Free Vikings in America by Graeme Davis

– are nowhere else recorded. It is likely the Denmark Strait produced conditions which the Viking ships were scarcely able to withstand. The crossing from Iceland to Greenland was dangerous, and as there were no significant developments in ship design in the centuries that followed, it remained perilous throughout the Viking Age. It is the Denmark Strait that is the true barrier between Europe and America, and from the outset Greenland, which is geographically part of America, had to function largely independently of Iceland and Europe.
    Maps of today correctly include Greenland as part of the American continent. The boundary between Europe and America is set by geologists as the mid-Atlantic ridge, with the result that Iceland, the only part of the ridge which rises above the sea, might be regarded as sitting on the boundary. Culturally Iceland is European, and no-one would seriously wish to argue the contrary, though Icelandic tour guides are prone to assert that one side of the Thigvellir rift valley is in Europe and the other in America. Greenland is open to discussion. Politically, the land is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and in terms of its recent history is bound to Europe. Yet its Inuit inhabitants are an American people, tied by blood and culture to theInuit of the Canadian Arctic. For the Vikings the decisive boundary was the difficult crossing of the Denmark Strait, the sea that their ships were scarcely adequate to sail. Greenland represents not an off-shoot from Iceland, but a new continent. For the Vikings this was the start of a whole new world.
    From the development of sea-going ships to the settlement of Greenland had taken the Vikings around 200 years. The islands of the North Atlantic had provided stepping stones, and the Viking expansion along this route may be regarded as inevitable. From Norway it was certain that they should reach Orkney and Shetland, island groups but a couple of days’ voyage with a favourable wind. Once there it was sure that they would reach the Faroe Islands, visible from a little distance off the shore of Shetland. Iceland and Greenland were just as certain. Driven by an expanding population and a need for arable land, the expansion had to happen. Just as the European settlers of North America pushed at their wild-west frontier until within a few generations they had crossed the continent, settling from ocean to ocean, so the Vikings pushed at their sea frontier.
    Yet Greenland was not the end of the road, just the last and biggest stepping stone. After Greenland was the continent of America, its northern lands just another short sail west. Driven by population growth and land-hunger, discovery, exploration and settlement of America was simply inevitable.

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The Greenland Base
    THE base for all Viking exploration and settlement of America was Greenland, and this expansion can only be understood within the context of Greenland. In Greenland we find a prosperous nation, one of the world’s first democracies, which flourished for approaching five centuries, before failing for reasons still not fully understood.
    To the Vikings, Greenland was a land of plenty. While winters were severe, they were little worse than in many parts of Norway or Iceland, and the Vikings’ style of farmstead met the challenge of keeping people warm through the Greenland winter. The country offered ample farmland, abundant food and a good quality of life. Greenland to the Vikings was as California to the pioneers who crossed the American continent. Skeletal remains of early Viking settlers in Greenland show them growing around two inches taller than their ethnically identical contemporaries in Norway, while there is much evidence of robust health and longevity. 1 Whatever the myths about Greenland in Europe and America, to the Vikings it was a good place to live.
Green Greenland
    Today Greenland is perceived through an accretion of myth. Two hundred years ago the hymn-writer Reginald Heber