Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian scholar and explorer whose discovery of a Viking landing in North America 500 years before Christopher Columbus turned Norse myth into historical fact, died on March 29th aged 101.
When he found a Viking settlement in northern Newfoundland in 1960, it was a watershed in New World history that ended centuries of wonder about where the legendary seafarers had gone on their travels, and it shattered belief in the novelty of Columbus's journey.
His achievement was even more amazing because he had not trained as an archaeologist. Born in Meraaker, on Norway's west coast, on December 30th, 1899, Helge Ingstad gained a law degree in 1922. However, after four years he abandoned law for a more adventurous life.
He lived as a fur trapper in Canada, studied the Apaches in Arizona, searched for a "lost tribe" in Mexico's Sierra Madre and lived with Eskimos in Alaska. In the 1930s he became governor of Greenland, then claimed by Norway, and later served as governor of the Svalbard Islands, a Norwegian territory in the Arctic.
By the early 1950s, he had begun looking for Viking outposts along the coast of western Greenland, correlating geography with information from the Viking sagas about the discovery of North America. He studied Viking folklore, which told how Eric the Red, an Icelandic settler and son of an exiled murderer, found Greenland in 982 and how, two decades later, Eric's son, Leif Eriksson, embarked on his own investigation into the land to the west.
According to the legend, Eriksson found Baffin Island and called it Helluland. Then he discovered Labrador, which he called Markland. Pushing south, he stopped at a grassy land where he and his crew found wild wheat and grapevines. Called Vinland in the sagas, this was a place where the seafaring Vikings were said to have built "great houses" and spent the winter before returning to Greenland.
Helge Ingstad suspected that Vinland was in northern Newfoundland, even though grapes had never grown there. Armed with an ancient Icelandic map, he set off on a history-making quest. In 1960, he heard of some ruins near a tiny fishing village named L'Anse aux Meadows, on Newfoundland's northernmost tip. "I felt as if I had hooked a large salmon," he wrote in Westward to Vinland, the 1969 account of his explorations.
When he arrived he found the remains of very old sod huts, barely visible under the tall grasses and wild bushes. Locals thought they had been built by an indigenous tribe.
Over the next seven years, under the leadership of his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine, the site was excavated. The outlines of eight structures with immense walls were found. Though built in the style of Icelandic houses, they alone were not enough to tie the settlement to the Vikings. However, in 1964, a smooth soapstone object with a hole in it was discovered. It turned out to be a Norse spindle-whorl, used throughout medieval Scandinavia as the weight in a device that spun wool into yarn. It was irrefutable proof linking the site to the Norse travellers.
L'Anse aux Meadows remains the only documented Norse settlement in North America. In 1980 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Helge Ingstad: born 1899; died, March 2001