Vínland

Vínland — the 'wine-land' — is the westernmost shore the Norse ever reached: the forested, vine-grown, mild coast of North America, found by Leif Eriksson five centuries before Columbus. Blown off course on the way to Christianise Greenland, or sailing deliberately west after Bjarni's sighting, the Greenlanders came to a land of wild wheat, self-sown vines, timber, and salmon — everything the treeless north lacked. They built houses at a place they called Hóp and wintered there. But Vínland was not empty: the Skrælingar, the people already there, met them first in wary trade and then in violence, and the Norse were too few and too far from home to hold a hostile new world. After a few seasons they abandoned it. Vínland is the corpus's great might-have-been — a continent touched by longship and then let go, remembered only in two sagas and, a thousand years later, proven true by the spades of archaeologists at L'Anse aux Meadows.