The Norse Discovery of America

It is now a well-established fact that Norse sailors reached the continent of North America hundreds of years before the more famous crossing of the Atlantic Sea by Columbus-but it is less well-known that many of these early voyages were mentioned, often in detail, in the Icelandic Sagas as well.

The Sagas-all dating from around 500 years before Columbus-spoke at length of numerous Norse voyages and settlements in North America. This work, written and compiled by experts who translated it directly from the original Icelandic, reveals that Columbus was aware of these Sagas and that this allowed him to even calculate approximately how many days sailing he would need to cross the Atlantic.

Included in the Sagas are details of the first settlements, the settlers' interaction with the Indians, their trade-and, of course, their conflicts. Finally, this work reveals the long-lasting effect of the Norse settlement and voyages, including evidence of Norse words were absorbed into Indian vocabulary and ends with a list of all of the known Norse/Irish trans-Atlantic voyages of exploration.

This new edition has been completely reset and contains the entire original text and illustrations.

Arthur Middleton Reeves (1856-1891) graduated from Cornell University with a specialization in philology and Scandinavian languages in particular. He produced several works on the topic of Norse history, most notably "The Finding of Wineland the Good."

North Ludlow Beamish (1797 - 1872), was an Irish military writer who was one of the earliest scholars to publish on the topic of the pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic voyages, in his work "The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century, with Notes on the Early Settlement of the Irish in the Western Hemisphere" in 1841.

Rasmus B. Anderson (1846-1936) was an American professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and it was primarily due to his 1874 book "America Not Discovered by Columbus" that the entire topic of the Norse settlement of North America came to public attention. He was also instrumental in originating Leif Erikson Day, which is still observed as a holiday by the US Federal government.