The Vinland Map, R. A. Skelton and Josef Fischer

Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map. By Kirsten Seaver. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0‐8047‐4962‐0 (cloth); 0‐8047‐4963‐9 (paper). Pp. xxi, 480, illus. US $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).

The Vinland map was first revealed to the world in 1965, when it was bought by Paul Mellon and presented to Yale University for the Beinecke Library. It was announced as a mid‐fifteenth‐century world map, drawn probably in the general area of the Upper Rhine; the inscriptions and the outlines of Greenland and Vinland showed, startlingly, that the eleventh‐century Viking voyages to America were known to learned circles in central Europe some fifty years before Columbus sailed there. Acquired with the map were mid‐fifteenth‐century copies of two works that seemingly had been bound with it. One was part of the Speculum historiale, the historical part of a massive general encyclopaedia by the thirteenth‐century Vincent de Beauvais, a well‐known text, often copied. The other was the so‐called Tartar Relation, a hitherto unknown account of the Mongols from the well‐documented Franciscan mission to the east in 1247–1248. With the news of the map's discovery a book was unveiled that had been prepared in secret, a book that reproduced both the map and the Tartar Relation, together with three learned discourses. These were by Thomas E. Marston, curator of early literature in Yale University Library, on the manuscript and how it was made up; by George D. Painter, in charge of incunables at the British Museum, on the Tartar Relation; and by R. A. Skelton, Superintendent of the Map Room at the British Museum, on the Vinland map.1 Almost immediately after the book's publication doubts were raised over the map's authenticity, and controversy has continued ever since.

Kirsten Seaver has long been interested in the Vinland map. In Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map, she brings together, and greatly expands, work on the map and related topics that she has published over the past ten years in a succession of articles.2 She started with a firm knowledge of Old Norse and Icelandic literature and history which, as she shows, Skelton did not possess, and she has also made herself familiar with other areas of expertise, among them medieval cartography and fifteenth‐century church history. While no more than a detail, it is impressive that she has grasped so well the way the British Museum operated forty years ago, more as a federation of departments than as a corporate entity.3 On the other hand she seems less at ease in some fields, notably codicology, palaeography and medieval Latin.4 She is in no doubt that the map is a forgery: the assumption throughout is that it was drawn in the twentieth century. What we are given is not so much the judge's summing up, the judicial assessment of the pros and cons. It is rather the case for the prosecution: the prisoner's guilt is taken for granted.

The sheer weight of her case is impressive. She explores at length and in knowledgeable detail all aspects of the map itself, of its presentation in 1965 and of the subsequent debate. Her thoroughness leads her down paths that scarcely relate to the map at all. Her long chapter on ‘The Norse in and near North America’ is most interesting, not least for its speculative conclusion that Greenland's Western Settlement ended in westward emigration; but even if she thought the map was genuine, this would be barely relevant to it.5 At some points she flogs what she herself sees as dead horses: if the map is a forgery it simply does not matter whether the Council of Basel knew anything of Greenland or Iceland, or whether Claudius Clavus had ever visited Greenland.6 But all this is a tribute to Seaver's thoroughness; she is not content to give us merely the bare bones of the matter.

So far does Seaver's thoroughness extend that this reviewer finds that even his tiny part in the drama is chronicled.7 I was a former member of the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts, and was allowed to examine the map for a short time on 9 June 1967, when it was temporarily deposited at the museum. I was among several scholars who were successively given access to it and who sent their comments to the Keeper of Manuscripts, and both I and others were particularly exercised by questions that arose from Marston's contribution to the 1965 book. He was the weakest member of the triumvirate of authors and clearly lacked the experience that would have enabled him to pronounce authoritatively on the handwriting of the manuscript, its make‐up and the relationship between its three parts. I was concerned only with these codicological questions, not with the content or authenticity of the map. While I had some knowledge of printed maps of the English counties and of early‐modern manuscript maps, in 1967 I was only beginning the work on the thirteenth‐century plan of Waltham Abbey's water supply that over the next thirty years would lead me ever deeper into the mysteries of medieval cartography.

