Viking Artifacts, Vinland Map On Display At Mystic Seaport

Lesson No. 1: Viking warriors didn’t wear horned helmets.

“Viking helmets with horns date to the end of the 19th century, with Wagner operas,” says Nicholas Bell, senior vice president for curatorial affairs at Mystic Seaport Museum. “People in general are fascinated by Vikings, there is a romance to them, but people’s ideas about Vikings are mostly from popular culture of the 20th century.”

A new exhibit titled “The Vikings Begin” sheds some light on this culture whose truth is shrouded in the mists of ancient history. Forty-three artifacts dug up in a massive Viking-age burial site in Sweden are traveling outside of that country for the first time, courtesy of the Gustavianum Museum of Uppsala University. The show is in the Thompson Exhibition Building, whose architectural design is inspired by ships and the sea.

The gallery is dimly lit to add to the aura of mystery and discovery. A silent video tells of the history and travels of the Scandinavian seafarers during their heyday in the eighth to 11th centuries, when they steered their sailed longboats as far south as Africa and as far west as North America. Exploiting a power vacuum in Europe that diminished capacity for defense, the Vikings ventured in search of riches, trade and settlements.

“People sometimes ask, why did they attack monasteries? Were they anti-Christian? But it was just because monasteries were rich and poorly defended,” says Bell.

He added that the expansion of Christianity coincided with the end of the Viking age, as did increases in literacy in Scandinavia and influences from other cultures whose societies had been visited by the Vikings. “They were considered barbarous heathens, but they were sophisticated and engaged in trading,” he said. “They had contact with Europe, Muslim countries, the Byzantine empire.”

In addition to artifacts, some reproductions are on exhibit, including one boat and a spectacular engraved metal helmet, depicting how it would have looked new on the head of a Viking.

Authentic helmets – of tooled leather and carved metal, corroded after a millennium underground, often with chain mail hanging – are on show next to metal swords decorated with Indian garnets. The swords may never have been pulled out of their leather scabbards since being unearthed. Those swords, diminished by time as they are, may be the only things still preventing the scabbards from falling apart.

Other items include fineals of worked iron, used as decoration on boats, pieces of leather body armor, a horse harness, shield hardware and a bone stave from a staff.

The exhibit’s wall text fleshes out where the artifacts leave off, including information about the role of females in Viking society.

“Women were typically associated with magic,” he says. The stave may have been used by a female shaman, he said, and women sometimes fought in battles.

Vinland Map

A companion exhibit to “Vikings” focuses on the Vinland Map. The map was revealed in 1965 by Yale University and touted as evidence that Vikings reached the Americas long before Christopher Columbus did. Decades of research concluded that the map was a hoax, but by then, other evidence had emerged to prove the same point: that in “discovering” America, Columbus was a distant second to Leif Erikson.

The map is on exhibit to the public, the first time in more than 50 years it has been seen outside of Yale’s Beinecke Library, where access to it is strictly monitored. The exhibit fleshes out the map by putting it in historical context of 1965. As soon as it was revealed that year, the day before Columbus Day, the map ignited furious backlash. Italian-Americans especially were enraged, and refused to let go of the centuries-old ingrained narrative that their countryman Columbus did something unprecedented.

Among the exhibit’s artifacts is a reproduction of a photo showing now-Sen. Joseph Lieberman setting fire to a copy of the map when he was a law student at Yale. Copies of mail received by Yale – both angry mail and supportive mail – are included in the show, including one letter from future travel writer Rick Steves, who was in fifth grade and was fascinated by the map.

One bay in the gallery focuses on L’Anse aux Meadows, the Newfoundland seaside village where a Viking settlement, dating to around the year 1,000, was discovered and authenticated in the ’60s.

“As much as Italian-Americans were upset about [the map], they were both right and wrong,” Bell says. “The map was fake. L’Anse aux Meadows was real. Columbus was not the first.”

Another piece of Scandinavian maritime history – of a more recent vintage – is the Gerda III, on exhibit in the water at the seaport. The boat, owned by The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York ,was one of dozens of seacraft used in 1943 to evacuate almost all the Jews from Denmark into neutral Sweden.

THE VIKINGS BEGIN and SCIENCE, MYTH AND MYSTERY: THE VINLAND MAP SAGA are at Mystic Seaport Museum, 75 Greenmanville Road in Mystic, until Sept. 30. On June 16 and 17, Viking Days will feature performances, Scandinavian food, boat-building demos and more. mysticseaport.org.