126 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
What was the ethnicity of the European people
who attempted to settle on, or at least close to, the
continent of North America some time around the
turn of the eleventh century? This question necessarily
leads back to questions about people who had
settled the other North Atlantic lands—Greenland
and Iceland—and even about the inhabitants of
Northern Europe, where the people who settled on
these islands originated. This discussion will not
introduce any new, and hardly many unexpected,
historical facts about the subject; it is intended to be
a theoretical one. The question which will be dealt
with may perhaps be rephrased as: What is the truest
answer to the question: what was the ethnicity of the
Vinelanders?
This question is about ethnicity, not nationality,
and I will seek to avoid, as far as possible, the
long-standing dispute on whether something existed
in pre-modern times which should be called nationality
(cf. Hastings 1997, Jenkins 1997:143–147).
Scholars seem to be able to agree that the connection
between ethnicity and state, which is expressed in
the term nation in our times, was far from necessary
in the Middle Ages or the Viking Age. There was
some connection, of course: the kingdoms of France,
England, and Denmark, for instance, came to be
predicated on the idea of French, English, and Danish
ethnicity, respectively, although the idea might
have been completely strange to a large part of the
inhabitants. The connection was neither as necessary
nor as strong as it became, at least in Europe, in the
19th and 20th centuries. Many ethnic groups seem
to have lived relatively peacefully without forming
their own states, and many kingdoms thrived excellently
although only a minority of their inhabitants
belonged to the same ethnic group, and normally the
heads of state did not care whether they did.
This perception may be a commonplace now,
but it was not so among historians until after Ernest
Gellner and Benedict Anderson published their infl
uential books on nationality, both in 1983, strongly
supported by English historian Eric Hobsbawm in
1990. Before that time, it was, for instance, common
in Icelandic historiography to assume that an
Icelandic nation, þjóð as we call it in our language,
had been founded in the year 930, because it was calculated
that that was the year of the establishment of
the Icelandic Alþing, the general assembly, at Þingvellir.
In 1910, in an era when historians still allowed
themselves some measure of romantic elevation, the
Icelandic historian Bogi Th. Melsteð wrote about
the settlers of Iceland (p. 3, my translation): “They
all colonized the same land, far out in the ocean, far
away from other countries. Nature itself showed
them, and internal necessity commanded them, to
enter into a community, establish a state and become
one nation (þjóð). Thereby begins the national history
of Iceland.” Historians do not write like this any
more; we have lost the support of the formal institution
of state in our search for ethnicity.
On the other hand, we can be sure that something
has existed since time immemorial which can be
called ethnicity, which of course does not mean that
any defi nite ethnicities are primordial and unchangeable.
As Jenkins (1997:44–48) has argued convincingly,
the theory of ethnic primordialism is largely
a straw-man. A good defi nition of ethnicity can
be sought in Anthony D. Smith’s book The Ethnic
Origins of Nations, according to which ethnies, as
he calls them with a French word, are collectivities
which have at least most of the following features:
1) a collective name, 2) a common sense of descent,
3) a shared history, 4) a distinctive shared culture,
such as language and/or religion, 5) an association
with a specifi c territory, whether they live there or
not, and 6) a sense of solidarity (Smith 1986:22–31).
Before we can consider what might have been the
ethnicity of the settlers of Vineland, we must know
who these people were; we must know their biographies.
This is a problem because there are, of course,
no contemporary sources available about them, only
Icelandic sagas which were originally written some
two or three centuries after the events took place and
only preserved in still later manuscripts. However,
the sagas are all we have, and there is, as far as I
know, nothing to contradict them. So the best we can
do in the situation is to base the discussion on them.
At least we can assume that they relate what was the
The Ethnicity of the Vinelanders
Gunnar Karlsson*
Abstract - This paper searches for the most logical answer to the question about the ethnicity of the European people
who attempted to settle permanently on the continent of North America around the turn of the 11th century. Were they
Norwegians, Icelanders, Greenlanders, or just Norsemen? Following a short study of the ethnic identities of Icelanders and
Norwegians in the Viking Age, the answer suggested is that the Vinelanders had a double ethnic identity, a Greenlandic
and a Norse one.
2009 Special Volume 2:126–130
Norse Greenland: Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008
Journal of the North Atlantic
*Department of History, University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland; gunnark@hi.is.
2009 Gunnar Karlsson 127
tradition of the origin of the settlers in twelfth- and
thirteenth-century Iceland, and whether or not the
individuals named existed or were involved, the
reconstruction of events presented in the sagas is
consistent with the dating of Norse archaeological
remains in Greenland and Newfoundland (Fitzhugh
and Ward 2000).
