4/4: American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America by Martyn Whittock (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
4/4: American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America by Martyn Whittock (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/American-Vikings-Sailed-Imaginations-America/dp/1639365354
The geographical reach of the Norse was extraordinary. For centuries medieval sagas, first recorded in Iceland, claimed that Vikings reached North America around the year 1000. This book explores that claim, separating fact from fiction and myth from mischief, to assess the enduring legacy of this claim in America. The search for “American Vikings” connects a vast range of different areas; from the latest archaeological evidence for their actual settlement in North America to the myth-making of nineteenth-century Scandinavian pioneers in the Midwest; and from ancient adventurers to the political ideologies in the twenty-first century. It is a journey from the high seas of a millennium ago to the swirling waters and dark undercurrents of the online world of today.
1893
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with Martin Wittig. The book is American Vikings. We have |
| 0:08.6 | Lance Almeadow that's established. You can visit it. There are remains of the camp. We have very |
| 0:15.9 | little else that stands up, however, but there's been a lot of effort over the last few |
| 0:20.8 | centuries. Martin, I enjoy these episodes because I'd always heard |
| 0:26.8 | there were other places that the Vikings traveled to. We're looking for them. I |
| 0:31.6 | understand. There continue to be, however, ruined carvings in rocks, |
| 0:37.8 | Minnesota, Nova Scotia, Maine, and on. I believe there's one there's one as far south as Massachusetts. |
| 0:48.6 | Oh there's one in Rhode Island. What do we know about these carvings, these ruins, and what they claim to be? |
| 0:55.0 | From the 18th century onward there's an increasing interest in the North sagas, |
| 1:00.0 | particularly in the 1830s when the sagas are translated into English and appear in America in the USA, the new state of the USA. A lot of interest. |
| 1:08.0 | There's a pushback at this time against the origin of history linked to Christopher Columbus. Of course never made it to North America anyway. |
| 1:15.0 | And increasingly people become interested in the USA, in the possibility of the Sargas. |
| 1:21.0 | This is before archaeological evidence you understand. |
| 1:24.0 | There's a movement of Scandinavians into the Midwest particularly after the Civil War |
| 1:29.8 | ends in 1865 and we start to find Roombes being discovered the most famous |
| 1:34.8 | from being Kensington in Minnesota but others turn up as you say we've got them |
| 1:39.0 | from Maine we've got them from Oklahoma we've got them from West Virginia We've got them from West Virginia. We've got them from a number of places. Quite astonishing. |
| 1:46.3 | But the most famous one is the Kensington Rhoonstone. And there are things about these |
| 1:50.1 | noonstones that make us always certain that these are fakes, that they are forgeries. |
| 1:55.6 | And what they seem to be is, they seem to be designed to prove prior title to the land. |
| 2:01.2 | So when a Swede, for example, discovers a room stone in Minnesota in the |
| 2:06.2 | 1890s following the taking of land thereafter, the Dakota Wars of the 1860s, we clearly have a situation here where newly arrived Europeans want to lay |
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