When Anne Stine and Helge Ingstad were married in May of 1941, the Father of the Bride gave a somewhat telling remark in his speech—“As a young girl, he was your dream hero, who now as a mature woman, you have found your way back to.” (A Grand Adventure 207) But could the transition really be that smooth? Despite their romantic courtship, Anne Stine soon found that marriage to her idol was vastly different from her girlish imaginings. Helge was used to following his own whims and living inside his mind. Anne Stine had fallen in love with adventures as well as an adventurer. She hoped he would lead her to new worlds and knowledge, but the force of tradition weighed heavily upon her. Helge expected his wife to stay home, tend to the household, and prepare Sunday dinners for his family. He was supported by both his own family and his in laws; his mother and Louise Moe devoted themselves to the needs of their husbands and children—to them, Anne Stine was acting unreasonable when she suggested otherwise.
The war years also revealed the chasm in their ages. Well into middle age, Helge and his friends didn’t enlist or join in the fighting. Yet the entire circle of young people with whom Anne Stine had grown up—her friends, her brother’s friends, Sigrid Undset’s boys— all joined the fight against the Germans and after capitulation, joined the Resistance. Many of them never returned; in their community of Lillehammer, no family survived unscathed. Anders Undset died in the first weeks of fighting. Her best friend, Charlotte Thomas, was arrested, as was her fiancé. Eilif too, had been imprisoned for months, Anne Stine’s little brother, Ole Henrik, spent most of the war in the German prison camp, Sachsenhausen. Eilif too, had been imprisoned for months and Tycho, her brave brother, best friend, and soul mate, went missing in February 1943. He had left as early as 1938 to fight for Finland in the Winter War in the north of Norway. He ended up based in England as a fighter pilot for the 139th Squadron. Anne Stine’s father and husband kept the news to themselves for over a year, as they hoped for a miracle, and Anne Stine was pregnant at the time. Yet when Tycho’s flying squadron companions returned, they all learned the truth. He had died in a plane crash after his squadron was flying back to England. Tycho’s death became the defining tragedy of Anne Stine’s life, and her unresolved grief would flare up during periods of deep depression. She never really recovered from his loss.
After the war, Helge, Anne Stine, and their daughter Benedicte moved to a forested area outside of Oslo, which they named Brattalid, after Erik the Red’s farm in Greenland. It sparked the first hint of what would develop into a family obsession—the Norse Greenlanders, and their voyage to the New World under the guidance of Leif Erikson, Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid the Far Traveler, and an array of fascinating characters from the sagas.
With the end of the war, Helge was also free to adventure abroad again. He took Anne Stine and Benedicte to Los Angeles, where his brother Kaare was the Norwegian Consul General, and then on to the Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo reservations in Arizona, which had furnished material for his earlier books. It was a wondrous time for the now six-year-old Benedicte and for Anne Stine, who got her driver’s license. Yet the trip ended in furious resentment, as Helge decided to venture on his own to Alaska. He revealed his plans at the last moment, leaving Anne to drive back across the desert on her own with a small child. The entire ride was fraught with terror—if the car overheated, they would be completely stranded in an unfamiliar place. They survived and returned to Norway, but Helge remained with in Alaska with the Nunamiut for a year. She never quite forgave him for pursuing adventures and always leaving her behind, as evident by the fact that they lived with her parents and would go for months without letters. But it was a formative experience for the young wife and mother. The disappointment resulted in a new determination. She would return to her childhood dream of becoming an archeologist, no matter the cost. Neither Helge, when he finally returned to Norway in 1950, nor her traditional parents and in-laws were especially pleased at her decision. She nevertheless went to University for Latin Religion, and Ethnography, and in 1960, she began graduate-level courses in Nordic Archeology. Even after she graduated, and had raised Benedicte, she still found her family obstinately dismissive of her desire for a career. Her graduation coincided with Benedicte turning seventeen, so she felt free enough to take a full-time job as a curator at the Norwegian Forest Museum in Elverum, about eighty-six miles from Oslo. Yet her family refused to move, so she ended up living on her own, and her mother moved into the family home to take care of the responsibilities she believed her daughter had abandoned. Despite her delight in her work, both the teaching and the curating, Anne Stine grew increasingly miserable, racked by guilt.
Other than their mutual love for Benedicte, few pursuits held the floundering marriage together. Helge’s adventures ceased to be a source of romantic inspiration, but rather an opportunity for him to travel, lecture, and work independently. But the family still possessed a collective fascination—the fate of the Norse Greenlanders who had travelled the North Atlantic and the location of the land they called Vinland. They discussed it around the dinner table, argued playfully, drew up maps and diagrams, and perused stacks of books. In the 1960’s, the voyages still lived in the realm of myth—there was no hard evidence to prove the Norse had ever settled further than Greenland. Helge was convinced he could discover hard evidence to prove beyond a doubt the existence of Vinland in northern Canada.
He wanted the whole family to sail the northern Canadian coast, tempting Anne Stine with the prospect of adventuring together at long last. However, she had her work and had no desire to leave her new job. As Benedicte would reflect later about her mother, “The belief that she actually had a right to live a fulfilled life, in whatever way she felt most compelled to do, deeply conflicted with her ingrained traditional beliefs and developed into feelings of a life not worth living.” (278) Her rocky marriage, her disappointed family, and the still raw grief at the death of her brother led to several suicide attempts. In the spring of 1961, her family persuaded her to resign from her position at the museum in 1961 to accompany Helge to go on the long-awaited Canadian expedition. The land of grapes and new beginnings lingered on the horizon…
Further Reading:
Ingstad, Anne Stine. The New Land with the Green Meadows. Translated by J.K. Stenehjem. Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2000.
Ingstad, Benedicte. A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America. Translated by J.K. Stenehjem. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017.
Ingstad, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. The Viking Discovery of America: The excavation of a Norse settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows Newfoundland. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001.