In addition to their exploits as raiders, traders, and settlers, the Vikings were accomplished explorers. Nowhere else was this aspect of their achievements more noteworthy than in the region lying west of Scandinavia and northwest of the British Isles. This was, they found, an enormous area, encompassing several small island groups, Iceland, Greenland, and the seas surrounding them. But fortunately for them it contained islands, both large and small, spaced in such a way that settling on one island created a base from which to explore the one or ones lying farther west. As a result, in the space of about a century and a half, groups of Vikings island-hopped across the entire North Atlantic region. Eventually they reached the shores of North America, a full five centuries before Columbus did.
Some modern observers suggest that this series of discoveries and settlements was, given the Vikings' boldness as a people and mastery of seafaring, almost unavoidable. According to Magnus Magnusson:
There is an unbroken chain of inevitable progression between the discovery and subsequent settlement of, first, Iceland, then Greenland, and then Vinland [in North America]. The discovery and attempted settlement of Vinland were the logical outcomes of the great Scandinavian migrations that spilled over northern Europe in the early Middle Ages, the ultimate reach of the Norse surge to the west.
It was on the Atlantic seaboard of North America that this huge impetus was finally exhausted.62
World History
