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Publié par | iUniverse |
Date de parution | 18 juillet 2023 |
Nombre de lectures | 0 |
EAN13 | 9781663251275 |
Langue | English |
Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.
Extrait
“Rediscovering Vinland, Proof”
Fred N. Brown III
“REDISCOVERING VINLAND, PROOF”
Copyright © 2023 Fred N. Brown III.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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ISBN: 978-1-6632-5128-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5127-5 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904087
iUniverse rev. date: 03/01/2023
Contents
Preface
Proof: A Declaration that the True and Precise Location of Historic Vinland Was and Is Pettaquamscutt River Valley in the State of Rhode Island
Summary
Notes
About the Author
Preface
A lamb lost its life to create a single page of the Vinland Narratives (Sagas); a church scrivener devoted perhaps a week or two to compose it more than eight hundred years ago. The Sagas are part of world history, speaking to us of majestic events, and it is only a small portion of pages that record the first arrival of European people in the New World.
Consider a winter Sunday afternoon in medieval days when Scandinavian families congregated to entertain each other with tales from grandparents who may have actually traveled to Vinland in the Americas. In a dark corner dimly lit by a flickering candle, a scribe listens and jots marks upon birch bark scraps for memory of his artistry to come, perhaps a visiting skjald— a tale-teller—absorbing for future transmission. The result clearly shows the reverence of the Roman Catholic Church and its responsibilities to its parishioners, their births, marriages, offspring, and deaths, those things that are the composites of history, civilization, and the human spirit. Many pages like this have been collected in Saga Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland, where even contemporary scholars can read back to past events.
On another, more recent winter afternoon in a New England library, this author came upon a series of volumes concerning the subject of these tales of Vinland, a land far to the south of that polar church to where numbers of Scandinavian forebears had voyaged and even settled. And then, for some mysterious reason, they became forgotten and lost to their histories—but not their memories.
The five or six volumes were arranged in such a way that I was able to detect a sort of narrative and chronology of several of many translations of the Vinland Sagas. They so captured my interest to the point where I commenced a reading program lasting some three years, simply to imagine facts on paper to some sort of chronicle. Along the way of gathering information, I found that others had done the same as I and there seemed a strong tendency for some to place Vinland and its hero, Leifur Eiriksson, to the very locale I then labored.
My three years of exclusive readings of the Sagas captivated me as part puzzle, part revelation, and wholly informative, Sagas aggregate a twenty- to thirty-year interval wherein some two hundred souls systematically followed Leifur Eiriksson to his discovery and there abided with both amiable and hostile relations with aborigines from inland areas. And what a story the Sagas convey, worthy of superb literature, even Grand Opera! A tale that starts with great promise in a hall of a mountain king in Norway, concluding in tragedy and shame in a New England forest. But modern science picks up the tale in, as this paper will show, a period of a recombinant generations similar to Hispanic Mestizos ensued, which, in modern times, record a nascent people whose name and fame is still recognized worldwide.
This occurred only a few years after the well-publicized discovery of a Viking encampment at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, which initially had claimed the archeological excavations as the very Vinland with which I was engaged. By this time, I had enough material to detect certain anomalies in the discovery and also that the discoverer, a Norwegian named Helge Ingstad, had commenced his own search for Vinland not in Canada, but in New England’s state of Rhode Island! And at that stage of my insights, scientists at the site at L’Anse aux Meadows reported that new findings there proved that their site could not have been Vinland but a way-stop toward it.
At just about that time my affairs permitted me time with my young son, then seven years old. It seemed the two of us might do a little exploring, so we arranged our minuscule twelve footlong vessel with a super-dependable Swedish outboard motor and set off, bloke, boy, and bowser, to find what we could find. We investigated any number of New England estuaries, not only Leif’s encampment, Leifsbudir, but any of the thirteen other landfalls that the Norsemen voyagers had described. Over three years we located several and eventually discovered, to our astonishment at Pettaquamscutt along east side Narragansett Bay approaches, what proved to be the target site to which we aspired.
The reader might be forewarned that the subject of this paper is controversial and that its text consists of unique insights unusual in analytical works. The first is a common misrepresentation of Nordic and Viking life. In fact, far from the barbarous and destructive thugs so often portrayed, they were as advanced as any culture of Europe with a presence and worldview of an eighth of the globe; sophisticated shipbuilders and seafarers; traders later known as the Hanseatic League, based in Germany and Bergen, Norway, ruled by mores and law, of stable and devout culture and physically hardy.
It took us three years to confirm our dream-site, a full year to believe it, the four a basis for presentations that produced further conversations, which produced endorsement from the then president of Iceland, the Swiss Rolex Awards for Enterprise of 1985, and other appreciated supports. Unfortunately, I also discovered that in most American and English halls of academe as universities and colleges, the entire subject was and is anathema, listing few programs, lectures, or notice of what I had believed a cogent program for scholars. Most of the PhDs holding a desk I have attempted to reach have been universally negative to the subject. In contrast, however, those I have contacted not holding a desk responded with a fair and balanced—even encouraging—manner, a manner I would have expected as commonplace. Viking artifacts found around colonial New England are more numerous than might be expected and just about all have been discounted, but I note that these discounts seem always attributed to unnamed third parties. I have yet to encounter a reasoned argument negating possible validity.