Local Folklore

The Vinland Sagas and Other Legends of Early European Contact

The idea that Europeans may have arrived in North America before Columbus is not a new idea by any means. Nearly from the outset of the Post-Columbus interest in the Americas the early explorers and fisherman alike were reporting European style kingdoms, inhabitants with blond hair and old ruins they attributed to European craftsmanship, or at least something above what they were willing to credit to the "savages" of the New World. In Ohio there were earthworks found which were often explained this way and Champlain himself found a wooden cross on the Shore of the Minas Basin which was recognized as the universal sign of visitation by Christian nations. The origin of this cross was never explained, but it likely came from a trading or fishing fleet. There has been speculation that Portuguese and other fisherman may have been using the Great Banks and visiting Newfoundland long before Columbus arrived.

Even before the Americas had been discovered there were tales circulating around Europe about islands and continents to the far West across the Atlantic. Wayward fisherman cast out to sea by bad weather would occasionally return with wondrous tales of kingdoms across the ocean such as Atlantis, Brazil (from which the modern nation takes its name), the Island of Seven Cities, Antilla, Frisland, the Isles of the Blessed, St. Brendan's Island, and of course Vinland itself were all reported in this way long before any concrete discoveries. Even China has tales of explorers setting out across the Pacific and discovering a land with strange people and beasts with branches protruding from their heads which sound very reminiscent of moose. Though mixed in with a lot of fancy and Euro-centrism, these tales point to the fact that there may have been contact with the Americas before the official record states.

At the turn of the 19th century there had been significant scholarly and popular attention on the Vinland Sagas and their possible connection to the Maritimes and New England. The Sagas told the tale of Lief Eirikson, among others, and his journey to a new land to the south west beyond Greenland. This journey was supposed to have taken place somewhere around the year 1000 A.D, nealy five centuries before the arrival of Columbus on the same shores. Through the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century scholars, amateur historians and archaeologists tried to uncover and prove the location of Vinland, arguing that various ruins such as the Newport Tower, the ruins under the memorial Norumbega Tower and the Dighton Stone were remnants of the lost Norse colony. All of these were discredited in time, helping to place the sagas among the myriad of other fantastical stories of legendary lands across the Atlantic. Making the task of proving them worse, there were issues with the distances between locations described in the Sagas. The distances do not match any real world distances on the east coast when compared to the climates described in the sagas. This had often been a point which was used to discredit the sagas and also made it a nightmare to allow any one place to claim ownership of being Vinland.

What little credence had been given to the sagas by doubters had been due to two things which set the Vinland Sagas apart from their counterparts: the impeccable reputation of Icelandic lore for its historical detail, combined with the fact that they were uniquely mundane in their descriptions. The sags focused on the types of plants that grew there (the name Vinland supposedly was given due to the presence of grapes in the wilderness of the land), on details about the lengths of the day, the forest growth, the events of the colony and the nature of the people they met there. This was a notable departure from the other stories of immortals, demons, leviathans and other incredible things which populated other stories of lands across the Atlantic, and had given them at least an air of credibility. But what finally proved the stories had nothing in particular to do with the stories themselves. It was the discovery of a settlement at L'anse aux Meadows which finally gave the proof need to be able to say that the Norse had visited the east coast some 400 years before Columbus. Recent discoveries on Baffin Island may expand the picture further, providing evidence for a prominent presence in North America than first thought.

The discovery of a Norse settlement in North America has made the Vinland Sagas the only verified legends of European contact before the arrival of Columbus. It is still unclear to what extent the Norse settled in the New World, but with the discovery of L'anse aux Meadows it is generally accepted that they at least had a few outposts in the north, likely for the access to lumber which the Greenland settlement so sorely lacked. Permanent or large scale settlement was unlikely, as there has been no written or archaeological evidence for it. The Sagas themselves record some failed attempts at settlement, but nothing that ended well or lasted more than a few years.

However, despite the lack of evidence of permanent settlement there were two nations rumored to exist in the New World when the other European nations arrived which both became connected to the Norse. Norumbega and Saguenay were reported by early European fisherman and explorers were the original impetus for the 19th century idea that the Vinland Sagas might have some truth behind them. The legends of Saguenay came from the Natives of the St. Lawrence who told of fair skinned, yellow haired people who lived up the Saguenay river. This immediately signaled the presence of Europeans to the explorers. The legend of Saguenay may have been based on the visitations of Norse tradesman especially considering that the Saguenay river was a portage route to the Hudson Bay which opened to the north where the Norsemen had been present at least until the 14th century in Greenland. Norumbega, on the other hand was a legend of European origin first reported by Jean Allenfonse, a french navigator. He reported having headed south from Newfoundland and finding a city on a great river in a bay full of islands where the inhabitants spoke something which resembled Latin. Champlain and others associated this with the Penobscot region. Though the original tales never connected the city to the Norse, later antiquarians connected this to the stories of Vinland primarily due to its obvious similarity to the old Norse word for Norway, "Norbergia". The connection was further driven home by the citation of a "normanvilla" or Norman Village on Verrazzano's map of the east coast of North America from 1524.

