L'Anse Aux Meadows




L'Anse Aux Meadows / 16x16

IT IS HARD for me to describe the feelings I have while I am walking around this most historic of historic sites. I don't cry, but I almost do, and I am astounded at the emotion that overtakes me. 

Here, in these fields, in this place at the edge of the sea, Europeans set foot on North America for the very first time. The Vikings - with Leif Erikson probably among them - left Greenland and sailed into the wilderness, crossing the ocean in small, small boats and landed at L'Anse Aux Meadows. 

To them, it was the new world. They built a village there, housing anywhere from 30-160 people. There were trees on the land at that time, and they used the wood to build boats, their homes, furniture. Their houses were sod huts - the earthen roofs are gone but the foundations remain, and that's what you see when your tour the area. 

In 1960, explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, spoke with George Decker, who lived in the town of L'Anse Aux Meadows. He showed the Ingstads a group of mounds that locals called "the old Indian camp."                                                                                                            The Ingstads investigated, carrying out seven archaeological digs from 1961-1968. They found eight complete Norse house sites and part of a ninth. Their knowledge of characteristics of structures and of Norse artifacts let them declare the L'Anse Aux Meadows site to be Norse, dating from about 1000 AD, more than 500 years before Columbus arrived in the New World. 

Years ago, my husband Peter wrote a book about the Vikings. Being who he is, he researched exhaustively, learning pretty much all there is to learn about the Vikings, their voyages, their settlements, and L'Anse Aux Meadows. I learned along with him, and have wanted to visit L'Anse Aux Meadows ever since. 

So when I am there, when I am walking where the Vikings walked, seeing the foundations of the houses where they lived, feeling the wind that blew on them, and smelling the ocean air that they smelled, it is for me, waking to a dream of history brought alive. 

It feels special, monumental, sacred. I am happier than I can say. 




Above and below, sculptures on the grounds of the site. 





These mounds are foundations of what would have been houses, 
forges or other buildings, with sod roofs.


Where the sea meets the land. The Norsemen probably came ashore yards from this spot. 

***
A Final Thought

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

- Marcel Proust


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