Posted on 06/06/2013 7:08:32 PM PDT by EveningStar
Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests.
The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Oak Island, one of the greatest treasure hunts ever.
Mark Kurlansky wrote “Salt” too, but I haven’t yet had a chance to look at it. Any comments?
I haven’t read it, but I like his writing style, for the most part.
The Vikings were not only fearless warriors, but fearless navigators as well. Their influence spread through Europe, nearly conquered England and stretched through Russia down to Constantinople where a detachment of Nordics was the palace “Varangian Guard” of the Byzantine Emperor. An Italian classics professor, Dr. Felice Vinci, has written a well researched book finding evidence that the Baltic Vikings were also the players in the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, later driven to the Mediterranean by global changes in weather patterns, where they became first adversaries and then allies of ancient Egypt as the enigmatic “People of the Sea” and subsequently colonized the Aegean Sea to become the forebears of Helenic civilization. His book “The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales” is a game changer and well worth the effort.
I know a guy who maintains that there is evidence that when Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay, there were inhabitants who had blond hair and blue eyes and said they were descendants of people from Nor-yah. (Norse for Norge, “Norway”). He did a high school paper on it. I cannot adduce any other evidence, but it is provocative.
Vikings.... subsequently colonized the Aegean Sea to become the forebears of Helenic civilization
***Utterly doubtful. Hellenic civilization precedes the vikings by about a thousand years.
Maine Coon Cats are supposedly (partly) Scandinavian in origin.
There’s a whole bunch of “the Odyssey was really over here” claims by various authors, it’s analogous to claiming Atlantis was here there and everywhere.
Fun stuff, but I have never heard of the Vikings being the forebears of Hellenic civilization:
Vikings.... subsequently colonized the Aegean Sea to become the forebears of Helenic civilization
“L’Anse aux Meadows was founded nearly 1000 years ago and was the only Norse settlement in the New World. “
That we KNOW of.
The Vinland Saga tells of grape vines found on one of their trips. And grape vines don;t grow in Newfoundland - only much further south.
They were in wildly profuse abundance on the Outer Banks of NC in early explorer accounts, giant vines that seemed to have been cultivated reaching down to the surf itself. One of them is still alive, the Mother Vine.
It’s such a storm-tossed place that finding artifacts from that long ago would be almost a fluke, though. New inlets get cut, old ones fill in. Always moving, those islands.
I love them, but they’re basically just very large sandbars, stable only where large stands of live oak and juniper are. Cut them down and it’s like a windy desert, entire houses buried under the dunes. Happened on Ocracoke in the late 19th century, possibly other islands in the chain.
One (at least) native American woman was taken to Iceland according to DNA studies.
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