Anyone standing today by the wind-swept shore of Epaves Bay at the northern tip of Newfoundland might find it hard to comprehend the enormity of the modest archaeological site that extends around them. Here, at L’Anse aux Meadows—the name is probably a garbled reference to an old French naval vessel—lies what is still the only known Norse settlement in North America. A few humps and bumps in the grass, a replica building, and a fine museum mark the point of first contact between human populations across the Atlantic. It is an astonishing place, but its significance was only recognised in relatively recent decades.
Until as late as the 1960s, the Viking adventure in North America was known only second-hand from the Icelandic sagas, the great epic tales that form one of the jewels of northern medieval literature. These stories mostly concern the Viking age of roughly A.D. 750-1050, but they were written down hundreds of years later, primarily in the 13th century. The degree to which they preserve genuine memories of the saga-writers’ ancestors, or whether they are more a form of historical fiction, still divides scholars today. The entire narrative of Norse voyages to North America is contained in just two of these texts, the Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) and the Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða).
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