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. With that they were the first to conclusively prove that the Icelandic/Norwegian Vikings had found a way across the Atlantic Ocean to North America 500 years before Christopher Colombus and John Cabot.
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.
Helge Ingstad passed away in Oslo at the age of 101. During the last few years of his life, he worked on categorizing and annotating a large amount of photos and audio recordings (141 songs) he had made while living with an Alaskan Eskimo tribe, the Nunamiuts, in 1950. The effort resulted in a booklet, Songs of the Nunamiut, with an accompanying CD containing the audio material.
Books
External links
(note that Ingstad's wife's name is misspelled (twice, differently) in this otherwise well-written obituary)