Despite Seaver's great thoroughness, however, there is one matter which she barely mentions, but which played a significant part in the drama: the personality of R. A. Skelton. She notes, correctly, that he was ‘a reserved and methodical person’, but she does him no justice to say that he was ‘intent on doing well in his profession’.8 He was unquestionably driven by the scholar's need to know, not by the careerist's need for personal advancement. He was in fact not simply reserved but austere, a precise, widely learned, man of international reputation, who wasted no words and who was wholly dedicated to the history of cartography.9 At the same time, he was possessed of a boyish enthusiasm, and it is easy to see how the Vinland map would fire his imagination and override any sense of caution in working on a manuscript of utterly unknown provenance and in the most conspiratorial manner. He, with Painter and Marston, literally swore an oath of secrecy at New Haven, as he told me later with some amusement. The risk was not that the map might be fraudulent. The suggestion that Skelton battened down growing doubts over its authenticity as the work progressed does not ring true.10 He was a scholar through and through, and a man who would never have hesitated to speak his mind. If he suspected that the map was not genuine, no sense of commitment to Yale would have stopped him from saying so. The risk, the real risk, in these procedures was that on publication the map would prove to have been blatantly stolen, or at the very least illicitly exported, to the embarrassment not only of Yale University but of the British Museum that employed both Skelton and Painter. If Skelton suffered any qualms in the course of his work, they are more likely to have concerned the map's immediate provenance than the date of its creation and, as Seaver points out, his inability to consult specialists in fields outside his own experience.11

My own relations with Skelton, never close, were always cordial, even friendly. In 1968 I had no hesitation in embarking on a collaboration which was sadly cut short by his death in 1970, but which led more than fifteen years later to the publication of a book that named us both as editors.12 However, sparing both of speech and of the graces, he was capable of giving offence unnecessarily and unintentionally. One instance comes to mind. In 1962 he was seconded from the British Museum to supervise the cataloguing of maps in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Visiting Boston that summer, I called on him in his office at Cambridge:

‘I shall want that work ready by lunch‐time tomorrow’, he told his secretary as we prepared to leave.

‘Well, I'll see what I can do, Mr Skelton’, she replied, ‘Of course I'll do my best, but …’

‘I shall expect it at lunch‐time’, he said, and walked out.

This is not how one makes oneself liked.

To say Skelton had enemies would be absurd; all the actors in the drama were professional colleagues and friends. But among those friends and colleagues, some might not have been altogether sorry if it turned out that he had made a monumental mistake. He had in fact staked a great deal on the Vinland map. Despite his deserved reputation and many publications—articles, introductions to facsimiles, translations—he had never before worked on such a scale or at such depth, and he clearly put his heart and soul into it. Despite what Seaver tells us of its shortcomings, Skelton's work on the Vinland map is impressively thorough and learned. It was against this background that doubts were first raised over the genuineness of the map. The doubts were fully justified, but an onlooker might have thought that then and in the years that followed they were pursued with more enthusiasm than simple objectivity demanded. In the thoroughness with which Seaver shows how, even if the map were genuine, Skelton's arguments would still be wrong, she seems somehow to have fallen heir to this tradition.

During the past forty years I have often heard it said that the Vinland map is, of course, an obvious forgery. It is nothing of the kind. If it is a forgery—and I think it most likely is—it is an extremely skilful one, as Seaver makes abundantly clear. When Bertram Schofield, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, saw the map in 1957, he refused to recommend its purchase: the lack of provenance understandably aroused his suspicions, and its ‘wrong’ handwriting recalled to him the work of German forgers of the 1830s.13 However, although other distinguished palaeographers have examined the map since then—N. R. Ker, T. C. Skeat and others—none, to my knowledge, has carried doubt so far as to say in print that the hand could not date from the fifteenth century. Nor can we take as evidence the map's various idiosyncrasies: its lack of frame‐line, its nomenclature, its coastal outlines in Europe and Asia. We do not have so many mid‐fifteenth‐century world maps that we can speak with confidence of a standard pattern and, if we could, a forger would be more likely to adhere to this pattern than to depart from it. In 1993 I wrote that I could see no decisive reason to suppose the Vinland map was a forgery,14 and despite the thoroughness and learning of Seaver's case for the prosecution, a clever counsel for the defence could still cast sufficient doubt to avoid a conviction.

