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Norse America
The Story of a Founding Myth
Gordon Campbell
Oxford University Press 2021
Hb, 272pp, £20, ISBN 9780198861553
The Real Valkyrie
The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women
Nancy Marie Brown
The History Press 2021
Hb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9780750997911
The Myths and Realities of the Viking berserkr
Roderick Dale
Routledge 2021
Hb, 196pp, £120, ISBN 9780367137458
Few periods of history attract as much interest as the Viking Age, and few are so blended with legend and fiction. Each of these three books tackles one of the famous images of the Vikings and their world, but each takes a very different approach.
In Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth, Gordon Campbell looks at the image of Leif Erikson as “discoverer” of North America. While archæological evidence suggests a small, short-lived Norse presence in what is today Newfoundland – consistent with some of the story told in the “Vinland sagas” – this has historically not been enough for some Americans. Attempts to create a Viking history for the United States derive partly from discomfort about having the Catholic Christopher Columbus for a national hero (ignoring the fact that Leif Erikson was also Catholic), partly from a desire to make Scandinavian immigrants feel at home in the new world, and partly from a view of Scandinavians as not too different from the English, thus validating Anglo-Saxon colonisation.
The book combines the history of these ideas, from flawed historical interpretations to outright hoaxes, with detailed discussion of the Norse experience in Greenland. For Campbell, myths of Leif Erikson as a national founder not only erase the importance of Native American peoples but also incorrectly assume “that Greenland is not part of the New World.” is partly a history of the
