How the Vikings Colonized America

hello and welcome to fire of learning I'm Justin let me think of the Norse and the Vikings the image that tends to come to mind is one of fierce pagan warriors from the harsh North who descended upon Europe like lightning conducting raids all the way from Ireland to Byzantium and changing the face of the continent forever this perspective is well-deserved but we must also remember that their success was in part Oh to their intellect creativity and curiosity they were ingenious inventors and perhaps the greatest explorers of their age they braved not only battle but also the unknown as they settled places like the Faroe Islands Iceland Greenland and even a mysterious land they called Vinland now known to have been modern-day North America by colonizing both Greenland and Finland the Norse working with medieval technology almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus or the first confirmed Europeans to have discovered and settled North America yet their colonies would not last they would mysteriously vanish into history but the story of them is nonetheless amazing in this video we will take a look at how the norse discovered america what they did there what the colonies were like and why they seemed to have vanished so let's get to it before we begin I would like to thank Yvonne I'm staal de magie she and Patrick Evans for being our most recent supporters on patreon they join these supporters listed here who make these videos possible let me start by saying I personally think this is a great story we hear all the time about forgotten voyages to mysterious far-off lands and lost settlements and all kinds of mysteries like that much of the time it's myth legend fiction misunderstanding but this is actually a situation where all that turned out to be true The Forgotten voyages were real the mysterious lands were real and there were lost settlements still much of the story of the north's reaching a new world is based on what are called the East London assumer hopefully my pronunciation in this video isn't too bad but I admit I don't know any of the languages anyway this means these sagas of the Icelanders the focus of these sagas is mostly on historical events including the discovery of Finland as well as many other events and they were actually the main reasons scholars started looking for Norse settlement in the Americas though more reliable than scholars thought they were written in the 13th and 14th centuries a few centuries after all this had taken place based off oral traditions and there was a lot of obvious fiction to them so just keep in mind that the tales should be taken with a grain of salt now then our story begins in the 10th century AD by the year 950 the Faroe Islands here and Iceland here had been inhabited by the Norse for less than a century it's not known for sure if the Viking explorers were the first to discover and live on the islands it's especially doubted for Iceland which may have first been inhabited by a handful of Irish monks but they were the first to carve out large settlements and he's cold harsh territories and the modernist sentence of these people still and how about the territories as the indigenous population also I know the word Viking refers more specifically to see Raiders than to the entire North's culture I understand the difference but in this situation I'm not really going to get too worked up about me anyway it was in or around the Year 950 that a man crucial to the story was born in Scandinavia the homeland of the Vikings modern-day Norway to be exact I had a quarter of ulsan better known in Old Norse as I had a good rowdy Eric the red from the color of his hair when Eric was a child his father Torvald was banished from Norway for manslaughter they moved to and settled down in Iceland which as I said was decently populated by then where Torvald died and 980 ad unfortunately it seems that Torvalds temper ran and family and Eric was banished from Iceland for three years for manslaughter as well just a couple years after his father's death although he may have been a little more justified than his father was as the man he killed had killed Eric slaves still however Iceland was a little more sensitive to violence than the Norse homeland the settlements there were too fragile for warfare so Eric was banished unable to stay on Iceland and unlikely to be welcomed in Norway because of his father Eric decided to explore to the northwest where there were reports of land the first to report land was a man named good beer and Olson who was blown heavily off course in a storm decades earlier it's possible that the Norse hunted in this mysterious land from time to time after Gwyn Buren's discovery but there were no settlements there accident by the way is how all these places Iceland the Faroe Islands Greenland and Finland were initially discovered so Eric set off in search of this mysterious land and eventually did in fact reach it he called it Greenland Greenland and he spent three years of his exile there exploring the island and planning out future settlements now I mentioned in a previous video I did country names explained that when Eric returned he decided to call this land Greenland to attract settlers even though it was very much not a green land I got a lot of comments on that video saying that this was incorrect and was actually much warmer in his time period and therefore much greener while that is true the climate was much more agreeable in his time period it was still not a green land it was certainly not greener than Iceland and the sagas themselves suggest that this was a bamboozle because Eric knew he'd need all the people he could get to make the settlement their work either way the promise of green land was enticing to these settlers in Iceland who were struggling to make a living much of the best farmland on the island had already been claimed and so many of them along with some Norwegians accompanied Eric to the island where they set up a couple of settlements and gradually expanded around the south and west of the island shown here we often forget that Greenland is a part of North America because it isn't on the mainland but it is and so Eric's settlements are technically the first true European settlements in North America the settlements were chosen in some of the few areas suitable for farming by the fjords a few word is a kind of narrow inlet of water surrounded by steep cliffs within a few decades the island became home to a few thousand Norse settlers some of whom are fleeing