Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois and the Vinland Viking Expeditions in the Nineteenth-Century Settler Imagination

Abstract

Abstract Between the mid-1700s and the Great War, people in Europe and North America were gripped by a frenzy of enthusiasm for all things Viking. Eminent scholars and ordinary readers discovered an insatiable curiosity for medieval Scandinavia, imagined land of dragon-prowed ships and saga heroes. Among these enthusiasts was the prolific French historian Pierre-Eugène Beauvois (1835–1912). Beauvois was fascinated by the Norse voyages to continental North America, known in Old Norse as “Vinland.” By arguing for extensive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas, Beauvois stole the glory enjoyed by Spain and Italy as the first “discoverers” of the “New World,” shifting it to Norse populations that Beauvois linked to France. Such a vindication of early voyages by ethnic “cousins” of the French presented France as genetically destined to colonize foreign lands, thus legitimating their conquest of Africa. Yet Beauvois’s arguments extended beyond simply positing a meaningful Norse presence in medieval North America. He maintained that Indigenous culture was really just a watered-down residue of transplanted European culture. By asserting that central components of Indigenous cultures such as language and religion derived from medieval European models, Beauvois usurped Native positionalities and affirmed the rightness of the settler colonial project.