Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Leif Erikson (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in the 11th century by Dr Eleanor Barraclough and actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe to learn about legendary Viking explorer Leif Erikson.
Leif was possibly the first European to reach the Americas, nearly half a millennium before Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean. According to the stories told about him, he was a lucky explorer with a murderer for a father and a fearsome warrior for a sister, who travelled in his longship across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. But we only know about him from two Norse sagas, written in the centuries after his death – so did he exist at all?
This episode explores the saga narrative before delving into the archaeological evidence for a Viking presence in Canada, to discover what we can know for sure about this legendary adventurer.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Jon Norman Mason
Written by: Jon Norman Mason, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: James Cook
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:15 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we are braving the brisk waters of the North Atlantic and following in the wake of Leif Erikson, the medieval Norseman who might have been the first European to visit America. He probably was. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In history corner, she's a historian, writer and broadcaster, based at Bath Spa University, where she's senior lecturer in environmental history. Her research focuses on the cultures, literatures and languages of the medieval North, particularly Viking history and the Old Norse sagas. She's the author of various books, including a new one, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. It's Dr Eleanor Baraklaff. Welcome, Eleanor.
1:56 Speaker 04 Thank you, Greg. Lovely to be here.
1:58 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian and broadcaster. As well as his fab stage performances in The Government Inspector, you'll also recognise him from hosting TVs The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms Ghosts, Stathlet's Flats and Man Like Moby, or Delighting the Nation on series 15 of Taskmaster. It is the amazing Cael Smith-Bynoe. Welcome to the show, Cael.
2:18 Speaker 05 Hello. I feel like I've been slightly blindsided because I didn't know you were a doctor.
2:23 Speaker 04 I'm not the useful sort of doctor. If you have a heart attack, you're on your own.
2:26 Speaker 05 No, that's fine. I know what to do.
2:29 Greg Jenner? You've not been on the show before, Kyle.
2:31 Speaker 05 No, I haven't.
2:31 Greg Jenner? How do you feel about history? Something you enjoyed at school?
2:34 Speaker 05 When I think of history in school, I remember the module where you have to build a castle. And mine was going so badly that I turned it into a dilapidated, ruined castle.
2:46 Greg Jenner? Nice.
2:46 Speaker 05 And that wasn't what I started out to make. But then I just went on Clipart and made some pictures of fire and then printed it out and stuck it to the front.
2:56 Greg Jenner? What do you know about the man, the myth, the legend, Leif Erikson?
3:00 Speaker 05 I know that that's who we're talking about today.
3:01 Greg Jenner? Great.
3:04 Greg Jenner? So what do you know?
3:10 Greg Jenner? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listeners will know about today's subjects. And even if the name Leif Erikson is not familiar, you might have heard that a Viking was the first person to probably reach North America. You might be sitting there thinking, what about Christopher Columbus? Well, we'll get to him. But if you're listening from North America, hello, maybe you know that in the USA and Canada, the 9th of October is Leif Erikson Day. He gets a day, which of course is celebrated in a much loved episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, an important document. He also pops up in Netflix's Vikings Valhalla, Leif Erikson, that is, not SpongeBob. And the Norse presence in North America is referenced with a Viking character in the US remake of your sitcom Ghosts.
3:48 Speaker 05 Haven't seen it.
3:49 Greg Jenner? That's fine. You were in the good one. That's brilliant.
3:52 Speaker 05 Thank you.
3:52 Greg Jenner? The American one is fine. It's nice.
3:54 Speaker 05 When you say he gets a day, as in not his birthday, just another one.
3:57 Greg Jenner? Just a ceremonial day. Yeah, October 9th. So Leif Erikson shows up in pop culture, there's novels, but how do we separate the truth and the lies from Leif's life? Did Vikings really make it to North America? Or is this just a big story? And how many people do you need to kill before you're kicked out of Norway? Let's find out. When we talk about the Viking Age, what is it? How long is it?
4:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, we can fix ourselves chronologically if we think of the Viking Age as spanning at least from around 750 CE roughly, up to about 1100 CE. And it begins in the Scandinavian homelands. So we're thinking Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It involves violence.
4:35 Speaker 05 Hang on, why is Finland not in there?
4:36 Speaker 04 Oh, because actually that's not a Scandinavian country. Nordic, they're there, but not, not quite in the same way. But yeah, there's lots of violence, there's conquest, but there's also trading and exploration and settlements. So you end up with this Norse diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and Ukraine, and then all the way to Constantinople, they end up in Baghdad. Then in the other direction, they go all the way across the North Atlantic and they settle the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland.