Two sagas relate the colonization attempts in
Vineland, Eirik the Red’s Saga and the Saga of
the Greenlanders, as they are called in the English
translation (Viðar Hreinsson 1997, vol. 1:1–32). The
question of the historicity of the sagas is a complicated
one, and a few words must suffi ce about it here.
The two sagas relate mostly the same recognizable
stories, but differ so much in the details that it seems
unlikely that one of them is based on the other, or
that they are to a large extent both based on the same
written text (Ólafur Halldórsson 2001:39–50). For
this reason, it could be argued that these sagas were
the very best indication of an oral tradition behind
the Icelandic family sagas, which of course is some
indication of their historicity. However, Helgi Skúli
Kjartansson (2000) has suggested that the common,
but in many cases somewhat different, elements in
the two sagas are based on a poem which is now lost
and which the authors of the sagas have understood
imperfectly and interpreted in different ways. Even
if we accept that idea, the two sagas support each
other to a certain extent, and about the biographical
facts of persons they do not contradict each other—
admittedly, however, because only a few such facts
are related in both of the sagas.
At any rate, it seems inevitable to base a study
of the ethnicity of the settlers on the evidence of the
sagas as if they were reliable, and the result is this:
Although the colonization expeditions to Vineland
(not including the exploratory expeditions of Leifr
Eiríksson and others) counted scores of people, only
twelve individuals are named. Of them, fi ve were
defi nitely born and brought up in Iceland, but had
emigrated to Greenland before they went on their
Vineland expedition (Íslenzk fornrit vol.4:20, 135,
202–203, 207, 218–219, 221, 229–230, 260–262):
Þorfi nnr Þórðarson karlsefni,
Snorri Þorbrandsson,
Bjarni Grímólfsson,
Þórhallr Gamlason,
Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir.
Five others had been living permanently in Greenland
before the expedition, and at least two of them,
the children of Eiríkr the Red, must have emigrated
to Greenland while still young (Íslenzk fornrit
vol.4:221, 229, 254):
Þorvaldr Eiríksson,
Þórhallr veiðimaðr,
Þorvarðr, Freydís’s husband,
Freydís Eiríksdóttir,
Þorbrandr Snorrason.
The remaining two are only said to be Icelanders,
from the Eastern Fiords, and seem to have come to
Greenland as merchants (Íslenzk fornrit vol.4:264–
265):
Helgi,
Finnbogi.
So, my conclusion is that most of the settlers of
Vineland were born in Iceland. Does that make their
ethnicity Icelandic?
There has been a long-standing dispute about
the ethnicity of the early Icelanders. Nineteenthcentury
Norwegians claimed Norwegian identity for
them. In 1914, Icelandic historian Bogi Th. Melsteð
rejected their view, with arguments that are, in my
opinion, mostly valid or at least worthy of attention.
There are episodes in the sagas where Icelandic people
call people from Norway útlenda menn, which
in modern Icelandic means simply “foreigners”. It
also occurs that an Icelandic person states: “ek em
ekki norrænn maðr”: I am not a Norwegian. (The
context shows here that the meaning must be Norwegian
and not Norse, another meaning of the word
norrænn.) In Icelandic law, there is a clause which
states: “If foreign men are killed in Iceland, Danish
or Swedish or Norwegian, the relatives own the case
…” (Grágás 1992:239). Seven decades after Bogi
Th. Melsteð, Danish ethnographer Kirsten Hastrup
took up the case, and argued for the opinion that an
Icelandic identity was created in the twelfth century
through two written works: Ari the Learned’s history
of Iceland, the Book of the Icelanders, and the First
Grammatical Treatise, whose author set out to create
an alphabet, and thus a written language, for “us
Icelanders” (Hastrup 1984:239–240).
The present author has discussed this question
before and reached the conclusion that the inhabitants
of Iceland probably began to call themselves
Icelanders as early as the fi rst or second generation
in the country. The argument for this was predominantly
based on the opinion that the settlers of Iceland,
coming mostly from the west coast of Norway,
probably did not have any concept of a common
Norwegian identity. The terms Norway (Noregr)
or Norwegian (Norðmaðr) do not seem to occur in
European texts until the 9th century, the former for
the fi rst time around 840 (Jakobsen 1967b col. 336),
the latter in 874 (Jakobsen 1967a, col. 334), the very
same year as the fi rst settler settled permanently in
Iceland, according to the tradition of Landnámabók,
the Book of Settlements. It seems unlikely that people
who emigrated from the western coast of Norway
to Iceland in the decades around 900 had any sense
of Norwegian identity, and it seems to be suffi ciently
supported by archaeological evidence that the
colonization of Iceland took place around that time.
