publicity material says that the Vikings fought "the savage warriors of the Iroquois Nation"; the Iroquois is a confederacy of tribes, not a single nation, it's based in interior New York State, and it formed long after the Vikings left North America.
- Pathfinder (2007): Ca. 1000 AD, a group of seafaring Vikings reach the shores of North America and settle there after killing the local "skraelings", but another Native American tribe wipes them out save for a boy they adopt and name "Ghost". Years later, another group of Vikings arrives and Ghost must find a way to stop them and protect his adopted people.
- The Viking (1928): Protagonist Alwin, an Anglo-Saxon noble carried off to Norway, sails with Leif Ericsson when Leif goes looking for new lands west of Greenland. The ending has Alwin staying in North America as the leader of a Viking colony implied to be situated at Newport, Rhode Island.note
- Xuxa e o Tesouro da Cidade Perdida ("Xuxa and the Treasure of the Lost City"): The children's entertainer Xuxa plays the role of a Brazilian archaeologist who searches for a lost city in the Amazon rainforest populated by descendants of Vikings.
Hoaxes
- There have been numerous cases of people faking discoveries of Viking artifacts (either by forging evidence or, more commonly, planting genuine Norse artifacts from Europe) to claim that Norse presence in North America was earlier, later, or greater in extent than initially believed.
- The most frequently forged pieces of evidence are runestones, rocks bearing inscriptions in the old Norse alphabet. Some have been "discovered" in the northeastern United States, but others came from as far afield as Minnesota or Oklahoma. They're usually identified as forgeries through linguistic anachronisms in the carving, or wear on the inscriptions indicating they're far newer than alleged.
- The National Football League's Minnesota Vikings have a name inspired by the (in)famous "Kensington Runestone
", a stone that appeared in 1898 with an inscription describing "an exploration journey from Vinland through the West" in the year 1362. It was almost immediately denounced as a fake by scholars, and evidence piled up over the next several decades that it was a hoax generated by a Swedish immigrant to that area of central Minnesota.
- In the 1930s, a set of metal Viking age artifacts were found near Beardmore, Ontario, over a thousand miles away from any known Viking settlement. The alleged discoverer's son confessed 25 years later that the relics were planted at the site. The historical consensus is that the artifacts were genuine, but imported from Norway.
- The Maine penny is a Norse coin from the late 11th century found at a Native American archaeological site in Maine. Although certainly authentic, its presence at the site is very controversial. While it postdates the Vinland settlements, it's certainly plausible that the Greenland Norse might've made occasional expeditions to North America in the following centuries and traded with local natives. But the lack of other Norse artifacts at the site has led some scholars to suggest that it was planted there, similar to the Beardmore hoax.
- In 1957, Yale University purchased the Vinland Map, allegedly a 15th-century map of the world that featured accurate depictions of Greenland and Vinland. Anachronistic details, such as Greenland being drawn as an island far before any European knew that, caused many to conclude it was a forgery; this was confirmed by a 2018 study that proved the ink was far younger than 500 years.
Literature
- The Vinland Sagas (The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders) are the Trope Maker, being a heavily fictionalized, if not mythologized, account of Erik the Red's settlement of Greenland, followed by his son Leif Eriksson's expeditions to what he called Vinland, or Canada. Written in the 13th or 14th century based on oral accounts of expeditions that would have been in the 10th century, which might explain how the undead and other monsters entered the tale.
- American Gods: One of the "coming to America" interludes shows a Viking expedition landing in the continental United States, only to be slaughtered to a man by Natives after capturing one of them and sacrificing him to Odin. It's implied that the sacrifice brought Mr. Wednesday to America, if not created him given that Iceland's Odin is substantially different.
- In "The Finest Story In the World", a Rudyard Kipling short story, the narrator, a famous writer, realizes that his acquaintance Charlie Mears, a poetry-loving London youth training as a bank clerk, remembers his past lives as a galley slave in the Mediterranean and as a Northman sailing to Vinland with Thorfin Karlsefne. The narrator plans to write down Charlie's memories (which Charlie thinks are just stories he is making up) to create the "finest story in the world", but fails because he cannot stop Charlie from forgetting his former lives as he inexorably transforms from a youthful dreamer into a middle-class bank clerk.
- How to Train Your Dragon: In one of the books, we meet Norbert the Nutjob, leader of the Hysterical Tribe, whose claim to fame is that his father travelled to America and came back bringing a potato (or, as less-educated Vikings call it, The Vegetable That No-One Dares Name) with him, even though he was killed by a sea dragon on the journey back. The potato is important, because it's the only cure for Vorpentitis, a deadly sickness that Hiccup's friend Fishlegs has (or so they initially think).
- The Merchant Princes Series: The east coast of North America is ruled by Germanic kingdoms descended from a second wave of Norse settlement.
- "The Skeleton in Armor" (1841) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired by the find of a burial of a well-preserved skeleton near Fall River, Massachusetts in 1832. In the poem, the ghost of the buried man speaks and reveals he was a Viking who carried off the daughter of a Scandinavian prince. Fleeing from the woman's father, their ship is blown westward over the Atlantic for three weeks by a storm to an unknown shore (implied to be Rhode Island) where they settle down and live out their lives.
