Land Under the Pole Star

A thousand years ago, twenty-five ocean-going Viking ships under the leadership of that most outstanding man, Eirik the Red, set out on one of the greatest pioneering enterprises of all time....Only fourteen of the vessels would arrive at their goal - the remote, newly discovered island of Greenland. The two Greenland settlements were to flourish for five centuries. Their seamen, with Leif Eiriksson in the lead, sailed even further west and made the first exploration of the North American continent. But after the fifteenth century, the community disappeared from known history....Helge Ingstad, the widely acclaimed Norwegian explorer and man of letters, set out to rediscover additional traces of this Medieval Norse colony, to reconstruct its way of life and to penetrate some of its unsolved mysteries. In his book he presents the discoveries he has made from on-site investigations and from a rigorous study of archaeological and historical data....