Let's all go a-Viking!

A surprise in reading A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones is that the facts that debunk the myths are revealed as further myths. Leif Erikson, it turns out, was born in Greenland. His discoery, it turns out, was not more than an inevitable and not too terribly risky jaunt over to the next islands from Greenland to the West. Leif Erikson was not a rebellious visionary and iconoclast cut from the strange cloth of anti-social and prophetic genius. He was simply the next in line to travel west in a centuries hold viking habit of colonization.Greenland was a community of hundreds born from Iceland which was a community of thousands born from Norway. Vinland, in turn, which never exceeded in population several dozen was meant to a colony of the Greenlanders. It failed partly because the Native Americans (Skraenglinger by the Viking term)harassed the newcomers. Vikings, it seemed, preferred or were unable to provide waves of invaders to slaughter native inhabitants of their land. And since the Skraenglinger didn't seem to have gold and silver, the waves of invaders that the Vikings could have supplied were not forthcoming. So they left. A changing climate on Greenland by 1040 also made the Vinland community untenable. What interesting lessons they are for today.

Gwyn Jones's book is peppered with quaint expressions. His love of the subject is palpable and the archaic stylisms make me think of an old-school historian. The book was first published in 1968 and revised in 1984.It is a long read at 415 pages of close text, plus appendices of primary sources in translation. Not a casual read, but one that can challenge the mind of an amatur historian.