Talk:Kingdom of Saguenay

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The name "Kingdom of Saguenay" (French: Royaume du Saguenay) has its origin in an Algonquin legend learned by the French during French colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to the Algonquin Indians, there was a kingdom to the north of blonde men rich with gold and furs in a place they called Saguenay. While imprisoned in France in the 1530s, Chief Donnacona also told stories about it, claiming it had great mines of silver and gold. French explorers in Canada looked for this kingdom in vain. Today, some people speculate it was an ancient, pre-Columbian European settlement to which the Algonquin oral tradition referred.

The name Saguenay survived in many modern placenames. The modern-day Saguenay region, including the city of Saguenay (Chicoutimi-Jonquière), is on both shores of the Saguenay River in Quebec. It is part of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean administrative region. Today, the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region is sometimes referred to metaphorically as the Kingdom of the Saguenay (Royaume du Saguenay), for example in tourist marketing.

It seems at least possible that the Saguenay legend has associations with Viking settlements in the Americas, notably at L'Anse aux Meadows.

Unrelated to the legend, a micronational project in the Saguenay region, Le Royaume de L'Anse-Saint-Jean (q.v.), achieved a certain amount of prominence in 1997.

Greenland, anyone?
Is it possible that the Algonquin had heard of the Scandinavian settlements in Greenland? This makes more sense than the L'Anse-aux-Meadows theory, as the Greenland settlements existed until the mid-1400s, scarcely a century before the legend was conferred to the French, whereas the Newfoundland settlement existed for only two years five-hundred years prior. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Erik Garrison (talk • contribs)

Pseudohistory
This article's currently in Category pseudohistory... I can't see any reason for that... It is quite possibly a mythical place, but nothing in the article suggests it is pseudohistorical... If so this should be mentioned —Preceding unsigned comment added by Furius (talk • contribs) 16:50, 9 December 2006


 * There is nothing pseudohistoric in the article as it now stands. I am hovewer moving it from Category:Pseudohistory to Category:Viking exploration of North America. This will no doubt make some editors claim that it is pseudohistory. Ain't this a paradox! -- Petri Krohn (talk) 22:35, 24 February 2009 (UTC)