As for growth rate, it really seem weird to go with the growth rate of 1%, Iceland was a island with very limited population size. The best farmland would have been depleted in the first or second generation leaving only increasingly marginal land for any new population. Historical lack of access to new land result in marriage age increasing and the marriage rate falling and as result a lower population growth. While access to land resulted in the marriage age falling and the marriage rather rising and as a result a rising birth rate and population growth.
Expansion of various aspescts of successful Vinland
- Thread starter galanx
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Pre-industrial farming settler societes of European origin, like French Canadians, 17-18th century English settlers in North America or Boers in South Africa achieved growth rates as high as 2-3% in favorable climate. Thus 1% for Vinland would not be something impressive.
Who says they have to make it in one go? Also you made literally no argument as to way it would be impossible, I honestly am not sure why this type of argumentation should have any weight, if you don't have any actual objection to something happening outside "it did not happen IOTL" then it shows me that the scenario is in of itself plausible.
The later Europeans used island chains like the Canarias, Azores and Cape Verde just fine, let's not treat Norse seafarers like another species uncapable of organizing a couple small long distance migrations every once in a while or even create a network where settlers born in Norway can end up in Vinland(or even the British isles given a Norse control there) even without a single migration, there was trade between Greenland and Europe after all.
The Norse colonies have much more time to grow until when I postulated we could see deeper incursions into North America and are dealing with smaller populations than anything the Spanish found and conquered within 2-3 generations. The English went from a single colony in 1607 to have about 300k people in the 13 colonies about a century later, I'm postulating 50k Vinlanders in about 3 centuries, so 6 times fewer people in 3 times the amount of time, so a 18 times difference in scale.
England in 1600 had 4,1 million people, about 16 to 10 times the amount the high medieval Norwegian and Insular Norse world had, and this doesn't even take in account the internal growth that would occur if you 3 centuries instead of 1.
If this scenario is somehow still improbable add another century or create scenario where you involved British and Irish groups too.
But it doesn't break for the Maritimes, Labrador or the coast of the bay of the St.Lawrence river past Quebec city from where the Norse community would first grow and establish itself. Also the point is that the Polynesian/Austronesian expansion involved massive distances, but you presume you can't have settlers from Norway using the 2 inbetween islands as hopping points?
No it's not induction, you are looking at complex events where we can nevertheless look at the specifics and outright decide to ignore the specifics and go for a universal statement based on just a pattern that is based on different events, all with very different circumstances.
I believe you have 2 different arguments there, but let's separate them into 2 :
- The Norse couldn't get many people in Vinland even through internal growth and a couple centuries. This is something we are also discussing.
- The Norse couldn't displace the Iroquois with the numbers you think they realistically could have had.
Norse Vikings didn't conquer Estonia and Danish Estonia was relatively short-lived, as a very evident counter-example one can look at the very quick Germanization of Prussia or East Germany, which happened largely in 2-3 centuries and I don't see why we should somehow exclude North Germans because they are a different ethnicity or because of their numbers, which weren't far from the whole of Scandinavia.
Also again this is a completely pointless comparison: "If the Spanish couldn't conquer Portugal with a 5:1 population ratio over the centuries even if it was right on their border, why would they be able to conquer the Mesoamericans and and Andeans across the oceans with 1:4 in favour of the natives?"
And yet the Danes conquered half of England and Swedes somehow became a middleman elite for such a large East Slavic state.
I also want to expand on the fact that Estonia was an active agent in the Viking period, it absorbed a lot of Norse influence in religion, material culture and societial practices, it has been for a millennium an iron working society, agricultural soceity with adequate naval capabilities and the geographical coverage of the closely related Baltic-Finnic languages went much beyond Estonia, covering half of Latvia, Ingria, Southern Finland and during this time it was itself expanding Northwards toward Saami regions in Finland or eastwards around lake Ladoga and Onega.
Did they actually try to displace the Beothuk or colonize the entirety the island IOTL? One can't take IOTL events without context and simply transpose to say whatever one needs, we are looking at a centuries-long timeline of divergences and different demographic patterns.
Given what we can infer from the later sources, the Slavs already had a shared political identity and dominated the regional landscape at large(we are talking about hundreds of thousand of km2 and hundreds of thousands of people), demographically and politically.
