The Bayeux Tapestry and the Vikings - Peregrinations

Figure 18: Ship at World’s Fair. The image is provided by Wikimedia Commons.
It was sailed from Bergen, across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, then on to Cape Cod and
New York, along the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes and on to Chicago. 21 This was to
affirm that Leif Erikson, the Viking, was the true discoverer of North America, some five
hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Perhaps the images of the ships in the
Tapestry were used to reconstruct the rather fanciful dragon with protruding tongue on
the prow, since the Gokstad ship did not have an animal-headed prow. The arrangement
of the shields along the gunwale is similar to that seen in the Tapestry (see Figure 15).
From then on, the ships in the Embroidery were recognized as being the true “Viking”
type.
21 Elisabeth Ward, “Reflections on an Icon: Vikings in American Culture,” in Vikings. The North Atlantic
Saga, 365-373. Today, the Viking is exhibited in Good Templar Park, Geneva, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.
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