Volume 13 Number 011 Norse Settlement of North America

Volume 13 Number 011

Norse Settlement of North America - I

Lead: Before Columbus, before Jamestown, before Vespucci, before Cabot, there was Leif Ericson and his Norse companions. They made the connection, completing the circle, old world to the new.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Wanderlust is an impulse as old as humanity. The desire to settle in a single place, build villages and cities, plant crops and then defend them is a relatively recent phenomenon. From earliest of times humans were wanderers, two-legged predators following the migration trails of the beasts that provided food and clothing essential to sustain life.

At some point in dimmest memory, perhaps 10,000 years ago, clans and tribal groups spilled out of central Asia across the Bering Sea or perhaps a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska into North and South America and the Caribbean Islands. There they prospered, increased in population, and developed complex societies. There appears to have been little or no contact between them and the old world they had left behind until 1000 years into the common or Christian era.

Across the bitter waters of the North Atlantic came a hearty race of Norsemen, ethnic ancestors of today’s Scandinavians: Danes, Norwegians, Swedes. They are known in fearful, popular parlance as Vikings, the Norse word for pirate. Their trading and raiding expeditions into England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Russia established their reputation as fearsome warriors, canny merchants, and restless explorers.

Sometime around 965 Erik Thorvaldsson, Erik the Red, settled in for a troublesome stay in Iceland. Twenty years later he was “encouraged” to leave by his enemies and, on the wisp of a rumor of a large island to the west, Erik the Red found and settled the desolate and frigid fjords of Greenland. His son, Leif, would go even further. Next time: Vinland.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

Resources

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