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Viking Horsemen

All the evidence I need:
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Fitter said:
Actually the indigenous Beothuks were a very violent and territorial people who basically chased the Norsemen away. They were the Skraelings of the Sagas. That and the winters there are miserable. Miserable I tells ya.
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I have not read the Sagas, do they say anything about this? I have never heard that the Vikings were chased away.

It is one possibility of course but there are several others as well.
 
qayak said:
I have not read the Sagas, do they say anything about this? I have never heard that the Vikings were chased away.

It is one possibility of course but there are several others as well.
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There are really only two possibilities:

1. They died in situ;
2. They left.

The Beothuks were doing quite well, so the area itself wasn't inhospitable. OTOH, we do know that the Beothuks were inhospitable as hell.

The Norse were chased away.
 
It's possible that the Norse exaggerated the dangers for several reasons. The author of the sagas might have wanted to paint their failure to establish a permanent settlement in more complimentary terms, or discourage further exploration in order not to cause people to abandon the not-so-hospitable Greenland colony.

The legend that that Vikings made it inland as far as Minnesota and fought Indians there is an old one: it dates back to when people of Scandinavian descent started settling in Minnesota. It's a nice story, but Newfoundland is a good distance from Minnesota. I suppose they could have found the St Lawrence and gone up it all the way to the Great Lakes, but then, there wasn't anything stopping medieval Arab sailors from discovering Australia, either.
 
TragicMonkey said:
The legend that that Vikings made it inland as far as Minnesota...
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Once again, I can only refer people to SE Morison's The European Discovery of America; The Northern Voyages. Morison personally sailed all the waters supposedly sailed by all the European seafarers, trying to identify all of their landfalls and inland journeys. He finds the evidence for Minnesota (as well as New England, etc) to be rather lacking.

"The late Samuel Eliot Morison, a former U.S. Navy admiral, was also one of America's premier historians. Combining a first-hand knowledge of the sea and transatlantic travel with a brilliantly readable narrative style, he produced what has become nothing less than the definitive account of the great age of European exploration. In his riveting and richly illustrated saga, Morison offers a comprehensive account of all the known voyages by Europeans to the New World from 500 A.D. to the seventeenth century."
 
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CFLarsen said:
Not a viking chance.

The Vikings (in those days) fought mainly on foot. Their weapons were uniquely suited for both-feet-on-the-ground-bashing-heads-chopping-arms-legs-and-heads combat.

ETA: Good source here.
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The vikings fought on foot, but they had horses. The horses were used for transport. Once arrived at the battleground, they dismounted and fought on foot.

To fight on horse-back, you need specialized weapons, specialized fighters, specific horse-training. The viking "armies" were small groups of a few hundred men, with a very flat command structure, and equipped with individual, personal weapons.

During the invasion if England from Normandy, launched by descendents of early viking settlers, horse-back fighting had been developed, if we are to judge from the Bayoux Tapestry.

The vikings might have brought a few horses to New Foundland, but it is not very probable (for reasons outlined by other posters here), and it is extremely unlikely that there would have been mounted fighters.

Hans
 
Beady said:
There are really only two possibilities:

1. They died in situ;
2. They left.

The Beothuks were doing quite well, so the area itself wasn't inhospitable. OTOH, we do know that the Beothuks were inhospitable as hell.

The Norse were chased away.
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Yes, but they could leave for several reasons besides the Beothuks running them off.

The Sagas state that they return, I was just wondering if they gave the reason why they returned.
 
If you want an interesting and concise analysis of the likely reasons why the Norse were unable to gain a foothold on North America, check out Collapse by Jared Diamond. He spends the marjority of the chapters concerning Viking settlements discussing the Greenland colonies, but it all relates back to why Vinland wasn't viable for more than 10 years or so.
 
Ryokan said:
Why are Americans so keen on making remakes of movies? I just don't get it, the original Pathfinder is an amazing movie, certainly the best Norwegian movie ever made.

The American version seems silly and not very historically correct. Yeah, the Vikings had horses, but they were pretty small.
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It seems to me that, despite the same titles, the movies are unrelated.
 
I'd like to see Vikings vs. Mayans in bloody combat. It would be really, really cool to have a scene where Mayan jaguar-rider priests charge a Viking encampment, but they're suprised when the Viking leader reveals himself to be a dragon. The war would end when the Welsh Prince Madoc shows up to aid his Viking friends, leading the Army of the Dead from Dunharrow.
 
MRC_Hans said:
During the invasion if England from Normandy, launched by descendents of early viking settlers, horse-back fighting had been developed, if we are to judge from the Bayoux Tapestry.
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Yeah but by that point, they really weren't vikings anymore. They'd adopted much of the Frankish culture along with the language and mounted warfare.
 
Bluegill said:
I'd like to see Vikings vs. Mayans in bloody combat. It would be really, really cool to have a scene where Mayan jaguar-rider priests charge a Viking encampment, but they're suprised when the Viking leader reveals himself to be a dragon. The war would end when the Welsh Prince Madoc shows up to aid his Viking friends, leading the Army of the Dead from Dunharrow.
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And in a climactic twist, the Pirates of the Carribean wade in from the deep and turn the tide for the Mayans.

Johnny Depp wins an Oscar and Mel Gibson throws racial slurs at "Northern Fisheaters."
 
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions the Danes acquiring horses once they were in England and fielding a mounted raiding force that gave the Aenglisc great gowdy.

It's just possible that an Icelandic expedition might ship some horses over to Vinland if they wanted to badly enough, but it sounds like a pretty long stretch. Howsomever, the wonders of TV are not mine to question.
 
Scott Haley said:
I
I ask those who know more history than me: In 892 A.D., could Scandinavians haul big live horses across the Atlantic?
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As was pointed out, Iceland has horses.

Horses were also present at the Greenland settlements (see Diamond's Collapse). So it's not unreasonable that the people who tried to settle Vinland from Greenland would have brought their horses.....
 
Bluegill said:
It seems to me that, despite the same titles, the movies are unrelated.
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It seems that way, doesn't it?

Pathfinder is a remake of Veiviseren, (Norwegian for The Pathfinder), a 1987 Norwegian film directed by Nils Gaup. Gaup had also written the screenplay for the original movie, and Laeta Kalogridis adapted the screenplay for the 2006 remake.
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Source
 
supercorgi said:
Yeah but by that point, they really weren't vikings anymore. They'd adopted much of the Frankish culture along with the language and mounted warfare.
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Besides, it was mostly the leaders and nobles of the Normans who were descended from the Vikings, not your average Norman.
 
drkitten said:
Horses were also present at the Greenland settlements
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I love the way you phrased this. I pictured people rowing up to Greenland to settle it, while inquisitive horses stood on the shore and watched them arrive. So the Greenlanders built their colony and the horses would hang out sometimes, but it didn't go further than that. You couldn't tell if they were being friendly, or just being polite.
 
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