political changes some escaping famine and poor farmland some like Eric were exiled criminals you can kind of see Greenland would have been sort of like the wild frontier of Europe filled with people from all walks of life there were Native American peoples living on the island but they were quite far away and so contact at this time seems unlikely life was undoubtedly difficult but archaeological evidence suggests that the settlers adapted hunting and fishing made up for where farming failed the Norse were able to get on with their lives they're practicing their pagan faith establishing government and marrying and having families one such family was Eric's whom he had brought from Iceland he had four children a daughter ladies and three sons life Torah bald and Torstein in time his children life in particular would take the next great step in this story life edek son had been born around 978 a time when noir society was experiencing considerable change the age of smaller fragmented earldoms was ending they were being replaced by larger kingdoms like the kingdom of Norway Norse mythology was also on its way out as Christianity became more appealing to the people of Scandinavia these changes were making their way to Iceland the Faroe Islands and now Greenland in fact life would play a major role in bringing Christianity to Greenland in the year 999 he traveled in Norway and adopted their religion while visiting the king who gave him orders to spread it to Greenland it's not exactly clear what happened next but it seems that life was blown off-course while returning to Greenland from Norway and sighted land to the west he realized this had to be the land that a man named VR&E Harry Olson had described over a decade earlier VR&E Harry Wilson had also once been blown off-course and had told the people of Greenland but he had seen land to the west though he did not land there himself around the Year 1000 upon finally returning to Greenland life found the arne purchased his ship gathered a crew and followed the route jarnia taken to get back home backwards life and his crew had wanted Eric to lead this voyage to discover these new mysterious lands but while preparing for it he fell off his horse and was injured still pagan he took it as an omen from the gods saying he was not meant to discover any other lands besides Greenland thus life and his crew set off they soon reached a land he called Helou land meaning the land the flat rocks very likely modern-day Baffin Island he and his crew ventured further sailing south eventually reaching the place they called Markland meaning the land of the forest probably the coast of modern Labrador two days later he landed in a new area where apparently geena's men found wild wheat and grapes growing in abundance leading them to name it Vinland probably meaning the land of vines or the land of grapes though some have suggested it means the land of Fields here he and his crew wintered then returned to Greenland to inform the others of the great land they had discovered and thus began Norse involvement on mainland North America where exactly was this Finland however historians still aren't sure but their best guess is modern-day Newfoundland where a Norse settlement which we'll discuss in a bit was actually later discovered but some historians suspect especially because of the reference to wild grapes that Vinland may have been a little bit further south somewhere around New Brunswick or Nova Scotia maybe as far south as Maine in the US there's clear evidence they did sail farther south based on plant remains found in the affirmation colony but as far as settlement goes they were definitely here although scholars wouldn't be too surprised to find remains of the North in this general area even if Finland was a land of great abundance like life claimed it was not exactly a convenient area to settle at some point early on the Norse made contact with the people whom they refer to as the sky linger this may mean the wretched ones this may mean the people who wear animal skin clothing it may mean the weak people but ultimately it means the Native Americans we may never know exactly what the first interactions were like the first time in Norseman and a native made contact but though the sagas discussed moments of peace and cooperation the majority of what they talk about our confusion misunderstanding suspicion and hostility and that's probably not far from the truth we know much less about the natives of Upper Canada and a 10th and 11th centuries and what life was like for them but at the end of the day the two cultures were both very likely fairly superstitious and violent and that's a bad combination many of the Norse present were likely Christians but the beings and legends from their old religion no doubt still haunted their minds they apparently weren't too sure of the natives were humans or if they were demons trying to impersonate them I'm sure the natives must have had similar concerns about them apparently the Norse life's brother Torvald specifically started the fighting by killing a handful of natives while they were sleeping one escaped however and inform the others so they came back with an army and life's brother was killed and fighting not a great start but it seems relations did become temporarily more peaceful and cooperative trade began between the two groups in one story though unfortunately it seems that the Norse gave them milk and cheese fun fact lactose intolerance is quite common among non-european populations even today Native Americans had never seen a cow in their lives though of course the Norse did not know this the natives after eating it believed it to be poison there's another story that later add another settlement there were peaceful relations between the natives and Norse but one day a bull got loose and started running tours and natives and that freaked him out so much that they thought it was a kind of attack and the little war was started over it in that story when the men were running away wife sister ladies eight months pregnant couldn't keep up so she picked up a sword and went berserk well not literally but she managed the cause of natives to retreat I believe this story goes she pulled out her breasts and started hitting them with the broadside of his sword and then they'd have saw that and we're basically like yeah I'm not dealing with that this chain of events even if there were a little bit of fiction to them isn't really surprising I mean looking at Jamestown hostility between the natives and sellers was