Christopher Columbus’s Edifying Winter in Iceland

Christopher Columbus’s Edifying Winter in Iceland

Great Explorer Gained New World Intel From Erstwhile Vikings

By Kirk Johnson

Although many may not be particularly well aware of it, the nascent beginnings of America can be thought of as arising in western Iceland. Yes, Iceland. Specifically, the region of western Iceland including the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, and associated Breida Fjord, from which the legendary Viking explorer Leif Eriksson hailed more than 1,000 years ago.

Like many in the greater Jamestown region with Scandinavian ancestry, I am proud of our peoples’ long, rich and storied history. My Scandinavian roots are primarily Swedish, and so travelled to Sweden several years ago to visit places my ancestors lived. But I am also intrigued by the history of Iceland, which was settled by Scandinavians — largely Norwegians but there were some Swedes too — during the late 800s and early 900s.

During a June Iceland vacation, I wanted specifically to investigate the little-discussed possibility that the great Christopher Columbus himself had also visited, over the winter of 1477 to 1478 at a farm and church called Ingjaldsholl, and while there learned from the native ethnic erstwhile Viking people about their frequent exploits in Vinland (North America) just a few centuries earlier. This would help explain much about Columbus’s own journey to America fifteen years later, and why he was confident that he would find land “across the ocean blue.” 

Leif Eriksson’s party had in 1000 AD landed and established a short-lived settlement at what we today call L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. For centuries afterward, while their small civilization at the south end of Greenland persisted, Vikings returned repeatedly to the east coast of North America to gather timber, game, grapes and berries, and to trade with the “Skraelings,” who we know today as American Indians. 

Upon my arrival in Iceland, Jon Sverrisson, the office manager at Happy Campers in Keflavik, where I rented a small camper van that I drove around the country for the next ten days, replied emphatically “it must be true” when asked about the possibility of Columbus staying at Ingjaldsholl. We had been poring over a large table-top map of the country in the Happy Campers’ lobby when the subject came up.

The next day I went to the National Museum of Iceland in the capital city of Reykjavik, a forty-five minute drive from Keflavik. It was a quite rainy day, so I made the most of it by visiting a number of different museums. The National Museum of Iceland guides visitors chronologically through the history of the country, from settlement in the 800s to the present. 

Finding, as expected, no mention of Columbus in the 1400s portion of the museum, I inquired with museum staff. (Essentially everyone in Iceland speaks nearly flawless English.) The museum staff people knew of the Columbus story, but explained that since it is not universally accepted by all historians, the museum does not interpret it. And in any event, there are no known artifacts from Columbus’s visit to display. However, I was informed, if you go to the little towns near where he is said to have overwintered and ask anyone on the street, they will happily tell you that it is true.

Two days later, I went to Ingjaldsholl late on my first evening on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, but not surprisingly the church there was closed. I walked around it and peered into the windows at the pristine, intimate sanctuary, and took some nice photos of the church in the setting sunlight. I was even able to capture a reasonable picture through the window in the parish office down below of a painting of Columbus on the wall in a large meeting room. But I was disappointed that I had come all this way from Warren, Pennsylvania, was at the cusp of what I wanted to see, and yet could not go inside. I hoped for better luck the next day. 

I stayed that night at a campground to the immediate east of nearby Olafsvik. The next morning I visited Olafsvik’s tourist information center. The agent there was a friendly, knowledgable and helpful woman, and knew the man who was the minister at both Ingjaldsholl, and the church in Olafsvik. She telephoned him and was able to arrange for me to meet with him at Ingjaldsholl at 11:00 a.m. He was willing to give me a personal tour and answer my questions! I almost could not believe my luck, and was grateful and elated.

This area of the Snaefellsnes Peninsula reminded me a bit of the northern Olympic Peninsula in Washington, where I lived for two years during the mid-1990s, with Olafsvik being reminiscent of Port Angeles in my mind. (Though Port Angeles is much larger.) The weather that day was to me evocative of a crisp sunny maritime day in coastal Port Angeles. Olafsvik was actually formally incorporated as a town even before Reykjavik, though Reykjavik did have a slightly larger population at the time.

The knowledgeable Oskar Ingi Ingason has been the minister at Ingjaldsholl since 2012. The current church was consecrated in 1903, and is the world’s oldest church made entirely of concrete. Reverend Ingason is also the minister at the modern church in Olafsvik, which was consecrated in 1967. He was on the board of directors for the organization that helped design and reconstruct the Leif Eriksson birthplace, living museum, and historical site to the east. Established in 2000, the site is called Eiriksstadir, meaning “Erik’s place,” named after Leif’s father Erik Thorvaldsson (Erik the Red).

