Viking settlements stretched from the fjords of Norway to Iceland, Greenland and a single turf-walled camp in Newfoundland — the first known Viking settlement in North America. In this calm, long-form documentary we visit the Viking settlements in Greenland, Iceland and the North Atlantic islands as lived places: the longhouse, the farm year, the towns, the ships and the families who sailed west.

What were the Viking settlements like, and what types of settlement did the Vikings build? We step inside the Viking longhouse, walk the lanes of Viking towns such as Hedeby, Birka, Dublin and York, follow settlers to Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes, and learn how the first Viking settlement in Iceland began — with high-seat pillars, a layer of volcanic ash and a law about carrying fire around your land.

Then we sail with Erik the Red to Greenland, where Norse farmers lived for more than four centuries among seals, walrus ivory and icebergs, and on to Vinland: Leif Eriksson, Gudrid and Karlsefni, and the turf halls at L'Anse aux Meadows, where tree rings show Europeans cutting wood in the year 1021. We also look at the search for other Canadian and North American Viking settlements — and why the Kensington Runestone and the Vinland Map turned out to be false trails.

The sagas were written down two or three centuries after the events, so wherever they disagree with each other or with archaeology, we say so. Sources are listed below.

CHAPTERS (times from the final edit)
0:00 Introduction: One Fire, Many Shores
2:51 The Fjord Farm
7:02 What Were the Viking Settlements Like? Inside the Longhouse
11:14 A Year on a Norse Farm
14:50 What Types of Settlement Did the Vikings Build?
19:26 The Knarr and the Sea Road
23:21 West Over the Sea: Shetland and Orkney
27:21 Viking Towns in Ireland and Britain: Dublin and York
31:47 The Faroe Islands: Sheep Islands in the Open Sea
35:19 The First Viking Settlement in Iceland
39:19 Taking the Land: How a Norse Settlement Began
43:03 Turf, Sheep and Law: Life in Norse Iceland
47:03 Viking Settlements in Greenland: Erik the Red
50:43 Seals, Ivory and Bishops: Life in Norse Greenland
54:27 Lands to the West: Bjarni, Leif and the Sagas of Vinland
58:30 Gudrid, Karlsefni and the People of Vinland
62:17 The Viking Settlement in North America: L'Anse aux Meadows
66:53 Canadian Viking Settlements? The Search for Others
70:48 The Last Wedding at Hvalsey: Why Norse Greenland Ended
75:34 What the Norse Settlers Left Behind

SOURCES (selection — full numbered list in the project dossier)
• Landnámabók, tr. T. Ellwood, The Book of the Settlement of Iceland (1898) — archive.org
• Eirik the Red's Saga, tr. J. Sephton (1880) — Project Gutenberg
• Íslendingabók (Ari Þorgilsson) — Wikisource translation
• Ohthere's voyage, Old English Orosius
• Kuitems et al., «Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021», Nature (2021)
• Parks Canada — L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site
• York Archaeological Trust — Coppergate excavation; National Museum of Ireland — Wood Quay
• Star, Barrett et al. (2018), walrus ivory ancient DNA, Proc. R. Soc. B
• Church et al. (2013), Faroe Islands pre-Norse barley, Quaternary Science Reviews


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