Canadian educational film from the '70s? Might be on the NFB site if they had a connection to its creation.
Yeah, i tried there, no go⌠its showed at the interpretation centre at LâAnse aux meadows⌠field trip?
Check this out:
I know everybody in that picture and I know the current owner of that longship! Although those particular Vikings have a new ship, thatâs a very old picture.
Thereâs much laughter about it⌠the Longship Company sailed the Fyrdraca from the Potomac to Newfoundland, but they didnât make the New York Times for 16 years.
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Canadian French is much more like historical vernacular French than the French now spoken in France is, much like the Appalachian dialect of English is much closer to the English spoken in Shakespeareâs day than modern British English is.
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âŚalthough, from the point of view of the Europeans, both cases were âthose colonials speak like archaic peasantsâ.
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Greenland is not at all a strange name for the place they colonized. Several Norwegians had accidentally sailed past Iceland and had seen uninviting glacial coast on the eastern side of Greenland. One red-haired Norwegian dude named Erik, who was a viking by tradeâŚ
(To go viking was a profession not a people. To go seafaring, to go from vik to vik to vik. Sometimes vĂkingr were sea-rovers.)
âŚand had pissed of everybody and the king in Norway, felt it necessary to emigrate to Iceland where they didnât know him yet. After a few years in Iceland he had succeeded to piss off almost everybody on Iceland also, so he decided it was a good idea to give those western snowy shores, some had spotted, a closer look while everybody at home had some time to calm down over that little bit of killing. Two or three days of sailing got him and his mates to Greenlands fjordy, glaciery, uninviting coast. Since going right back home or to any other inhabited place wasnât really an option, he decided to follow the coast south and westwards. Coming around the southern tip of Greenland into Baffin Bay, after endless days of sailing past ice-covered crags and icebergs, they came into an area that was heated by the gulf stream, that was free of snow, had grassy meadows and hills with flowers and herbs.
He had discovered green land.
He named it that and stayed over winter.
He later settled in his tax free haven.
His son Leif already was one of the hundreds of men and women who camped in Canada.
The name Vinland has nothing to do with berries or grapes.
The Greenlanders described the lands they found by their features. The remaining sagas tell of Helluland in the north, Markland further south and past Furdurstrandr, the wonderously extensive beach, Vinland being the southernmost of their new world discoveries. These words have known meanings in Norse. Hellu meant rocky escarpment, or something. Remnants of the word are in âhellingâ (wharf), or the island âHeligolandâ for example. Many more.
Mark meant forested land, there are tons of place-names reflecting that. Vin meant pastures, like in the German word Wiesen.
At the time the word for pasture, âvinâ, had already taken on the meaning of farmland in Old Norse, but to a Greenlander sheep were a vegetable. 
Crossing Baffin Bay from western Greenland, where most of the America-visiting Norsemen lived, they first found Baffin Island, the coast of which, as you can fact check in Google maps or earth, fits the descriptive name of âRocky boulder slopeâ quite well. Greenlanders had gone near there for generations to hunt walrus and narwhale and the like.
A few days sailing south from there took them to Markland, Labrador. It is still quite densely forested and unpopulated. Greenlanders went on expeditions to get their wood from there, sensibly preferring larch, archaeology tells us.
A couple days of travel further south they found what looked like farmable pasture land, Vinland. To a Greenlander, Newfoundland must have appeared quite fertile and mild.
Since you have visited LâAnse aux Meadows you know that the descriptive grassland fits the landscape of Newfoundlandâs coastal areas well. The Norse had simply named those lands after their respective landscape features.
The Sagas were an oral history for several hundred years and while in part surprisingly accurate, had simplified or had gathered some elements, just because they made the stories more fun in the retelling. By the time three of all the sagas mentioning travels and camps in Canada were written down to remain, and remain unchanged, entertaining nonsense had entered the history. Like the side story chronicler Adam von Bremen invented, of a Turkish ârunnerâ from Germany and his wife, also a runner, who were sent out to scout the area. They supposedly came back telling of the native people they had come across, that only had one leg and one eye and were shooting poison darts or something. This German and his wife are who, in this silly add-on, discovered grapes on their trip and then practically overnight made wine so that they arrived back at the ship drunk. Adam, I know itâs obvious, did never live in any areas of Germany that produce wine. He had no idea what he was talking about but made up this side story to explain the name.
In his native written tongue, not Old Norse, but old high German, âwinâ meant wine. He must have felt compelled to deliver an explanation for the name that wasnât as laughable to his readers as the idea that Norseman could have made wine themselves. But much like mapmakers of the time did it, monsters were added to clearly mark to the more enlightened readers which part of the story he was pulling outta his ass. One-legged hopping poison Indians. âHere be monstersâ practically means âIâm just guessingâ.
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Really not. If the dating is unassailable, the presence of slag from bog-iron makes a viking camp certainty.
They found a small fragment of slag which they dated to the 16th century⌠Viking camp my arse.
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