Reverend Ingason stated that there is a well-known oral tradition around the Olafsvik-Rif-Hellissandur maritime region that Columbus visited Iceland and stayed at the farm at Ingjaldsholl during the winter of 1477 to 1478, likely arriving in the early autumn and leaving in late spring (it would have depended upon wind and weather patterns and conditions). It is known that a “southern gentleman” stayed there that winter, with “southern” denoting someone from the south of Europe. According to Columbus’s own diaries, and Ferdinand Columbus’s 1571 biography of his father, he indeed stayed at Ingjaldsholl.

Columbus’s ship docked at nearby Rif. He came to this area of Iceland specifically because he would have known that Leif Eriksson came from the Breida Fjord region. Columbus was aware of Eriksson’s voyages and wanted to gain information about Viking exploration in preparation for his own journey west — he was there quite deliberately ‘doing his homework.’ Reverend Ingason told me Columbus stayed at Ingjaldsholl because the nearby Hellissandur was actually the largest town in the area at the time, as a result of their substantial fishing industry. More so there than in other parts of Iceland at the time, in fact.

Earlier this year a parishioner informed Reverend Ingason he had recently become aware of a large timber which was purported to have been part of Columbus’s ship, and had been incorporated into the construction of an old house in the northern part of Iceland. The timber was said to have been at the farm at Ingjaldsholl until the 1800s. When the last inhabitants of Ingjaldsholl left, they had taken the timber to their new place in northern Iceland.

Large wooden timbers would have been highly valued construction material in Iceland, and difficult to come by, due to it being a largely treeless land. There were some thick lowland forests when the Vikings first arrived, but they were made up primarily of relatively small, crooked downy birch trees (Betula pubescens) generally not suitable for manufacturing large timbers, and even those forests had been all but denuded within a few centuries.

After touring the charming, meticulously maintained church sanctuary, Reverend Ingason and I walked down through an underground corridor into the newer parish office section, where I was able to view the “Cristoforo Colombo 1477” painting by Icelandic artist Aki Granz first-hand. Gifted to the church by the artist in 1998, the painting depicts Ingjaldsholl’s priest at the time (not unlikely Bodvar Jonsson, known to have been there in 1480 and possibly as early as 1476) symbolically pointing Columbus toward America.

The intellectually dishonest wont from some contemporary historical revisionists is to willfully mischaracterize Columbus as a bumbling fool not knowing what he was doing as he made his way blindly across the Atlantic in 1492, so he just got lucky to find any land at all. And sundry other such absurd calumnies — any false narrative to as an end in itself sully the reputation and cast aspersions upon the historical figure they hold in such contempt.

That Columbus purposefully travelled to Ingjaldsholl and learned from the Icelanders in the lead-up to his New World trip helps demonstrate that this is not the case. Our great Scandinavian ancestors, who were such brave, noble and acutely accomplished world explorers, were able to provide Columbus with knowledge and confidence from which he surely benefitted in order to help him make a more informed attempt at finding a way across the Atlantic.  

“Leif landed first,” as the old saying goes, because he and the Vikings were indeed the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas. But it took a skilled navigator in Columbus, half a millennium later, standing on the shoulders of what the Vikings had already experienced and learned, to help Europeans finally gain a permanent foothold in the New World, eventually establishing the greatest country ever known to mankind with the United States of America. Columbus’s trip should not be thought of as being independent of or unrelated to Leif Eriksson’s deeds, but rather a logical progression, and an expansion upon them.

As an ethnic Scandinavian, I am proud of what Eriksson and the Vikings accomplished in discovering the New World. At the same time, as a red-blooded American, I am naturally also quite grateful to Columbus for being wise enough to recognize the Vikings’ proficiency, having the good instincts to deliberately seek out their knowledge, and build upon what they had already accomplished. Thanks in no small part to Eriksson and Columbus, we all now live in a truly amazing place built by generations of our ancestors.

Over the years there have been unfortunate disagreements between Scandinavian-Americans and Italian-Americans on the discovery of America question, but it is past time to leave contentiousness behind, and simply agree that both Eriksson and Columbus were equally important. 

What is needed are more monuments across America, not just to Christopher Columbus, or just to Leif Eriksson, but rather statues symbolically portraying the two profoundly consequential trailblazers together, shaking hands in the good cooperation that they for all intents and purposes engaged in across the centuries in helping to assemble the beginnings of America. If they only knew at the time the gravity and magnanimity of what they had accomplished for mankind.

Kirk Johnson is a resident of Warren, Pennsylvania, and has extensive Scandinavian ancestry. He is a volunteer with the Scandinavian Jamestown organization.