- To Shape a Dragon's Breath is set in an alternate 1840s where the colonizers of "North America" (North Markesland) are of Norse descent. The Norse also conquered much of "Europe" including the British Isles, meaning that England is not a country of its own; the term "Anglish" is used for both them and Norsemen, with Norsemen dominating.
- Strata: One of many subtle hints that Kin doesn't come from the same "Earth" as the reader is a mention that North America is called "Valhalla," suggesting that it was named by believers in Old Norse Paganism, as Christianity doesn't exist on her homeworld.
- The Technicolor Time Machine is about a movie studio using time travel to make a realistic film about Vikings discovering America. And accidentally giving the Vikings the idea to go there in the first place.
Live-Action TV
- American Gods: Much like the book it also features a Viking expedition arriving in America. However, unlike in the novel where they attempted to set up a colony, they were quickly repelled by the unwelcoming terrain and hostile natives. However, they couldn't leave as there was no wind for their ship. So they built an idol to Odin, and held a melee as a mass human sacrifice. This succeeded in summoning enough wind for them to leave, but in their haste they left their idol behind. This event led to the creation of Mr Wednesday, the American incarnation of Odin, who was drastically different from the version they knew.
- Ghosts (US): The oldest ghost in the upstate New York mansion is Thorfinn, a Viking who got marooned there one thousand years ago and struck by lightning. In one episode the living characters find his remains and consider selling them to a museum, but opt for giving him a Viking Funeral instead.
- The Vampire Diaries establishes that the Original Vampires were Norsemen who traveled south to what is now Virginia. This was done to justify Mystic Falls, Virginia being the origin place of vampires, despite the Originals 1) being a bunch of white people, and 2) predating European colonization of the Americas by several centuries.
Music
- Bob Dylan: At a 1998 concert in Oslo, there was this little bit of stage banter from Bob (probably thinking about the Kensington Runestone mentioned in Hoaxes).
"I feel quite at home here actually. I was born and raised in Minnesota, where the Vikings landed long before Columbus did."
- Clamavi de Profundis: "Vinland Saga" is a dramatized account of the Norse westward expansion, starting with Erik the Red's expedition towards Greenland and continuing into Leif Eriksson's exploration of the American coasts.
- Juanita Coulson set to music and sang a Martha Keller poem titled Grugan about a cavalry man who finds armor on the body of one of the Sioux warriors he skirmished with. In questioning where the armor came from the filk song promptly asks "Was old Leif Ericjson the first to seek the setting sun or was it Madoc after all, that Welshman out of Wales?" as one of several speculations as to how an Indian warrior ended up wearing metal armor.
Tabletop Games
- Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok: The setting materials include details on Vinland, for player characters who want to recreate Leif's voyages.
- GURPS Alternate Earths II: In Midgard, Vikings captured Greek Fire from the Byzantines and came to dominate the European world and a good part of America by the 15th century. By 1412, an independent Vinland is one of the four primary Norse powers alongside Danemark, Svearika and Gardarika in Europe.
- Pathfinder: Ulfen explorers from the Land of the Linnorm Kings are believed to have been the first explorers from Avistan — the setting's equivalent of medieval Europe — to have reached Arcadia — the equivalent of pre-Columbian America — and maintain the hardscrabble settlement of Port Valen on its shores.
- Warhammer Fantasy: The first human explorers to reach Lustria, the setting's counterpart to South and Central America, was a Norscan crew of the Bjornling tribe under the command of the adventurer Losteriksson. Skeggi, the town founded where they landed, remains the largest human settlement in Lustria in the present day.
Video Games
- Age of Empires II: The "Vinlandsaga" scenario is a fictionalized recounting of the Norse expeditions to the New World.
- Assassin's Creed: Valhalla:
- One story arc involves Eivor traveling to the fledgling Viking colony of Vinland to assassinate Gorm Kjotvesson, the colony's leader and a member of the Order of the Ancients. With his death, it's implied that the colony will soon unravel and become abandoned.
- Eivor ends up leaving England and living the rest of their life in North America, where they die of old age and eventually are buried. Their body is discovered and exhumed by Layla and her crew.
- Eiyuu Senki: War Wonder: Gender Flip versions of Leif Eriksson and Thorfinn Karlsfeni are playable characters, and they're encountered on the North America part of the game alongside Geronimo.
- Europa Universalis IV:
- The game's Random New World option sometimes includes Vinland (the only Norse religion country of the entire game), although in this case the Americas themselves have also been turned into something completely different than what they are in real life.
- In the alternate history mod Third Odyssey, the Viking colonies of Markland and Helluland have survived till the 1400s, and play a part in the Byzantine exodus to and settlement of the Americas in 1444. Helluland is located on the Labrador coast, while Markland has Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island. They're also rivals, feuding over who's the true heir of the Viking legacy.
- Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997): The third case is set during Leif Erikson's expedition to Vinland, where the player must help recover their ship to help Leif and his crew return home.
Web Comics
- Full Frontal Nerdity: Frank finds a Viking axe buried in his backyard, somewhere in the continental United States but not specified. He winds up possessed by a Viking ghost obsessed with reaching the West Coast and claiming the continent in the name of Erik the Red.
Web Original
- Atlas Altera: In the setting, the Norse stuck around and eventually founded a country called Windmark, in OTL Newfoundland.
