Other supposed runestones in New England, such as Dighton Rock in Berkeley, MA on the Taunton River, have not been authenticated despite perennial speculation.

Duxbury even named a promontory Krossanes, quoting the same words other towns use to justify their claims. This burial site has been claimed by Hampton, NH (which has a rock with rune-like scratchings claimed to be Thorvald’s headstone), as well as by Cape Neddick ME, Gloucester MA, Boston, Nahant, Lynn, and Duxbury. 3Īccording to the Icelandic sagas and the 15th century Skalholtsbok manuscript, Thorwald-fatally wounded by natives he had attacked-requested to be buried at Krossanes, “Cape of the Crosses”, a mistranslation of Krossarnes, “Crossness”. Even assuming the explorers sailed farther south than their maps record, the problem remains of a lack of accepted or substantiated physical or documentary evidence. Surviving Viking maps of the North Atlantic rim extend no further south than 50 degrees north latitude, supporting the conclusion that the lands and peoples the Norse described may have included Algonquians but were all north of Cape Ann, which lies below the 43rd parallel. The Sagas, meanwhile, refer to a heavily forested cape, not a parkland with vines, facing an elbow-shaped north-facing cape to its south, which Pringle and others took to mean Cape Cod. Algonquians created meadowland or parkland all along the Atlantic seaboard through their methods of land use, and wild grapevines grew on trees all up and down the coast between Newfoundland and New Jersey. Those features of terrain would have been characteristic of New England, but hardly diagnostic of Norse exploration on Cape Ann. In Old Norse, vinland apparently could have meant “pastureland” or “meadowland” or “land of grapes” depending on how the word was pronounced. Robert Pringle, citing the 11th century Icelandic sagas in his 1895 history of Gloucester, says the Vikings named New England Vinland in 1007, but candidates for that name range from L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland to sites in New Brunswick Newport RI, Martha’s Vinyard, as far south as Virginia, and as far west as Minnesota.

The surname actually was Eirikssen, and the father of the brothers Lief, Thorvald, and Thorstein Eirikssen was Erik Thorvaldson, or Erik the Red, the developer, if not discoverer, of Greenland. I found no evidence, not even a shred of circumstantial evidence, that Lief Ericson’s brother Thorvald was buried on Cape Ann in 1004 AD or even that Vikings actually set foot here. It’s perhaps easier to start with who did not come to Cape Ann, and that would include the Vikings. The former Thorvald Hotel at Bass Rocks in Gloucester ma

Vikings in America by Graeme Davis