How to get the Vikings to stay in America...even possible?

Infinity

Banned
If the Horse Had Never Slipped on Ice

Okay, so a friend of mine and I were discussing ways America could have been different by the time the age of exploration began at the end of the1400s. One way occurred to me would veto have the Vikings settle permanently in the Aemricas, and develope their own culture here, also interacting with the native americans.

Any way to realistically pull this off?

If Erik the Red never fell off his horse, he'd have accompanied Leif Ericson to the new world. Then Leif would have never had to return to Greenland to fulfill his filial duties. Furthermore, Erik would have inspired more Vikings to join him in the new world, just as people followed him to Greenland.

Next, have Erik name the new world Treeland, instead of Vinland. A lot more Vikings would have colonized Greenland if it weren't for the shortage of trees. Lastly, have the colonists build some of the finest ships to date, to further emphasis the riches of Treeland.
 
I thought it might be interesting to have a series of Viking Thrall-ships containing Celtic Christian slaves blow off course slightly before all this and land, shipwrecked, in New Brunswick. The Irish would outnumber their Norse masters, who would be forced to free them, and the resulting society would be far friendlier to the local natives who were essentially nomadic. Assuming the slaves don't just roundly execute the Norsemen, let's say as Celtic Christians they have mercy on the sailors and attempt unsuccessfully to convert them.

Without the directions or resources to return to Ireland, these settlers live in symbiosis with the natives and intermarry with the proto-Maliseet for about a generation or two. Timber and food are both plentiful and the native culture there in southern New Brunswick supplemented their farming by fishing, hunting, and gathering and these Irish thralls and the surviving Norsemen could settle along the St. John River with most of them concentrating at the fork with the Eel River founding an earlier Meductic analog with a hybrid culture emerging. This is of course after the thinning of the natives to smallpox, which results in the short lived supremacy of the Irish-Norse settlers and their mixed race offspring.

Two short generations later, (many of the original colonists yet live, though they are old) the adult mixed race second generation traders and their children who are almost of age are expanding north and east making contact with Vinland settlements and telling of the better opportunities further south. Leif Ericksson and company bring further settlement further south and Northern Maine is settled by the Irish-hybrid culture and Ericksson's Vikings. A new wave of immigration which ultimately meets a new culture of natives in OTL's Maine and adapts less violently than Vikings OTL.

For about a century a valuable trade link is established from New England to Europe along the Vinland - Greenland - Norway route, but ultimately, the Greenland settlement fails and the Vinland settlement follows with many of the settlers traveling south to New England where the Nordicelt-Native culture flourishes. Without the resources or trading incentive to return to Europe, the Viking-Celt culture survives for generations as a loose confederacy of native tribes in New England which spreads along the coasts south to New York becoming further native-ized with each passing generation of new contacts, though retaining much cultural, religious, and of course genetic distinction.

Enough so that when settlers arrive in New England and discover a vaguely European race of natives with technological and cultural similarities to medieval Europe and a heavily Amerindian spirit worship influenced form of Pagan informed Folk Christianity, the assimilation of those peoples is far easier and involves less famine, disease, and bloodshed due to war.

TTL has the potential for less self-identity as Amerindians, which is bad if you are a very proud modern one, but good if you want to retroactively avoid centuries of Indian Wars.
 
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