The Farfarers: Before the Norse

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Memorial
University, reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and editor of
Northern Seas.

Over 30 years ago, Farley Mowat’s book Westviking: The Ancient Norse
in Greenland and North America was published. Based on what was then
known from the saga literature, archeology, and historical investigation
into medieval technology, together with a vigorous application of
imagination, Mowat offered a convincing interpretation of Norse
trans-Atlantic expansion to North America and a plausible explanation
for the location and nature of the semi-legendary Vinland. Almost
immediately, however, Mowat began to believe that the Norse were not the
first Europeans to reach North America. He became convinced that a
seafaring people, whom he identifies as the “Albans,” were
established in northwestern Europe even before Roman times. Enduring and
surviving the tribal migrations and invasions that characterized Roman
and post-Roman Europe during the first millennium of the Christian era,
they allegedly migrated to Scotland and its adjacent islands and then,
when threatened by the Viking expansion, sought sanctuary in Iceland,
then Greenland, and finally North America. That is Mowat’s contention
in The Farfarers.

Unfortunately, he has almost no evidence to support this theory (a gap
that he freely admits), so he is obliged to resort to his imagination.
The problem is that the line between fact and imagination is crossed so
many times that readers are left without any notion of how much validity
there is to Mowat’s tale. Even the publisher defines The Farfarers as
fiction. The book, therefore, should be read not as history, but rather
for the sweeping power of Mowat’s narrative and his skill at evoking
vivid imagery. Westviking provided a convincing demonstration that
imagination can meld with history to bring the past alive; it was
provocative, but plausible. The Farfarers is not.