Kingdom of Saguenay
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The name "Kingdom of Saguenay" (French: Royaume du Saguenay) has its origin in an Algonquin legend learned by the French during French colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to the Algonquin Indians, there was a kingdom to the north, of blond men rich with gold and furs, in a place they called Saguenay. While imprisoned in France in the 1530s, Chief Donnacona also told stories about it, claiming it had great mines of silver and gold. French explorers in Canada looked for this kingdom in vain. Today, some people speculate it was an ancient, pre-Columbian European settlement to which the Algonquin oral tradition referred.
The name Saguenay survived in many modern placenames. The modern-day Saguenay region, including the city of Saguenay (Chicoutimi-Jonquière), is on both shores of the Saguenay River in Quebec. As the name of the river, the Kingdom has also become the namesake of Saguenay Herald at the Canadian Heraldic Authority. It is part of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean administrative region. Today, the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region is sometimes referred to metaphorically as the Kingdom of the Saguenay (Royaume du Saguenay), for example in tourist marketing.
It seems at least possible that the Saguenay legend has associations with Viking settlements in the Americas, notably at L'Anse aux Meadows.
Unrelated to the legend, a micronational project in the Saguenay region, Le Royaume de L'Anse-Saint-Jean (q.v.), achieved a certain amount of prominence in 1997.
("Saguenay" should not be confused with "Saginaw", a name of a river, bay and city in Michigan, derived by the Ojibway.)