5:08 Greg Jenner? Do you know why we called them Vikings, Kyle?
5:10 Speaker 05 No.
5:11 Greg Jenner? A fair and honest answer. Thank you.
5:14 Greg Jenner? Eleanor.
5:14 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:14 Greg Jenner? There's no place called Vikingland?
5:16 Speaker 04 No, no, there is a place called Vik in Norway, which is sort of, might be related to the word, but there's an Old Norse, so that's the language that the Vikings spoke. There's an Old Norse version of the word, Vikinger, which is someone who's essentially a raider. So it's basically a seaborne raider, but not everyone who lived during the Viking Age in that cultural context is a raider. So they're not all Vikings. And even raiders are not always raiding. And sometimes, sometimes they call their children Vikings.
5:43 Speaker 05 What's a raider doing if he's not raiding?
5:44 Speaker 04 Farming, mostly.
5:46 Speaker 05 Farming?
5:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, fishing.
5:47 Speaker 05 A farming raider?
5:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, mostly farming. You've got to eat before you can go and steal all that water.
5:53 Speaker 05 I'd bully that guy.
5:55 Greg Jenner? So most Vikings aren't Vikings?
5:57 Speaker 04 Most Vikings aren't Vikings.
5:58 Greg Jenner? Okay.
5:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. And that idea in the 19th century, it gets expanded and Viking becomes a sort of catchall term for that early medieval Nordic diaspora.
6:08 Greg Jenner? Let's talk about Leif Erikson himself, the star of today's episode. Who's Leif Erikson? You know, when's he born?
6:15 Speaker 04 So, okay, so Leif, he's probably born in, I don't know, something like 975, 980 in Iceland. He's a character mostly in two of these sagas. One's called Grannlendiga saga, which means the saga of the Greenlanders. And the other one is Erik saga Roide, which is the saga of Erik the Red. Now, together, they're known as the Vinland sagas because Vinland is the Old Norse word for that part of North America, the edge of the continent that the Norse, spoiler alert, do reach around the year 1000 or so. And Leif seems to be a very big part of that. But.
6:51 Speaker 05 I can't believe you've spotted that for me.
6:54 Speaker 04 But Leif, his dad is called Eric the Red, but he's Leif Erikson because of that. The sagas like him, he's described as promising, tall, handsome, moderate in his behaviour, in stark contrast to his father.
7:07 Greg Jenner? Oh, okay. All right. So can we trust the sources? Can we say they're historical documents with real people in them?
7:14 Speaker 04 Yes. The historian's answer is, depending on your definition of historical.
7:18 Greg Jenner? Great. Good historian's answer.
7:20 Speaker 04 There you go, just covering all the bases.
7:22 Speaker 05 But how do you decide what's real and what's not? If there's so much of it mixed together, how do you decide what's real and what's not? Just on like what you like?
7:31 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, you're looking for other evidence. So for example, the Vinland sagas, these two sagas featuring Leif, they were actually the basis for archaeologists in the 60s, realising that actually the Norse had reached the edge of the North American continent. And then they find the archaeological evidence. And sometimes you've got to think of them in a different sense. So it's not just a case of, okay, let's sift out the history from the fiction. We've got to think of them as essentially kind of cultural storytelling, remnants of how this particular culture thought about the world and their place within it. And in fact, the word saga comes from an old Norse verb, "ad säja", to say, to tell.
8:11 Greg Jenner? So we've heard that Eric is the father of Leif Erikson.
8:14 Speaker 04 So he's born in Norway and then he's forced to leave Norway because of some killings, how they put it in the saga. Okay.
8:23 Greg Jenner? How many killings is some killing, Eleanor?
8:25 Speaker 04 More than one. I can't remember. It's not good. Yeah. So he's outlawed and he goes off to Iceland, settles there. And he marries Thjöð Hildur, his wife, and they have a family. But then it's not long before he's in trouble again. And this is such an embarrassing story. Basically, he gets into an argument with his neighbour about some benchboards, which are kind of carved decorative panels. And everything goes downhill very fast. And once again, he finds himself outlawed, this time from Iceland, because of some killings.
8:58 Greg Jenner? So Eric the Red was exiled twice, second time for an argument about some benchboards. You seem like a very chilled guy, Kyle, but have you ever gone to a beef with a neighbour over a, you know, a lawnmower or something?
