Helge Ingstad

Helge Marcus Ingstad (December 30, 1899 - March 29, 2001) was a Norwegian explorer. After mapping some Norse settlements, Ingstad and his wife Anne Stine, an archaeologist, in 1961 found remnants of a Viking settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland.

Helge Ingstad was originally a lawyer by profession, but, ever an outdoorsman, sold his successful law practice in Levanger and went to Canada's Northwest Territories as a trapper in 1926. After returning to Norway, he wrote the bestselling The Land of Feast and Famine (Knopf, 1933).

Ingstad became governor of Erik the Red's Land, from 1932 to 1933, when Norway annexed that eastern part of Greenland. The International Court of Justice in The Hague decided that the lands belonged to Denmark, and so the official Norwegian presence had to end.

Books

• Ingstad, Helge; Gay-Tifft, Eugene (translator). The Land of Feast and Famine. McGill-Queens University Press (1992). ISBN 0773509127
• Ingstad, Helge; Ingstad, Anne Stine. The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. Checkmark Books (2001). ISBN 0816047162

External links

• Obituary from the New York Times as it appeared in the Halifax Sunday Herald, April 1, 2001
  (note that Ingstad's wife's name is misspelled (twice, differently) in this otherwise well-written obituary)
• Concise obituary from Memorial University of Newfoundland Gazette, April 12, 2001