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- Title
Vínland and Wishful Thinking: Medieval and Modern Fantasies.
- Authors
Jakobsson, Sverrir
- Abstract
This article discusses the evidence for the journeys of several Norsemen to a place called Vínland around the year 1000. In hindsight, the stories of the unsuccessful attempt to settle Vínland have been enduringly linked to the consequent discoveries of the American continents, which occurred five centuries later. However, as there are no contemporary, or near-contemporary, written records of journeys to Vínland and the nearby islands, all reconstructions of those events spring from later texts, some of them written down 300years or more after the faetr Yet what may, or may not, have happened has gradually been granted the status of a real event. Reevaluating the wishful reality of the Vínland islands requires that the stories of the Vínland journeys be squarely situated in the context of the world geographic system adopted by those who told those stories. This article examines how information about the newly encountered lands intersected with the dominant system of defining and classifying knowledge. It thus sheds light on the worldview, now obsolete, in which that system was embedded. A careful dissection of the narrative of the Vínland journeys makes it possible to understand the morphology of this worldview, its epistemic underpinnings, and the spell it continues to cast on the Western imagination.
- Subjects
GREENLAND; NEWFOUNDLAND &; Labrador; NORSE discovery of America; VOYAGES &; travels; GEOGRAPHICAL discoveries; NORSE people; EXPLORERS; SAGAS -- History &; criticism; HISTORY of Iceland; HISTORY; RELIGION
- Publication
Canadian Journal of History, 2012, Vol 47, Issue 3, p493
- ISSN
0008-4107
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/cjh.47.3.493