The Icelandic sources give them all one name: the people in hide boats off Vinland, the hunters of Greenland's far north, the neighbours of the last Greenland farms. Skrælingar. No people of that name ever existed. The word says more about its speakers than about those it labelled, and behind it stand people with names of their own: Innu, Beothuk, Mi'kmaq, Inuit, and the Dorset culture, whom Inuit call Tuniit. This article tests the word, reads the first encounters in both Vinland sagas side by side, sorts out who lived where, and takes two disputes seriously: the Baffin Island finds and the Norwegian coin from Maine.
This article uses Skrælingar (anglicised as “Skraelings”) only where it reports Norse sources or examines the word itself. Otherwise it uses the names by which these peoples are known today. There is a factual reason too: the sources do not distinguish. Canadian Mysteries, a Canadian history project on Vinland, puts it plainly: the Norse applied the term to all of them, Inuit or First Nations, to mean people who looked, lived and spoke differently.
Its origin cannot be firmly established. Several derivations circulate, reported here from English Wikipedia, Wiktionary and an essay by Hayden Godfrey; I have not seen the dictionaries and studies behind them. One leads to Old Norse skrá, “dried skin”, and would refer to skin clothing; Godfrey thinks this likeliest and the word originally descriptive. Another, proposed in 1932 by the Danish scholar William Thalbitzer, leads to skrækja, “to bawl, shout or yell”. Also suggested are skrælna, “to shrivel”, and a reconstructed adjective for “puny”. All of them describe strangers from outside.
The later history of the word is clearer, though here only from Wiktionary and Wikipedia: in modern Icelandic skrælingi means “barbarian”; Danish skrælling means “weakling”. How it sounded in everyday medieval speech we do not know. Canadian Mysteries, for one, says it carried a negative ring from the start; Godfrey disagrees. It can only be demonstrated for texts where the word sits next to descriptions such as “ill-looking”.
The peoples themselves had other words. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Beothuk means “the people” or “the true people” in their own language. A Norse word, by contrast, may have lived on in Greenland, as we will see.
The word first appears not in an adventure story but in a dry work of history. In the 12th century Ari Þorgilsson wrote Íslendingabók, the “Book of the Icelanders”. Chapter 6 reports the settlement of Greenland by Erik the Red and his people. They found there, it says, manna vistir bæði austr ok vestr á landi ok keiplabrot ok steinsmíði: traces of habitation in east and west, fragments of boats and stonework. From this they concluded that the same people had been there who lived in Vinland, the ones Greenlanders called Skrælingar.
The note assumes Ari's audience knew the word. It also contains a false inference: the traces Erik's people saw came from older Arctic cultures, by no means the same people as those on the coasts further south.
Two sagas tell of the Vinland voyages, the Grœnlendinga saga (Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red). They were written long after the events, by people who had not been there, and contradict each other in many ways. Our article on Vinland covers how they survive and how far they count as reports. The narrower question here: how do they describe the moment when both sides first see each other?
In the Saga of the Greenlanders the answer is grim. Leif's brother Thorvald and his men find three skin boats on the beach, three men under each. The Norse seize them; one escapes, and they kill the other eight. In the summary of the 1906 English edition available to me, no attack comes first. Then a great number of boats advances, an arrow strikes Thorvald under the arm, and he dies and is buried on the headland he had admired.
The first violence in this saga comes from the newcomers, not from the people who lived there.
The handling of the name is striking as well. The Icelandic historian Sverrir Jakobsson points out, in his essay in Approaches to Vínland (2001), that both sagas first leave these people unnamed and only then call them Skrælingar. His suggestion: the audience already knew who was meant, and the silence recreated the explorers' experience. I have read only the introduction of this essay, in an excerpt.
The saga's second encounter belongs to Thorfinn Karlsefni, the merchant who wants to settle in Vinland. His bull charges bellowing out of the forest and terrifies the arrivals; that is the first impression. Trade follows. Karlsefni forbids his men to sell weapons, and the women offer milk instead, which the visitors want more than any other goods.
Then comes one of the strangest scenes in the whole tradition. As Gudrid sits in the house, a visitor comes in and asks her name. Gudrid answers, and the stranger replies that she too is called Gudrid. At a loud crash she vanishes. The crash belongs to the next event: one of the visitors tries to seize weapons and is killed by one of Karlsefni's men.
