The Vinland Millennium
The Vinland Millennium deals with the discoveries made in the New World by Nordic seafarers around the year 1000, in particular by Leif the Lucky, Thorvald Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni. Author Páll Bergţórsson, working on the Vinland sagas - the Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga - traces the Vinland voyages step by step, mapping out where they travelled and where they camped. The accounts in the saga are compared with other information on Viking navigation, climate, vegetation and animal life in the New World, and with the folkways of the Native Americans and the Inuits. But Páll goes further in his quest for a solution to the enigma of Vinland. He himself travelled to North America to pursue his research; he examined local conditions there, and found, among other things wild grapes and "self-sown wheat", or wild rice. The book includes passages from his diaries, and photographs from his field trips, which lays further foundation to his theory.

The author: Páll Bergţórsson (b. 1923) is well known in Iceland for his work, research and writing in his field, meteorology. This book is, to some extent a new departure for him. He examines the sagas from a new and exciting point of view which is, nonetheless, firmly based in scholarship.

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