How far could the Vikings explore/colonize the Americas?

So obviously they would be limited to coastal areas or maybe rivers, but in general, how far could the Vikings go down East Coast if they wanted to, and what could have motivated them to colonize there?

It's possible that Vikings went as far as Great Lakes or Rhode Island IOTL : the problem was not a geographical problem, but a social one.

Vikings expeditions were never about settling for the sake of settling, and the scandinavian demographical pressure was far too low to have a similar push to XVth European one.

Norses created settlement in Vinland in order to support their Greenland settlements that lacked wood, which was hard to make come from Europe and decisive for Scandinavian life style.
You could end with more settlements in America, but they would be limited demographically, and vulnerable to native attacks and/or absorbtion, due to a lack of real motivation to have a reasonably important (demographically wise) move of population.

A major issue was that the main supplier of settlers was Greenland which didn't exactly have many to begin with. It's difficult to settle an area when you have such a small pool of people to pull from.

There is evidence that the Vikings got as far as Arkansas. There has been speculation that Viking explorers may have gone as far as Wisconsin and Minnesota . Viking coins have been discovered as far west as Oregon but there is no positive proof.

I think you would need different push-pull causes than OTL. The previous posts bring out the lack of drivers pushing the Vikings to explore/colonize farther into NA.

There also didn't seem to be a "pull" cause to get them past the wood for building. If they encountered some North American source for trade items that would have been lucrative back to Europe, that might have pulled them farther inland.

LSCatilina said:

You could end with more settlements in America, but they would be limited demographically, and vulnerable to native attacks and/or absorbtion, due to a lack of real motivation to have a reasonably important (demographically wise) move of population.

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Well, if you could just get them to the point where they can actually survive without Europe, a few hundred years of natural growth would do wonders. That wouldn't necessarily do much for assimilation, though, and the net effect might just be that Europeans have some (odder) theories about where Native Americans came from due to the presence of some with blond hair and beards and so on...

Maybe if the conflict between pagan and Christian Norse was a lot more acrimonious than in OTL, and a sizeable number of pagans flee West, first to Iceland, then to Greenland as Iceland is christianized - and population pressure in Greenland plus Greenland´s inherent inability to support Scandinavian lifestyle causes migration from Greenland to Vinland.

chris N said:

There is evidence that the Vikings got as far as Arkansas. There has been speculation that Viking explorers may have gone as far as Wisconsin and Minnesota . Viking coins have been discovered as far west as Oregon but there is no positive proof.

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Little statuettes with carved runes were found in Paraguay and their surroundings...