Legends of the riches of both of these nations circulated through Europe and the early North American colonies. Though often forgotten or ignored today these stories of Pre-Columbian contact form an important part of the story of early exploration. The search for legendary cities and kingdoms in North Americ helped drive exploration into the interior and along the coasts of the New World. Cabot, Champlain, the Cortereal's and nearly every other early explorer including Columbus himself had come to America in the first place searching for the semi-legendary kingdom of Cathay which had been described by Marco Polo nearly two centuries beforehand. It was the original impetus to cross the Atlantic and for the early part of European contact with the Americas the search for these legendary kingdoms or passageways to them drove much of the exploration of the continent. Several of explorers, such as Champlain, even went looking for Norumbega and Saguenay themselves.

The Vinland Sagas are the only verified legend out of the myriad of legends and stories about European visits to the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and have helped rewrite the history which was generally accepted for nearly five hundred years. They are a singular ray of light among the countless fanciful tales of crossings of the Atlantic before Columbus but also an important reminder of the gaps in our knowledge of history which all of these early New World legends played with and that while many of these are simply perpetuating the Old World-centric views of the early explorers some of them may have more truth to them than we know.

For anyone interested in the Vinland Sagas the full text of several of the tales can be found on the Internet Archive. Readers may also fine Ebon Norton Horsfords Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega interesting despite its inaccuracies.

Witches, Witchcraft and the Evil Eye

Far from the powerful and over the top images of witches portrayed by popular culture or even other areas of the world, witches in Nova Scotia have traditionally had a certain element of the mundane to them. But this did not mean they weren't feared or a force to be reckoned with. A run in with a witch, or even being on their bad side could ruin someone.

Witches are an odd sort of thing in the traditional lore of our province. They look like everyone else and act much the same. They live in and are knosn, often openly as witches. Sure, they might be generally avoided out of uneasy or fear, but still, people would visit them, talk to them on the street when they ran into them. In in some ways they were. Some elements of witchcraft could even be possessed unwillingly, like the evil eye, which could inflict harm without the originator even knowing they had the supernatural knack.

Witches were either male or female (though usually female) members of the community, but had an ability to "witch" others. This was almost exclusively a hex which brought about some form of barrenness or bad luck. They could dry up cows utters, cause animals to expire, cause cream to spoil, horses to become stubborn, crops to fail or hunts to go unsuccessful. This hardly seems detrimental today, but in the earlier days of the province, particularly in agrarian societies, this could ruin a livelihood or jeopardize someone's ability to support their family.

In some stories a witch could torment their victim usually by taking the form of an animal, such as a cat, slip into the victim's house and keptthe awake at night. This form of harassment was usually accompanied by general maladies such as nausea, lack of appetite and loss of weight.

Witches "witched" others for two reasons in our lore, one conscious and one usually unconscious. Consciously, witches would put hexes on others when they felt slighted or jealous. Unconsciously witches could cast the evil eye, a powerful look of envy which could bring about the same results as their hexes

Sympathetic magic was abound in our province, in many ways an accept fact of life. Witches and victims alike made use of it. Witches to hex and the victims to retaliate or break the hex. In earlier days of Nova Scotia, and European culture in general, sympathetic magic was a fact of life, it made the world go round. For many it was one of the basic tenants of the universe. The facts that "like produces like" and that object which were once together remained linked were the foundations of folk belief throughout Europe and its descendant countries. Relics could have the healing powers of saints and representations could influence the represented even at a distance. By these properties, in the same way a voodoo doll was supposed to work, physical pain or maladies could be inflicted on a representation and transferred to the represented. If you look anywhere in folk belief you will see at least a trace of these elements, though sometimes the necessary associations and logic to make sense of the practice has been lost to time.

While some cures for a hex were simple, others were more complex and involved the victim fighting fire with fire, making use of sympathetic magic to give the witch a taste of her own medicine. In the case of the evil eye, if it caught your cattle, a ritual show of disdain, such as whipping or beating would often defeat the curse. If you could show that you thought the cows were worthless, the witch would logically follow suit. Many other cures involved elements of magic. One of the most common cures involved the stabbing of pins and needles in red flannel to cause the witch pain to discourage her continued torment. In this ritual the flannel appears to represent the witch's flesh. The pins represent nothing in particular, they are merely tools for a means. However, they do have a potential significance of their own. This pins and needles would have been iron in the early days. In the European tradition supernatural beings such as fairies were adverse to iron. Beyond the pins, most cures for the evil eye make use of this idea as well, calling for the beating your cattle with something full of iron nails.