9:09 Speaker 05 No, can't have it in the first place. Get off.
9:13 Speaker 05 No, I don't think so. My neighbours recently painted their fence and some of it's bled through.
9:20 Greg Jenner? Oh.
9:21 Speaker 05 And it looks horrible on my side.
9:23 Greg Jenner? So what are you gonna do?
9:24 Speaker 05 Some killings.
9:27 Greg Jenner? How do we know North America is settled by Vikings? Or at least, what do the sagas say?
9:31 Speaker 04 So the saga, so we're back with those two Vinland sagas.
9:35 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
9:35 Speaker 04 Saga of the Greenlanders, the saga of the Reds. They give slightly different accounts. According to the saga of the Greenlanders, the first person to sight land to the west of Greenland is a merchant called Bjarni. He gets blown off course. Often discoveries happen because people have just got lost at sea, but he doesn't explore it and the sagas are not very pleased about this. Basically, everyone criticizes him because he's shown a lack of curiosity, which is sort of not a Viking thing to do. And then later Leif goes back and finds the land.
10:04 Speaker 05 When you say not very pleased, is that?
10:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:07 Greg Jenner? Did they kill him?
10:10 Speaker 04 No, he's, he's fine. He doesn't, but it's just like, oh, okay. You didn't, you didn't set foot on there. All right.
10:15 Speaker 05 Oh, passive aggressive, right.
10:17 Speaker 04 The sagas are extremely passive aggressive. Yeah. They'll just say she slightly changed colour and that means she's absolutely furious.
10:25 Speaker 05 Wow.
10:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 05 I used to work for a lady who ran a children's entertainment company and every time she hated something, she'd go, that's interesting.
10:35 Speaker 04 There you go.
10:36 Greg Jenner? Okay, so 1000, Leif Erikson has found, or at least explored, a new land.
10:41 Speaker 04 Yes.
10:42 Greg Jenner? So what does he find?
10:43 Speaker 04 Well, I should say, not just he, but his followers and the main discoveries, once again, in both sagas are made by enslaved people. So it's very, but so one is called Tirkir and the others are two sort of Scottish slaves called Haki and Hekja. And they basically find, so, well, before they get to Vinland, they find other lands. And then they come to this region, which they call Vinland because of the sort of the wild grapes. The weather is fine, the winters are mild, there's salmon, there's all sorts of nice things and they think, great, this works. And so they build some temporary houses there.
11:14 Greg Jenner? Oh, lovely, yeah.
11:15 Speaker 04 Yeah. And they call them Leif's Boothiers, which means kind of like Leif's booths, Leif's houses.
11:20 Greg Jenner? So we've heard about people getting blown off course. We've heard about shipwrecks. Cael, in Taskmaster, you built a beautiful egg boat.
11:27 Speaker 05 Yes, I did, didn't I?
11:28 Greg Jenner? You are a master shipbuilder.
11:29 Speaker 05 Yes.
11:30 Greg Jenner? So could you talk me through how to build a Viking longship?
11:34 Speaker 05 Well, what you want to do. Is get some of your neighbours decorative, what's it called?
11:40 Greg Jenner? The bench boards.
11:40 Speaker 05 Bench boards. You want to turn them the other way around so your neighbour can't tell that you used his. And then knock it together.
11:51 Speaker 05 Get some mead for the journey, maybe a pig.
11:55 Greg Jenner? Right.
11:56 Speaker 05 Because you don't know how long you're going to be at sea.
11:58 Greg Jenner? Sure. How are you propelling this boat? What's the propulsion mechanism? Pig?
12:02 Speaker 05 More boards.
12:03 Greg Jenner? More boards?
12:04 Speaker 05 Yeah. So we use the boards like oars.
12:06 Greg Jenner? Okay, you're using oars.
12:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, because I imagine the water's quite cold.
12:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I'm not popping my hand in there.
12:12 Speaker 04 No.
12:13 Speaker 05 Right, so, but that can, we can also use some of that to cool the mead. Cool the mead wife.
12:25 Speaker 05 That's my plan.
12:25 Greg Jenner? Tell me about Viking shipbuilding, because they are renowned.
12:29 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, they are amazing.
12:31 Speaker 05 Well, you mean it wasn't exactly what I said?
