Viking North America

I thought it was from the Skraelings thinking they'd been poisoned (them not being used to adults drinking milk)

dug out my book on the Greenlanders saga... it says that the trouble began when a Skraeling was killed by one of Karlsefni's men for trying to steal some weapons. The 'milk poisoning' was never mentioned in the saga... I think it was inferred later. The bull scared the Skraelings on their initial visit, but it didn't start the fight...
 
(Due to complicated personal resosns I am not really online, but I had to get to a machine and log on to rlate todays article in Aftenposten, a Norwegian equivalent of The Times):

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article1855708.ece

Basically, during the conservation of the St. Nicholas chrurch in southeastern Norway, a skeleton was found dating to around 1000 ad, and posessing skeletal traits unique to Andean Indians. As in South America.

Intriguing.
 
PS: I've recently come to consider what would have happened if Eric the Red:

From wikipedia:
"When Eric returned to Iceland after his term of banishment had expired, he brought with him stories of "Groenland". Eric purposely gave the land a more appealing name than "Iceland" in order to lure potential settlers. He explained, "people would be attracted to go there if it had a favourable name". Ultimately he did this, though, to gain favor among people, as he knew full well that the success of any settlement in Greenland would need the support of as many people as possible. His salesmanship proved successful, as many people (especially "those Vikings living on poor land in Iceland" and those that had suffered a "recent famine") became convinced that Greenland held great opportunity.
After spending the winter in Iceland, Eric returned to Greenland in 985 with a large number of colonists and established two colonies on its southwest coast: the "Eastern Settlement" or Eystribyggð, in modern-day Julianhåb, and the "Western Settlement" or Vestribyggð, close to present-day Godthåb. (Eventually, a Middle Settlement grew up, but many people suggest this settlement formed part of the Western Settlement.)"

A speculation I've recently made is "What if Eric the Red had been dirven off course by unseasonable weather during his banishment and ended up in North America?"

He had drive, charisma, violence, and got a massive colonization effort running on Greenland. What could he have made of Noth Amrica?
 
(Due to complicated personal resosns I am not really online, but I had to get to a machine and log on to rlate todays article in Aftenposten, a Norwegian equivalent of The Times):

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article1855708.ece

Basically, during the conservation of the St. Nicholas chrurch in southeastern Norway, a skeleton was found dating to around 1000 ad, and posessing skeletal traits unique to Andean Indians. As in South America.

Intriguing.

Having let this percolate in my brain for a while, I suspect that if this is truly the body of a south american indian, it is more likly to be a statment on the adventures of one indian, than the explorations of the Norse.

I.e. it is easy to think that this means "Vikings in south america!!", but it might just as well be one indian with the wanderlust getting to north america. Or even the offspring of one such.
 
Well, in my Interference TL one of the features is exactly Norse presence in North Am... pardon, "Hesperia". I made them veeery cautious, conservative and lacking that drive for expansion shown by Conquistadores and British colonists. So in the second half of the XIIIth century they're still limited to OTL Newfoundland, Acadia and parts of Quebec, struggling hard with local tribes. On the whole, they know the coasts from Cape Hatteras to Baffin Island and have a discreet knowledge of the Great Lakes through limited trade, but they haven't expanded or explored in a Renaissance sense.
 
Eric the Red in Vinland is a pretty good POD for a Vikings-in-NorAm TL. My guess is that he would get Norse settlers coming through to Vinland from Greenland and Iceland, making ports on the two earlier colonies grow. So a string of ports stretching from Newfoundland to Greenland to Iceland back to Scandinavia grows as Eric convinces more and more settlers that Vinland is the place to go.

The Grand Banks are bound to be discovered eventually by the Viking settlers, and that's going to be another reason for settling Newfoundland. People are going to want to harness this major food sources, so fishing becomes a way of life on Vinland's south shore. In turn, so does boatmaking, so ports and shipyards pop up all over Vinland. Explorative Vikings taking after the way of Eric the Red are going to go explore north and south from Vinland.

