Did vikings really discover America?
Yes! According to two sagas, Eirik the Red’s Saga and the Saga of the Greenlanders, after the vikings had settled in Greenland they continued to explore lands further to the west. About the year 1000, a man named Leif Eiriksson is reported to have established a small settlement in a place the sagas call Vinland somewhere in North America. For centuries it was thought that such a journey could not have been undertaken at that time and so the story was considered to be just a legend. But then, in the 1960s, a Norwegian couple, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated a site in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and uncovered Viking Age Scandinavian dwellings, tools and other implements which proved the truth of the tale. The sagas also tell, however, that the new arrivals faced many troubles and abandoned the settlement after only a few years.
