Ræðismannaráðstefna: Magnús Magnússon I

Ráðstefna fyrir kjörræðismenn Íslands erlendis
Reykjavík, 2.-5. September 2001

Ræður og erindi

Magnús Magnússon
"The Vínland Adventure"

Dalabúð: 5 September 2001




Ladies and gentlemen, honorary consuls and honorary saga pilgrims:

Later this afternoon we are visiting Eiríksstaðir in Haukadalur, to pay homage at the home of Eiríkur rauði – Eiríkur the Red, the coloniser of Greenland and ancestral inspirer of the Vínland adventure. We shall be enjoying the replica Saga Sage farmstead which has just been built there, based on painstaking archaeological excavations over the past few years.

We have already come across Eiríkur's spoor – or at least his wake – when we sailed among the myriad islands of Breiðafjörður: on one of the them, Øxney, Eiríkur lived after being outlawed from the mainland and before setting off on his first, momentous voyage to Greenland.

My task is to give you all some background to what we are going to see, and to think aloud about the great Vínland Adventure which grew from it.

And what an adventure it was! What heroic journeys were involved! In sturdy but frail-looking viking ships, propelled by sails and oars, groups of men and women braved the hardships of open and uncharted seas in search of some Eldorado of the soul, the Blessed Isles of the West. They tried to make a legend come true – and they succeeded beyond their dreams. But only for a short time.

We are looking at stories about the discovery and attempted settlement of an area in North America by Icelanders and second-generation Greenlanders sometime after the year 1000, five centuries (as we are always told, with a certain triumphalism) before, in 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled across South America. These stories were given the patina of ancient authenticity by saga sources written in Iceland a couple of centuries or so after the alleged event.

But we must bear in mind the traditions enshrined in the sagas are stories, great yarns, not historical reports or geographical treatises. They are more concerned with people than with places; they are explorations of people's responses to ordeal. They enshrine truths perhaps greater even than history itself has.

In the case of the Vínland Adventure are talking about not one but two Icelandic sagas: Grænlendinga Saga (The Greenlanders' Saga) and Eiríks saga rauða (the Saga of Eiríkur the Red). They cover much of the same ground in a series of episodic stories, but they are not two versions of the same saga but two separate sagas incorporating different and often conflicting traditions – especially over who was the first discoverer of North America.

But both sagas agree on how the great enterprise began.

Let us take Grænlendinga saga first, because it seems to have been the earlier of the two – not necessarily 'better', not necessarily 'more authentic', but earlier – written in the first years of the 13th century.

'Þorvaldr hét maðr, sonr Ásvalds Úlfssonar, Øxna-Þórissonar. Þorvaldr og Eiríkr inn rauði, sonr hans, fóru af Jaðri til Íslands fyrir víga sakir…'

'….Þorvaldur and his son Eiríkur the Red left their home in Jæren, in Norway, because of some killings and went to Iceland; it had been extensively settled by then…'

What an opening! A whole new world unfolding in a couple of laconic sentences: father and son, scratching a living in western Norway, who 'left their homes because of some killings'!

And what a vivid picture it conjures up: a fleeting snapshot of tough people in a tough frontier world, just like the pioneering days of the Wild West, when people took the law into their own hands until they were either run out of town or summarily hanged.

Let's think of Eiríkur rauði for a moment – Eiríkur the Red.

From his nickname, he must surely have had red hair and a red beard. But what marked him out from the others was not just his colouring, but also his prickly pride and his refusal to bow down to anyone – especially when he established his new home here.

Imagine, if you will, conditions on the west coast of Iceland in the year 980 or so – just before the end of the first millennium. Iceland had been settled only for a century or so, but already it was well populated with farmers and their families and slaves, with craftspeople and traders and poets – but no princes: Iceland was a newly-minted republic, a commonwealth, the only nation in Europe at that time not to have a monarchy.

Eiríkur married and settled down just up the road from here in Haukadalur. Here he cleared land and made himself a new homestead which he named after himself – Eiríksstaðir, or Eiríksstead. Here he had a son, destined to be one of the main protagonists of the Vínland adventure: Leifur Eiríksson, known by his nickname of heppni, 'the Lucky', and officially celebrated in the United States as 'The Discoverer of North America'.

But Eiríkur and his hasty sword were soon in trouble again. He killed a couple of people and was run out of Haukadalur, and settled on one of the myriad islands out in Breiðafjörður – well out of harm's way, one would have thought.

But Eiríkur did not change, and after another feud with his neighbours on the mainland he was sentenced to three years of outlawry.

But where to go? The long, mountainous peninsula of Snæfellsnes points like a bony finger towards Greenland, 320 kilometres away over the western horizon along the 65th parallel.

One of the stories current in those days was that a storm-driven Icelandic mariner had sighted land far to the west; and Eiríkur decided to spend his three years of exile by going to see what existed there. So he slipped out of Breiðafjörður, past the looming ice-cap of Snæfellsjökull, and headed straight into the unknown west.

And he did indeed find the land which had been sighted all those years before. He sailed down the east coast, then round Cape Farewell on the southern tip and then up the west coast. It was a forbidding-looking land; but in the folds of those icy mountains lie unexpectedly green valleys, reaching back from sheltered fjords littered with icebergs but teeming with fish.

In a fjord he called Eiríksfjörður he built himself a farm he called Brattahlíð, or 'Steep Slope'. It was in the heart of the very best farming land in Greenland, and Eiríkur had large ambitions for it. He had no intentions of living there as a hermit. He had a much grander vision: he was going to start his own Free State, with himself as its founder and leader.

All he needed was a band of willing colonists. And to achieve that, he hit on a masterly idea – the idea of a public-relations genius long before his time. The saga says, 'He named the country he had discovered Greenland, because he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had a good name'.

And it worked. Would-be colonists hastened to join him.

Despite the short summers and the long, hard winters, the fledgling settlement flourished. Eiríkur's domain grew into a large community of 140 farms. Eiríkur's optimism had been fully justified.

Meanwhile, Leifur Eiríksson was growing into an exemplary young man.

One day, according to Grænlendinga Saga, a visitor arrived at Brattahlíð. He was a young Icelandic merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had wanted to emigrate to Greenland to join his father there. He had a remarkable tale to tell.

He said that when he was on his way to Greenland from Iceland in the wake of his father, he had been blown blindly off course far to the south-west, far past his intended destination. And there in the west, he said, he had sighted a series of huge, unknown lands.

Everyone – especially Leifur Eiríksson – was eager to find out more about the uncharted lands which Bjarni had sighted. But it emerged that Bjarni, who was nothing if not prudent, had refused to go ashore anywhere, even to stock up with fresh water and firewood, because he was worried about possible dangers – and he wanted to find Greenland before autumn weather set in.

They all laughed at Bjarni, patronisingly, for his timidity and lack of enterprise. But Bjarni had given Leifur an idea, a huge idea – the idea of going in search of the lands to the west himself. And so, on the tried and trusted principle that 'ships know the way back', he bought Bjarni's ship and started to plan the first deliberate voyage of exploration to the New World.

Leifur hired a crew of 35. But he took no women and no livestock. This was to be strictly a voyage of exploration.

They made their ship ready and put to sea. And because 'ships know the way back', Leifur retraced the route which Bjarni said he had followed in order to reach Greenland from the west. They sailed past Baffin Island and Labrador.

The most southerly point he reached, two days' sail farther south, was a large island on which he built some houses (later to be known as Leifsbúðir, or 'Leifur's Booths'), which would become a focal point for later explorers in Grænlendinga Saga.

This is a key section in the Vínland story. When the explorers landed, the saga says: