Vinland map

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The Vinland Card ;
Yale University , Kniecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library , MS 350A

The Vinland map is a presumably historical world map , the authenticity of which is doubted by large parts of the professional world. While the parchment certainly dates from the late Middle Ages , the doubts are mainly based on the characteristics of the ink used and the question of whether it was first produced in the 20th century or as early as the Middle Ages. The scientific controversy surrounding the authenticity of the card continues and no clear evidence in one direction or the other has been found.

content

The Vinland map would be the earliest map that maps a stretch of coast of North America , and names a "Bjarni" and a "Leif" as discoverers of Vinland and thus America. In addition to Africa , Asia and Europe, it shows three islands in the North Atlantic with the names “Isolanda Ibernica” ( Iceland ), “Grouelanda” ( Greenland ) and “Vinland” with the text “Vinilanda Insula a Byarno reperta et leipho sociis” - “The island Vinland, discovered by the companions Bjarni and Leif ”.

The following text can be read on the card at the top left:

"Volente deo post longum iter ab insula Gronelanda per meridiem ad reliquas extremas partes occidentalis occeani maris iter facientes ad austrum inter glacies byarnus et leiphus erissonius socij terram nouam uberrimam videlicet viniferam inuenerunt quam Vinilandam [or: Vimlandam appellauer] ins. Henricus Gronelande regionumque finitimarum sedis apostolicae episcopus legatus in hac terra spaciosa vero et opulentissima in postremo anno pontificis [or: patris] sanctissimi nostri Pascali accessit in nomine dei omnipotentis longo tempore mansit estiuo ad de brumonemeland voluntilli postea superior processit. "

“With the will of God and after a long journey south from the island of Greenland to the other outermost regions of the western ocean through the ice, the companions Bjarni Herjólfsson and Leif Eriksson discovered a new, very fertile, namely wine-bearing land , which they called the island of Vinland. Henricus [= Erik], Bishop of the Holy See of Greenland and neighboring countries, sent to this vast and extremely rich country, arrived in the last year of our most holy father Paschal, stayed there in the name of Almighty God for a long time, both in summer and in summer in winter and then returned to Greenland to the north-east, and then continued his journey in obedient obedience to higher will. "

Both texts largely correspond in their content to the circumstances that have been passed down in the Icelandic sagas and other sources.

In several Icelandic annals for the year 1121 it is reported that Erik, Bishop of Greenland, searched for Vinland. There is at least an approximate agreement with regard to the term of office of Pope Paschal II.

In detail, the assignment of the names mentioned in the above texts to the historically valid persons of the Icelandic Sagas is controversial, whereby the doubts are based at least in part on the controversy about the authenticity of the map.

history

The map can only be traced back to 1957 to a bookseller from Barcelona who offered it for sale, bound together with a late medieval copy of the Historia Tartaorum . The Historia Tartaorum ("History of the Tatars") is an account of the missionary trip of the Franciscan Johannes de Plano Carpini to the Mongols in the years 1245 to 1247. Lawrence Witten, an antiquarian from Connecticut , bought the map and the book for $ 3,500.

Made possible by the donation of $ 250,000 from an initially anonymous patron ( Paul Mellon ), the card came to Yale University in 1959 . In 1995, Yale University had the map reprinted for the first time in 1965, almost unchanged, and without reacting to the criticism it had since then. The insurance value was set at 25 million US dollars in 1995.

Importance to science

That the fertile land that the Grænlendingar discovered in the west and called Vinland was on the North American continent and that the Vikings reached America, Newfoundland to be precise , is now archaeologically certain. The remains of a Viking settlement on Newfoundland near L'Anse aux Meadows, discovered around 1960, bear witness to this . In this respect, the Vinland map has no additional historical source value: all information it contains is already known from written sources. This supported the suspicion that it might be a modern forgery.

