Word: vinland
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...True or False? The Vinland Map, seen since the 1950s as possible proof that Norse explorers reached North America before Christopher Columbus, has been branded a fake. British scientists analyzed the composition of the map's ink and discovered that it dates from the 1920s or later. However, the forger almost got away with it. A forthcoming academic paper reports that carbon-dating methods show that the parchment on which the map was drawn was made around 1434. But the map's defenders are holding fast. "If it is a forgery, then the forger was surely one of the most...
...decided to sail westward to find the new land. First, say the sagas, the crew came to a forbidding land of rocks and glaciers. Then they sailed on to a wooded bay, where they dropped anchor for a while. Eventually they continued south to a place he called Vinland ("wineland," probably for the wild grapes that grew there). Leif and his party made camp for the winter, then sailed home. Members of his family returned in later years, but Leif never did. Erik died shortly after his son returned, and Leif took over the Greenland colony. Though he retained ownership...
...place where Leif set up camp. Among the artifacts turned up: loom weights, another spindle whorl, a bone needle, jasper fire starters, pollen, seeds, butternuts and, most important, about 2,000 scraps of worked wood that were subsequently radiocarbon dated to between 980 and 1020--just when Leif visited Vinland...
...bogus. The Newport (R.I.) Tower, whose supposed Viking origin was central to Longfellow's epic poem The Skeleton in Armor, was built by an early Governor of Rhode Island. The Kensington Stone, a rune-covered slab unearthed on a Minnesota farm in 1898 that purportedly describes a voyage to Vinland in 1362, is today widely believed to be a modern forgery. So is Yale's Vinland Map, a seemingly antique chart with the marking "Vinilanda Insula" that surfaced in the 1950s bound into a medieval book...
...cycle's first volume was The Ice-Shirt, a brooding narration of the settling of Greenland and Vinland. Fathers and Crows has six glossaries, endless footnotes, maps and epigraphs, a 47-page biography of St. Ignatius Loyola and nearly 1,000 pages. It relates Jesuit efforts to convert Huron and Iroquois Indians in the early 17th century, but the author prepares his narration so thoroughly that major characters are not introduced before the book's tardy midpoint...