A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America by Benedicte Ingstad (review)

In 1960, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad discovered the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. In this biography, their daughter, social scientist Benedicte Ingstad, contextualizes their famous discovery in Helge's adventurism and Anne Stine's archaeological career. While acknowledging that she cannot approach these topics objectively, Benedicte Ingstad effectively discusses the controversies surrounding the discovery of the site, the gender dynamics that sidelined Anne Stine's contributions, and Helge's early twentieth-century beliefs about Indigenous peoples that defined his early career as a writer. Displaying the relevance of their experiences to several prominent debates that still exist today, A Grand Adventure brings Ingstad's parents to life.

Helge Ingstad was born in Norway in 1899. While he is now primarily known for his discovery at L'Anse aux Meadows, Benedicte Ingstad demonstrates how her father was already a household name in Norway through his popular memoirs documenting his experiences as a fur trader in Canada's far north, as a cowboy in Arizona, and as a territorial governor in the Arctic. Attracted to the popular and romantic ideas of Indigenous peoples through their popular depiction in children's books, Helge abandoned his legal practice to become a Hudson's Bay Company fur trader, arriving at Fort Resolution in 1926. He spent four years living alongside the Dene, praising their rejection of "civilized society." Utilizing letters that Helge wrote home, his diaries, and his memoir, The Land of Feast and Famine (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992), Ingstad discusses themes such as intercultural gender relations in fur trade societies and the understandings of Indigenous and Canadian cultures by Norwegian traders. Throughout her analysis, she successfully demonstrates how Helge's views were shaped by a broader cultural belief that Indigenous cultures were at risk of being tainted by Euro-Canadian and Euro-American influences. She also shows how Helge's writings fit into the larger framework of "salvage" anthropology, a framework that would also impact his memoirs written about the Apache in Arizona and the Nunamiut in Alaska.

Born in 1918, Anne Stine Moe was an early admirer of Helge Ingstad's memoirs, writing him fan letters and hoping that they could someday meet. When Helge's literary career turned to politics–he served as the territorial governor of Erik the Red's Land in Greenland and, later, the governor of Svalbard–Helge and Anne Stine married. Although Helge doubted Anne Stine's academic aspirations, she earned a master's degree in archaeology, which would benefit Helge's endeavours to locate Vinland, the first European settlement in North America.

Helge's efforts were nationalist, based on his Norwegian pride, and they were quixotic, based on his early experiences exploring desolate environments. By following the Viking sagas, he traced the location of Vinland to northern Newfoundland in 1960, making his initial discovery alongside his daughter, Benedicte. In her analysis of Helge's discovery, Benedicte Ingstad acknowledges competing claims, including those by Danish archaeologist Jørgen Meldgaard and Newfoundland historian William A. Munn. Meldgaard and Ingstad had agreed that the former should be recognized as the first individual to identify northern Newfoundland as the territory of Vinland, while the latter deserved recognition for locating the precise settlement near L'Anse aux Meadows. But Benedicte Ingstad stresses that Munn likely deserves recognition over both, having identified L'Anse aux Meadows as a likely site for the Viking settlement as early as 1914. She could have easily overlooked these competing claims, especially as she was present at the time of her father's famous discovery but, instead, has done an effective job in clearly delineating the significance of what her father discovered and recognizing how it built on, and differed, from the work of the earlier individuals.

While the initial chapters of...