What the Gudrid scene means is interpretation. It cannot be used as historical evidence.
Karlsefni then has a palisade built around the house and picks a spot between lake and forest for the expected attack. In the fight one of the attackers picks up an axe and kills a companion with it. A large man, apparently their leader, hurls it far into the sea.
The Saga of Erik the Red tells the same man's story differently. Nine hide boats approach, their occupants waving staves that sound like flails. Snorri suggests showing a white shield as a sign of peace. Then comes the description that has shaped almost every text on the Skrælingar since.
“Then did they in the canoes row forwards, and showed surprise at them, and came to land. They were short men, ill-looking, with their hair in disorderly fashion on their heads; they were large-eyed, and had broad cheeks.”Eirik the Red's Saga, ch. 9 in Sephton's numbering, translated by J. Sephton (1880), consulted at Project Gutenberg.
The wording varies. Sephton writes “short” and “ill-looking”, Keneva Kunz's modern translation has “threatening features”, and the title of Sverrir Jakobsson's essay quotes “Black Men and Malignant-Looking”. That matches the Old Norse svartir menn ok illiligir, cited in a 2009 paper in the journal Gripla from the 1935 edition. Sephton's “short” must rest on another reading; I have not seen the manuscripts themselves. The sentence offers no portrait of any particular people; it shows how Icelandic storytellers pictured strangers.
The next spring far more boats arrive, and a market forms. The visitors want red cloth above all and pay in furs and grey pelts. Karlsefni and Snorri again forbid the sale of weapons. The buyers bind the cloth around their heads, and when it runs short the Norse cut it into ever narrower strips that still fetch as much.
Then Karlsefni's bull runs bellowing out of the forest and the visitors flee. Some three weeks later they return in great numbers, now with staves waved in the opposite direction. They sling round dark objects on poles, which land with a terrifying noise. The Norse fall back until Freydís berates them, picks up a dead man's sword and strikes her bared breast with the blade. The attackers withdraw.
At the end Sephton gives the sentence that carries the whole episode: the land is good, but there would always be “war and terror overhanging them, from those who dwelt there before them”. The saga knows perfectly well whose land this is.
So both sagas share a frame: barter, weapons ban, bull, rupture, fight, departure. They diverge in detail, with milk in one and red cloth in the other. That points to a shared narrative core but proves no individual scene.
How far the sagas count as ethnography shows at the end. On the way back Karlsefni's people meet five people in Markland, probably Labrador: a bearded man, two women, two children. The adults get away, the children are taken, taught the language and baptised. The saga tells this without fuss; it was an abduction. The children then speak of two kings, Avalldamon and Valldidida, of people without houses who live in caves, and of a land opposite whose inhabitants, dressed in white, go about with poles, shouting loudly. The saga calls it Hvítramannaland, “white men's land”.
This sounds more like learned wonder-lore than observation. The one-legged being that shoots Thorvald with an arrow in the same saga makes it plainer still. The Saga of the Greenlanders has him die in a fight with the boat people, Erik's saga by the hand of a creature familiar from medieval catalogues of marvels. These descriptions are not field notes.
Archaeology shows roughly who lived on which coasts and when; it cannot attach a saga name to a find. Writing in Antiquity (2008), Robert Park names three archaeological counterparts of the Skrælingar: Dorset, Thule and Point Revenge, the last a culture in Labrador.
The Dorset culture is the oldest of these. Inuit call these predecessors Tuniit; older literature files them under “Palaeo-Eskimo”. According to Canadian Mysteries they spread south from about 500 BC, reaching Labrador, Newfoundland and the northeastern shore of the St. Lawrence. They disappeared from the south around 800 and lasted longer in the Arctic. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives a late Dorset phase of about 500 to 1300 in northern Labrador and about 700 to 1300 in Greenland's High Arctic. So hardly in Vinland, but quite possibly in Markland and Helluland. Canadian Mysteries reports no known living descendants.
At L'Anse aux Meadows itself lay a complete Dorset-style soapstone lamp. The Canadian Encyclopedia considers it likely to have been brought from a northern Dorset site or obtained by trade.
