This is very far from my expertise, but surely you can also live off the land?
Hunting and fishing shouldn't be very different in Newfoundland compared to Norway/Iceland. Bring a few chickens along, and you have another food source.
I assume/guess the vikings were better at this stuff than the Mayflower crowd.
They didn't want to live like that. It's one of the things Jared Diamond argues in Collapse: sure, they could have survived longer in Greenland if they adopted more of the customs of the Inuit, but this went against everything they considered important and valuable in life. They wouldn't be themselves any more if they did (and for all we know, a few of them may have been assimilated into the native population and stopped being Norse in any sense recognizable to us).
Not least of all, Leif Eriksson was a Christian, a Catholic in modern terms. It's reasonable to assume most of his followers were, too. He had gained the epithet "the lucky" due to his habit of coming across and rescuing castaways at sea. To the Norse, luck was evidence the cosmos was on your side, and one of the most important attributes a leader offered to potential followers was a share in this cosmic luck. This probably helped Leif the missionary securing a lot of conversions!
But the heart of Christianity at the time was in Rome. They were already profoundly cut off from the mystical fellowship of believers, the communion. How much worse wouldn't it be for their sense of self if they were not only to go off in an impossibly distant land, but to live as the savages there?
I don't quite understand. Ansgar was quite connected to Rome, as much as you would expect from a missionary in a foreign country. There was, as I understand it, correspondence between Ansgar and the pope, at the very least there had to be a letter appointing him as bishop. Think of how much harder it would have been to send a letter from Vinland.
That's an excellent question. The answer I would give is that the process by which the Norse settled Greenland did not actually ultimately work out in the first place. Colonization isn't a simple matter of gathering enough people to form a colonizing party, staking out an empty(-ish) piece of land, and building a new settlement there. Once that settlement is built, there needs to be a steady stream of consumable goods being provided, and until the new settlement can produce or trade for those goods on its own right, the colonizers are effectively subsidizing that settlement.
The settlements in Greenland never really reached that point. The leading hypothesis at this point for why Greenland collapsed was that the Arctic trade routes dropped far-off Greenland from their destinations--and without that trade, the settlements couldn't sustain themselves and collapsed. Newfoundland may be a more hospitable place than Greenland, but from a trade situation, it's even worse: it's not offering any trade goods to Europeans that Greenland or Iceland could be providing (at much shorter journeys), but it's still probably not able to tap into the North American trade network--I think you have to make it to Nova Scotia or New Brunswick to do that.
Stories of Norse Greenlanders visiting Iceland mention their poverty. They would come to Iceland and taste beer and bread for the first time in their lives. They lived, yes, but they definitely did not thrive over there. Perhaps they were sustainable, but they were on the very edge of being so, and when conditions worsened (worse climate, lost trade routes, competition, etc.), they weren’t any more and these settlements were abandoned.
The Norse mostly settled Greenland because they had to, not because it was such a great place to be. It was a frontier, settled by desperate people. Leif's father, the chieftain Eric the Red, had moved there because he had been banished from Iceland over a murder.
And of course the Greenland colony wasn't really sustainable, which is why it died out when a couple of hard turns came their way (climate change and getting cut off from trade for a few years).
Hunting and fishing shouldn't be very different in Newfoundland compared to Norway/Iceland. Bring a few chickens along, and you have another food source.
I assume/guess the vikings were better at this stuff than the Mayflower crowd.