really a big part of the troubles there and why the colony almost failed in this time period the natives and Norse would have been a little more evenly matched it doesn't appear that the North's ever even made a huge effort to colonize Finland and only had settlement in the area for a few years for example evidence and he discovered settlement suggest that the area was inhabited for around fifteen years at most every major effort the Norse made to colonize America was no doubt warded by hostility with the native peoples who heavily outnumbered them they furthermore lack the guns and cavalry of later Europeans and had not yet themselves exposed to the diseases that the later Spanish brought over which devastated local native populations the settlement which I previously mentioned that archeologists discovered is at Lanza Meadows in modern-day Newfoundland it was discovered in 1960 by Norwegian explorers Helga and Ana in STAAD the architecture and remains iron tools in particular proof of the Norse were indeed here and Old Norse maps such as the one shown here display Vinland in an area that looks suspiciously like the tip of Newfoundland though the settlements of Finland itself were likely short-lived interestingly it appears Norse involvement in North America was not it's entirely possible that Greenlandic Norseman remained aware of the region and were active there for around 400 years possibly in regular contact with the natives in that time period this interaction would have been very limited however the main and presumably one of the only reasons the Norse continued returning was for a lumber Wood was central to life in Greenland of scarce they're speaking of the Greenland settlement it would last for centuries and remain in contact with Europe until it seems the 15th or 16th century when the settlements there mysteriously disappeared it is not known exactly what happened to the Greenland colonies but there are a number of likelihoods one factor was that the climate became somewhat cooler around this time period which would have made life harder than it already was secondly it appears the resources that were necessary to keep the colony in Greenland functioning economically became less valuable to the mainland Europeans over time as trade expanded across the world in that time period furthermore an exchange of letters between the Catholic Church in Iceland and Pope Nicholas the fifth in the 14 40s mentions that the settlement in Greenland had been without priest or bishop for some time ever since the area had been attacked by heathens the heathens were likely the Native Americans who at this time were moving into the region more specifically the Thule people the same group that became the Inuit also called Eskimos the descendants of these tribes now make up the majority of the population of Greenland ironically this was a situation where the Native Americans seemed to have wiped out an indigenous European population the Greenland colony would also over time disappear and Europeans would not return until 1721 when Danish explorers once more visited the region and laid the foundation for the nation's modern ownership of the island you ever notice how the better the name the colony had the worse it actually did the colonies in the land of wine and the Greenland for example failed but the one that succeeded it was the one that was built in the land of ice well the Faroe Islands worked out too but anyway so do these findings change history does this mean we should talk about life Eriksson Erik the red and green beer and Olson more often than we do Christopher Columbus it's complicated I think on one hand it's fair to give credit to the Norse for being the first Europeans to discover and settle North America and to remember that their story is also a very important part of history however it is also important to note that Norse influence in North America was very limited they don't seem to have had very much influence on the people as inhabiting North America at the time and weren't influenced by them much either the Norse never really came to understand the true extent of Finland nor did the settlements there really lasts outside the cold outskirts of the continent so I would say that while we shouldn't call Columbus the first European to step foot on the Americas he was the one who truly opened the door for Europeans to expand and settle the region and create the societies we have today still however like I said we should not forget that the Norse had built a metaphorical path across the northern lands from Europe to North America long before Columbus which lasted for centuries until only decades before his arrival there it's still interesting though to consider how differently things could have gone you can't of course take this all kinds of ways but the most fascinating scenario my opinion is one where the Norse were successful in Newfoundland and maybe some surrounding territories and built up a society there I think the concept of the colony losing contact with the rest of Europe especially when Greenland's colonies disappeared would be especially fascinating just to see how differently it would have developed later Europeans would have found North America to have been a very different place not only would there have been an island home to a civilization full of a bunch of Vikings still around but the Norse could have introduced horses ironworking and maybe even christianity to the continent a couple small changes like that could have reshaped human history and how we look at it when you consider this you can see that the Norse were inches away from rewriting human history I hope you enjoyed this video if you did then I invite you to come check out the rest of fire of learning and to subscribe to keep up with more videos like it in the future I've recently done a video on whether or not the Chinese also beat Columbus to America which I'd recommend checking out as well to help with the cost of production fire learning does take donations on patreon the link to which you can find in the description you can support the channel with as little as a 1 dollar contribution however simply subscribing to our YouTube channel for free is also a large help special thanks to our patreon supporters once again listed here we are also on Instagram Facebook and Twitter so come check us out there to talk skal du ha for watching

Channel: Fire of Learning

Views: 327,396

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Id: RN3JuVDL3J4

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019