Further south lived the people the specialist literature groups as “Recent Period”, among them the ancestors of the Beothuk and Innu. They lived in central and southern Labrador and on Newfoundland, and in the early Norse period some reached as far north as Ramah Bay. The Innu are a living nation today in Labrador and Quebec; older texts call them Montagnais and Naskapi.
The Beothuk lived on Newfoundland, perhaps as descendants of the Little Passage people, named archaeologically after a site. They are known for their use of red ochre on canoes, objects and bodies. Shawnadithit, often called the “last Beothuk”, died in 1829. Violence by settlers, loss of the coasts and disease had destroyed the community. Even so, “extinct” is not undisputed: Mi'kmaq and Innu oral traditions tell of flight to the mainland and intermarriage, as The Canadian Encyclopedia records.
Further south again, in eastern New Brunswick, the Gaspé Peninsula, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, lived the ancestors of the Mi'kmaq. If Vinland included the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, they come into question as trading partners, but that depends on the unresolved location of Hóp.
Direct contact is proven for none of these groups. According to Canadian Mysteries, people camped at L'Anse aux Meadows for nearly 4,000 years before the Norse and again afterwards, in short seasonal hunting camps. In the 11th century, however, the Norse were apparently alone there. The sagas' encounters, if they happened, belong elsewhere.
People once mostly saw the Skrælingar as ancestors of the Inuit; in 1880 Sephton adds the then-current term for Inuit in brackets. For Vinland this no longer holds. The Thule culture, ancestors of today's Inuit, came from the west. In 2008, in American Antiquity, Max Friesen and Charles Arnold dated their arrival in the western Canadian Arctic to about 1200 at the earliest; their abstract says neither site was occupied before the 13th century. Canadian Mysteries likewise gives the 13th century for the eastern Arctic. For Greenland's High Arctic The Canadian Encyclopedia gives 1200 to 1300, while Gulløv places the first Thule there as early as the second half of the 12th century.
In Greenland the Skrælingar of the later sources really are Inuit, with one exception. The Historia Norwegiae, which Hans Christian Gulløv places in the 12th century, tells of hunters in the far north who had no iron. When struck by Norse weapons, “their wounds became white and didn't start bleeding until they were dead”, as Gulløv paraphrases it. In light of new finds he considers these people possibly Dorset. The wounds are obviously legend.
The finds reach further than the few written notes. On Ruin Island in Smith Sound, by Gulløv's figure more than 2,000 kilometres north of the Western Settlement (closer to 1,600 in a straight line, reckoned from the latitudes), excavation in 1936 turned up a comb, a spoon case, a draughtsman and a chess piece of Norse origin, along with woollen cloth. Iron ship rivets come from later Canadian excavations on the same strait. Gulløv reads the exchange as chiefly economic, perhaps metal for walrus tusks and narwhal teeth, without any fixed trading relationship. There are also carved figures depicting Norse people. Skraeling Island in the High Arctic, a rich site for such objects, still carries the word on the map.
Violence is barely attested. For the year 1379 Icelandic annals report an attack with eighteen Norse dead and two boys carried off. Ívar Bárðarson, working for the Church in Greenland in the 14th century, found the Western Settlement empty: “no people, neither Christian nor Heathen”, only feral livestock. His report, surviving only in Danish translation, states outright that the Skrælingar had destroyed the whole settlement. That is not proof, since he witnessed no attack; according to English Wikipedia the farm Gård Under Sandet was abandoned intentionally. The wider frame is in our article on the Greenlanders.
A view from the other side exists, if late. In the 19th century Rink wrote down Greenlandic traditions of violent and friendly encounters and of living together. Then there is kalaaleq, the old word for a Greenlander. It is often derived from skræling itself (Jahr and Broch 1996, via Wikipedia), while Gulløv notes it is supposed to come from Norse klæðast, “those who wear (skin) clothing”. Neither is secure. Egede recorded in 1750 that Greenlanders traced it to “the old Christian” in their land.
Was there longer contact much further north? The archaeologist Patricia Sutherland, long at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History), worked in the Helluland Project at the Nanook site in Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island, in today's territory of Nunavut. The starting point was spun yarn whose character recalled yarn from Norse farms in Greenland; accounts differ on exactly when it was noticed. Then came whetstones with traces of bronze and smelted metal, notched sticks resembling Norse tally sticks, whalebone shovels and a stone crucible. Sutherland interpreted Nanook as a possible shore station for hunting and trade with the Dorset, expressly not as a settlement.
