The Wolf in the Whale

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A thousand years ago, Norse explorers led by the children of Erik the Red left Greenland and landed on the shores of North America, in a place they called Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red, written two centuries later, tell us their story, detailing internal strife and hostile encounters with native people in a land rich with grapes, grain, and timber. The ruins of their settlement, in what is now Newfoundland, can still be seen.

Around the same time, Inuit hunters began their own far more successful explorations, migrating eastward from Alaska across the Arctic Sea to what is now Baffin Island in eastern Canada. While the Norse eventually abandoned their attempts at settlement, the Inuit established a society that has thrived there ever since.

In The Saga of Erik the Red, the Norse kidnap two boys from a family they encounter north of Vinland. The story describes the natives as a family dressed in white, living in a hole in the ground. The father, it notes, has a beard. This brief description is the only surviving written record of a possible meeting between Inuit and Norse in the New World. The rest is up to our imaginations.

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