When your ship goes to L'Anse aux Meadows, there's only one thing to do beyond vegetating on board, and that's go to the National Historical Site. We had done this in 2023, but booked the tour again to maybe see something we missed the first time or learn something new.
Our sea day from Qaqortoq was rough like the first two days out of Reykjavik had been, but fortunately the clouds lifted as we approached L'Anse aux Meadows. It was nice and sunny but quite windy, so we weren't 100% sure we would be tendering until the clearance announcement was made.
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| Serenity in the distance from the tender pier |
This time we visited in the opposite order - Norstead, the replica Viking village with historical re-creators demonstrating life in the community, and then the excavation sites and replica buildings based on what was found.
At Norstead, we started off by visiting Snorri, the replica Viking ship that was built in the early 2000s and sailed from Greenland to L'Anse aux Meadows by a crew of nine using only wind power, the way Leif Erikson would have done it 1,000 years ago. It apparently took them about twice as long to get there as it did the Vikings.
The Vikings had actually discovered this area by accident, when one of the ships was blown off course when heading from Iceland to Greenland. Once they arrived there, the men told about this land they had seen, and Leif Erikson led an expedition to investigate it. They called it Vinland, and saw that they could establish a trade network of wood and furs at the permanent settlements back in Greenland. They needed this desperately as Greenland had become overcrowded and there weren't enough natural resources to support the population.
The church and blacksmith's hut were both very important to the community and Norstead includes historically accurate reconstructions. There's even a working blacksmith using the same methods to forge nails for the ship as well as other tools. It was interesting to watch him use the double bellows to build up the fire while he talked about training older children as apprentices so the trade could be carried on seamlessly.
The last large building at Norstead is a stofa. This is a community gathering spot, or longhouse, where the women would cook, spin yarn from the wool of their local sheep flock, weave and knit. And the handicrafts were being demonstrated as we looked on. The knitters in our on-board group were all very interested in the single needle knitting called Nalbinding which was used in Scandinavia even before Viking times. There are YouTube channels demonstrating it that I'm going to look at...
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| Spinning the wool into yarn by hand |
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| All of these yarns were dyed with natural products |
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| This batch is steeping in beet juice to get its colour |
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| Strips of weaving done with the little blocks in the bowl. We saw this last time. |
In the kitchen and dining area, the largest room in the stofa.
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| A carving attached to a column |
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| The leader obviously got the big chair! |
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| An assortment of seeds grown by the community or traded for with the local indigenous population |
Here are a few more photos from around Norstead:
From Norstead we took the shuttle (school) bus over to the National Historic Site, about two kilometres away. The community of L'Anse aux Meadows has 13 permanent residents. The closest town with a school and shops is St. Anthony, which is 72 kilometres, a good hour's drive, away.
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| Some of the local's homes. The whole bay is frozen over every winter. |
From artifacts and other historical research it has been verified that the settlement here was in fact Viking, and related to those in Greenland and Iceland, and that it had been used as a summertime base for a logging industry of sorts, some agriculture, sheep farming and collecting furs. A little farther inland you can find trees that are less affected by the wind and salt from the sea, so they grow taller. The Vikings felled these trees, moved them to the village and from there loaded them on to boats to take back for shipbuilding and other uses in Greenland. The site was used over a thirty-year period, although it was really only inhabited for about ten of those years, when the wood was being moved from the forest to the coast. They only had a relatively short time each year, so it seems that they broke the process up, picking up where they left off on the previous year. They probably didn't have so many people there that they could have enough men to do each job every year.
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| A sculpture on the boardwalk path from the visitor centre to the excavations |
The excavations in this area were made by Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Ann Ingstad in the 1960s, who were following the writings of Icelandic sagas and trying to find the place that was called 'Vinland'. They were actually led here by a local resident who showed them the 'old Indian camp', as it had been known. And the rest, as they say, is history. They discovered 8 buildings in total. This is how they are marked on the site; and there is information in the Visitor Centre about what was found there and the significance to the community.
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| One of the more famous photo angles of the site...the stofa |
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| The interior of one of the outer huts. It may have been used for storage. |
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| Inside the stofa, or longhouse |
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| Sleeping quarters at one end of the stofa. The beds were in those little alcoves with the doors.... Claustrophobic! |
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