L'Anse aux Meadows
What some old butternuts can teach us about how we look at ancient writings
For generations, the story of Vinland, as told through the Icelandic Saga and the Saga of the Greenlanders, had been dismissed as pure fantasy, untethered to real history in any which way. The notion that somehow these ancient documents could be relied upon as anything more than allegory would have been laughable in scholarly circles. That is until Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad (1899-2001) and his wife Anne Stine Ingstad (1918-1997) decided to take a leap of faith.
In their minds, the ancient descriptions of Helluland, Markland and Vinland lined up well with the geographic reality of Canada’s Atlantic shoreline. Their hypothesis was simple — that in spite of the normality of the paranormal events described in the sagas, and despite the superficial contradictions between the various accounts, perhaps — just perhaps — the sagas could have meant what they said.
Thankfully, in 1960 the Ingstad’s faith in the old stories was vindicated, for they had successfully uncovered the remnants of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, which is at the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. Their find forever changed the narrative that Christopher Columbus had been the first European to discover the North American continent, establishing instead that it had indeed been Leif Erikson, roughly 500 years earlier. Leif was a Christian convert who had been commissioned by King Olaf I as a missionary to the people of Greenland.
Longships themselves were once considered to be fanciful works of fiction, that is until we started unearthing their remains in the late-19th century. And the recent discovery of an oblong crystal in the wreck of a 16th-century English warship is now lending credence to the myth of the Viking “sunstone.”
So, surely one couldn’t be blamed for taking a lesson from this story, right? That maybe the ancients were worthy of a bit more credit then is sometimes afforded them. After all, these Norwegian explorers were able to authoritatively rewrite the history books for their trust in those old accounts, all while the scholarly community would have scoffed.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. And this is where the story takes an all-too-human twist.
Vinland, or the Land of Wine, was so named for its plentiful grapes which were said to be growing wild. Of course grapes do not grow in Newfoundland today, nor is there any reasonable support to believe that they could have grown there a thousand years ago either. That being said, wild grapes seem an integral part to the accounts given in the different sagas, so reconciliation of this detail should be important, no? After all, it was trust in the story that led to the archaeological find at L’Anse aux Meadows in the first place. So, it would seem reasonable to question that perhaps we are not seeing the whole picture with the L’Anse aux Meadows site.
Unfortunately, the most vocal opponent of any theories to reconcile these matters came from Helge Ingstad himself, who dismissed any grapes being found by Leif and his crew as delusion and pure fantasy. Some modern scholars have even stooped to claiming that some of the characters in the sagas were invented just to lend believability to the grapes being found. Sadly, this high-browed attitude in which we moderns feel qualified to stroke our red pens against ancient texts has been a plague on academia for too long,1 but I digress.
When thinking of the site at L’Anse aux Meadows as a base camp of operations rather than being the whole story of Vikings in North America, we broaden the possibility for the existence of these aforementioned grapes and are awarded with a more robust understanding.
Fortunately, we are not left completely in the dark as to where these Vikings could have travelled, for Butternuts (white walnuts) have been discovered at the L’Anse aux Meadows site, as well as a burl of butternut wood (which had been cut with a metal tool). Like grapes, butternuts do not and have not grown in Newfoundland. But interestingly, they do grow in New Brunswick, about 1,000 kilometers south of the L’Anse aux Meadows site — and so do wild grapes! Indeed New Brunswick is the northern limit for wild grapes and butternuts which are said to ripen at the same time, around September.
Thus, it is entirely reasonable then to hypothesize that the site at L’Anse aux Meadows could have been a winter base camp for summer excursions down south. At the very least one is confronted with the fact that those Vikings had visited southern lands where the grapes and butternuts grew, as their remains had been brought back to camp.2
So what can some old butternuts teach us about how we look at ancient writings? It seems a great deal! No doubt, ancient texts can be chock full of paranormal events and unexplainable occurrences. And this journal is certainly not a blanket approval over the legitimacy of each and every oddball-type claim. But it does stand to reason that we’d be wise to check our egos at the door before we turn our degrees into red pens to edit the accounts of the ancient eyewitnesses. A humbly spoken “I don’t know,” can be the more academically honest approach.
But what do we make of the supernatural events? Perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle best summarized the medieval mindset as an era in which Heaven itself was perceived as being very near to the common man.
“God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them.”
The medieval perspective is fundamentally different from our scientific age, and would no doubt inform their way of communicating events as they perceived them.
The absence of genealogies is cited by some scholars as support for the text’s allegorical nature. All the while, ancient texts with thorough genealogies are dismissed as allegory just the same.
In her brilliant 2009 publication in the Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 2:114-125, Birgitta Wallace argues that these butternut remnants are “the smoking gun that linked the limited environment of northern Newfoundland with a lush environment in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where wild grapes did indeed exist. The mythical Vinland had a basis in archaeological fact.”
This is a great article. Really hits the mark. Keep it up!
"Sadly, this high-browed attitude in which we moderns feel qualified to stroke our red pens against ancient texts has been a plague on academia for too long..." So true! Spot on!