A comment on the article found here: http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/usa-viking-ship-discovered-near-mississipi-river/
This story was published by World News Daily Report, which is a homepage with intentional fake news. They write in their disclaimer: “WNDR assumes, however, all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.”.
Even though it’s clearly fictitious, I once in a while run into the article posted by people that believe it’s true, so I will look into the article.
The article starts with a picture of what is supposed to be the Mississippi Viking ship. It is not, it’s a picture of the longest Viking longship ever found “The Roskilde 6 ship”. You can see the same picture in this article from a Danish newspaper. http://jyllands-posten.dk/kultur/historie/article5650467.ece
In the intro, the WNDR claims that it’s a Knarr type Viking ship, which also would be likely to find in the Americas. Knarr’s are the big burly trading ships. Unfortunately, the ship on the picture is clearly a longship and not a Knarr. Longships are long sleek ships, made for speed and transporting a lot of warriors.
The size for the fictitious ship is also reliable for a Knarr-type ship and are very close to those of the Skuldelev 1 Knarr found in Roskilde Fiord. (source http://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/no_cache/besoeg/udstillinger/de-fem-vikingeskibe/skuldelev-1-havskibet/)
There is also a picture of a Viking sword in the article, but that was not found in Mississippi, but in Scotland in 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-15366336
The professor mentioned in the article is also not a real person and the picture is of an Italian professor from Trinity College in Dublin. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/meeting-held-for-ancient-city-of-karkamis.aspx?pageID=449&nID=67144&NewsCatID=375
As always, if you read an article that falls out of what normally assumed in archeology, then it’s important to look at it critically and check the information in it.
This page was deleted by a mistake at the end of 2019. This blog post is from the old page and has been reposted on the new page.