Simek, Rudolf Vinland!

How the Vikings discovered America. "They came to an island that lay to the north of the land and went up there and looked around in good weather. They found dew on the grass and the first thing they did was to touch the dew with their hands and bring it to their mouths, thinking they had never tasted anything sweeter." This is how the Grænlendinga Saga describes the arrival of the Vikings in America. Rudolf Simek here tells the story of this voyage of discovery and describes how their archaeological traces were rediscovered in the 20th century. What drove the Vikings on their perilous voyage through the Arctic Ocean some 400 years before Christopher Columbus set out for the New World?

Lust of adventure, lack of important raw materials and food sources? Where did these explorers come from in the first place, whom we refer to rather imprecisely with the term "Vikings", and what sources tell their story(s)? The renowned Viking researcher Rudolf Simek explores these questions here. He also explains what the Vikings' boats were like, describes the nautical knowledge and world views of the Norse seafarers and tells how in 1961 the Norwegian couple Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad came across the archaeological remains of the Viking expedition at L'Anse aux Meadows on the coast of Newfoundland. An entertaining chapter on false North American Vikings, about whom people in the USA fantasised so vividly that they created veritable "Viking hoaxes", concludes the book.

Rudolf Simek teaches as Professor of Older German Studies, including Norse, at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn.