When, around the birth of this new millennium, I first decided to send Thora out voyaging, I looked at the map of the North Atlantic, prevailing ocean currents and winds, and at the info and photos collected on trips around coastal Atlantic Canada, to help me chart the most likely course a knorr would take on a western voyage, departing from southern Greenland.

They would, I thought, presumably steer into the Belle Isle Strait and continue south, skirting Newfoundland’s west coast and stick into the fjord leading to the Codroy valley, to put up their winter logging camp somewhere on wooded shores.

I described it all in The Sun Road, and felt quite smug, I admit, when last year, the press reported on the discovery of a Norse campsite at Codroy!  Here is the link to an early article on the subject; it includes more background than the later press updates. I don’t believe Norse explorers would settle on the exposed cape mentioned in later press updates. They would want to build their winter quarters farther inland in a tree-sheltered spot near the water.

Article link:
http://www.saltscapes.com/roots-folks/2601-second-viking-settlement.html

Long before recent archeological reports appeared in the press, confirming my expectations, I felt a crew of Norse skirting the coast for a place to stay the winter and cut timber could hardly do better than settling in the Codroy Valley — ‘deduction, my dear Watson.’

Imagine my delight when I saw reports on another discovery of traces left by Norse travelers in Atlantic Canada, this time around the Bay of St. Lawrence! (link below) on the

Inviting shores of the Bay of Chaleur in present day New Brunswick!

Article link:
Long-lost North American Viking settlement was in Canada, say archaeologists

Article link:
Viking expert certain Norse seafarers visited Miramichi, Chaleur Bay

Needless to say, I’m more than pleased to have placed Thora and company at the end of The Sun Road in the middle of the Bay of St L, and left them marooned in the Magdalen Islands.

In another year or so I hope to tell in the sequel I’m writing, how they get away from the island to make their way back east to Elkimu’s home in the land of the Ellenu (Unamakik) — and on to new adventures.