The Vinland Map, the story of a forgery that fooled the experts

In 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, Yale University presented a sensational document to the world: a map of the world, apparently from the fifteenth century, showing a land called Vinland west of Greenland. If genuine, it would have been the oldest cartographic representation of part of America, earlier than Columbus's voyage. Today we know, with good certainty, that it is a forgery.

An appearance on the market

The map appeared on the antiquarian market in 1957, bound together with a medieval manuscript known as the Tartar Relation, an account of the Franciscan mission to the Mongols of 1245 to 1247. The bookseller Laurence Witten offered it to Yale, and the benefactor Paul Mellon bought it, later donating it to the university. Its earlier provenance, however, was obscure and undocumented.

The map shows Europe, Africa and Asia according to medieval models and adds, in the North Atlantic, Iceland, Greenland and a large island with two deep inlets. A Latin legend tells of the discovery of Vinland by Bjarni and Leif Eriksson, the Norse navigators remembered in the Icelandic sagas, and of a later voyage by a Greenland bishop.

Doubts and analyses

From the start some scholars noticed oddities: the shape of Greenland was surprisingly accurate, and the legend contained unusual expressions. In 1974 the chemist Walter McCrone analysed the ink and found anatase, a form of titanium dioxide produced industrially only from the twentieth century. Other analyses in later years questioned that result, and the debate went on for decades. Specialists in medieval cartography, meanwhile, kept pointing out anomalies in the drawing.

The parchment, on the other hand, was genuinely old: a radiocarbon date published in 2002 placed it in the first half of the fifteenth century. But an old support does not guarantee the authenticity of what is drawn on it. The most skilful forgers have always sought blank period leaves, often taken from older volumes, precisely to pass this kind of test.

The 2021 verdict

In 2021 Yale announced the results of a new examination carried out by its conservators and scientists: titanium compounds were present along all the lines of the map, not as random contamination. In addition, an inscription on the back had been altered to make it appear connected with the other texts in the volume. The conclusion was clear-cut: the map is a twentieth-century forgery.

It is not known who drew it. Several names have been suggested over the years, but without decisive evidence. The case remains an instructive example of how a document can deceive expert scholars when it offers what the public wishes to find, and of how essential material analysis has become in the study of manuscripts.

Ironically, the Norse presence in North America is real: excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland have revealed a Viking settlement dating from around the year 1000. The map was not needed to prove it. Today it remains at Yale as a document in the history of forgery, not of exploration. Its story has become a case study in courses on the history of the book and on conservation.