They didn't get "assimilated" in England or Hebrides, they were conquered. Also the local population in England was itself many time what Atlantic or the Great lakes region had. Norse seem to have been the primary language in the Hebrides beforehand:
One further factor that may have encouraged the identification of the Gallgáedil with Ketill Flatnose’s Hebridean subjects was the perception that the Norse impact on the southern Hebrides was somewhat less intense than the impact on the Northern and Outer Isles. This impression is the product of an examination of the toponymic evidence. Early analysis of settlement names in the Outer Isles and the Southern Hebrides, respectively, showed that in the former names of Norse origin made up about seventy per cent of the total, and those of Gaelic only about thirty per cent, while in the latter the proportions were reversed. This created the impression that Norse settlement in Islay and the adjacent islands may have been simply an aristocratic veneer and that the bulk of the population would have maintained their Gaelic language and identity. This encouraged an interpretation of the Gallgáedil as either a hybrid group or as a basically Gaelic group under Norse leadership.
Recently more thorough analysis of the place-names of Islay has suggested that in fact as late as the sixteenth century the vast majority of farm names were of Norse origin and that the high proportion of Gaelic names in the modern toponymy of the island are the product of land re-organisation and the establishment of new names in the course of the last 400 years. It seems likely that in the tenth and eleventh centuries Islay was as Norse as Lewis and it seems likely that similar studies of other southern islands, and even Kintyre, might produce similar results.3
Recently more thorough analysis of the place-names of Islay has suggested that in fact as late as the sixteenth century the vast majority of farm names were of Norse origin and that the high proportion of Gaelic names in the modern toponymy of the island are the product of land re-organisation and the establishment of new names in the course of the last 400 years. It seems likely that in the tenth and eleventh centuries Islay was as Norse as Lewis and it seems likely that similar studies of other southern islands, and even Kintyre, might produce similar results.3
It seems quite likely that when the Scandinavian-led groups from Ireland settled in western Northumbria they included at least some Irish who had thrown their lot in with them in Ireland. Perhaps these were people who were native to the immediate hinterland of Dublin who had, over the sixty years or so of the settlement, come to identify with their overlords. Perhaps there were groups of young Irish males who felt that a Viking lifestyle might offer them greater opportunities. Perhaps there were individuals of Irish origin who had, one way or another, ended up living in Dublin. It should also be recalled that the Icelandic authors of the twelfth century seem to have believed that there was considerable inter-marriage between the Irish and the Norse. If this was true, as seems likely, then many ‘Scandinavian’ households may have been bilingual.
The upshot seems to have been that English, Gaelic, British and Norse appear to have been widely spoken across the region in the tenth and eleventh centuries and that only gradually did one language come to dominate in each district. Unfortunately, the documentary evidence is so poor that we cannot chart this process other than to say it was probably not yet complete by 1200, and it is by no means agreed when Manx, a Gaelic dialect, became the dominant language on Man. For our purposes we probably should imagine that the Irish Sea region remained linguistically balkanised throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The upshot seems to have been that English, Gaelic, British and Norse appear to have been widely spoken across the region in the tenth and eleventh centuries and that only gradually did one language come to dominate in each district. Unfortunately, the documentary evidence is so poor that we cannot chart this process other than to say it was probably not yet complete by 1200, and it is by no means agreed when Manx, a Gaelic dialect, became the dominant language on Man. For our purposes we probably should imagine that the Irish Sea region remained linguistically balkanised throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The example of Normandy also doesn't work because the Norse settlers settled the regions on French terms and were subservient to the French crown from the get go and quickly intermixed with it, plus Christianity also bridged the gap.
Plenty of populations displaced or assimilated smaller populations, the Anglo-Saxons were seemingly at most 40% of the local population in just some select places in the East and even with that they assimilated most of the population leaving virtually no substratum in their own language. Plus in terms of raw settlers figure, I don't believe anyone would postulated than more than(or even anything close to) half a million Germanic people migrated to to England during late antiquity.
Even Old world societies such as 18th century England or Ireland or 18th century China sustained massive growth country-wide for generations, obviously the Norse example would better resemble new world pioneering societies or the growth we can infer in Iceland or Greenland. Between the Maritimes, Newfoundland and Eastern Quebec you have something like half a million km2 of land for some farming and plenty of livestock and fishing too.
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As for language, note that Montreal Island would be around the language border between Algonquin speakers and Iroquois speakers. Plus the Algonquins are likely several related but mutually incomprehensible languages.
If half of the Skraeling settlers at Hochelaga have to learn a new language anyway, it makes sense for them to learn the most prestigious one around... which is Norse.
If half of the Skraeling settlers at Hochelaga have to learn a new language anyway, it makes sense for them to learn the most prestigious one around... which is Norse.
What was the genetic linguistic closeness/relation between the contiguous Iroqouis languages on the St.Lawrence river basin and Great lakes region?
