Vikings

Páginas: 6 (1293 palabras) Publicado: 18 de octubre de 2010
First Project
Problem: Is it true that the Vikings were the first ones to land on America?
Hypothesis: If the Vikings had developed ships for their time and made trips, they were the first ones to reach America.
Justification: Almost all of us learned that the one who discovered America was Cristopher Colombus. Maybe because of lack of records that statement was taken as true. Although troughthe modern era there been researches about the fact that the Vikings were the first one to arrive to the American continent it remained as a mystery. Now a days, most of the people barley know about this fact and some of them don´t believe it’s true. That´s why, with this work I want to prove the fact that the Vikings were the first ones to land on American fields. Also, to explain how this waspossible, in the order to make it clear and discover the truth behind the common beliefs.
The Vikings were sea explorers from Scandinavia who spread through Europe and the North Atlantic in the period of Scandinavian expansion (800-1100 CE) known as the Viking Age. From Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, they appeared as traders, conquerors, and settlers in Finland, Russia, Byzantium, France, England,Iceland, Greenland and even in the Netherlands. They were well known for their skills as sea warriors and they carried with them a civilization that was in some way more developed than those of the lands they visited. That is another explanation of their triumphs in their wars. Scandinavia was rich in iron, which stimulated Viking cultural development. Iron tools cleared the forests and plowed thelands, leading them to a great increase in population. Trading cities such as Birka and Hedeby appeared and became the centers of strong local kingdoms.
As the Viking´s civilization developed their ships also did. The Viking ship, with its flexible hull and its keel and sail, was far superior to the rowboats used by other people of that time. Kings and nobles were buried in ships. They had amassive production of boats that testifies to the technical expertise of the Vikings in working with stone, gold, silver, (used for the decoration of the ships), and especially with the iron and wood.
Viking civilization flourished with its towns and markets, and, most of all, the ability to organize people under law to achieve a common task- such as an invasion. Expansion was apparently caused bythe search of new trading opportunities and new areas in which settle the growing population.
The Viking's reliance on the sea as their avenue of attack and escape motivated them to develop more ships and reliable navigational techniques with which they could travel long distances over open water. These advantages let them travel the dangerous ocean to the west and reach the shore of Americaalmost five hundred years before Columbus.
The story of the Viking exploration is contained in the sagas that passed by word-of-mouth from one generation to another before being passed to paper. Modern archeological evidence has substantiated much of the saga's story.
"The country which is called Greenland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Eiríkur the Red was the name of a man fromBreiðafjörður who went there from here and took possession of land in the place which has since been called Eiríksfjörður. He named the country Greenland, and said it would make people want to go there if the country had a good name. There, both in the East and the West, they found human habitations and fragments of skin boats and stone implements, from which it was evident that the same kind of peoplehad been there as lived in Wineland and whom the Greenlanders call Skraelingjar. He began settlement in the country 14 or 15 years before Christianity came to Iceland, according to what a man who himself had gone there with Eiríkur the Red told Thorkell Gellisson [Ari's uncle] in Greenland." This extract from the Book of the Icelanders by Ari the Learned (1067-1148) told us almost the same as the...
Leer documento completo

Regístrate para leer el documento completo.

Estos documentos también te pueden resultar útiles

  • Vikings
  • els vikings
  • vikings metal
  • The vikings
  • Vikings
  • Vikings
  • Vikings in retrospect
  • The Vikings In Ireland

Conviértase en miembro formal de Buenas Tareas

INSCRÍBETE - ES GRATIS