Some evidence suggests that at some point the Vikings realized the Earth is a sphere, though their explanations for that fact were often convoluted and flawed. In the following excerpt from a thirteenth-century Norwegian document, a father gives one of these explanations to his son.
If you take a lighted candle and set it in a room, you may expect it to light up the entire interior, unless something should hinder, though the room be quite large. But if you take an apple and hang it close to the flame, so near that it is heated, the apple will darken nearly half the room or even more. However, if you hang the apple near the wall, it will not get hot; the candle will light up the whole house; and the shadow on the wall where the apple hangs will be scarcely half as large as the apple itself. From this you may infer that the earth-circle is round like a ball and not equally near the sun at every point. But where the curved surface lies nearest the sun's path, there will the greatest heat be.
Laurence M. Larson, trans., The King's Mirror. Www. mediumaevum. com/75years/mirror/sec1.html#V.
And they are not really abundant until you reach southern New England."68
It appears, therefore, that the building of Leifsbudir and the finding of the grapes occurred in two separate places, and the author of the saga later mistakenly assumed they were the same place. Most archaeologists now agree with Richard Hall, who suggests that Leif's village may well have been "an explorers' and exploiters' base, a way-station from which to range out in search of valuable natural resources that could be brought back [to the main camp] for storage."69 If that is true, Vinland was probably located farther south, maybe in Maine, Cape Cod (in Massachusetts), or Narragansett Bay (in Rhode Island).
World History
