alternatehistory.com

POD: 8,000 BC
(give or take a century)

A roll of the cosmic dice. Perhaps as a space rock falling into a gravity well hit a certain bit of turbulence a molecule parted right instead of left or up instead of down. Perhaps it hit a patch of cosmic dust on its journey to Earth, or didn't hit dust it did allohistorically. Perhaps it hit the atmosphere at a slightly different angle. Something utterly unknowable and immeasurably small. But for whatever reason, what will now never be known as the Cape York meteor lands several hundred miles south of its "destination".

The effect this has on human history is not immediately obvious. Much as in our timeline, what is now the Eiriksfjord meteor is found and utilized, its iron becoming an important part of the North American arctic. When the Medieval warm period hits, a people who may or may not be the Dorset--the archeological record is virtually identical outside Greenland, but with nine thousand years of butterflies and considering how little we really know about that people, who can say for sure?--retreat to cooler climes, but still regularly travel to southern Greenland for iron.

But when a man in Iceland named Eirik Raudha is sentenced to three years of outlawry and, just as his namesake and counterpart in our timeline did, used this as an opportunity to explore a land to the west which had been reported by fishermen blown off-course, this puts these maybe-Dorset directly in his path...

This is a preview/development thread rather than a TL. Also, the title may end up being misleading, as at this juncture I imagine the Norse may ultimately end up having some small sucess in colonizing North America, specifically in and around L'Anse-aux-Meadows, as it is the perfect location from which to control trade between the *Dorset and the Algonquian nations to the south. (It also appears to have been abandoned when the Norse set up shop there; certainly, the Norse didn't bother to set up palisades or anything, which they would have if there were hostile locals.) Though in the theory I'm going off of Newfoundland is Markland rather than Vinland, so I suppose that the title gets off on a technicality even if that ultimately is the case.

What I have done here is, in one fell swoop, solved or at least delayed the Greenlandic Norse' eventual iron problems, given them a monopoly on the resource in arctic North America, and caused them to meet the Dorset right off. In short, I have jumpstarted and turbocharged trade between these two groups, and the Norse would be fools to not trade broken iron tools for ivory, polar bear cubs, and other goods coveted by Europeans. The *Dorset aren't precisely getting a bad deal, either, as historically the tools they made out of Norse scraps were better quality than those they made out of meteor iron--just a more expensive one.

I doubt (at this juncture) that the initial Vinland explorations will be any more sucessful than they were historically, but the context is altered by the trade the Norse are already engaged in. The Algonquians have several goods the Norse would covet and trade for, after all.

What I do know is that the whole "God's-eye view" thing in this prologue is the exception, not the rule, to how the story is going to be told. I'm debating whether to go with a narrative-based structure, as I attempted in Swords of the Iroquois, or a series of scholary papers about the milieu from an alternate present.
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