12:33 Speaker 04 What, like raft with a pig? Well, for start, they're propelled by sails as well as by oars. And that is very important because when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic, you might need the odd sail. And rather than your raft, you've got to try sort of clinker built style. So you've got boards, you've got planks, and then you're overlapping them. So they make these very supple, beautiful boats with very shallow bottoms, which means if you want to go raiding, you can sail them into very shallow bays. And then if you want to go across the North Atlantic, you're going to need something a bit bigger. And those are boats that then you can fit your family in, your followers, your livestock. You can try pigs, but I'd go for goats and sheep.
13:17 Speaker 05 So these are two different types of?
13:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's multiple different types of boats, but it's still pretty cool.
13:23 Greg Jenner? Yeah, there's no cabins, there's no lower deck.
13:25 Speaker 04 No.
13:25 Greg Jenner? Just benches.
13:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:27 Greg Jenner? So it's open sky, so it's raining, if it's snow.
13:31 Speaker 04 Exactly.
13:32 Greg Jenner? You're there with your furs.
13:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're there with you and the furs are probably wet. I mean, there's also, you know, a lot of sun, too much sun and not enough wind, also not great. And you can end up just stuck there in the middle.
13:43 Greg Jenner? Let's get back to Leif Erikson. So we have the two sagas, the Vinland sagas. They don't say very much about him after the journey. We know about his family, though.
13:51 Speaker 04 Yes.
13:52 Greg Jenner? Leif's, he's got siblings?
13:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's got siblings, half siblings, something. Yeah, we're not quite sure, but yeah, exactly. And they, even after Leif comes back to Greenland, then according to the sagas, seem to be making voyages out again to Vinland, as they call it. So there's one led by Leif's brother Thorvald, doesn't end well for him. Another by.
14:11 Speaker 05 Nice name, though.
14:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a lovely name, isn't it? Yeah. So Thorvalder. And then he's got another one, Thorstein. And.
14:19 Speaker 05 Spain, I'm not into.
14:20 Speaker 04 No, not, but Thor, it's like Thorstone. So like the god, yeah. I like it. Yeah.
14:27 Speaker 05 I preferred the first one.
14:28 Speaker 04 Okay, well, we'll stick, yeah. And then there's, there's ones led by what was his sister-in-law, Guthrie, with her new husband, Carl Steffni. And then there's another one, either led by, or at least she is there, depending on the version, by his sister, half-sister Fredis.
14:47 Greg Jenner? And she's, how am I going to put this delicately? Terrifying?
14:52 Speaker 05 She's a raidette?
14:53 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
14:54 Greg Jenner? I mean, raidette doesn't even, doesn't even come close to.
14:57 Speaker 04 Okay, but, but here we're talking very specifically about the Saga of the Greenlanders, because this is one of these really interesting things where we've got oral traditions that are, that end up in these sagas, but her character, it depends on which saga we're looking at. Saga of Greenlanders, yeah, absolutely terrifying. She makes a deal with two Norwegian brothers to sail to Vinland and they're there to gather timber and resources, but she ends up getting her followers, and specifically her husband, to kill all the men in, on the other boats. And no one will kill. So she gets into an argument with them and she wants the bigger of Leif's bootier and she wants kind of all the resources and it's, she's. This is not nice.
15:38 Speaker 05 She knows what she likes.
15:39 Speaker 04 She does. The problem is.
15:42 Speaker 05 She loves herself.
15:42 Speaker 04 It gets, yeah, she also, so no one, there were, there were women in the other, uh, party as well, on the other ship, and no one will kill them. And so she actually, she says, hand me an axe, or literally put an axe in my hand. She finishes them off. And it just says in the saga, and so it was done.
15:58 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
15:59 Speaker 04 It's horrible.
16:00 Greg Jenner? Freddis in, in one saga is a sort of psychopathic Tarantula character.
16:03 Speaker 04 Horrible, yeah.
16:04 Greg Jenner? Then the other saga, she's not nearly as terrifying.
16:07 Speaker 04 No.
16:08 Greg Jenner? But she's still quite hardcore.
16:09 Speaker 04 She's hardcore. She's totally badass. She's amazing.
16:11 Greg Jenner? She's a raidette.
16:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, she, yeah, yeah. So she, she doesn't lead the expedition in this one, but she's on the expedition. And then there's a violent encounter.
16:18 Speaker 05 She's tired from slashing those ones to bits. She's exhausted.
