The North Atlantic was a hostile environment, but somehow the Viking settlers on Iceland survived while the settlers on Greenland failed. Sagas, historical sources, and archaeology are combined to answer the five hundred year old question--why?

Horned helmets. Pirates. Murderers. The Vikings are often depicted as fierce invaders who straddle the line between barbarians and civilized people. However, the Norse spread throughout Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages, taking with them new ideas. They discovered and settled the islands of Iceland and Greenland and tried to build their own idealized societies, free of the kings they left behind in Norway and Denmark. In Iceland the experiment worked and thrived while the settlement in Greenland failed. Using information gathered from archaeology and historical sources, Ryan Sines answers the question: What allowed Iceland to succeed while the last Greenlander died waiting for a supply ship that never came?

Showcases the exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable obstacles to expansion westward. This volume looks first at the legacy of the Viking expansion which had briefly created a network stretching across the sea from Britain and Ireland to North America, and had demonstrated that the Atlantic could be crossed and land reached. The next sections deal with the English expansion in the western and northern British Isles. In the 12th century the Normans began the process of subjugating the Celts, thus inaugurating for the English an experience which was to prove crucial when colonizing the Americas in the 17th century. Medieval Ireland in particular served as a laboratory for the development of imperial institutions, attitudes, and ideologies that shaped the creation of the British Empire and served as a staging area for further expansion westward.

This collection of ten papers investigates the Norse colonization of the North Atlantic region, starting with Viking expansion in Arctic Norway and ending with a discussion of the longterm implications of medieval Scandinavian exploration of the New World. Each chapter provides a short regional synthesis of the archaeological evidence and, where appropriate, addresses three interrelated themes: the relationship between native and newcomer; the creation of local identities in the settlement period; the relationship between archaeology, history and the construction of modern national identities. In sequence, the chapters focus on North Norway, the Faeroes, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, the Inuits of Smith Sound, L'Anse aux Meadows and Vinland, together with introductory and concluding chapters.

The story of how the fearsome Atlantic Ocean was explored by early sailors, including the Vikings, whose brilliant navigation matched their bravery. The early voyages into the deep waters of the Atlantic rank among the greatest feats of exploration. In tiny, fragile vessels the Irish monks searched for desolate places in the ocean in which to pursue their vocation; their successors, the Vikings, with their superb ship-building skills, created fast, sea-worthy craft which took them far out into the unknown, until they finally reached Greenland and America. G.J. Marcus looks at the history of theseexpeditions not only as a historian, but also as a practical sailor. Besides the problem of what these early explorers actually achieved, he poses the even more fascinating question of how they did it, without compass, quadrant, or astrolabe. From the opening descriptions of the launching of a curach on the Aran Islands, through the great pages of the Norse Sagas describing the first recorded sighting of America, the author brilliantly conveys theexcitement and danger of the conquest of the North Atlantic in a narrative that is based equally on scholarly research and sound seamanship. G.J. MARCUS's previous books include The Maiden Voyage, on the sinking of the Titanic.

The story of the Vikings in North America as both fact and fiction, from the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the myths and fabrications about their presence there that have developed in recent centuries. Tracking the saga of the Norse across the North Atlantic to America, Norse America sets the record straight about the idea that the Vikings 'discovered' America. The journey described is a continuum, with evidence-based history and archaeology at one end, and fake history and outright fraud at the other. In between there lies a huge expanse of uncertainty: sagas that may contain shards of truth, characters that may be partly historical, real archaeology that may be interpreted through the fictions of saga, and fragmentary evidence open to responsible and irresponsible interpretation. Norse America is a book that tells two stories. The first is the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, ending (but not culminating) in a fleeting and ill-documented presence on the shores of the North American mainland. The second is the appropriation and enhancement of the westward narrative by Canadians and Americans who want America to have had white North European origins, who therefore want the Vikings to have 'discovered' America, and who in the advancement of that thesis have been willing to twist and manufacture evidence in support of claims grounded in an ideology of racial superiority.