Norse America

The Story of a Founding Myth

Gordon Campbell

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Hardback

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English

Oxford University Press
31 July 2022

History; European history; History of the Americas; Maritime history; Medieval European archaeology

The story of the Vikings in North America as both fact and fiction, from the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the myths and fabrications about their presence there that have developed in recent centuries.

Tracking the saga of the Norse across the North Atlantic to America, Norse America sets the record straight about the idea that the Vikings 'discovered' America. The journey described is a continuum, with evidence-based history and archaeology at one end, and fake history and outright fraud at the other. In between there lies a huge expanse of uncertainty: sagas that may contain shards of truth, characters that may be partly historical, real archaeology that may be interpreted through the fictions of saga, and fragmentary evidence open to responsible and irresponsible interpretation.

Norse America is a book that tells two stories. The first is the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, settling in Greenland and establishing a shore station at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (to which a chapter of the book is devoted) and ending (but not culminating) in a fleeting and ill-documented presence on the shores of the North American mainland.

The second is the appropriation and enhancement of the westward narrative by Canadians and Americans who want America to have had white North European origins, who therefore want the Vikings to have 'discovered' America, and who in the advancement of that thesis have been willing to twist and manufacture evidence in support of claims grounded in an ideology of racial superiority.

By: Gordon Campbell
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 224mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 382g
ISBN: 9780198861553
ISBN 10: 0198861559
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 31 July 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Gordon Campbell is Fellow in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. In January 2012 he was presented with the Longman History Today Trustees Award (for lifetime contribution to history). He has authored and edited many books for OUP including The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (2003); Renaissance Art and Architecture (2004); John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (2008; co-author); Bible: the Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 R(2010); and IThe Hermit in the Garden: from Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (2013). He most recently edited The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance for OUP.

Reviews for Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth

Norse America is an important book that equips the reader to interrogate the stories we think we know, and asks how - and why - we arrived where we are today. This highly readable volume is particularly suited to those who want to understand how the past is shaped in the present - often for explicit political aims. * Cat Jarman, BBC History Magazine * [An] engaging and illuminating account ... this breadth, this willingness to see the Norse voyages to Greenland and Canada as part of a much bigger story, is the great strength of this book. * Judith Jesch, History Today *