16:23 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, but well, so they get into an altercation with the local population that they meet there. And so basically all the men run away and there's a weapon on the floor from one of the people who's been killed. And she picks it up to face the sort of indigenous people who are coming towards them. And by the way, she is heavily pregnant at this point and she bears her breast and she slaps the sword against it. And we're not entirely sure why, but basically the indigenous people are so terrified. They then run away and.
16:55 Speaker 05 That would scare me actually.
16:56 Greg Jenner? Oh, yeah.
16:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
16:58 Greg Jenner? We've touched on a really important point. You, you said, you know, the, the locals. So when we talk about the discovery of new lands, obviously they're not new lands. People have been living there for 25,000 years. Indigenous peoples in North America, in, in Canada, the First Nations peoples. So what did the sagas say about these interactions between the Norse and the, the native people?
17:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:21 Greg Jenner? Of Newfoundland, is it Newfoundland?
17:23 Speaker 04 Newfoundland, yeah, well, and further south.
17:25 Greg Jenner? Right.
17:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And this is really interesting because it's possible this is the first time, if we think of the world as a circle, this is the first time you see the two sides culturally meeting. These are the first encounters we've got. And it's sort of pretty typical. So depending on the saga, depending on the episode, sometimes they're trading. And they, they particularly, so the indigenous people particularly like the, um, red cloth and the dairy products and the weapons, but the Norse are like, nah, we'll, we'll keep hold of the weapons. Thank you. But then they give, they give the Norse, the Norse give them furs and skins. So it's actually very much like what happens later on when you, you end up.
17:59 Speaker 05 Fair trade.
18:01 Speaker 04 Not necessarily, because in other encounters, they basically, it all gets horribly wrong and there's a lot of violence and people get killed, sometimes entirely without provocation. One episode, it's like, they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them.
18:13 Speaker 05 Oh, come on, not in a sleep.
18:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's not, it's not great, it's really not. And it's telling, they describe them, the word they use is skryllingar, and skrylling means sort of wretched or puny, so that's how the Norse are looking at these people. And they lump them all together, but we're probably talking about, you know, the Inu of Labrador and the Bay of Turk of Newfoundland. And then we've got around the Gulf of St Lawrence, which is probably that sort of southern extremity of where they get to, we've got the Algonquins and the Iroquois. So we've got those various groups that the Norse do seem to encounter. But ultimately, when they leave for the last time, in the sagas, they say, we've found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to settle here, we won't be able to use it.
18:59 Greg Jenner? So that's the story told by the sagas, these two sagas, the Vinland Collection, which is Eric the Red Saga and the Greenland Saga.
19:06 Speaker 04 Yes, yeah.
19:07 Greg Jenner? Do we have any more evidence for the life of Leif?
19:10 Speaker 04 Basically, those sagas, from what we know of the sagas, he's got to have died somewhere between 1018 and 1025, and that's purely because in one of them, he's there in Greenland, and in the next, it's his son, and there's no sign of him, so he's probably gone.
19:23 Greg Jenner? Definitely dead by 1025.
19:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, it looks like it, yeah.
19:25 Greg Jenner? A thousand years ago, a good, nice, memorable number.
19:28 Speaker 04 There we go, let's stick with that one, yeah.
19:29 Greg Jenner? So we've killed off Leif Erikson, right? We don't know how he dies, but he dies in 1025, we think it will take.
19:35 Speaker 04 Ish.
19:35 Greg Jenner? Ish. Probably of, I don't know, old age or whatever, although, you know, maybe he was killed, but.
19:39 Speaker 05 Sorry, I've got to put this in my calendar, we can't say ish, I need a date.
19:43 Greg Jenner? Okay, by 1025, someone else is in charge of it.
19:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:47 Greg Jenner? So he's definitely dead by then.
19:48 Speaker 05 Okay.
19:48 Greg Jenner? So let's, let's agree, 1025.
19:50 Speaker 04 But we can't be that, yeah, we're not in the right period of history to be really specific.
19:54 Greg Jenner? No, okay. Let's talk about the afterlife of Leif, the afterlife.
19:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, the afterlife, that's so good.
20:01 Greg Jenner? Thank you. What happens to his story? You know, he's dead, but what happens to the story of him in the modern day?
20:07 Speaker 04 Well, so this is quite interesting, because the first English-speaking Settlers of the US and Canada want to emphasise their English roots. And we know that Columbus, landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, takes hold as sort of an alternative origin myth for the US after the War of Independence particularly. But Columbus also has never actually set foot in North America.
