What happend to Vinland?

Question

Can someone tell me what happened to Vinland, and why it was left by the Vikings or if something happened to them?

Answer 1

Nobody truly knows the answer to that, however here is some information on Vinland that might form an accurate answer in your mind:

The country named "Vinland," or Wineland, began to be mentioned by European scholars almost 1000 years ago, and the name has echoed down the centuries. To mediaeval Europe, Vinland was a fabulous but vaguely known region of great forests and wild grapes, located somewhere in the western Atlantic. Today we know enough about this land to sketch its general location on a map. We can also reconstruct the historical events leading up to the discovery and naming of this country by Norse explorers from Iceland and Greenland.

The Norse adventure in the western Atlantic grew out of the Viking Age, a brief period during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. At this time, Scandinavian peoples suddenly exploded out of their northern European homelands. Isolated Viking raids along European coasts gradually developed into Norse armies that seized and occupied large areas of western Europe. In the east, Norse adventurers settled the river valleys of Russia, exploring and trading as far as Baghdad and Constantinople.

For some land-hungry Viking farmers, the most attractive land lay in the islands of the North Atlantic. Two such groups of islands, the Shetlands and Faeroes, were stepping-stones to the Norse discovery of Iceland. Between about AD 870 and 930, immigrants flocked to Iceland, which by the end of the period had an estimated population of 30 000 people.

Not much later, around AD 980, farming country was discovered along the fjords of Greenland, apparently by the outcast Eirik the Red. Immigrants arrived to build colonies on the southwestern coast of the new country, and soon the population of Greenland grew to an estimated 2000 people.

Answer 2

Well nobody can truly answer that question, because the location of Vinland has never been discovered.

The most likely location is the island of Newfoundland, Canada where the ruins of the only known viking settlement on North America has been found. There is also archeological evidence which shows that much of the island was used to farm grapes (Vinland means vine land or land of grapes).

Odds are the vikings never went through with a full colonization of North America. They were a relatively small civilisation and also relatively primative. The prospect of new lands probably did not appeal to them as much as the idea of taking land owned by their foemen. The land of Vinland was probably a last line of defence, a place to continue the Anglo-Saxon way of life, should scandinavia have been conquered by enemies.