The Legend of the Lost City of Vinland: The Norse Voyages to North America, the Settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows, and the Saga of the Vinland Map
Recreated Norse long house, L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1978. The Land of the Wild Grapes In the late tenth century, under the leadership of Leif Erikson (the son of Erik the Red), a group of Norse mariners sailed west from Greenland, navigating the cold waters of the North Atlantic to explore a new, uncharted continent. According to the Icelandic chronicles—the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red —they discovered three distinct lands: Helluland (the Land of Flat Stones, modern Baffin Island), Markland (the Land of Forests, modern Labrador), and Vinland (the Land of Wine, likely modern Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence), where they found wild grapes, self-sown wheat, and rivers filled with salmon. The legend of Vinland is the mystery of the Norse presence in the Americas five centuries before Christopher Columbus. For centuries, the sagas were interpreted as mytho...