[Earlier this
month, I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently
discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special
post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]
Three telling details
about the Iceland-born explorer
considered one of the
first Europeans to arrive in the Americas.
1)
His multi-national heritage: It’s not at all
surprising that Leif made the journey to (what is now) Newfoundland,
Canada, as he was the descendent of two generations of
nomadic Vikings. His grandfather Thorvald Asvaldsson had been banished from
Norway and helped bring the Vikings to Iceland; Thorvald’s son Erik the Red was
subsequently banished from Iceland and established the first permanent
settlement in Greenland. Besides highlighting the frequency of banishment
for the volatile Vikings, these moves both reflect a highly mobile culture and
(I would argue) suggest why Leif’s resulting mindset might have readied him
for global exploration. It’s no coincidence, that is, that Christopher
Columbus had traveled far before he began his Atlantic voyages—exploration
is not only the vehicle for but just as importantly the illustration of an
increasingly mobile world, and Leif’s heritage exemplified that mobility.
2)
His religious conversion: Before he made the
journey to the Americas, Leif and his crew traveled east to Norway (after a
detour to the Hebrides), where he spent time in the court of King
Olaf Tryggvason and converted
to Christianity. When Leif and company returned to Greenland, he brought
that new religion with him and it became a divisive element in the Viking
community, with Leif’s father Erik opposed to its influence but his mother Thjódhild
likewise converting and building
a famous church. Besides telling us a good deal about the era’s complex
interplay of European cultures and perspectives, this history can remind us
that the European communities that explored and settled the Americas were just
as cross-culturally influenced and evolving as was the new society they would
help create. And indeed, that such cross-cultural shifts, like the geographic
mobilities in Leif’s family tree, likely helped produce the perspectives and
conditions that made global voyages and explorations possible.
3)
His holiday: I like to think that I know a lot
about American memory days—hell, I invented a whole calendar of them!—but I’ll
confess to not having known before researching this post that October 9th
is Leif
Erikson Day. Originally created in Wisconsin in
1929, the holiday was put on the national calendar by Congress in 1964 and
has been celebrated annually ever since. Lyndon Johnson’s first Erikson Day proclamation
(available at that last hyperlink) connected “the intrepid exploits of the
Vikings of Erikson’s time” to America’s 1960s “adventurous exploration of the unfathomed
realms of space,” illustrating one of the many ways that this Viking explorer
and his voyages can continue to resonate in our collective consciousness. But
as always, I would want a memory day to allow most especially for historical
understanding and engagement, and in Leif’s case that could include not only
his pioneering voyage to the Americas, but also some of these cultural,
familial, and individual factors that made it possible.
Next
VikingStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?
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