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The Viking Sagas
IN 982 AD, Eric the Red was outlawed from Iceland for three years at a Thing there. He decided to explore the country to the west; it had been sighted some 50 years earlier from a storm-driven ship. The land was rich in wild life, fish and birds, so he and his men marked sites for future farms there. He returned to Iceland, called the country Greenland, and sailed again to Greenland in 986 AD, accompanied by 25 ships. Only 14 of them arrived safely.
They landed in an area (the Eastern Settlement) which eventually contained several hundred farms, 12 parish churches, a cathedral and a monastery. Sheep, cattle and goats were raised in the area; seal and Caribou supplemented the diet. The best land lay around Ericsfjord in the Eastern Settlement. Here at a farm they called Brattalid, Eric and his family settled.
Norse ruins at Brattahlid
Excavations of Erik's farm, Brattahlid ("Steep Slope"), in 1932 by Danish archaeologists (Greenland, which became Danish in 1814, is today a self-governing possession of Denmark), revealed the remains of a church, originally surrounded by a turf wall to keep farm animals out, and a great hall where settlers cooked in fire pits, ate their meals, recited sagas, and played board games. Behind the church they found ruins of a cow barn, with partitions between the stalls still in place, one of them the shoulder blade of a whale--a sign of Viking practicality in a treeless land where wood was always in short supply.
Reconstructions
Thjodhildur's Church and Erik and Thjodhildur's Farmhouse
Settlements Map
In the year 1000 A.D., the legendary Greenlander Leif Eriksson, son of Eric the Red, set his course westward from his parental home at Brattahlid and discovered Vinland - today better known as Newfoundland, North America.
Within ten years the settlers had pushed north and formed the Western Settlement around present-day Godthabsfjord. And the area to the north of the Western Settlement, Nordseta, was good for hunting, fishing and gathering driftwood.
A small area called the Middle Settlement contained about twenty farms along the coast near modern Ivigtut.
The Greenlanders exported furs, hides, rope, cable oil, woolens and sea ivory and imported corn, iron, timber, garments and assorted luxuries.
The Icelandic Annals for the year 1121 record that Bishop Eric of Greenland set out in search of Vinland. The results of his voyage are not recorded.
In the 1400s temperatures went down, and before 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone.
ADAM OF Bremen was a German historian and geographer of the 1000s
The fourth and last book of Adam's work is a geographical appendix and describes the Northern lands and the islands in the Northern seas. It contains the earliest mention of America found in any geographical work. The passage is as follows (IV, 38):
Furthermore he [King Svend] mentioned still another island found by many in that ocean. This island is called Winland, because grapevines grow there wild, yielding the finest wine. And that crops grow there in plenty without having been sown, I know, not from fabulous report, but through the definite information of the Danes
And finally some words the meaning of Winland or Vinland
extracts from:-
Vinland The Viking Name for America by:Julius Streicher
"When one sees the ancient maps which reflect the Norse expolration, reads of hears the ancient sagas, one is at first struck by the name used for the "New World".... Vinland... This name has always brought forth images of grapes and vinyards, of the bounty of the earth being transformed by the Northmen, or Vikings as they are popularly known, into the rich, red fruit of the vine. Unfortunately, fact is somewhat less romantic, but far more practical than fiction... The fact is, the name Vinland has a far different meaning... and even if it is not as romantic, it is far more practical, and much more fitting to a practicle, sea-faring people such as the Norse...
The word, 'vin', the root word in the name "Vinland", actually came into use in Norway around 500 CE. Rather than meaning "vine" or, or more specifically "grapevine, the word is actually used to indicate a farm with adjoining pastureland, or a meadow