About me

Sivert Fløttum

born a farmer's son on a croft in Buset, Singsås, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway Nov. 25. 1932.

The milieu for higher education was not prevailing where and when I grew up, but managed to finish junior high in one year (instead of three) before my conscription which I served in the occupation forces in Germany. During this time I also attanded and finished an officer's training course. During the "cold war" I was employed as an intellegence officer, learned russian and also finished senior high school. I quitted the service in 1968 and graduated from the university of Trondheim in 1974. After which I ran an outward bound school on our farm in Singsås, teaching young people how mankind should behave in order to survive on this globe.

In 1957 I found the girl my heart desired, Tora Folstad. We married, and our married life resulted in 6 children, who again have given us 9 grandchildren and one great grandchild.

In 1976 we bougth from a relative the farm Ravnås with woods and mountains and 50 old log houses with the aim to run this outward bound school.

In 1985 I suffered from a break down. Instead of just be sitting in a chair, I had to find a theme with which to occupy my mind and time. Having with enthusiasm red Helge Ingstad's books on the Norse Greenlanders' ventures to America - which they called Vinland -   I turned my attention to viking time navigation, shipbuilding and ventures.

To learn boatbuilding "from the bottom", I built a boat ca 50 feet long. This boat was many years ago "captured" by the Svedes, who have had much fun with the boat and kept it well.

Of navigational aids, the sagas are practically void. A "sun stone" has been mentioned, but if it was used in practic navigation, is doubtful. The magnetic compass was not used before the 13th century, and even then not by many skippers. However, they most probably had some sort of a sun compass, possibly could the "husasnotra" mentioned in Karlsefni's saga be a sun compass. My studies of viking time navigational practices resultet in a work published in "Mariner's Mirror": The Norse Vika sjovar and the Nautical Mile".

The "vikings"' world encompassed the waters from Jerusalem to New York. (When people at large use the term "viking", they think of northern people in general. However,in the "viking" time, a viking was a pirat. I am therefore reluctant in using the term "viking", and when I do, I put the word between inverted commas). The "vikings" had an inshore route on Russian rivers to the Black Sea. They had a more or less regular route from Norway to Greenland, they traded on Dublin and Lynn, not to speak of the North Sea which was considered Mare Nostrum.

In 1991 I planned a trip to Leningrad with a "viking" ship, up and down rivers to the Black Sea with native russian river log boats, and across the Black Sea til Konstantinopel with a reinforced log boat. We made it to Leningrad with our "viking" ship replica, however, our Russian partner turned out to be a total disappointment. They had no boats ready, and as Jeltsin at the same time accomplished coup and not being certain of the outcome, we returned to Finland.

To commemorate Bjarne Herjulfsson's discovery of the American shores, I fronted in 1986 a sailing with a Norwegian traditional craft in the Vinland waters.

All this time I have had the whereabouts of the named places in Vinland in the back of my mind. I am now in the ferm belief that I have been able to get all the pieces of the puzzle in place.

This autumn my friend Kristen Mo and I shall go there to look at the country the Greenlanders called Vinland 1000 years ago.