The Norwegian-American historian Kirsten A. Seaver considers the German cartographer and Jesuit Joseph Fischer to be the possible creator of the map.

Debate on authenticity

Whether the card is a modern forgery or whether it can actually come from the 15th century is highly controversial. The main objects of discussion are the following properties of the map and the entire manuscript: the parchment, the ink used, fonts, language features and the cartographic representation.

parchment

The parchment on the card is beyond doubt genuine. The radiocarbon investigation dates it to around 1434. The map and the Historia Tartaorum could be identified as the original components of a codex based on matching wormholes , which mainly contained a partial copy of the widespread “ Speculum historiale ” of Vincent de Beauvais (today Yale, Kniecke Library MS 350) . This also clarified a previously incomprehensible text fragment on the back of the parchment sheet, which in incorrect post- medieval Latin (instead of partis it should be parti in the ablative) describes the card as "delineatio prima pars secunda pars tertia partis speculi", i.e. H. "Map, first volume (and) second volume of the third part (Speculum Historiale) of the Speculums (Maius des Vincent von Beauvais)". The “Speculum historiale” and the travelogue were undoubtedly written on parchment in the middle of the 15th century.

For the 16th century, based on a passage in the text, the existence of map drawings relating to the previously discovered land in the west is suggested. A Sir Erlend Thordson is said to have owned a small book with a map in 1568, in which “the boundaries of Markland , Einfœtingjaland ('Land of the Infooter'), and Little Helluland , together with Greenland, to the west of it, where apparently the good Terra Florida begins ”.

Characteristics of the font

A second codex has been known since 2004 that contains the same compilation of texts (Cistercian monastery Lucerne , around 1340) and was possibly the model for the Yale copy. However, the Lucerne copy does not contain a map. According to palaeographic criteria, the map legends of the Vinland map do not come from the writer who copied the two texts. A serious palaeographical and codicological investigation, as requested in 1966, was not initiated by the owning library for a long time; there were therefore massive doubts that the card was put on the parchment at the same time as the texts. The humanistic spelling of the ae ligature appeared as a foreign body in the otherwise humanistically unaffected bastard script .

Inks

Doubts were also expressed about the map drawing itself. The legends of the map and its border were drawn with black ink, the map itself with brownish ink. The brownish ink contains the titanium dioxide anatase . Electron microscopic examinations seemed to suggest that the pigment was formed not by pulverization but by precipitation - a process that has only been used since 1923. According to findings from 1987, however, anatase can also be found in real documents from the 15th century, since it can form from natural mineral components with a certain ink formulation, iron gall ink . In July 2002, however, it was found, using Raman spectroscopy , that the map - in contrast to the authentic parts of the text of the Codex - was not made with an iron gall ink, but with a carbon-based ink. This initially seemed to prove that the drawing on the map could not have been made before 1923.

For René Larsen, the headmaster of the School of Conservation at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts , the authenticity of the document is beyond doubt: "After five years of intensive studies, we have not found any evidence that the Vinland card is forged" - especially since then Particles of anatase were found in the ink , a rare mineral that can form in iron gall ink but not in carbon-based ink. According to Larsen, the anatase comes from the sand that was sprinkled over it to dry.

Cartographic representation

The cartographic representation also indicated that the Vinland map was not authentic. The map depicts geographical conditions that were not yet known to the navigators of the 9th to 15th centuries. The representation of Greenland as an island in particular seems anachronistic, since other maps showed Greenland centuries later than to the north without boundaries. The northern extension of the island was only in the 19th and 20th centuries. Century has been mapped. While Iceland and Greenland are reproduced very accurately, Scandinavia shows the typical medieval distortions and displacements. The graphic inland structure of Vinland with two bays or fjords is also regarded as highly atypical; other islands and coastlines are shown in a very undifferentiated way. The three western islands are also outside the oval shape within which the other coastlines are arranged. If one admitted that the draftsman intended an oval shape and considered it necessary, then this oval shape would nonetheless be preserved. Because the line of this oval shape would have to be thought of from the center of the map along the northern and western lines of the islands. This could thus be seen as a sufficient motivation for the representation of Greenland and Vinland as islands. These islands could also be understood as rounding off the oval shape to the north and west.

