Helge Ingstad, Discoverer of Viking Site, Dies at 101

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/30/world/30INGS.html

Helge Ingstad, Discoverer of Viking Site, Dies at 101

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

 Helge Ingstad, the Norwegian writer and adventurer who followed a hunch and
an ancient map to identify the place where Vikings landed in North America
500 years before Columbus, died Thursday in a hospital in Oslo. He was 101.

Mr. Ingstad transformed a myth into scientific fact in the spring of 1960
when he found ruins almost a millennium old on the north coast of
Newfoundland. Though many doubted that the fishing village, L'Anse aux
Meadows, represented Leif Ericson's fabled Vinland, expeditions led by Mr.
Ingstad and his wife, Ann- Stine, over the next seven summers uncovered
houses of Norse origin.

Definitive proof came as objects were discovered so obviously and
conspicuously of Norse origin that they could not be disputed. Radiocarbon
analysis established they were about 1,000 years old. Particularly
convincing was the discovery in 1964 of a spinner for yarn, the first proven
Norse artifact in North America. This discovery implied that the settlers
included women who attended to household tasks while the men tried to
establish a permanent settlement.

William W. Fitzhugh, the curator of an exhibition last year at the National
Museum of Natural History in Washington and the American Museum of Natural
History in Manhattan, said the Ingstads' work "proved that Norsemen, Vikings
if you will, were actually in America 500 years before Columbus."

To Mr. Ingstad, this was headily inspirational stuff, and in the final lines
of his book, "Westward to Vinland," he tried to see the Newfoundland coast
as it looked to the Vikings seeing it for the first time. "Young sailors
once stood under a square sail, gazing wonderingly across the water to where
a strange shore rose about the sea - a New World," he wrote.

Mr. Ingstad's entire life seemed to be a quest for newer shores. He
abandoned a lucrative law career to become a trapper in the Canadian Arctic,
served as a governor in Greenland and lived with the Apache Indians and
Alaskan Eskimos. He wrote novels and a play.

Three years ago, he told NTB, the Norwegian news agency "I came into the
world at the right time. I got to do everything. I have it in me like
wealth, the experiences and the people."

Helge Marcus Ingstad was born on Dec. 30, 1899, in Meraaker, on Norway's
west coast. He practiced law in Levanger before striking off on a life of
adventure in 1926. 

He spent four years as an animal trapper and hunter northwest of Great Slave
Lake in Canada, then wrote extensively about his experiences. Percy
Hutchison, reviewing his book, "The Land of Feast and Famine" (Knopf, 1933),
said the adventure tale read more true than tall. He called the book "a fine
narrative of consistent courage, extremely well written."

In 1932 and 1933, Mr. Ingstad served as governor of a portion of Greenland
that was briefly claimed by Norway in the 1930's. It was the same area where
Eric the Red lived and built. Mr. Ingstad then served for three years as
governor of the Svalbard Islands, a Norwegian territory in the Arctic.

He next conducted research on a group of Apaches in Arizona and Mexico who,
he said, had not previously been contacted by white men. During World War
II, he served first as a leader of a relief action in Norway and then in the
underground resistance movement.

In 1941, the dashingly handsome adventurer married Ann-Stine Moe, a
respected archaeologist. They became professional collaborators. She died in
1997. He is survived by their daughter, Benedicte.

In the 1950's, the couple gained familiarity with ancient Norse ruins from
excavations in Greenland. He intensively studied the original Icelandic
sagas, and every available interpretation. Particularly useful was a
pamphlet written in 1914 by William Azariah Munn, a Newfoundlander who made
a name for himself in the cod liver oil business. Mr. Munn used the old
sagas to theorize the site of Vinland was just 10 miles from where Mr.
Ingstad ultimately found it.

But before investigating Newfoundland, Mr. Ingstad roamed coastal areas of
New England and Nova Scotia by foot, boat and airplane without finding any
archaeological evidence. Finally, he arrived at the spot identified in an
Icelandic map from the 1670's as Promontorium Windlandiae. He asked a
fisherman, George Decker, if there were any strange ruins in the vicinity.

"Yes, follow me," Mr. Decker said.

"Decker took me west of the village to a beautiful place with lots of grass
and a small creek and some mounds in the tall grass," Mr. Ingstad said in an
interview with The New York Times last year. "It was very clear that this
was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen
assumed it was an old Indian site. But Indians didn't use that kind of
buildings and houses."

Ensuing digs confirmed that the ruins were Vinland, although grapes never
grew in Newfoundland. (Vinland is believed to derive from the ancient Norse
word for pasture.) The place seems to have been a base used by Vikings to
spend winters, repair boats and mount expeditions to what are now Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick. 

Archaeologists have found butternuts, a white walnut considered a delicacy
by the Vikings, buried there. The closest place where butternuts grow is New
Brunswick.

Mr. Ingstad lived on a nine-acre estate in Oslo, where a polar bear rug was
spread on the floor of his home and mounted ox heads decorated the walls. He
attended the unveiling of his own statue in January.

The intrepid explorer always insisted that his discovery did not undercut
Columbus's achievement, although facts, he also suggested, are facts.

"He made a wonderful discovery," he said in an interview with The Ottawa
Citizen last year. "But he was a few hundred years later."