Norumbega

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Norumbega (or Norumbègue, Nurumbega, etc) was a legendary settlement in northeastern North America, inextricably connected with attempts to demonstrate Viking incursions in New England. Like Cathay, it was a semi-legendary place name used to fill a gap in existing geographical knowledge.

An early reference was that of the French pilot Jean Allefonsce (1542) who reported that he had coasted south from Newfoundland and had discovered a great river. "The river is more than 40 leagues wide at its entrance and retains its width some thirty or forty leagues. It is full of Islands, which stretch some ten or twelve leagues into the sea. ... Fifteen leagues within this river there is a town called Norombega, with clever inhabitants, who trade in furs of all sorts; the town folk are dressed in furs, wearing sable. ... The people use many words which sound like Latin. They worship the sun. They are tall and handsome in form. The land of Norombega lie high and is well situated." (DeCosta, 1890)" (pg. 99).

It often appeared on European maps of North America, lying south of Acadia somewhere in what is now New England. Norumbega was thought to be a large, rich Native city, and by extension the region surrounding it. The name connoted a romantic antiquity that New England appeared to lack: in 1886 Joseph Stearns, the inventor of the duplex telegraphy system, built his "Norumbega Castle", which still stands in Camden, Maine. In the late 19th century Dr Eben Norton Horsford made some attempts to link the name and legend of Norumbega to actual indigenous archaeological sites or even to alleged Viking settlements. Much literature was written concerning Norumbega but without conclusive results. The whole question has been more or less abandoned in recent years. Norumbega is generally considered purely mythical.

The word "Norumbega" was originally spelled Oranbega in Girolamo da Verrazzano's 1529 map of America, and the word is believed to derive from one of the Algonquian languages spoken in New England. It is often cited as meaning "quiet place between the rapids" or "quiet stretch of water".

[edit] External links

• davistownmuseum.org: The Davistown Museum, special-topic bibliographies: Bibliography of Pre-Columbian visitors to North America: The Ancient Dominions of Maine Norumbega Reconsidered and the Wawenoc Diaspora....The Myths of Norumbega Quote: "...The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages debunks the 19th century assertion of Norumbega as a Viking name and is the foremost among many historians who assert it is entirely a myth. "Norumbega, apart from the name, which means 'quiet place between two rapids' in Algonkin, was wholly created by European imagination." (pg. 464)..."
• nsexplore.ca: The Defences of Norumbega. Professor Dr Eben Norton Horsford. 1891 Quote: "...was written to advance the view of the author that Norse emigrants from the Greenland colony had founded a settlement near Boston, Massachusetts, dating from the beginning of the 11th century...The book itself has been scanned and made available as a sequence of images..."
• 30-Apr-2002, The Straight Dope: Did Leif Erikson once live in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Quote: "...Around the intersection of Memorial Drive and Mt. Auburn St. there is a granite plaque in the ground, with the following: "On this spot in the year 1000 Lief Erikson built his house in Vinland."...Horsford did a little digging (literally) and found some buried artifacts that he claimed were Norse. On the spot he built the memorial you saw. He didn't stop there..."

[edit] Further reading

• DeCosta, B.F. 1890. Ancient Norumbega, or the voyages of Simon Ferdinando and John Walker to the Penobscot River, 1579-1580. Joel Munsell's Sons, Albany, NY
• R. H. Ramsay, 1972. No Longer on the Map'
• Baker, Emerson W., Churchill, Edwin A., D'Abate, Richard S., Jones, Kristine L., Konrad, Victor A. and Prins, Harald E.L., editors, 1994. American beginnings: Exploration, culture, and cartography in the land of Norumbega (University of Nebraska Press)
• Diamond, Sigmund. (April 1951). "Norumbega: New England xanadu" in The American Neptune vol. 11. pp. 95-107.
• 1941 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia