In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland

The Vinland sagas are the earliest known narratives of first contact between Europeans and the native peoples of North America, and thus are a crucial archive of both Nordic and Native American history. After a decade of working with the Eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Canadian Maritime Provinces and northern New England, award-winning American Studies scholar Annette Kolodny has uncovered the Native American side of the Vinland story. In her latest book, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (2012), Professor Kolodny rereads the sagas through the eyes of both the native peoples of Vinland and the Norse colonists. With an acute literary understanding of the sagas, Professor Kolodny additionally unravels episodes in the sagas whose meanings have baffled previous generations of scholars.