You know didn't someone write a POD about this except Americas are still inhabited by Ice Age creatures and Pagan Vikings split off from Christian Vikings and the Mongols penetrate into Italy.
Anyone have that link. I lost it a long time ago.
In surfing the Internet the other day I stumbled on this site. I was taken with the above comment and mistakenly thought the reference to "POD" was to print-on-demand, a modern digitally based printing technology which, when combined with the economies of scale and distribution capabilities of the Internet, enables self-publishing on the cheap. The reference caught my eye because, back in the early nineties, I wrote and self-published a novel about just the thing you folks are discussing here.
I originally set out to write an alternative history story about Norse settlement in North America which succeeded. However, as I explored the various factors (as you are doing here) I became more and more convinced that it could not have and, in the end, made the tale one of a failed settlement, albeit one that came close to taking.
The novel,
The King of Vinland's Saga,
http://www.amazon.com/King-Vinlands-Saga-Stuart-Mirsky/dp/0738801526/ref=ed_oe_p is a largely fictionalized account of a settlement attempt that did not succeed (and of course which never actually occurred) some time after the historically documented efforts. To write it I had to consider the many factors that you folks have raised here including the lack of sufficient technological superiority of the Norse to the native Americans (unlike the later Spanish they had neither guns nor horses) and the lack of sufficient population to replenish Norse ranks (the links to their European homeland were too tenuous, their sailing technologies in open boats too limited and their Greenland base too small to support the newcomers with an endless stream of people, approximating the kind of incursion the later Europeans would produce which overwhelmed the smaller native populations already here).
What about disease? I reasoned that that was as much a function of population density as of new microbes being introduced from Europe so a smaller incursion would not have decimated the natives as the later, increasingly expanding, incursions were to do.
A few years back a reader e-mailed me to complain that I made it too easy on the Norse because everything he had ever read about later European settlements in the "New World" empahsized the hardships and privations. "It's not like a restaurant was waiting for them when they got here, either," he wrote, complaining that I had not had them starving in winter. I tried to explain to him that the Greenland Norse would have been a hardier sort than the later Pilgirms and Jamestown settlers, and would have been used to much harsher climates than the Pilgrims found in what is today's New England. After all, the Norse had been surviving on farming and hunting up in Greenland already. Besides, all the evidence suggests that that period was one of Global warming so that the climate encountered by Europeans 500 years later was likely to have been much colder. But he wasn't having any of it and went on to castigate me in an amazon review for all the imagined violations of the norms he had decided I was guilty of.
Anyway, I was taken by this site and the thread on the Norse incursion into North America leading to results that differ from those actually experienced in history. Hope you all don't mind my inserting myself here. By the way, I did not include "Ice Age creatures" in the North America of a thousand years ago that I described and, certainly, there were no vikings much earlier, so combining vikings with woolly mammoths, saber tooth tigers and the like would just make no sense!
Another quick aside: the peoples we call "Vikings" today were really a hodge-podge of various Scandinavian (Germanic) folks including the people who would become the Swedes, the Norse (ancestors of today's Norwegians), the Danes (successors to the Angles and Saxons who overran and settled Britain a number of centuries earlier), the Icelanders (largely Norse expatriates), and other expat Norse groups including the Hebrideans, the Faroe Islanders and the Dublin Norse of Ireland. The Normans of France were, of course, also an offshoot of these Germanic peoples (hence their name -- from "North" or "Norse" men) while the Rus were apparently at least partly an offshoot of the eastern or Swedish branch (giving their name to the land that would one day be Russia).
Being a "viking" was more a vocation than an ethnic heritage. As such, my story's characters, though mainly Norse (Greenlanders, Icelanders, etc.), include very few vikings. Indeed, by the eleventh century, when the actual Norse explorations of North America were taking place, the so-called viking age was pretty much grinding to a halt -- the last gasp of the old era was probably King Harald Hardrada's abortive invasion of England and his defeat by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge one week before Harold himself was defeated by the Norse-descended Duke William of Normandy.
A second comment: Someone here mentioned a Thorvald Karlsefni (one of the settlers of historic "Vinland"). In fact he was "Thorfinn Karlsefni". The reference to "Thorvald" is probably to Leif Eiriksson's brother who was killed by Indians in one of the historical exploration attempts (shortly after he and his men stumbled on some sleeping Indians and gratuitously murdered them).
Stuart W. Mirsky