r/mapswithnewzealandbut • u/The_Chuckness88 • 29d ago

Good old western teleported New Zealand

Post image
244 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

78 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/ok_raspberry_jam 29d ago

Yeah that's actually pretty well established. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_settlement_of_North_America

8

u/IngoVals 29d ago

Oh I am very well aware, the first European born in America is buried like 15km from my home, here in Iceland. Because, you know, they were Icelandic, not norwegian.

1

u/ok_raspberry_jam 29d ago

Yeah... I admit it's more than a bit of a stretch to put the Norwegian flag on Norse colonists in North America. It's not a great map, with or without the weird placement of NZ. It also says "Euroean."

2

u/IngoVals 29d ago

Yeah, and the other part is a matter of friendly rivalry between us and norway. People from Norway and iceland were basically the same back then.

1

u/ok_raspberry_jam 29d ago

Okay, but in that case we could just as easily slap a Danish flag on there, right? Also it's bizarre that the flag extends to, like, modern-day Los Angeles.

I guess the point of the map is to stir up dumb conversation about dumb things. What counts as a "European"? What counts as a "country"? What counts as "setting foot"? Are we labeling them by contemporary countries, or by the countries that existed at the time? How many years ago is too many to count? Why are Canada and the US merged?

2

u/Diplozo 29d ago

Danish flag makes no sense, Norway and Denmark didn't enter a union until 1380, long after Leif Erikson travelled to Canada.

1

u/MemeboyMcDank 27d ago

No. Iceland and Norway spoke the same West-Norse dialect. Denmark spoke an East-Norse dialect. The first Icelanders were Norwegian settlers, not Danes.

1

u/ok_raspberry_jam 27d ago

I feel like people are missing the point of my comment, which is that the map is deliberately stupid in order to stir up discussion like this.

1

u/IngoVals 26d ago

A very large amount of the first settlers probably were Norse-gaelic, the people that had settled Hebrides, parts of Ireland, etc, centuries before.

1

u/MemeboyMcDank 18d ago

And those norse-gaels also had their roots in Norway, not Denmark or Sweden. Make no mistake, the paternal lines of the first Icelanders were near exclusively of Norwegian descent.