In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

Tracing the journeys of both real and imagined Vikings through the American past, Annette Kolodny provides a fascinating, erudite, and sprawling narrative about the making of stories. Working adeptly with varied sources including Norse sagas, Yankee poetry, and Wabenaki oral histories, Kolodny finds that the medieval Icelandic colony of Vinland inspired a millennium’s worth of memories. She shows how a tiny cluster of Europeans on the periphery of the North American continent came to stand at the center of an ongoing debate about American origins.

Vinland was the westernmost in a long chain of colonies, as Norse sailors had hopped their way across the North Atlantic from Iceland to Greenland to arrive in Atlantic Canada around the year 1000 ce, in the midst of a global warming period that made these forbidding seas somewhat more navigable. Most of what we know of the Viking prescence comes from excavations of the L’Anse aux Meadows site at the tip of Newfoundland, first uncovered in 1960, though the presence of certain plant species at that site indicate that its occupants also settled at points farther south either along the coast or down the St. Lawrence Seaway. This uncertainty about the extent of the Norse presence in America is central to Kolodony’s entire analysis, which aims not so much to fix Vinland firmly on a map as trace its ever-expanding bounds in later American memories.

Kolodny approaches Vinland from several angles. As a scholar long concerned with contact narratives, she adds her own close critical reading of the two key Icelandic texts: The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga. While combing them for clues of encounters, she points out the common features of all Norse sagas that shape these works’ structure and style. The sagas’ authors blended information from nonextant manuscripts with centuries-old oral traditions laden with magical elements. Dramatic tales centered on the heroic figures of Eirik the Red and his scions Lief, Thorvald, and Thorstein, along with Thorstein’s wife, Gurdrid. Kolodony stresses that these are backward-looking sagas set on the eve of Iceland’s embrace of Christianity. These stories focus on their lead characters and their roles in shaping the Icelandic past, making them quite distinct from later accounts of exploration aimed at piquing the curiosity of European readers and raising capital for future colonial ventures.

The sagas provide cryptic but tantalizing evidence of Norse-native encounters. Kolodny pays close attention to every appearance of “Skraelings” in the text, “Skraeling” being a coarse term meaning “little wretches” that the Vikings applied to all Arctic and American peoples (58). Many of the contacts described were tense or openly hostile skirmishes, though there are hints that engagements between colonists and natives could be more complex. In an arresting moment from Eirik the Red’s Saga, there is a meeting between the heroine Gudrid and a woman described as “pale” with “the largest eyes that have ever been seen in any human head,” “wearing a black, close-fitting tunic; she was rather short and had a band round her chestnut-colored hair.” The stranger asks Gudrid her name, then repeats Gudrid’s answer, saying “My name is Gudrid,” then suddenly disappears into thin air (65). Was this a spirit or a “Skraeling”? Noting that meetings between mutually incomprehensible people often include repetitions of speech, Kolodny suggests “we may have in this scene a faint trace of a brief first encounter between a Norse woman and a Native woman,” in which the details of a hazily remembered exchange were combined with elements from “the folklore of apparitions and doppelgängers” (67). Throughout her readings of these texts, Kolodny draws on impressive research into both Icelandic and Indian cultures of the time, giving her cautious but canny interpretations real heft.

The bulk of the book’s...