As Scandinavians, Americans, and Canadians prepare to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the Viking arrival in the New World with a series of ambitious exhibits and celebrations, researchers are uncovering new evidence that Viking expeditions ranged farther into the Arctic than previously believed, and that their contacts with the Skraelings, as they called the aboriginals with whom they battled and bartered, spanned centuries.
The disparate clues -- a strand of yarn found in the frozen Arctic tundra, rivets from a longship -- provide tantalizing hints that the Vikings may have journeyed nearly to the North Pole and southward to the Gulf of Maine.
The Viking voyages from Iceland and Greenland across the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic still fire the imagination, and inspire fierce controversy.
Even as the Smithsonian Institution and other museums prepare major exhibitions depicting Vikings as the first European discoverers of North America, a controversy has erupted that echoes the debate that once surrounded claims that Vikings had preceded Christopher Columbus to the New World by 500 years.
Canadian author Farley Mowat, one of the best-known chroniclers of the Far North, is raising scholarly hackles, and winning wide attention, with speculation that the Vikings themselves were latecomers, beaten across the Atlantic centuries earlier by a little-known seagoing people from the British Isles.
In The Farfarers, a Canadian bestseller just published in the United States, Mr. Mowat contends that mysterious stone towers and building foundations found from the Arctic barrens south to Newfoundland were not built by Inuit or Vikings, but are similar to ancient structures found in Scotland's Orkney, Shetland, and Western islands.
The book argues that these forgotten mariners, hopping island to island in walrus-skin boats, ventured first to Greenland and Iceland before settling in the sheltered coves of Northeastern Canada.
They got there, he contends, about 200 years before Leif Ericsson, the most famous of Viking explorers, founded a short-lived trading colony in 1000 AD near present-day L'Anse aux Meadows, Nfld.
Arctic scientists, historians of the Viking era, and, above all, proud Icelanders for whom "Leif the Discoverer" remains a national hero, are incensed that Mr. Mowat's theories are attracting so much attention. They say there is no hard archeological proof to back his colourful claims.
"So many absurd tales are told," said Einar Benediktsson, director of Iceland's Leifur Eiriksson Millennium Commission. "But serious scholars go by the archeological evidence, and all the discoveries point to the Vikings as the first Europeans to reach North America."
Such discoveries are still being made; some large, some small, but all adding incrementally to knowledge of the Vikings, intrepid seafarers who presided over one of the world's greatest trading empires. They are remembered mostly as bloodthirsty invaders who pillaged England, looted the monasteries of Ireland, sacked Paris, and caused generations of other Europeans to end their prayers with the appeal, "From the fury of the North Men, deliver us, oh Lord!"
To the west, they settled Iceland and Greenland and made bold forays to places they called Helluland, Markland and Vinland. Even today, little is known of these ventures to a new continent, but researchers are combing sites in the High Arctic and the rugged shores of Newfoundland for fresh clues.
Last month, a new bit of North American history was unravelled with the revelation that a strand of yarn found at an archeological site high in the Canadian Arctic is Norse in origin.
In itself, there's nothing momentous about yarn, even a piece 800 years old, according to radiocarbon dating. But this fragment, uncovered near the Inuit settlement of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island and probably spun in a Norse village in Greenland, is significant because it adds to evidence that Vikings were still journeying to the New World in the 13th Century, 300 years after quitting their first settlement in Newfoundland.
"It points to a much longer Norse presence in North America, not just a few quick sailing trips," said Patricia Sutherland, archeologist and associate curator of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull.
The discovery was made at a site once occupied by the Dorset people, an early aboriginal culture of North America that disappeared around 1500.
The find suggests extensive commerce between Dorsets and Vikings. "We're beginning to see that the relationship between aboriginal people and the Norse was sustained over centuries," Ms. Sutherland said.
"An astonishing number of artifacts have been found in the High Arctic," said Peter Schledermann, senior research associate for the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary.
Most dramatic of these finds, perhaps, was Mr. Schledermann's recovery of pieces of Viking chain armour and fragments of a Norse ship near an aboriginal settlement on the eastern edge of Ellesmere Island, less than 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. Dated to about 1250, these fragments, too, show Norse forays to the New World continued for centuries.