Editing Vinland Map (section)

=== Vinland Map Conference 1966 ===
[[File:Cantino_planisphere_(1502).jpg|thumb|upright=1.65|''The [[Cantino planisphere]]'' (1502), which was the first world map to show the Americas separate from Asia]]
[[Image:Biancomap.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The Bianco map (1436)]]

Many academic reviewers of ''The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation'' took the opportunity to point out evidence that called the map's authenticity into question. So a year later, a Vinland Map Conference was held at the [[Smithsonian Institution]], during which further significant questions were asked, particularly of Witten. However, the proceedings were not published for another five years.<ref name= Washburn/>

There were questions about the actual content of the map. Witten had pointed out that it bore strong resemblances to a map made in the 1430s by Italian mariner [[Andrea Bianco]], but others found some of the similarities and differences very strange—the map cuts off [[Africa]] where Bianco's map has a page fold, but distorts shapes, and includes major revisions in the far east and west. The most surprising revision is that, unlike, for example, the famous [[Cantino World Map]], the Vinland Map depicts [[Greenland]] as an island, remarkably close to the correct shape and orientation (while [[Norway]], of which Greenland was just a colony, is wildly inaccurate) although contemporary Scandinavian accounts—including the work of [[Claudius Clavus]] in the 1420s—depict Greenland as a peninsula joined to northern Russia. For practical purposes, [[Arctic ice pack|Arctic sea ice]] may have made this description true, and Greenland is not known to have been successfully circumnavigated until the 20th century. Skelton wondered also whether the revisions in the far east were meant to represent [[Japan]]—they seem to show not only [[Honshu]], but also [[Hokkaido]] and [[Sakhalin]], omitted even from Oriental maps in the 15th century.

In addition, the text uses a [[Latin]] form of [[Leif Ericson]]'s name ("Erissonius") more consistent with 17th-century norms and with transmission through a French or Italian source. The Latin captions include several usages of the [[Typographical ligature|ligature]] ''æ'';  this was almost unknown in later medieval times (a simple ''e'' was written instead), and although the ligature was revived by Italian humanist scholars in the early 15th century, it is found only in documents of deliberately classicising [[humanist minuscule]] produced by Italian scribes, and never in conjunction with a Gothic style of script such as is seen in the map.

Another point calling the map's authenticity into question was raised at the 1966 Conference: that one caption referred to Bishop Eirik of Greenland "and neighboring regions" (in Latin, "regionumque finitimarum"), a title known previously from the work of religious scholar Luka Jelić (1864–1922). An essay by British researcher [[Peter Foote]] for the ''Saga Book of the [[Viking Society for Northern Research|Viking Society]]'' (vol. 11, part 1), published shortly after the conference, noted that German researcher Richard Hennig (1874–1951) had spent years, before the Vinland Map was revealed, fruitlessly trying to track Jelić's phrase down in medieval texts. It seemed that either Jelić had seen the Vinland Map and promised not to reveal its existence (keeping the promise so rigidly that he never mentioned any of the other new historical information on the map), or that he had invented the phrase as a scholarly description, and the Vinland Map creator copied him. In practice, because Jelić's work had gone through three editions, Foote was able to demonstrate how the first edition (in French) had adopted the concept from the work of earlier researchers, listed by Jelić, then the later editions had adapted the anachronistic French scholarly phrase "évêque régionnaire des contrées américaines" into Latin.

Handwriting experts at the 1966 Conference tended to disagree with Witten's assessment that the map captions had been written by the same person as the ''Speculum'' and ''Relation'' texts. This had also been a major reason why the British Museum had rejected the map in 1957, the Keeper of Manuscripts having detected elements of handwriting style not developed until the nineteenth century.<ref name="seaver"/>