The last days of the Scandinavian settlement in Greenland must be the saddest conclusion to one of Europe's earliest population expansions. The settlement was a result of the voyages of Erik the Red to Greenland and of his son Leif (Eriksson) to Vinland (probably Newfoundland) 1,000 years ago. Now, three centuries later, cut off from his brethren in Iceland, the last survivor of the long doomed settlement in Greenland, wracked with infirmities from generations of inbreeding and advancing age, could only wait for the deliverance of his own death.
It had all started off as a glorious sea adventure when the Vikings became the first Europeans to actually leave archaeological traces of their presence in North America. St Brendan, or the Irish figure on which his medieval literary character may have been based, might have got to North America a lot earlier - but he left no definite archaeological trace of having done so. The Viking traces were discovered and excavated in the 1960s by the Norwegian archaeological partnership of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. Stine, who died a year or so ago, came to see our Wood Quay results in the mid 1980s. The expansion westwards across the North Atlantic is the subject of a new ) exhibition on the Vikings which has just opened at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, where it is justified as a celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of the Viking landing in North America.
When it comes to touching popular imagination and packing in visitors, the Vikings certainly have it. Not only has the present anniversary and exhibition made the National Geographic ("in a casually brutal age Vikings were simply better brutes"), the New York Times and Time also put it on their covers. Even when the treasures of Ireland toured museums in the US and Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s to give what was then considered a counterview of Ireland to violence, we had no such impact. Hopefully, no first world country will put the main definitions of its ancient identity at risk in that way again. The Scandinavians don't appear to have done so in Washington but they have still managed to come up with an exciting cultural event.
The Smithsonian show is accompanied by a sumptuous, 432-page souvenir book characterised by typical US attention to the production quality, type face, decorative chapter heads, layout and colour reproduction. It is a useful update on the North Atlantic aspects of the Viking age by specialists, particularly on the American and Icelandic sides. Edited by scholars for the Natural History Museum, Washington, it features contributions by specialists who deal with such subjects as "Puffins, Ringed Pins and Runestones", "Sagas of Western Expansion" and "Norse Greenland".
Unlike the benchmark 1980 British Museum exhibition, with its strong emphasis on the European homelands of the Vikings and their colonial expansion in the Atlantic Islands, and the 1992 Nordic Council/ Council of Europe exhibition, which was important for bringing Russia and eastern material into the picture, the main thrust of the latest show properly appears to lie in the North Atlantic expansion to Greenland and Vinland. The exciting inferences from the finds at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the objects found further north in Baffin Island which attest to Scandinavian contacts with the indigenous Inuit, and the longevity of the doomed settlement in Greenland are most graphically mapped and illustrated in the book. But it lacks a full list of artefacts, complete with with catalogue numbers - an unfortunate omission.
The 230 illustrated entries of objects on show range from established goodies such as the carved planks from Flatatunga, Iceland, the clay bear and beaver claws from Finland, the Irish reliquary from Copenhagen (most recently, incidentally, seen in the Viking exhibition at the National Museum, Kildare Street when we had the replica boat on the street outside), Gotlandic ring and box brooches, the silver cup from Jelling, the Mammen harness bow and the Tating cup from Birka. There are also replicas of Rhenish beakers, the Birka Budda and the Soderala weathervane.
Of particular Irish interest is the bronze ringed pin from the floor of the house at L'Anse aux Meadows. While the claim in the publication that this was made in Ireland was never totally accepted by the late Tom Fanning, and while it doesn't suggest that an Irish or Irish-derived settler lost the pin in early 11th-century Newfoundland, it does show that this representative of an Irish fashion in clothes fastening (which we know from other sites the Vikings fell in love with) was well known to at least one of the settlers. But, like Dubliners, Manx, Orcadians, Faeroese, Icelanders and others, they all belonged to what can loosely be called the Viking world. You only have to see items such as the weighing scales beam from the Inuit site on Baffin and the toy boats from Greenland not to mention ships' planks and ringed pins to see just how unified elements of the material culture of that disparate and far flung network of places (in no way was it an empire of any kind!) was.
A great deal has happened to what may be termed Viking studies in Ireland in the 25 years since James Graham Campbell's study of silver ornaments resulting from trade with the Viking network abroad was published. The Dublin excavations and, more recently, those at Waterford, now occupy a central place in the relevant international discussion on towns, layouts of settlements, town origins, buildings, artefact types, commerce and environmental studies. These are all being published as volumes on the Wood Quay excavation results.
The silver hoards from Dunmore cave and, more recently, work on cave burials of the Viking Age in Kerry, are of major international significance. The Kilmainham and Islandbridge grave project at the museum, in which experts are trying to piece together the sequence of the various ninth-century burials and their grave accompaniments (including one of Europe's most spectacular ranges of Viking swords) is of great importance - as is the challenge of the Laughanstown site, near the Bray road, which has yielded what look like the first Scandinavian-style farmstead buildings (just where you'd expect to find them).
The work of identifying the nature and location of Viking-defended sites at places such as the Dublin longphort as well as at Dunrally, Co Laois, and Athlunkard, near Limerick, suggest that Irish scholars haven't become revisionist enough to forget what the earliest Vikings were all about - attack, pillage and defensive strategy. As Irish researchers, we are delighted to be at the forefront of the ongoing campaign of learning more about Europe and (its expansion) 1,000 years ago.
As with the new exhibition in Washington, the National Museum of Ireland's own show - "The Vikings in Ireland" - will foster further essential contact and debate between the Celtic and the Viking worlds. "The Vikings in Ireland" will be opened next month by Minister for the Arts, Sile de Valera, at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, as a kind of quid pro quo for the important ship material they sent to Ireland two years ago. The Vikings may have been the victims of bad press 1,000 years ago, when their bad notices came from mainly monkish (principally Irish) chroniclers whose monasteries and their treasures, as well as their families and comrades, suffered at the hands and swords of these pirates and raiders. Although they did not then, as illiterates, have the means of replying, it has to be admitted that the contemporary world has more than recompensed them by exhibiting their remains in our museums and recognising their huge contribution to the story of Europe.
Dr Pat Wallace, the director of the National Museum, was the archaeologist in charge of the Wood Quay excavations. He was recently made a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog by order of Queen Margarethe of Denmark