This is one of my favorites, I’ll just get this out of the way at the start. It is 980 AD and we have a highly stylized attack on a highly stylized viking village in Newfoundland. Our native attacker, apparently there is only one, is in a first-person stabbing game it seems. He walks into a ghostly viking’s home and murders this one guy. The guy’s ghostly viking neighbors come running and find their dead friend (the native apparently having fled, I guess). Then we’ve got a viking funeral (is that taps? I think the vikings are playing taps) and the vikings leave. Their village falls prey to a time lapse and then, in the 1960s and some scientists find out that there was once a village there.
Our Norwegian scientists are Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad (as a child I heard this as “Helga and Onastina Ingsta”, but I should have known the lady would never get top billing) and their scientific work (which consisted entirely of sticking one trowel into some dirt = Fact) shows that the vikings made it to Newfoundland way before other whiteys made it to North America. Good to know.
“Do you know what I think this is?” probably shouldn’t be one of my favorite Heritage Moment quotes, but it is. Maybe it’s just because it is the only non-narrator line of dialogue in the whole piece, but I also like the universal nature of this quote. I don’t have to wait for someone to ask if someone can fly so I can reply “Fly no…” and nobody has to wait until I say my name to say “Patrick, Patrick O’Neil” with this quote. You can ask anyone if they know what you think a thing is whenever you want. Try it today.
I’m giving this highly stylized Heritage Moment Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. It’s a little light in the educational department, but it is an interesting watch.
It’s a little suspicious that we never see the native attacker. I entertain an idea about this: Our viking victim was, in fact, murdered by his wife! See how quickly he reacts to someone barging into his home? He’s not surprised. He doesn’t hesitate. Is that how you’d react if you were… smithing or whatever, and suddenly someone barged in to do a murder at you? I think not. But suppose you’d been arguing with the viking missus and she stormed out, grabbed the native weapon she happened to have found the day before, and stormed back in intent on releasing her womanly fury. When the others arrive they find the murderer pretending to mourn, accusing some native attack and sticking to her story so strongly that even the establishing captions thought it was a native attack. Well, fictional dead lady, you almost got away with it, but you didn’t reckon on the excellent deductive reasoning of PDR. Case closed.
The other option is that between the viking colonists and the Norwegian scientists the only proper Canadian in this minute is a murderer.
