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Eriksson's Millennium: Honoring the Pre-Colombian Explorer
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18775 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,369 Words |
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David D'Arcy
David D'Arcy broadcasts on cultural matters on National Public
Radio. |
As the entire Western Hemisphere prepares to mark the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World, there are naturally those who want to remind the Americas that Columbus was not the first explorer to reach these shores.
Many Irish and Irish-Americans, for example, maintain that a certain Catholic monk, Saint Brendan, reached this continent in a boat made of animal hide centuries before the year 1000. No evidence of early Irish settlement in the New World exists, however, nor does there seem to be any celebration scheduled anywhere to honor Brendan's legendary journey during the upcoming Columbus festivities.
The Vikings or Norse peoples, however, are an altogether different story. There is definitive archaeological evidence that they reached North America around A.D. 1000 and settled here. There is also reason to believe that they made several voyages along the coast, probably in the eleventh century. The Vikings (made up of Greenlanders of Norwegian and Icelandic background, and their slaves), therefore, do have a claim to have been the first Europeans to have discovered America.
But commemorating this discovery at a time most others are honoring Columbus presents a dilemma. Although the Vikings were prodigious seafarers in an era when Italian and Spanish maritime travel did not extend far beyond the Mediterranean, the Vikings--whom we might laud as discoverers--were the same warriors who ravaged the coasts of England and Ireland, laid waste to Paris, and raped and pillaged their way from the Basque country to the Black Sea. In Europe, particularly in the British Isles, the brutality of the Vikings is far better remembered than their navigational achievements.
Retracing the original voyage
Marking the anniversary of the Vikings' arrival in North America means reexamining the legacy of the Viking Age (A.D. 800-1200), particularly the Norse expeditions westward across the North Atlantic. In the course of that commemoration, recent scholarship about Viking explorations and everyday life is still being debated as it reaches a broader audience than ever before. Also, that Viking tradition is now being put in the service of projects the Vikings would never have imagined.
Last spring, an exact replica of a medieval Viking ship began a transatlantic journey to commemorate the approximate millennial
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