20:28 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
20:29 Speaker 04 So then the story of Leif Erikson gets really popular in the 19th century. And part of that is because Protestant US citizens, they're not, you know, Columbus is a little bit too Catholic for them. So what seems to be happening is Viking gets conflated with the idea of Anglo Saxons. It implies a sort of ancestral link to modern white Americans. So it's this sort of quite uncomfortable racial myth of white Anglo Saxon colonisers bringing civilisation to indigenous populations around the globe, you know, it's the classic story.
21:02 Greg Jenner? So Eleanor, you are an environmental historian. You work with archaeologists?
21:07 Speaker 04 Yes.
21:07 Greg Jenner? Collaboratively?
21:08 Speaker 04 Yes.
21:08 Greg Jenner? Okay. What kind of science have we got that actually goes, yeah, you know what, the Vikings did get to North America?
21:14 Speaker 04 We do have that. And so, and basically the Vinland Saga's directed these archaeologists straight to it. So in the 1960s, archaeologists started working on a site in Lanzarote Meadows in Newfoundland in Canada. And they found the remains of several Norse style buildings. So it looks like there's some that people can live in temporarily. There looks like there's workshops where people can sort of mend things. It's the tip of Newfoundland.
21:40 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So it's a place called Lanzarote Meadows.
21:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's right by the water. This is temporary. So you can tell no one's really living there permanently because, yeah, essentially you'd expect to see more rubbish, you'd expect to see some graves, all the rest of it. You don't have that. So it looks like what they're doing is essentially using it as a stopping off point, mending their ships, overwintering. And then they can go further south. And there's some things that have been found at that site, like butternuts that don't, and butternut wood, they don't grow that far north. So we're talking the area further south down the Gulf of Saint Laurent.
22:14 Greg Jenner? So they've brought stuff there and left it?
22:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Vinland in a way isn't that place. Vinland is the whole area going south from there.
22:21 Greg Jenner? Okay. And the exciting, the exciting scientific term I'm going to use, radiocarbon dating.
22:25 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
22:26 Greg Jenner? You know what that is, Kyle?
22:27 Speaker 05 Not a clue.
22:27 Speaker 04 No. Solar flares, that's a bit.
22:30 Speaker 05 That's not helping.
22:31 Speaker 04 No.
22:34 Speaker 04 So this is something that's just been found, which is, they know that there was a big cosmic storm, so like big solar flares, in the year 993. And you can see that in some of the wood that has been, obviously been chopped by the Norse at this site, at Lanzar Meadows. So the way we can know this is, we know the date of the solar flare, which is 993, and then we just literally count forwards on the tree rings, every ring is a year. And when we get to the end of the rings, that tells us the year that the tree was cut down.
23:05 Greg Jenner? Dendrochronology.
23:06 Speaker 04 Dendrochronology, exactly, thank you. And so-
23:08 Speaker 05 So it's how many rings since the flare?
23:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And so we know that that wood was cut in the year 1021. And so that's the one date that we can say, all right, it looks like the Norse were definitely at this site in this year, which is really specific, because usually we're talking, you know, a good flabby hundred years or so.
23:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
23:27 Greg Jenner? Yeah. So that's during Leif's life, because he died in 1025-ish, probably.
23:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:32 Greg Jenner? His sister might be there, this could be Freddus.
23:34 Speaker 04 It could be, or it could be the axe she used.
23:36 Greg Jenner? It could be the murderer, the murder weapon, who knows?
23:38 Speaker 05 Wow.
23:39 Greg Jenner? So this site is called Lanzar Meadows. It's very exciting, it's very important. There's other stuff too, other physical evidence.
23:45 Speaker 04 There's an archaeological site that's not Norse, it's early Inuit, and it's close to the sort of southernmost tip of Baffin Island. And there, they found this really lovely piece of carved wood, and it's a human figure, and it's about five and a half centimetres high, but it looks like it's wearing Norse clothing. So it's got like this very full, yes, it's lovely, it's like this full folds of a skirt, and then possibly a yoked hood covering the head and the shoulders.
24:13 Greg Jenner? And we have Norse graveyards in Greenland.
24:15 Speaker 04 Yes. So we've got a Norse grave, like, and I can't remember if it's stuck in their ribs or something, but it's an arrowhead. This is not a Norse arrowhead. The only thing they've found that is sort of equivalent to that is over in, you know, in the cultures of people who were living on that edge of the North American continent. And actually, that's how one of Leif's brothers is said to be killed in the saga. So an arrow basically hits him.
