Paul Knudson

This article is about a Norwegian navigator of the 14th century. For the 20th century American author who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Knutson , see Revilo Pendleton Oliver .

Count Paul Knudson , actually Pål Knutsson , was a Norwegian civil servant in Bergen and an officer in the bodyguard of the Swedish King Magnus Eriksson , who was also King of Norway from 1319 to 1355 .

Paul Knudson Expedition

The Kensington runestone was interpreted as an alleged message from the missing Knudson expedition

Magnus had received a cry for help from the Norwegian Grænlendingar , who had settled Greenland since 982 and had been subjugated by Norway in 1261, but had been forgotten since the beginning of the 14th century. The pious king, concerned about the situation of the Christian communities in Greenland, thereupon commissioned Knudson in 1354 to go in search of these Norwegian settlements. The king's written order has been preserved and is kept in the Royal Museum in Copenhagen.

With a Knorr and a crew consisting mainly of Norwegians in addition to a few Swedes , Knudson sailed from Bergen to Greenland in 1355. They found the former western settlement destroyed and abandoned, whereupon Knudson suspected that the Grænlendingar had fled to the western mainland ( Vinland ) from the attacking Inuit . According to the Scandinavian Hjalmar Rued Holand (1872–1963), Knudson is said to have reached the North American continent in search of the refugees without having found them. Together with search teams that he sent ashore, Knudson was now also considered missing.

Holand brought the runestone from Kensington in connection with the Knudson expedition, but the inscription later turned out to be a forgery. In 1362, when the inscription was supposedly dating, the remains of the expedition were already back in Iceland. They returned to Sweden in 1363 or 1364. Norway was meanwhile to Magnus' son Håkon VI. fallen, the new king stopped the connections to Greenland. Håkon's wife and successor Margarethe I (from 1380) finally forbade calling at Greenland.

literature

• Erich Rackwitz : Stranger Paths - Unknown Seas , pp. 67–70. Urania-Verlag, Leipzig / Jena / Berlin 1980
• Austrian Geographical Society: Communications from the Austrian Geographical Society , volumes 91–92, page 246. Vienna 1949
• Leonard George Carr Laughton, Roger Charles Anderson, William Gordon Perrin: The Mariner's Mirror , Volume 45, Page 345. Society for Nautical Research, London 1959
• Lutz Mohr : The Norwegian-Swedish "Vinland Expedition" under Poul Knutsson in the years 1355 to 1362 (?) - the last offshoot of northern America discoveries . In: ICELAND REPORTS. Journal of the Society of Friends of Iceland V. (GdFI), Vol. 33, Issue 1-2, Hamburg / Reykjavík 1992, pp. 10-18
• Lutz Mohr and Robert Liese: Vikings between Pomerania and the Arctic Circle. Truth or sagas . Horn-Bad Meinberg: Leo-Verlag Robert Liese 1997, 2nd edit. 2000 edition. Chapter XXXIV: The last Vinland trip under Poul Knutsson , pp. 271–287

Web links

• History of Medieval Greenland
• Diplomatarium Norvegicum (volumes I – XXI)