Skraeling

SKRAELING from VINLAND, early 11th century (but based on the early modern Beothuk of Newfoundland).

VIKINGS IN AMERICA: The year 986 AD, an Icelandic sailor named Bjarni Herjólfsson attempted to sail from Iceland to Greenland, but due to bad weather, he was blown off course and missed the southern tip of Greenland. Bjarni then sighted an unknown coastline, covered in trees. He immediately knew that land wasn’t the barren Greenland. He didn’t land there and instead sailed back to his original destination. But back in Greenland, Leif Erikson, the son of the Norwegian discoverer of Greenland, Erik the Red, heard Bjarni’s story directly from him. Leif then hired a crew of 35 people, bought Bjarni’s ship and sailed west in search of that mysterious land. Leif first landed in a desolate rocky place that looked nothing like the forested land sighted by Bjarni, and which he named Helluland (that was probably Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic). Without knowing it, Leif and his crew had just become the first Europeans to set foot in the American continent, 500 years before Columbus. From there, Leif sailed south to another land he named Markland (probably Labrador), covered in forests as Bjarni described. They continued their journey south to another land with a milder climate and decided to establish their settlement there. That island was full of wild vines, reason for which they named it Vinland (probably the island of Newfoundland in Canada). After collecting timber and spending the winter there, Leif sailed back to Greenland to never return to Vinland again.

Soon after Leif’s voyage, another Icelandic explorer named Thorfinn Karlsefni followed on his footsteps, trying to create a permanent settlement in Vinland. It was during this voyage when worlds collided, as Thorfin was about to become the first European to make direct contact with Native Americans (probably the Beothuk), and face them in battle. The Norse named these natives “Skrælingjar”. While in Vinland, his wife Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir gave birth to their son Snorri, the first European born in America. After his crew was attacked by the natives, Thorfinn sailed back to Greenland.

Norse Greenlanders continued visiting North America sporadically until their settlement in southern Greenland collapsed because of the Little Ice Age. Around the same time as the Norse were dying of cold and starvation in southern Greenland, the Inuit expanded from the Canadian Arctic to Greenland from the north.

The exact location of Vinland is still a hotly debated topic. While it can’t be denied that it was in North America, and while Newfoundland seems the most likely candidate, there are alternative hypothesis. Some even suggest it might have been located as far south as what is now the north-east of the United States. Even if Vinland was Newfoundland, the exact location of Leif Erikson’s settlement remains unknown. So far, archaeologists have only found the remains of one Norse settlement from the late Viking Age in Newfoundland, L'Anse aux Meadows, discovered in 1960 in the extreme north of the island, but most experts nowadays believe that Leif Erikson’s settlement must have been somewhere else, probably in the south of the island, and it has not been found yet. In 2022, a study was published that precisely dated the settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows to the year 1021, so, two decades later than Leif Erikson’s voyage.

If we accept Newfoundland as the location of Vinland, the Skrælingjar would be the ancestors of the modern Beothuk, a currently extinct people, possibly Algonquian-speaking, that were known for covering their entire bodies, leather clothes, tools, weapons and every object they had in red ochre paint. The ancestors of the Beothuk are believed to have migrated to Newfoundland from the mainland more than 1000 years ago, replacing the Paleo-Eskimos of the Dorset culture that had been living in the island since before the Christian Era (replacing, in turn, the Amerindians of the Maritime Archaic cultural complex). Archaeological finds in Newfoundland from the time of the Norse expeditions are limited to stone arrowheads, spearheads and tools, but no organic finds, so we can only guess what these Skrælingjar looked like based on early modern written descriptions of the Beothuk and the finds from modern Beothuk burials.