Seaver rightly urges the map's sheer unlikeliness, but it is no argument to state as a premise that ‘before the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, there was no interest outside of Scandinavia in the Icelandic saga texts and their tales of American discovery’.15 This is exactly what everyone is agreed on, the very reason why the map, if genuine, is so interesting, as evidence of knowledge of these things that no one had ever suspected. Nor do the map's errors in nomenclature tell us anything. They may reflect the mapmaker's ignorance in either the fifteenth century or the twentieth, or equally the twentieth‐century mapmaker's attempt to reproduce fifteenth‐century ignorance.16

In fact, after forty years' effort, only three difficulties have emerged in the way of seeing the map as genuine. They are, however, serious difficulties. The first is that its ink contains anatase crystals that would not have become available before about 1923. This should be conclusive evidence. The crystals occur only in the parts of the ink nearest to the parchment surface, so cannot come from recent overwriting of the lines or wording, and since they occur nowhere else on the map they are unlikely to have been introduced by any conservation process.17 However, historians of cartography will be wary of technical evidence which most are incompetent to assess and which, for all they know, may have to be revised in the light of later work. For the time being, we can see it only as contributory evidence, however strong.

The second difficulty is that according to the map Vinland was discovered by the companions Leif and Bjarni. This is not what the sagas tell us: Leif Eiriksson alone led the voyage. However, a history of Greenland by David Crantz, published in Germany in 1765, makes them travel together, and Seaver sees this as the source of the map's inscriptions.18 If the map dates from the fifteenth century, we have to assume either that its author made the same mistake or that the mapmaker and Crantz both drew on some minor and erroneous manuscript note, undiscovered or now lost. Although both alternatives are improbable, neither is beyond the bounds of possibility. What the sagas do tell us is that Bjarni Herjolfsson had sighted lands west of Greenland before Leif's voyage, and that Bjarni Grimolfsson took part in a later voyage to Vinland. One or other Bjarni could as easily have been joined with Leif in the fifteenth century as in the eighteenth. This is the least of the three difficulties.

The third difficulty is that if we accept that the map was drawn in the fifteenth century, we must also accept that it is sheer coincidence that Greenland is not only correctly shown as an island, but as an island of amazingly accurate shape. Skelton was prepared to take this in his stride. He was accustomed to working on the voyages of early‐modern explorers who drew maps of their discoveries, and he expatiated on the accuracy of the Greenland outline, even suggesting the bare possibility that a warmer climate may have made it possible for the Vikings to circumnavigate the island.19 He will have started from the possibly unconscious premise that the sense of spatial relationships inherent in seamanship will naturally, even inevitably, have found graphic expression in maps. A mid‐twentieth‐century forger will have started from the same assumptions and would have made the outline broadly realistic to give the map an air of verisimilitude, as the product of a genuine cartographical tradition of the Viking north. We have learned to be more sceptical. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that Vikings drew maps of any kind, and it is unthinkable, conceptually if not technically, that they could have produced an exemplar from which this outline of Greenland was copied. To see the shape on the map as merely lucky chance strains credulity too far. This is surely the most cogent of the three difficulties in the way of seeing the map as genuine, and it is interesting that it raised doubts even in Skelton's mind: ‘By its delineation of Greenland … the map makes its strongest claim on our curiosity; and it is this feature … which most clearly seems to lift the map out of its period and might suggest—were the converging evidence to the contrary less strong—the work of a counterfeiter’.20

Seaver goes further, and sees the map's outline of Vinland as a careful map of Nova Scotia, which again we would consider not possible as a product of Viking sources.21 I too think the map's twentieth‐century creator was deliberately hinting at reality here, but the east coast of the map's Vinland can also be seen as reflecting, less realistically but more subtly and on a smaller scale, a longer portion of the American seaboard: southern Labrador, the Strait of Belle Isle, the Newfoundland coast from the Northern Peninsula to the Avalon Peninsula, the Cabot Strait and then Nova Scotia. That varying interpretations are possible makes these resemblances quite different from the outline of Greenland. Here the similarities we see really could be due to chance.

However, there has long been one big difficulty in the way of seeing the map as a forgery, and Seaver has gone far towards resolving it. Why ever was the map drawn, and who drew it? One would expect that a forger, or a forger's employer, would benefit financially from the work, or else would get pleasure from seeing the learned world taken in or baffled by the new discovery. Neither motive seems to apply to the Vinland map. Much money was paid to give it to Yale (how much is uncertain), but although we know little enough about where the map came from, this payment was made too far down the chain of ownership for whoever made or commissioned the map to have profited; earlier changes of ownership had been for small sums.22 And far from being flaunted before the learned world, we know that it was passed around surreptitiously, shrouded in mystery, for nearly ten years before the learned world was allowed to know of its existence.23