Of course, like all parts of folk culture in reality witches are not so cut and dry as above, but this article should give a good overview of the basic and most common elements. More outlandish and familiar stories about witches flying on broom sticks exist, but are less common and are more specifically regional or on the fringes of our folklore. Individual elements are often muddled when the lore is looked at as a whole. For example, while a many appear to have believed that declining a witches request to borrow something was asking for trouble, some other felt that if you gave the witch what they asked for then by the properties of sympathetic magic they would have power over you through that object. Others still believed that if you were already hexed if the witch came asking for something, lending or giving it to them would break the ill will and thus the hex. Others still believed that refusing the witch at this point was the best course of action.

While this may make examining witch-lore overwhelming and pointless, looking at the individual elements themselves, how ever they are used, can cast some light on the subject. Borrowing was nearly always part of a Nova Scotian witch tale, regardless of how. This same kind of muddling confusion, particularly common in the New World where so many traditions melded as Europeans and others flooded in and lived in closer confines than in the Old. Borrowing, or some other kind of neighborly contract was always present. So was livelihood (in the cursing of the cattle). On the whole, many of our witch stories appear to have centered around the complicated social structures of rural life. Rural towns in Nova Scotia, as with elsewhere, were heavily co-dependent; good will and good relations with your neighbours could make all the difference if your crops failed one year. The witches seem to have been drawn out of this. In many stories they act as reinforcers, heavy consequences for not doing your goodly duty as a neighbour and aiding the less able and fortune. In most of these tales the witches seem to be old woman, and thus less capable of taking care of themselves in an agrarian town. On the other hand, the witches who cursed based on having been giving items are a sort of outcast, ostracized in most communities for biting the hand that fed them. In these stories they themselves are the breachers of the social contracts. It is often these witches who are given associations with the devil and black arts. The spurned witches are given these characteristics less often.

In the case of the Evil Eye particularly, the stories also center around the uncomfortable reality of jealousy. Traditionally, there was almost a fear of doing too well for yourself and not just out of christian modesty. Too good a crop, too much money, too fine clothing, too attractive and healthy a child could draw the bitterness and ire of those who had not been so blessed. While this could have physical consequences, like vandalism, theft or worse, in some cases there was believed to be supernatural consequences as well. Many sudden turns of bad luck, whether cows that would not give milk, crops that failed, children who suddenly grew ill this was often blamed on the Evil Eye. These stories recognize that in a co-dependent society. Doing better than others could have been viewed as a hording of fortune, that the well off weren't putting in their fair share to the community. In the same lines as the borrowing stories, the evil eye has a fair bit to do with the social contract of these rural towns and their complicated social structures that the townsfolk had to navigate.

The counter measures against witches appear to have less to do with social structures and more with magic itself. The grand majority of the cures involve causing pain or discomfort to the witch by sympathetic magic. In some cases, parts of cursed cattle were stuck full of pins and needles to inflict pain on the witch, or milk from them was boiled with pins. In both cases this is an element of taking something of the afflicted cattle and performing a ritual on it. By all appearances, the logic was that in the process of the witch's curse the afflicted animal had gained a sympathetic connection to the witch which could be turned against her.

Of course, with the grand majority of early settlers in the province being of Christian European descent, witch-lore is tied up in church matters as well. A lot of the "social contract" discussion above also has to do with contracts to the church and God. Especially in German tales the witches are often viewed as being servants of the devil. Witches were thought to have cursed their own parents (again severing an important social tie and contact) and to have sold their souls to the devil. And just as the devout victims in the story often repelled the witches with open bibles, the witches themselves has a "black art book" which was essentially an antithesis to it. This association with the devil also shown in the counter-spell of boiling or filling animal hearts with needles. In many German tales it is not part of the afflicted animal which must to be used in the counter-spell but the heart of any cloven hoofed animal. This is likely due to the idea that the devil himself had cloven hooves any through the animals similarity to him and the witch's contract with him that a magical link could be made.

Anyone wishing to delve into this topic further should look to Helen Creighton's work. BLUENOSE MAGIC has an extensive collection of witch-lore, and her FOLKLORE OF LUNENBURG COUNTY has a chapter dedicated to the regional manifestations there. Anyone ambitious enough to delve into the nitty-gritty of folk magic and belief should look for a copy of Frazer's groundbreaking THE GOLDEN BOUGH.