Where is vinland on the map

While the authenticity of the map has been controversial since at least the s, only now is Yale itself definitively confirming that it is a forgery. The announcement came after a months-long forensic probe by Yale researchers concluded that the Vinland Map was likely forged in the early 20 th century on a piece of year-old parchment ripped from an authentic Medieval manuscript. Norse explorers did indeed found settlements in North America more than years before the first voyages of Christopher Columbus.

After his banishment from Iceland in the late s, Norse explorer Erik the Red established colonies in coastal Greenland that would stand for more than four centuries. No cartographic records exist of these pre-Columbian Norse expeditions.

Any details of the Vinland settlements are mostly known through the Vinland Sagas, which were written down only after spending more than years as Scandinavian oral history. Until then, it was an open question of whether Norse accounts of Vinland were purely legend — a kind of Scandinavian Atlantis myth. The Vinland Map was purportedly drafted to accompany the Council of Basel, a major Catholic conference that began in The implication of the map is that it was generally accepted among Medieval Europeans that Norse explorers had found islands in the Western Atlantic.

In truth, one of the only contemporary written references to the potential existence of Vinland was a text by a German cleric in which he mentions rumours that Danish sailors were discovering lands to the west. One of the most suspicious elements of the Vinland map was its stunningly accurate depiction of Greenland. The map is unusually spartan.

The map is in the collections of the Danish Royal Library. Resen had a vivid interest for Iceland and its ancient history.

Resen first served as professor at the University of Copenhagen and later Bishop of Zealand [the large island on which Copenhagen is located]. His map was made shortly after a Danish expedition to Greenland in the summer of to search for the Norse settlements there. This map also shows Vinland as a long narrow peninsula extending north. Resen stated that his map was based on ancient sources.

The other manuscript, the Hystoria Tartorum, or Tartar Relation, is an account of a journey by two Polish clerics into the lands of Genghis Khan in mids. But when the map arrived at Yale, it was bound inside the slim copy of the Tartar Relation, which had a modern binding.

The university subsequently acquired the Speculum Historiale. Radiocarbon dating performed on both manuscripts in showed that their parchment and paper date approximately from to , which correlates with prior carbon-dating done on the map. A watermark on a paper leaf of the Speculum Historiale is traceable to a papermill that operated in Basel during the s, corroborating the theory that the two manuscripts were made during the Council of Basel, Zyats explained.

Also, the text in both manuscripts is written in a similar style, likely by the same scribe. The recent discovery of a 14 th -century copy of the complete Speculum Historiale in Lucerne, Switzerland that had a copy of the Tartar Relation bound in its last volume shows there is historical precedent for combining the two manuscripts, Zyats said.

Patched wormholes dot its parchment. Much of its ink appears faded. The members of the Yale team focused their attention on the ink used in the map. Using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy XRF , a non-destructive technique, they identified the distribution of elements throughout the map. While scientists for decades have used XRF to study the elemental composition of specific points on an object, Bezur said, only recently have they been able to use it to scan an entire two-dimensional object in a laboratory setting.

Medieval scribes typically wrote with iron gall ink, which is composed of iron sulphate, powdered gall nuts, and a binder the first two are primary elemental ingredients of iron gall ink, and the third is often present as an impurity. Their analysis showed definitively that the ink contained titanium, which only became popular in the s.

Scans also revealed a note on the back of the parchment that was intentionally altered to make the document seem more authentic. Medieval texts that mention Vinland , as the Vikings called the region, are an amalgam of both Viking and classical, or ancient Greek and Roman, forms of storytelling. The tales they tell are spectacular: blood feuds among Vikings, magical rituals, battles between First Nations and Vikings, lively mercantile exchanges. In recent years, the stories of Viking voyages to North America have shown up in movies , video games , Japanese manga and anime , and more.

A similar wave of Viking nostalgia in the early 20th century may have inspired a forger to create the purportedly medieval map. In the case of the Vinland Map, both are quite possible. The first record of the map dates to , when a dealer offered it to the British Museum on behalf of Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry, a dealer based in Spain.

The British Museum turned the sale down, suspecting the chart was a forgery. Then, in the early s, American dealer Laurence C. Instead, wealthy alumnus Paul Mellon paid for the map and donated it to the Connecticut university. The motivation for manuscript forgeries is generally financial or political.