page_title: Vinland
section_title: Medieval geographers
hierarchical_section_title: Vinland / Medieval geographers
caption_attribution_description: Graphical description of the different sailing routes to Greenland, Vinland, Helluland and Markland travelled by different characters in the Icelandic Sagas, mainly Saga of Eric the Red and Saga of the Greenlanders. Modern Icelandic versions of the Norse names.
context_page_description: Vinland, Vineland or Winland is the area of coastal North America explored by Norse Vikings, where Leif Erikson first landed around AD 1000, approximately five centuries prior to the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. Vinland was the name given to North America as far as it was explored by the Norse in the Vinland Sagas, presumably including both Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. As many of the features and details of the sagas match present day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America they are considered to be a reliable historical account. According to the historian Gisli Sigurdsson, 'The sagas are still our best proof that such voyages to the North American continent took place. Coincidence or wishful thinking simply cannot have produced descriptions of topography, natural resources and native lifestyles unknown to people in Europe that can be corroborated in North America.'
  In 1960, archaeological evidence of the only known Norse site in North America was found at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.
context_section_description: The oldest commonly acknowledged surviving written record of Vinland appears in Descriptio insularum Aquilonis, by Adam of Bremen, a German (Saxon) geographer and historian, written in about 1075. To write it he visited the Danish king Svend Estridsen, who had knowledge of the northern lands and told him of the "islands" discovered by Norse sailors far out in the Atlantic, of which Vinland was the most remote. The exact phrasing of this, the first mention of Vinland in known written sources, is as follows:
  He also told me that in this part of the Ocean many have discovered an island, which is called Vinland because there are grapevines growing wild, which produce the best of wines. From trustworthy Danes rather than from fantastic tales, I also have heard that there is an abundance of cereal which is self-sown. Beyond this island, he (King Sven of Denmark) says, are no more inhabitable islands in the Ocean. Everything farther out is covered by immense masses of ice and perennial fog. Martianus tells of this:’ One day of sailing beyond Thule the sea is solid.’ This the widely travelled King Harold of Norway found to be true. With his ships he recently investigated the extent of the northern Ocean but finally had to turn back when the extreme limit of the world disappeared in fog before his eyes. He barely escaped the gaping ravine of the abyss.
  Adam became confused between Helluland and Halagland, the northernmost part of medieval Norway, where the "midnight sun" is visible. He also spelled Vinland in Latin the same as Wendland, the Slavic province closest to Denmark. In addition, Adam contradicts himself by stating that Vinland is in a location of a polar sea with "intolerable ice" and "immense fog," while also stating that the location provided the ultimate climate for the best wine to come from Greenland.
  The earliest map of Vinland was drawn by Sigurd Stefansson, a schoolmaster at Skalholt, Iceland, around 1570, which placed Vinland somewhere that can be Chesapeake Bay, St. Lawrence, or Cape Cod Bay. 
  In the early 14th Century, a geography encyclopedia called Geographica Universalis was compiled at Malmesbury Abbey in England, which was in turn used as a source for one of the most widely circulated medieval English educational works, Polychronicon by Ranulf Higden, a few years later. Both these works, with Adam of Bremen as a possible source, were confused about the location of what they called Wintland—the Malmesbury monk had it on the ocean east of Norway, while Higden put it west of Denmark but failed to explain the distance. Copies of Polychronicon commonly included a world map on which Wintland was marked in the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland, but again much closer to the Scandinavian mainland than in reality. The name was explained in both texts as referring to the savage inhabitants' ability to tie the wind up in knotted cords, which they sold to sailors who could then undo a knot whenever they needed a good wind. Neither mentioned grapes, and the Malmesbury work specifically states that little grows there but grass and trees, which reflects the saga descriptions of the area round the main Norse expedition base.
  More geographically correct were Icelandic texts from about the same time, which presented a clear picture of the northern countries as experienced by Norse explorers: north of Iceland a vast, barren plain (which we now know to be the Polar ice-cap) extended from Biarmeland (northern Russia) east of the White Sea, to Greenland, then further west and south were, in succession, Helluland, Markland and Vinland. The Icelanders had no knowledge of how far south Vinland extended, and they speculated that it might reach as far as Africa.
  The "Historia Norwegiae" (History of Norway) compiled around 1200 does not refer directly to Vinland and tries to reconcile information from Greenland with mainland European sources; in this text Greenland's territory extends so that it is "almost touching the African islands, where the waters of ocean flood in".
caption: Medieval Norse sailing routes and geography of the North Atlantic, based on the saga texts (after Árni Ibsen, Svart á hvítu, 1987)
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