Is Vinland Real?

Vinland is the name the Icelandic sagas give to the land Leif Erikson’s crew reached around the year 1000, grapes or berries in the telling, somewhere on the coast of what is now Canada. For centuries it was filed under legend. Then, in the 1960s, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland: turf halls, iron working, and Norse artefacts, proof that Europeans lived in the Americas around 1000 AD, roughly five hundred years before 1492. Tree-ring work has since pinned Norse activity there to the exact year 1021.

The sagas describe more than one shore: Helluland, Markland, and Vinland itself, and scholars still argue the map. Yukimura’s manga plants its settlement, the village of Arnheid, in the same north-eastern theatre and peoples it with the Mi’kmaq, whose ancestors held that coast. The land Thorfinn dreams about from the first chapter is not an invention. It was simply, for the Norse, too far to keep.