It’s a mystery of history akin to the Shroud of Turin or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And of course we are interested because of Walter McCrone’s debunking of the Vinland Map.
And since 1965 when Yale University announced the discovery of an alleged 15th century Vinland map [click on map for large, high definition, Commons freely licensed media image] that detailed an 11th century exploration of the New World by Norsemen hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus, its validity has been a source of controversy.
But McCrone isn’t even mentioned. Nonetheless, it is now once again a fake in the minds of some researchers. There is this:
Raiswell says at that level the map seems to ring true, but a key point he noticed during his research for the Treasures Decoded show had to do with one of the cartography images.
“Greenland is shown as an island. It’s really quite an important thing because nobody circumnavigated Greenland until the 20th century. So why does the person who drew this map think of Greenland as an island?
And how about this for a theory:
So who crafted the map? And when? A theory by Norse scholar Kirsten Seaver, who was also an expert on the Vinland map Treasure Decoded show, identifies an Austrian Jesuit priest in the late 1930s as a likely culprit.
“At that point Austria has just been taken over by the Nazis and this man is the head of a private religious library in Austria. The Nazis of course aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Catholics. They’re beginning to loot the treasures and so on,” Raiswell says. “And what Kirsten Seaver argues is that what this map does is shows the whole world is actually Christian very, very early. . . . so this Jesuit priest is putting this map together more as just wishful thinking and perhaps to use against the Nazis at some point as a propaganda exercise just to say ‘Well the whole world’s Christian and has been Christian since the 11th century and here’s a map which shows that Christians were the ones who discovered the New World, Christians were the ones who were in Asia and Christians were the ones who were in Africa. . . .’”
The belief is that the priest then bound the map into a book with the other medieval documents and put it in the library, which was then pillaged by the Nazis and through the fickle finger of fate made its way to Yale University where Raiswell got to view it firsthand last summer.
Seem speculative