The two men believe Vinland to be located in North America, somewhere between Nova Scotia and Long Island, much as nineteenth century speculators like Carl Rafn concluded from the same readings of the same sagas. Arbuthnot and Nelson happily ignore the self-sown wheat, for example, and instead focus only on grapes and river currents. Fortunately, America’s Lost Vikings S01E05 “The Curse of Death Island” doesn’t traffic in complexity, so hosts Mike Arbuthnot and Blue Nelson simply take the sagas at face value and attempt to use their semi-fictional stories to locate the true Vinland, conveniently enough in the United States.Īs I said ,this episode goes in search of Vinland by using clues from the Icelandic sagas, but it is highly selective in what it takes from them. The complexity of the description of Vinland in the Icelandic sagas in relation to the European literary tradition it sits within makes the question of identification of the “real” Vinland challenging.
I have discussed this material previously here and here. Frakes called a wider Scandinavian literary “narrative discourse” that interacted with Latin literature and its mythical and legendary traditions. When the Icelandic sagas repeated the same elements, they did so as part of what Jerold C. That this should not be taken completely literally is evidenced from the fact that Adam’s words are nearly verbatim those used by Pliny, Isidore, and Rabanus Maurus in describing the Fortunate Islands, write down to the mysterious “self-sown wheat,” a key element of the Fortunate Islands’ ecosystem. That unsown fruits grow there in abundance we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes” ( Gesta Hammaburgensis 4.38, my trans.). “Vines grow there naturally, producing the best of wines. The oldest reference comes from Adam of Bremen, written around 1075 CE. It was therefore no wonder that when the Vikings told the story of Vinland, the same people who proclaimed the icy Greenland to be lush and green also used the language of paradise to describe what is believed to be the mainland of the United States. Brendan, from around 900 CE, reports that the legendary monk discovered a paradisiacal island covered in grapes on his fictitious voyage across the Atlantic. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (6.37) said as much about the Fortunate Islands, as did Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (14.6.8) and Rabanus Maurus in De universo (12.5). From the time of the Romans through the Middle Ages, any legendary paradise worth its salt had to have wild grapes growing freely.
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