Seaver addressed the problem by first asking herself who would have had the considerable specialized knowledge that underlay the map's production. The date range could be seen as quite narrow, between about 1923 (because of the anatase crystals in the ink) and 1957 (when the map made its first known appearance). There could be very few candidates, and she saw the Jesuit Josef Fischer (1858–1944), from Feldkirch in Austria, as the most likely. He was author of many publications on fifteenth‐century maps and some on the westward expansion of the Vikings, among them a book translated as The Discoveries of the Norsemen in America. Seaver introduced him as the probable author of the Vinland map in 1995; now she has expanded this with a great deal of research on Fischer, his life, work and contacts.24 The result is impressive. We see not only that his learning had both the strengths and the weaknesses displayed by the map, but also that the sad circumstances of his last years could explain why the map was drawn. The Nazis, suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church in general, and of the Jesuits in particular, had closed the school and Jesuit house at Feldkirch, and from 1939 Fischer lived first in the Jesuit house in Munich, then with his friends at Wolfegg Castle, where he died. Seaver suggests that the map was intended to tease Nazi scholars, at once flattering their belief in Nordic superiority with its references to the Viking discovery of America, while dismaying them with its insistence that this was all a part of the expansion of the Church.25

The argument is ingenious and compelling, and this may well be exactly what happened. But it is only hypothesis. Not a shred of hard evidence connects Fischer with the map. That the maker of the map, like Fischer, sometimes puts a line above a letter to mark an omitted m or n is not significant; any palaeographer imitating a medieval hand would have used this commonest of all abbreviations.26 Both Fischer and the mapmaker were inconsistent in the ways they formed letters, but so too were innumerable other writers in the fifteenth century as in the twentieth.27 The long discussion of the possibility that the Speculum historiale fragment associated with the map had been at Mikulov Castle at Brno and then passed to the Jesuits at Feldkirch can only be seen as speculation.28 But to say all this is not to diminish Seaver's work. The circumstantial evidence of Fischer's authorship is telling. ‘The recollection of Greenland’, he wrote, ‘was kept alive by charts and geographical descriptions even at the time when all communication with the Norse colonies had been broken off’.29 The fact that Seaver has been able to present a scenario for the map's origin which is, at the lowest estimate, wholly plausible, is a considerable achievement and is not the least impressive part of the book.

Perhaps we are not yet at the end of the drama of the Vinland map; there may be further scenes still to come. But even if there should eventually be a final denouement, it will probably turn out that Kirsten Seaver has already brought us a long way towards it.

Notes

Dr P. D. A. Harvey is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History in the University of Durham, England.

1. R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston and George D. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1965). A second edition, published in 1995, was reviewed by Paul Saenger, ‘Vinland Re‐read’, Imago Mundi 50 (1998), 199–202.

2. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men, Bibliography, 457–58.

3. For example, ibid., 94.

4. For example, ibid., 175–76, 346–48, 364.

5. Ibid., 19–86.

6. Ibid., 136–38, 228–30.

7. Ibid., 113, 115, 122, 171, 174. I had already been brought on stage in the interesting note by Peter Schofield, ‘Bertram Schofield and the Vinland map’, Imago Mundi 53 (2001), 136–39.

8. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men (see note 2), 147.

9. Within the British Museum Skelton was regarded, wrongly I think, as an empire builder. ‘He wants to get our maps’, I was told in the Department of Manuscripts. Manuscript maps were in that department; Skelton's Map Room, within the Department of Printed Books, was for printed maps.

10. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men (see note 2), 208–10.

11. Ibid., 145–47.

12. R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey, eds., Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986).

13. Schofield, ‘Bertram Schofield and the Vinland map’ (see note 7), pp. 136–37.

14. Paul D. A. Harvey, ‘Nordeuropa in der Kartographie der Mappae mundi’, in Dagmar Unverhau and Kurt Schietzel, eds., Das Danewerk in der Kartographiegeschichte Nordeuropas (Neumünster, Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1993), 61.

15. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men (see note 2), 286.

16. Ibid., 285–86.

17. Ibid., 198, 201.

18. Ibid., 287–89.

19. Skelton, Marston and Painter, Vinland Map (see note 1), 182–97.

20. Ibid., 197.

21. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men (see note 2), 317–18. If she has correctly identified the mapmaker as Josef Fischer, then the outline is indeed probably that of Nova Scotia, since this is where Fischer placed Vinland.

22. Ibid., 99–100.

23. Ibid., 94–96.

24. Kirsten A. Seaver, ‘The “Vinland Map”: Who made it and why? New light on an old controversy’, The Map Collector 70 (Spring 1995), 32–40.

25. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men, 297–373.

26. Ibid., 364.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 343–53.

29. Ibid., 327.