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Vinland Map - Download Image

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High Resolution Vinland Map

In the early 1960s, something called the "Vinland map" was uncovered. It became famous because it proved that Vikings came to America before Columbus. It seemed to be a map of the North Atlantic as drawn from Scandinavian discoveries between 800 and 1100 CE, well before western Europe's great Age of Exploration that began in 1400. It was announced by Yale University in the early 1960s, receiving much fanfare, and much skepticism.

There are a number of questions about the actual content of the map. The original authentication team recognized that it bore strong resemblances to a map made in the 1430s by Italian mariner Andrea Bianco – even to the extent of cutting off Africa where Bianco's map has a page fold – but with changes of shape, and major revisions in the far east and west. The most surprising revision is that the map depicts Greenland as an island, remarkably close to the correct shape and orientation (while Norway, of which Greenland was just a colony, is wildly inaccurate) although contemporary Scandinavian accounts—including the work of Claudius Clavus in the 1420s—depict Greenland as a peninsula joined to northern Russia. For practical purposes, Arctic sea ice may have made this description true, and Greenland is not known to have been successfully circumnavigated until the 20th century. Skelton wondered also whether the revisions in the far east were meant to represent Japan, which would be another remarkable achievement for 15th-century cartography.

In addition, the text uses a Latin form of Leifr Eiriksson's name ("Erissonius") more consistent with 17th-century norms and with transmission through a French or Italian source. The Latin captions include several usages of the ligature æ; this was almost unknown in later medieval times (a simple e was written instead), and although the ligature was revived by Italian humanist scholars in the early 1400s, it is found only in documents of deliberately classicising style produced by Italian scribes, and never in conjunction with a Gothic style of script such as is seen in the Map.

Another point calling the map's authenticity into question was raised at the 1966 Vinland Map Conference: that one caption referred to Bishop Eirik of Greenland "and neighboring regions" (in Latin, "regionumque finitimarum"), a title known previously from the work of religious scholar Luka Jelic (1863–1922). An essay by British researcher Peter Foote for the Saga Book of the Viking Society (vol. 11, part 1), published shortly after the conference, noted that German researcher Richard Hennig had spent years, before the Vinland Map was revealed, fruitlessly trying to track Jelic's phrase down in medieval texts. It seemed that either Jelic had seen the Vinland Map and promised not to reveal its existence (keeping the promise so rigidly that he never mentioned any of the other new historical information on the map), or that he had invented the phrase as a scholarly description, and the Vinland Map creator copied him. In practice, because Jelic's work had gone through three editions, Foote was able to demonstrate how the first edition (in French) had adopted the concept from the work of earlier researchers, listed by Jelic, then the later editions had adapted the French scholarly phrase "évèque régionnaire des contrées américaines" into Latin.

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