They come back to Vinland and Greenland with stories of white whales and swimming unicorns in the north, and tales about the massive forests in the south in New England. By the twelfth century, settlers from Vinland have pretty much dominated the Amerindians. With the Vikings there in large numbers by now, the Indians have no choice but to be good conquered people. As settlements pop up around the Gulf of St. Lawrence and even in northern New England, the Vinlanders are getting rich off trade. Horses and cattle arrive in Vinland and surrounding settlements, being used from things such as plowing, milk, meat, and transport. As in OTL French NorAm, the Vikings trade animals and metal (the Vikings don't have less expenzive things to offer) for furs and pelts. The fur trade is started in late twelfth century, and reaches its peak in the early thirteenth century, when the colonies swell from an influx of disgruntled pagan settlers forced to move from Scandinavia for not embracing christainity.

So by about, say, 1240, the Vikings have a largely pagan and native belief settlement of about ten thousand (a lot for that time) based in Vinland. Smaller settlements have been started in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Labrador, Eastern Quebec, and northern Maine. What I'm interested in in this TL is how the Mongol Invasion will affect the colonym if it hasn't been butterflyed away.
 
I think Eric is exactly what Vinland needed to make a go of it. Consider what he made of the far less attrctive Greenland.

He was the guy who got a big, organized settlement fleet going. And he seems to have been personally charismatic and violent. Sort of a proto-king.

I suspect the indians would hold the Vikings once they recovered from the epidemics, but the Norse would have had a good long consolidation phase before that.

Religous tension would certainly have been a part of Vinland. Erics wife was very christian, as I remember.
 
But would Eric's wife religion affect how Vinlands religious climate will turn out? I predict as Vinald grows in size and importance, it becomes a sanctuary for pagans fleeing the new Christian administration in Scandinavia.
 
I think initially it'd paralell OTL greenland. Some of the same people and beliefs. A generation or two down the line it might change. Different people, and once Vinland is well established, it'll likly be a bigger draw than Greenland was OTL.

Its worth noting that Greenlands reputation was so bad that when one of the towns there vanished, people in Scandinavia was sure they had reverted to paganism, killed the priest and escaped to Vinland. (And maybe they did.)
 
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
 
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One point, Norse isn't the term for Norvegians, it's was a catch all term for all Scandinavians.


I don't think that's true. It is a catch term for western Scandinavians because they largely came from Norway (the north way) but not for all. Swedes, who gave their kingly line to medieval Norway (Haakon the Black, Harald Fairhair's father, was an Yngling) were constitued by Gautar (possibly related to the Goths) and Sveir, among others. A certain Swedish group (possibly a tribal unit) may have given their name to Russia (via "Rus"). The Danes, of course, were neither Norse nor Swede. Needless to say, if you go far enough back, to the era before there are such clear distinctions, it's likely they were a single group given the linguistic and cultural relationships.

SWM
 
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Swedes (who gave their kingly line to medieval Norway (Haakon the Black, Harald Fairhair's father, was an Yngling) were constitued by Gautar (possibly related to the Goths) and Sveir, among others. A certain Swedish group (possibly a tribal unit) may have given their name to Russia (via "Rus").
The origin of Rus is fairly well known. Roslagen is an area along the coast (today mostly suburbs of Stockholm) that contributed rowing teams (thus the name: ro = to row, lagen = the teams) to the defense of Sviþjod in early times. These ancient divisions are still well know in Sweden and are everyday names (e.g. Götaland, Svealand & Roslagen).
 
I am of the belief that there were 3 main reasons for Norse settlements in Vinland failing.

First, it was at the end of a very long supply chain, with numbers of potential colonists decreasing at every step. Iceland was not all that populous, and Greenland was minute.