More probably the settlers thought about themselves
as Sygnir if they came from the Sogn district, Hörðar
128 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 2
if they came from Hörðaland, or Mærir if they came
from Mæri. Besides that, a considerable part of the
settlers of Iceland originated in the British Isles and
came from there—even a majority of the women
according to recent genetic research on present day
people (Agnar Helgason 2004:49–55). These people
had of course no reason to identify themselves as
Norwegians. When this mixture of identities had
settled in Iceland and began to think and talk about
themselves collectively, they could not use any
other appellation but Icelanders (Gunnar Karlsson
1988:29–30, 1994:113–114).
It does not seem likely that this new identity had
very much content as yet. The Icelanders did not
have a separate language or religion, nor a common
myth of descent. But they had at least three components
of ethnic identity: a common name, a shared
history (predominantly the emigration to Iceland),
and an association with a specifi c territory. Of any
sense of solidarity, we do not know much at that
early stage.
What, then, can we conclude from this about the
identity of the settlers of Vineland? What would they
have answered if one of the Skrælingar, the native
inhabitants of North America, had asked them in a
language that they understood: Where do you come
from? Well, they would of course have killed the
Skræling, according to the sagas (cf. e.g., Viðar Hreinsson
1997 vol. 1:16). However, if he failed in doing
so and if I am right in guessing that even the fi rst
generation of Icelanders looked upon themselves as
Icelanders, it seems logical also to conclude that the
fi rst generation of Greenlanders called themselves
Greenlanders. I guess that they would have answered
the Skræling: Ek em maðr grænlenzkr—I am a Greenlander.
This was one possible answer to the question
posed above. There are, I think, other possible
answers. One way of solving the problem is to disregard,
at least provisionally, the idea of self-image
and look upon the settlers of Vineland predominantly
as the people who conquered the North Atlantic.
This achievement was a historic deed, a milestone
in the progression of mankind. This was actually the
fi rst time that man achieved the full encirclement of
the globe; descendants of people who had set out
from Asia some millennia before in opposite directions
met again, in Vineland rather than Greenland
according to the sagas.
Who were the people who did this deed? It is
meaningless to say that the Greenlanders did so, because
they were already more than halfway through
the process before they had become Greenlanders.
Icelanders too have only a weak claim to the honor,
because it is the step to Iceland from the continent or
the British Isles which is most important here. And
we can hardly say that the Norwegians did the deed;
other Scandinavians were also involved. What we
come down to here is the concept Norse, norrænn.
It was Norse people who developed the technique
which was needed to conquer the North Atlantic.
The question was about the ethnicity of the
Vineland settlers, so one must ask further: was there
a Norse identity? Yes, there was. As Kirsten Hastrup
(1984:237) has pointed out, medieval Icelandic law
distinguishes in some respects between all Norsemen
and all other people. This distinction occurs
in two kinds of cases. Firstly, men who had not in
their childhood learned the Norse language, which is
called Danish (dönsk tunga) in the law, were not to
be nominated to join a court until they had lived in
Iceland for three years (Grágás 1992:371, Dennis et
al. 1980–2000 vol. 1:53). It follows that all speakers
of the language were eligible to join a court. From
other sources, we know that the language of Danes
and Swedes was also considered to be Danish, so
that the clause applies to all Germanic Scandinavians
(Skautrup 1957:662–663). Secondly, the right
of suing a person for manslaughter or claiming
inheritance from a dead relative was unlimited for
Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes, but for men of all
languages other than Norse (dönsk tunga), this right
was restricted to the father, son, and brother of the
dead person (Grágás 1992:55, 239; Dennis et al.
1980–2000 vol. 1:160, vol. 2:11). The fi rst of these
two stipulations obviously has a practical purpose: it
is not good if the judges do not understand the proceedings.
The other provision may have a practical
side to it too; it may have been thought to be easier to
determine whether the claimant was the proper one
if he was of Nordic origin. At any rate, these legal
rules make a distinction between people: whereby
Scandinavians of all three kingdoms are within the
same boundaries as Icelanders, all others are not.
A further indication of Norse identity among
Icelanders is the fact that Icelandic individuals are
sometimes called Norsemen, norrænir menn, if
they are located outside the Nordic countries. For
instance, the Icelandic kings’ saga Morkinskinna
relates of Norsemen in Mikligarðr, Constantinople:
“En mikill fjolde var þar adr fyrir Nordmanna er þeir
kalla Væringia. þar var saa madr islenskr er Már hiet
og var Húnrödarson …” (Morkinskinna 1932:60).