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The Iroquois spread into the Saint Lawrence doesn't seem to have happened until the 13th century, at which point it was still firmly Algonquin. When the Algonquin languages started to firmly separate from each other is a question we'll probably never know, but their oral tales seem to indicate that the groups remained in decent contact with each other until the warfare with the Iroquois came into earnest, which implies some kind of lingua franca or mutual intelligibility among the Algonquins (or a dialect continuum).
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Honestly, you're right, I haven't been. I tend to be fairly conservative with with making changes like that, but you're right it's possible. I still don't think its likely, but part of the fun of alt-history is looking at the less likely but still possible events, so you have me there. That said, its still important to look at why those things didn't happen OTL in order to see how best to change them, so I do think there is still merit to the discussion.
I apologize if I've been too aggressive with pushing my take on Norse settlement of the Americas. You're absolutely right that there are ways the Norse could have achieved a larger influx of population, and you might be right about a larger population being able to push into the Saint Lawrence, but without something to make that change in population, I do think the path of least resistance for the Norse goes through creolization. That still requires a plausible scenario for why there's a larger influx of settlers than OTL though.
That's fair, the things the Spanish and Portuguese were able to achieve during their early colonization rush continue to amaze me.
Not to be too pedantic since it doesn't benefit the discussion, but I have a logic book right in front of me, and that is almost exactly the definition of induction: using the general case to analyze a specific case.
Given what little we know of the OTL Vinland settlement, the relationship between the settlers and the Beothuk seems to have been rather antagonistic, so I would imagine they would have had the desire too, if not perhaps the capability.
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From what I can gather proto-Algonquian was spoken 2500 to 3200 years ago. This here:
Argues more or less that the relation between Algonquian language is commonly said to be like that of Romance languages, but maybe that's a bit too much given the deep dating of their separation, although in 1200-1300 they should have had that kind of closeness still.
Based on this other study:
journals.sagepub.com
I think Eastern Algonquian(excluding Mikmaq) can be better compared to Slavic or West Romance internal diversity, depending on the exact dating and shared lexicon.
The relationship between Central(areal grouping) and Eastern(genetic grouping) Algonquian languages can be compared Germanic diversity.
Argues more or less that the relation between Algonquian language is commonly said to be like that of Romance languages, but maybe that's a bit too much given the deep dating of their separation, although in 1200-1300 they should have had that kind of closeness still.
Based on this other study:
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journals.sagepub.com
The relationship between Central(areal grouping) and Eastern(genetic grouping) Algonquian languages can be compared Germanic diversity.
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I don't think that's avoidable, Iceland officially converted in 1000 and the establishment of Vinland occurs after that. Vinland could maybe stay Norse since Greenland wasn't Christianized yet, but even that might be difficult.
Do you have any recent study on the Iroquian-Algonquian linguistic-ethnic border throughout history? The 2 studies I linked before give somewhat different dating and theories but they are 30+ years old.
Do we assume that Vinland submits to Hakon IV of Norway, along with Greenland and Iceland, in the 1260s? And how might this affect things?
This one is from about 20 years ago: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25801165?seq=1
Its still pretty vague on Iroquois settlements though at any specific point in time with estimates for different sites ranging from 1000ish to 1500ish on the Saint Lawrence, though the median is 1300ish. I'll see if I can find some of the other articles I read, I think some of those are from the last decade at least.
I wouldn´t.
OTL, Greenland and Iceland submitted to Norway because Norway was able to interfere with local politics through control of essential external trade.
Neither Iceland nor Greenland had straight ship timber. They could import ships, but only imported a few, and mostly relied on Norwegian ships. No one else was interested in sailing to Iceland or Greenland in 13th century OTL - not Denmark, not Hanse, not Scotland nor England.
TTL, Vinland already in Newfoundland is self-sufficient in timber and grain. And will export grain and timber to Greenland and Iceland. And build their own ships.
Vinland will still want to trade with Europe - just as OTL Norway, Sweden and Novgorod did. But by 13th century, Vinlanders would be able to sail their own ships to Europe - not only to Norway, but to Ireland, Scotland and England. And Vinland would take a dim view of Norway trying to control Iceland.
I doubt Vinland would have the weight to throw around politically just yet, but I agree that the shipments of wood would make Iceland and Greenland more independent, although I'm not sure that by itself would be enough to prevent Norway from taking over Iceland, trade was just one of the factors.
Not only shipments of wood, but Vinland ships travelling to Britain and returning Britain to Vinland with stopovers at Iceland and Greenland.
Maybe this could be part of a potential scenario in which a united kingdom of the isles conquers Alba in the 10th and 11th century. I mean if you wanted to have some interesting conflict over the North Sea.
Not in 10th or 11th century. But by 13th century, Vinland would be a political player comparable with Lord of Isles, Prince of Wales or King of Ulster.