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The English-speaking world was introduced to accounts of late tenth- and early eleventh-century voyages from the Norse settlement of Greenland to what was almost certainly the mainland of North America in a volume entitled Antiquitates Americanae , published in Copenhagen in 1837. Largely the work of the Danish scholar Carl Christian Rafn, Antiquitates Americanae comprised editions, with Danish and Latin translations, compendious background information and an English summary,1 of the so-called 'Vínland sagas,' Grænlendinga saga (The Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga rauða (The Saga of Eric the Red), Icelandic family sagas composed during the thirteenth century. The revelations in Antiquitates Americanae concerning the Norse 'discovery' of the New World inspired retellings of the Vínland voyages in English and American fiction and poetry from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, all of them underlined by varied expressions of nostalgia: for an imagined medieval ideal of Viking intrepidity and enterprise; for an earthly paradise found and lost; for a history that never happened; for a settlement and a home that might have been. Whereas regret for the loss of a promising colony is the nostalgic keynote in nineteenth-century English Vínland fiction, in American Vínland poetry of the same period nostalgia for the moment of 'discovery' betokens a glorious history to come.
Set around the time of Iceland's conversion to Christianity (ca. 1000) but composed during the political upheavals of the thirteenth century, which led to the surrender of the autonomy of the Icelandic Commonwealth to Norway in 1261-1262, Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga tell the story of the discovery and settlement of Greenland from Iceland by the Norwegian-born Eric the Red.2 Like the family sagas in general, the Vínland sagas are nostalgic inasmuch as they romanticize the memory of an unrecoverable past - not the lost Golden Age of Arthurian romance but a more recent past, where heroic ideals of conduct are honored and the law of the land upheld. At the conclusion of both the Vínland sagas, Greenland has become a relatively prosperous Christian community, but further westward voyages of exploration and the attempted settlement of the land called Vínland (Wineland) have ended in failure: a fledgling colony is abandoned in Grænlendinga saga , and, in Eiríks saga rauða ,...