What We Know About Vikings in North America

During the Early Middle Ages (around the 5th through 10th centuries CE), groups of peoples speaking the Old Norse language lived throughout much of northern Europe including what is today Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and beyond. Near the end of the 8th century, they began an expansionist movement that saw them sweeping into new lands in all directions. The sailors, soldiers, traders, and settlers who made up this expansion were often known as Vikings.

While the term Vikings has since become somewhat synonymous with these Norse peoples as a whole, at the time that it was initially coined—when they were often seen as raiders and pillagers, a connotation which the word still bears—the term basically just meant “pirate.”

Though our modern understanding of the Vikings and the Norse people is growing more robust, the images of Vikings have historically been characterized by distortions and misrepresentations shaped by various political ideologies. In Edward Watts' book Colonizing the Past, Professor Annette Kolodny describes these as “plastic vikings" which are “depicted variously as heroic warriors and empire builders, barbarous berserker invaders, fighters for freedom, courageous explorers, would-be colonists, seamen and merchants, poets and saga men, glorious ancestors, bloodthirsty pagan pirates, and civilized Christian converts,” depending on the needs and predilections of the person doing the describing.

The short answer is “all over.” In the Anglophone world, we know of Vikings primarily through their raids on Britain, although even those are often mischaracterized or oversimplified, with entirely different groups of Vikings actually striking different parts of the British Isles.

The expansionism which characterized the Norse peoples in the 8th and 9th centuries took them to just about any place their boats could reach, including, it would seem, North America—if only barely. Key to our purposes, Norse settlers from Iceland likely colonized Greenland around the year 980 CE, give or take. The first of these expeditions were led by Erik Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik the Red.

Having been exiled from Iceland for committing manslaughter, Erik the Red spent his time exploring the edges of the place he would name Greenland, hoping that “people would be more eager to go there because the land had a good name,” according to writings by 12th-century Icelandic priest Ari Thorgilsson. (Anyone familiar with Greenland knows that the land is considerably less green than the name might suggest.)

Consisting mainly of two settlements with a combined population of only around 2,000 or 3,000 people, Norse Greenland nevertheless established a foothold on the territory and served as a launching pad for expeditions farther to the west. There are records indicating that the Norse settlers of Greenland engaged in trade with nearby Indigenous peoples and the Norse colonies there lasted until the early 1400s.

Yes and no. Despite rumors, guesswork, myth building, and hoaxes aplenty going back at least as far as 1770, there was no actual verifiable evidence of Vikings having reach North America until 1960, when husband-and-wife archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated the remains of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of what is present-day Newfoundland. The archaeological site included buildings, fire pits, slag from the smelting and working of iron, and items of clearly Norse workmanship, including a bronze, ring-headed pin, a spindle whorl, a bone needle, and others.

While Newfoundland is a territory of present-day Canada, it is in actuality a large island just off the eastern seaboard, meaning that even the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows—though considerably farther westward than any other confirmed relics of Norse habitation—is not located on the mainland of North America.

The presence of the settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows lends credence to earlier theories that the Vikings may have made their way as far as North America, however, as recorded in Icelandic sagas. These sagas depict voyages undertaken by Leif Erikson and others to the west of Greenland which claimed to have found new lands named Helluland or “land of the flat stones,” Markland or “land of forests,” and most famously Vinland, the “land of wine.”

While it remained unclear for centuries whether these sagas described real expeditions and discoveries, the presence of a Norse settlement in Newfoundland suggests that they at least had some basis in reality.

Whether or not the Vikings ever expanded farther westward than the settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows remains inconclusive, but there is certainly reason to believe that they did. Archaeological evidence suggests that the settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows was likely a jumping-off point for other expeditions, even if those expeditions didn’t lead to settlements themselves. 

Meanwhile, additional archaeological research has identified possible evidence of Norse outposts on other islands in northeastern Canada. Particularly on Baffin Island, unusual fabric that was first discovered in the 1980s has since been identified as possibly of Norse manufacture.

So far there has been no confirmed evidence that these Norse expeditions ever reached mainland North America. There also may not have been any definitive way for them to have known whether they had or not, given the maze of islands that make up Canada’s northeastern coast. But the sagas which suggest the discovery of lands to the south have led many to speculate that Vikings may have settled as far south as New England, and as far inland as Minnesota.

And just because there’s no actual confirmed archaeological evidence of any such settlements has never stopped anyone from manufacturing some to suit their purposes. The most famous of these is the so-called “Kensington Runestone,” a stone slab decorated with Norse runes supposedly detailing a 14th-century Scandinavian expedition. The slab was “discovered” by Olof Ohman in a field in central Minnesota in 1898, and though it still has its proponents, most within the scientific community regard the stone as a 19th-century hoax.

While the Kensington Runestone may be the most famous of these hoaxes, it is far from the only one. Runestones and monuments purporting to be Norse in origin range throughout much of Canada, New England, and even as far afield as Oklahoma. As Gordon Campbell wrote in his 2021 book Norse America, this idea appeals to a certain subset of Americans who have “elaborated” this “fleeting and ill-documented” notion of first contact into “a myth centered on the idea that the descendants of the British settlers who now dominate America inherit their strength and vigor and love of freedom from the Vikings who ‘discovered’ America.”