Furthermore, proponents of the forgery thesis claim that even the “modern orientation” of the map (orientation to the north) would be unprecedented in the Latin tradition before the 15th century.

Linguistic features

It is also unusual that the text speaks of an event in the last year of a Pope. Normally the year itself would be mentioned as a cardinal number .

See also

literature

Fiction

Movie

  • The legend of the Viking map. (OT: The Vinland Map. ) Documentary, Canada, Great Britain, 2013, 46 min., Written and directed: Kenton Vaughn, production: History Channel , series: ZDFneo : Revealed: Secrets of Antiquity , GEO Television : Treasures Decoded - hunters of the lost treasures , ServusTV : Revealed - Rätsel der Geschichte , (OT: Treasures Decoded ), original first broadcast: March 24, 2013 on the Smithsonian Channel, German first broadcast: August 17, 2014 on ZDFneo, summary by fernsehserien.de , preview video from Smithsonian Channel.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b N.N. : Worm tracks in the Viking map. In: Der Spiegel , August 3, 2009, No. 32, p. 97, short message.
  2. ^ Brendan Borrell: Pre-Columbian Map of North America Could Be Authentic - Or not. In: Scientific American , July 22, 2009.
  3. ↑ Melissa Snell: Vinland Map is genuine! Or is it? ( Memento from April 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: historymedren.about.com , July 22, 2009 (English).
  4. ^ After PG Foote: On the Vinland Legends on the Vinland Map. In: Saga-Book , No. 17, 1966–69, pp. 73–89, pp. 74 ff., ( Full text as PDF file ; English).
  5. ↑ See the English translation of the text after Skelton 1965, p. 140, quoted in Geraldine Barnes: Viking America: The First Millennium. Boydell & Brewer, New York 2001, p. 76: “By God's will, after a long voyage from the island of Greenland to the south toward the most distant remaining parts of the western ocean sea, sailing southward amidst the ice, the companions Bjarni and Leif Eiriksson discovered a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines, which island they named Vinland. Eric [Henricus], legate of the Apostolic See and bishop of Greenland and the neighboring regions, arrived in this truly vast and very rich land, in the name Almighty God, in the last year of our most blessed father Pascal, remained a long time in both summer and winter, and later returned northeastward toward Greenland and then proceeded in most humble obedience to the will of his Superiors. ”Likewise Derek Hayes in: Historical Atlas of Canada , 2006, p. 10.
  6. ↑ See also Stuart. C. Brown: The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. RA Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D. Painter. In: Newfoundland and Labrador Studies. Volume 15, No. 1, 1999, p. 115 f (English).
  7. ↑ PDA Harvey: Review Article: The Vinland Map, RA Skelton and Josef Fischer . Review by Kirsten Seaver: Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map . In: Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, ISSN  0308-5694 , Volume 58, Issue 1, 2006, online publication July 18, 2006, pp. 95-99; accessed on August 25, 2018.
  8. ↑ AM Reeves, NL Beamish, RB Anderson: The Norse Discovery of America. - Voyage of Gudleif Gudlaugson to Great Ireland. 1906. In: sacred-texts.com , accessed on August 25, 2018 (English).
  9. ^ René Larsen, Dorte V. Poulsen: Report on the Assessment and Survey of the Condition and Technique of the Vinland Map and the Bindings of the Tartar Relation and Speculum Historiale. In: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts , School of Conservation , December 20, 2005 ( full text as PDF file ; English).
  10. ↑ René Larsen, Dorte VP Sommer: Facts and Myths about the Vinland Map and its Context. In: Journal of Art Technology and Conservation. 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 196-205 (English).