Viking Country

I am at the furthest point north that I’ll be going on this journey – St Anthony.

Today I”m at St.Anthony. It is here that one can see icebergs floating by and spot whales.

Up here, it is all things Viking because they have the only authenticated Viking site in North America and the earliest evidence of Europeans in North America. Located here is L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This is a model of what the settlement would have looked like. The big building is called the Leader’s Hall and contains the leader’s bedroom, a kitchen/social room where the workers ate and slept, a men’s workroom and a women’s workroom. The outbuilding were where they did blacksmithing type of work.

The story goes that Erik the Red was kicked out of Norway for crimes he committed. So he settled in Iceland, only to be kicked out of there as well. He convinced a few of his buddies to settle in Greenland, but they were lacking resources, such as wood to build and burn as fuel, and iron. He was going to go exploring for more resources further west, but he broke his leg and sent his son, Leif Erickson and 60-90 others to look. They tried Labrador but there were no trees. They established a settlement in Newfoundland because there were trees and a bog to produce iron.

L’Anse aux Meadows was discovered by a couple of archeologists. They found outlines of several buildings and several artifacts proving the settlers were Norse as opposed to native. The original archeologists worked for a few years, then the Canadian government stepped in for several more years. After the digs, they reconstructed the buildings they found so that we could see how they lived.

The walls were made of an outside layer of an peat, a layer of stone, and another inside layer of peat.

This was an outbuilding for working with iron. It shows the roof construction.

This would have been the kitchen and social area of the lodge. There were benches on the outside walls for sitting and sleeping. The smoke just goes out a hole in the ceiling (very smoky inside).

Eventually the Norse/Viking people left the area because either they got the resources they needed, or it proved too costly for them to continue in that location. They left on their own accord, and burned their buildings when they left.

We also visited a place called Norstead. This place resembled L’Anse aux Meadows, but was actually celebrating Norse heritage and the similar buildings here were modeled after ones found in Finland.