Europe discovers the Americas earlier?

Lady Kate

Donor
This is all very interesting to me since I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a timeline from the Norse discovery of Vinland to the present, with the world today being vastly different due to the medieval Norse taking control of the whole North American continent. This post is clueing me in to the importance of motivation. Why would the Norse have wanted to branch out from l’Anse aux Meadows to the rest of America? One idea that pops into my head is the fur trade - perhaps the Norse establish dominance over that and reap the benefits of bringing the harvest back to Europe, just as the French did centuries later in the OTL. What other natural resources does North America have that would have been of interest to medieval Europe? I’m thinking that if the Norse had ventured further south and inland than l’Anse aux Meadows, they would have discovered vast tracts of fertile land far more productive than any in Scandinavia, and people might have immigrated there for the farming opportunities?
 
This is all very interesting to me since I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a timeline from the Norse discovery of Vinland to the present, with the world today being vastly different due to the medieval Norse taking control of the whole North American continent. This post is clueing me in to the importance of motivation. Why would the Norse have wanted to branch out from l’Anse aux Meadows to the rest of America? One idea that pops into my head is the fur trade - perhaps the Norse establish dominance over that and reap the benefits of bringing the harvest back to Europe, just as the French did centuries later in the OTL. What other natural resources does North America have that would have been of interest to medieval Europe? I’m thinking that if the Norse had ventured further south and inland than l’Anse aux Meadows, they would have discovered vast tracts of fertile land far more productive than any in Scandinavia, and people might have immigrated there for the farming opportunities?
The thing with furs is that they already were the big dogs in the fur trade, trading furs from their native lands and from what became russia and the baltic states.

Maybe you could have a Norwegian king in the high middle ages get upset that they're being squeezed out of the fur trade by Novgorod and/or The Hansa and remember being read the Greenlanders saga growing up or something, and thinks Markland (probably what is now Labrador) would be an excellent source of furs that only he would have access to.
 
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