The site was occupied and abandoned several times, and its oldest traces predate the Norse. English Wikipedia reports a date range for the crucible from 754 BC to 1367 AD, which rules out almost nothing.
In 2018 Michèle Hayeur Smith, Kevin Smith and Gørill Nilsen re-examined the yarn in the Journal of Archaeological Science, using a method against contamination by marine mammal oil. Dorset yarn from Nanook dates to roughly 100 BC to AD 300, from Nunguvik to the 7th–8th centuries. Spinning was thus present about a thousand years before the Norse; Dorset yarn differs technically from Norse yarn, and there is no evidence the Dorset ever wove it. The authors see no evidence for transfer from the Norse. Their test concerns the fibres only. Whetstones and sticks are untouched by it.
Sutherland lost her post in 2012 and saw her access to the material as blocked; the museum spoke of negotiations. She hinted at political reasons, and the museum rejected any link with its new mandate. William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian faulted her in 2012 for publishing too little, while James Tuck thought the lead promising. In 2018 the museum itself said the research “suggests, but does not prove conclusively, longer-term contact”. L'Anse aux Meadows remains the only generally accepted Norse site in North America outside Greenland.
On 18 August 1957 the amateur archaeologist Guy Mellgren, by his own account, found a small silver coin at Naskeag Point in Brooklin, Maine. The so-called Goddard site is a large Indigenous settlement site whose inhabitants are regarded as ancestors of the Penobscot, one of the Wabanaki nations. English Wikipedia dates it to 1180–1235.
In 1978 the London dealer Peter Seaby recognised the coin, until then taken for English, as Norwegian, and in 1979 Kolbjørn Skaare of Oslo examined it at the Maine State Museum and declared it genuine: a penny of Olaf the Peaceful (Olaf Kyrre), who reigned 1067–1093. It had been perforated, probably as a pendant, and is the only Norse item among some 30,000 objects.
Hardly anyone doubts the coin; the find is another matter. Mellgren collected coins, nothing was properly documented, and a follow-up excavation in 1979 produced no more coins. Edmund Carpenter concluded “not proven” in 2003, and Robert Hoge of the American Numismatic Society wrote in 2006 that it “should probably be considered a hoax”. In 2017 the numismatist Svein Gullbekk tested the opposing case in the Journal of the North Atlantic. He dismisses Carpenter's suggested source, a New York auction of 1948, as conjecture; Norwegian hoards hold no matching coin. His conclusion is cautious: more likely a genuine find, but the evidence “wholly circumstantial”.
Even a genuine find proves no Norse in Maine. The museum and many scholars prefer a route through Indigenous exchange networks from Labrador or Newfoundland southward; a Dorset burin from the same site is read the same way. And according to English Wikipedia, some two centuries separate the voyages of Leif and his successors from the site's date.
What does Skræling mean? Nobody knows for certain. Skrá (“dried skin”), skrækja (“to shout”) and skrælna (“to shrivel”) are among the proposals. In modern Icelandic skrælingi means “barbarian”.
Is it acceptable to use the word today? As a source term, with explanation, yes. For the people themselves there are better names: Innu, Beothuk, Mi'kmaq, Inuit, Dorset or Tuniit.
Who were the Skrælingar in Vinland? This cannot be firmly established. Candidates are the ancestors of the Innu, Beothuk and Mi'kmaq, and in Labrador also the Dorset.
Did the Norse and Indigenous peoples trade peacefully? According to the sagas, at times, cloth or milk for furs. In the Arctic, finds suggest exchange over a longer period.
Is the Goddard coin genuine? The coin is. Whether it truly lay in the ground at Naskeag Point remains disputed, though Gullbekk thinks it likely.
Vinland · Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid · Freydís Eiríksdóttir · The Greenlanders · Erik the Red · Leif Eriksson · Vinland and the DNA question · The Kensington Runestone · Vikings in the North Atlantic
Vinland · Thorfinn Karlsefni · Freydis · The Greenlanders · L'Anse aux Meadows: what eight turf buildings in Newfoundland prove, and what they don't.
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