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The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500
by KIRSTEN A. SEAVER, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1996, xvi + 407 pp, cloth us$49.50 (ISBN 0-80472514-4)
The Frozen Echo is to be welcomed as a major contribution to the history and historical geography of the northern North Atlantic. It presents an ambitious and wide-reaching synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence bearing upon Norse Greenland and the fishing and trading arenas of Western European nations during the half-millennium preceding the 'discoveries' of Columbus and Cabot. Its subtitle, however, is misleading, in that the theme of North American exploration appears only in the first and last of ten chapters. The ultimate intention of the volume, on the other hand, is to reexamine the context within which the mediaeval Norse colony disappeared and to present a new hypothesis for its sudden demise.
The author, who is proficient in the Scandinavian languages, cites 9 journals (Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Greenlandic), 40 primary sources (including eight sagas and the controversial Vinland Map), 14 general works of reference, and 300 secondary references, including many of very recent vintage. On this basis, her synthesis integrates matters of political, commercial, and ecclesiastical history pertaining to Norse Greenland with Icelandic genealogies for the late-1 Oth, and crucial 1 5th centuries, the archaeology of Norse Greenland, and the 1 5th-century cartography of the North Atlantic. It represents the first comprehensive review of Greenland's...