Traveler: Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni
This activity corresponds to the "Traveler: Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni" feature in your textbook. The questions below are designed to help you learn more about the topic. Once you have answered the Comprehension questions, submit your answers and move on to the subsequent questions included in the Analysis and Outside Sources sections. Each section is designed to build upon the one before it, taking you progressively deeper into the subject you are studying. After you have answered all of the questions, you will have the option of emailing your responses to your instructor.
Introduction
Most of what we know of Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni comes from the Old Icelandic sagas. The sagas are among the most remarkable literary productions in Western culture. Written mainly during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, they tell vivid stories of Scandinavian kings, mythological heroes, and the Norse migrants who began settling Iceland around 870 C.E. Yet the qualities that make them so compelling also make them problematic as historical sources. As prose works filled with realistic details and characters (many whom actually lived), they project the illusion of historical fact. However, they were written 150 to 200 years after the Viking Age by thoroughly Christian Icelanders looking back on their pagan forbearers. What the sagas offer, then, is a people's vision of their past, a vision that presents some details neutrally, while bending others to fit the values of the later time. Below you will have an opportunity to consider some additional passages from a saga you have already encountered in your text. The other questions and links will help you deepen your understanding of the culture of the Viking Age.
Comprehension
1. Who first sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland?
2. What did Thorfinn Karlsefni and his companions find when they landed in the Hop?
3. How did Karlsefni and his companions signal their peaceful intentions during their first encounter with the Native Americans?
Analysis
Below, are three passages from Erik the Red's Saga, a section of which you read in the Traveler feature for Chapter 10 of your textbook. Click on each link, read the passage, and then answer the accompanying question.
1. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=224625&pageno=3. What do these episodes in Erik's story tell you about how Viking Age Norse managed conflict with each other?
2. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=224625&pageno=6. What does this section of the saga tell you about how Christianity came to some of the Viking territories? What role did women play in the spread of Christianity?
3. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=224625&pageno=12. What conclusions can you draw about the nature of the conflict between the Norse explorers and Native Americans? How does this episode portray Freydis, Erik the Red's daughter, and what does that portrayal suggest about attitudes toward women during the period in which the sagas were composed?
Outside Sources
1. At http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/america/ca/anseAuxMeadows/boat.html, you can take a virtual tour of the reconstructed Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. What conclusions can you draw about Norse domestic life during the Viking Age?
2. The following links provide more information about Viking ships.
· http://www.mariner.org/educationalad/ageofex/viking_ships.php offers a good overview of types of ships that Vikings used.
· At http://www.ukm.uio.no/vikingskipshuset/english.php, you can examine two of the most famous reconstructed ships.
· http://www.regia.org/Ships1.htm includes some helpful diagrams of ship construction and some of the equipment of a Viking ship.
· At http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/homelands/archeo.html, you can watch a 3-D reconstruction of the building of a Viking Age ship.
What techniques did Viking Age shipbuilders use? What were the relative advantages of the types of Viking ships?
3. http://www.ioa.ucla.edu/backdirt/Fall99/viking.html provides an overview of the Mosfell Archeological Project in Iceland. What does the project seek to learn, and what challenges have archeologists confronted as they have tried to excavate at Mosfell?