I assume that Norðmaðr refers here to Norsemen
collectively, not a Norwegian (cf. Sverrir Jakobsson
1999:119–122), so this can be translated: “But there
was already a great number of Norse men whom they
call Varangians. There was an Icelandic man named
Már the son of Húnröðr.” When Icelanders were suffi
ciently far away, their Norse identity took over, and
the same has surely applied to Greenlanders.
From this, I argue that Viking-Age and medieval
Icelanders had at least a double ethnic identity, an
Icelandic one and a Norse one. Actually, Kirsten
2009 Gunnar Karlsson 129
Hastrup (1984:237–39) has argued, based on the
stipulations of medieval Icelandic laws, that they had
a triple identity: one Icelandic, which excluded all
other people; one that included Icelanders and Norwegians
and excluded all others, and thirdly a Norse
one, which included the whole Nordic world. This
interpretation seems to be based on solid evidence,
mainly from the law code of Iceland. However, only
nominal identifi cations can count here—that is,
group formations which have a separate name (Jenkins
1997:41). The common Icelandic-Norwegian
identity does not seem to have had any name that
could distinguish it clearly from the common Norse
identity (including Swedes and Danes). It can hardly
have been called anything but norrænn, Norse, which
would not have separated the Icelandic-Norwegians
from Swedes and Danes, as it could also apply to all
Scandinavians. Therefore it is diffi cult to imagine
that the Icelandic–Norwegian identity could apply to
people living outside these countries.
It is maintained here that the Icelanders had a
Norse identity, but what about other Norse people,
those who had founded their separate kingdoms
within the Nordic space? There are strong indications
of Norse identity in the Nordic countries,
which is for instance expressed in the establishment
of the Kalmar Union as late as 1397, after centuries
of three separate and often mutually hostile Nordic
kingdoms. That period, though, will not be discussed
here because it seems more informative to look further
back in time.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, a
Norwegian scholar, Håkon Melberg, put forward the
theory that people who called themselves “Danes”
had occupied the whole of Scandinavia during the
great migrations in Europe. Thus, all Germanic
Scandinavians had been “Danes” until the independent
Norwegian and Swedish kingdoms were established
in the Viking Age. Melberg presented a great
number of arguments for his theory: archaeological
evidence, mythological tales about prehistoric kings,
and so on. However, in my view, only one of his arguments
is really strong, namely the repeated use of
the appellation dönsk tunga (Danish language) to refer
to common Norse language in medieval Icelandic
texts (Melberg 1951:840–924).
Nonetheless, Melberg was not aware of the argument
which I think is the strongest one. In the Sami
language (Lappish) in Scandinavia, there is a loan
word which derives from the Germanic word Dane,
namely North Sami “Norwegian”/ South
Sami “Swede or Norwegian”. This nomenclature
was borrowed from the Proto-Scandinavian
danja-, which yielded later Dan- (Ante Aikio, researcher,
Giellagas Institute for Saami Studies,
University of Oulu, Finland, pers. comm.). This
etymology suggests that when the Sami people and
the Germanic Scandinavians fi rst met, somewhere
on the Scandinavian peninsula which later was to
become Norway and Sweden, and the Sami asked:
“Who are you?” then the Germanic person most often
answered: “I am a Dane.” And if the pioneers in
northern regions were “Danes”, it is most likely that
they were all “Danes”, from the northern frontier to
present-day Denmark.
Melberg’s theory has never been accepted in
Scandinavian scholarship. Thus for instance, in the
encyclopaedia of medieval Nordic studies, Kulturhistorisk
leksikon for nordisk middelalder, at least
two authors mention his opinions without really
relating or discussing them, just stating that they
were disputed or had not been accepted (Skautrup
1957, col. 663, Jakobsen 1967b, col. 337). It is true
that Melberg had little support for his theory about
a Danish kingdom covering the whole of Scandinavia.
In that point, he overestimated the connection
between ethnicity and state in pre–modern times, as
most scholars did at his time. On the other hand, it
seems convincing to assume that Danish ethnicity
was shared by all Germanic Scandinavians, especially
if we add to Melberg’s arguments the piece of
evidence from the Sami language.
Therefore, let me conclude by saying that I
started out with four different candidates for being
the settlers of Vineland, namely Norsemen, Norwegians,
Icelanders and Greenlanders. In my opinion,
the Norwegians and the Icelanders have lost; the
winners are Greenlanders and the Norsemen, the
latter perhaps without having yet completely abandoned
the name of Danes. The settlers of Vineland
had a double ethnic identity: they were Greenlanders
and they were Norsemen.
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