People in Greenland may have wanted to emigrate to Vinland and made a number of non-recorded trading and lumbering trips to Noth America, but didn't ahve the surplus population to make a go at it.

Second, there was a bit too little knowledge about Vinland. I expect the general beleif was that it was an isalnd about the size of Iceland, with better climate, but hostile natives.

Third, for people beyond the Icealnd/Greenland area, it did not offer anything that closer places didn't. Ireland and Bjarmland had pretty much everyhing Vinland did, as far as they knew, with the additional advantages of being closer, and having neighbours to support them there.

I have a short timeline based on the mongol invasion of europe going much further. This causes a bit of a panic, at a time when Norway and the rest of Scandinavia is close to its carrying capacity in population. This causes a wave of settlers to hit Vinland, most arriving just as the disease is flattening the natives.
 

Stephen

Banned
Once you have a big enough Vinland giving the Vikings a foothold, exponential population growth can take care of the rest. A case of small pox decreasing scraeling resistance would help too.

I dont think the technology gap between 10th century vikings and 16th century conquistadors is that great. Early guns sucked anyway. The problem is getting a large force of amoured theigns in the New World instead of just a single hamlet of settler peasents.

What if the Christianising kings like Olaf and Canute sudenly feel a pang of mercy and decide to exhile the pagans to Vinland instead of executing them. This gives Vinland a larger founding population than the trickle from Greenlandk, with bonus points for the extra pagan flavour of the resulting timeline. Actually I have been thinking of posting a timeline with exactly this POD, some day I might actually get around to it.
 
King Hrorekr the Blind

What if the Christianising kings like Olaf and Canute sudenly feel a pang of mercy and decide to exhile the pagans to Vinland instead of executing them. . .

There's actually precedent for this. When King Olaf the Stout (aka Olaf the Saint) is consolidating his power he blinds one of the petty kings he conquers, King Hrorekr, and makes him a ward of his court. But when the blinded king tries to kill him with a knife one evening at the dinner table, Olaf has second thoughts and exiles the king to Greenland where he disappears from the historical record. Olaf declined to kill Hrorekr because he was a kinsman of his but he had fewer scruples with other petty kings he rolled up in his drive to re-establish the primacy of his predecessor, King Olaf Trygvasson (ruled Norway 995-1000 AD and is the Christianizing king in Leif Eiriksson's time), and of the first pan-Norwegian king, Harald Fairhair, before him.

There is less reason to think that disease would have decimated the native population, based on what I have already said above, i.e., we know from the record that the Norse found their way to the North American coast and had a number of contacts with the natives and yet there is no evidence of any widespread epidemics depleting the population at that time or shortly afterwards. Likely small scale contacts would have had limited impact and would have led to the growth of resistance in the native population commensurate with the ability of the alien pathogen(s) to propagate themselves.

And even the supposition that large scale emigration of pagan Norse in the era of Christianization would have made the difference wouldn't suffice because their sailing technology was inadequate to successfully ferry over the number of people needed to approximate the later European invasions and Greenland was inadequate as a base of operations because, even in its warmest phase, it could not sustain such large populations.

Oh yes, and Stephen also wrote: "I dont think the technology gap between 10th century vikings and 16th century conquistadors is that great. Early guns sucked anyway." It bears remembering that however limited the guns of the later conquistadors appear to us today, they worked wonders for the small number of Spanish adventurers who used them, with a little luck and a lot of pluck, to overturn a large native empire and subdue the natives throughout the region afterwards. However inefficient in modern terms, it's pretty clear they made a huge difference to the Spaniards and their adversaries.

SWM
 
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Stephen

Banned
The small isolated populations of Iceland and Greenland were likely acting as quarantine zone protecting the North American natives from diseases like Small Pox etc.

Although a full sized musket is great at blasting through a suit of armour or over penetrating through a crowd of Aztecs. In a skirmish with unarmoured North American Natives the higher rate of fire from a weapon like a long bow would seem to be more useful.
 
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