The Vinland Map

Abstract

The discovery of the Vinland Map and the recent publication of its description* has been attended with considerable publicity on both sides of the Atlantic, in publications ranging from learned journals to glossies. Briefly, the map, provisionally dated about 1450, was discovered by an antiquarian bookseller of New Haven, Connecticut, in circumstances which so far have precluded a proper examination of its history. It has, as a recent reviewer put it, ‘no ancestors, no close relations and no descendants’. Its importance to the student of the history of navigation and discovery, however, is that (assuming it is authentic) it is by far the earliest surviving example of a map portraying any part of the Americas, and it ostensibly provides the first evidence for an early school of Norse cartography, for Vinland can clearly be identified with that part of the American continent settled by the Norsemen in the latter part of the tenth century.