24:40 Greg Jenner? So it could be him?
24:40 Speaker 04 It could be him. Let's say it's him. We've got Freddus-
24:43 Greg Jenner? It's him, we found him.
24:43 Speaker 04 -cutting that wood. Now we've got Leif's brother.
24:45 Speaker 05 This is what I'm starting to realise, it's let's say, let's say it.
24:49 Speaker 04 Let's say, why not?
24:49 Greg Jenner? Let's just agree it's him.
24:51 Speaker 05 That's what history is.
24:52 Greg Jenner? You heard it here first, Clayle.
25:00 Greg Jenner? This is the part of the show where Kajal and I pull the ship to shore. We get warmed by the fire and Dr Eleanor teaches us something we need to know about Leif Erikson and the Viking Age. Take it away, Dr Eleanor.
25:10 Speaker 04 Okay, so what I would say is that big names such as Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red are the ones we tend to know about. But I want to make the case for the everyday people who are just bumping along, living their lives through the Viking Age because they're every bit as interesting, if not more so than the larger-than-life characters who end up in the sagas and history books. We just don't get to hear about them so often, although there's a book coming out in September called Embers of the Hands, which may be very much about that subject. So it's this idea of looking at the everyday people who slip between the cracks of history and the little bits and pieces of them that survive. And Greenland is actually a really exciting example of this. It's my favourite part of the Norse world because its remoteness and that permafrost
25:52 Speaker 04 we talked about means that tonnes of material from Norse Greenland has actually been frozen in time. And I'll give you two examples, but they give us more names, names of ordinary humans that we wouldn't know about otherwise. Now, one of those comes from a coffin in a graveyard. There's no body in that coffin, but there's a rune stick. And carved onto this little piece of wood is an inscription that can be translated as, "This woman, who was called Gulveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea." So earlier, when we were talking about those great voyages across the ocean, we have to remember how many ordinary people and how many women were there and how many of them may have actually not reached the other side.
26:36 Speaker 04 The other example, again, runes, this time on a stone found high in the Arctic, hidden in a kenn. And these runes refer to three men, Erling Sigvadsun, Bjarne Óthodursson and Endurri Ódsun. And it says they built these kenns the Saturday before Gagean Day, which is in late April. They were probably hunters. Perhaps they were up there looking for walrus because of that really, really precious ivory. But if they're there that early in the year, they probably got stranded. Maybe they overwintered there. We never know if they got home. But we don't know what happened to them. And so that's what I'd say, that it's the stories of everyday people that we really need to remember.
27:14 Greg Jenner? Oh, lovely. Thank you so much, Eleanor. Fascinating.
27:16 Speaker 05 Should I go to Greenland?
27:17 Speaker 04 Yes. Well.
27:19 Speaker 05 What do you mean, yes?
27:20 Speaker 04 Because depending on which bit of Greenland, what time of year you want to go and what you want to get up to while you're there.
27:25 Speaker 05 And how hot does the summer get?
27:27 Speaker 04 It can actually, well, particularly now, you know, it can get quite hot. I've been there when it's, what, I can't say 25 degrees. It's kind of T-shirt weather.
27:34 Speaker 05 Not enough for me.
27:35 Speaker 04 Not enough. So if you're looking for tropical, nah, not Greenland.
27:39 Speaker 05 No.
27:40 Speaker 04 But they did get, I mean, you can go to Istanbul. You can go to all sorts of.
27:44 Speaker 05 Oh, I will. Do you worry about that?
27:45 Speaker 04 Yeah. Vikings got there too.
27:47 Greg Jenner? Okay. Well, let's know if you want more Viking Age adventures. Check out our episode on Old Norse literature. For more early American history, why not listen to our episode on Sakka Juaia, who's a very fascinating lady. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we had the excellent Dr Eleanor Barakluf from Bath Spa University. Thank you, Eleanor.
28:10 Speaker 04 Thank you. This has been so much fun.
28:12 Greg Jenner? It has been fun.
28:12 Speaker 05 Thank you for teaching me.
28:15 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, we had the master student himself, the brilliant Cael Smith-Bynoe.
28:20 Speaker 05 Thank you. Rawr.
28:23 Greg Jenner? Good Viking energy. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we sail off on more historical adventures. But for now, I'm off to go and fight my neighbour over who gets to keep my lawnmower. Hooray. Bye.
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