Born late 970s,
Iceland
Died 1020,
Greenland
The most reliable evidence of Leif Eriksson’s exploration of North America remains the sagas written almost 200 years after the events they describe. The two sagas chronicling the explorations of Leif Eriksson and other Norsemen are Erik the Red’s Saga, which credits Eriksson with bringing Christianity to Greenland in 999 at the request of Norway’s King Olaf I, and Greenlanders’ Saga, which credits the discovery of Vinland to Bjarni Herjolfsson and not Eriksson, who was its first explorer and name-giver. Scholars believe the two sagas do not share the same origin, and were written independently of each other, sometime in the thirteenth century and most likely after 1263, using older stories from the oral tradition.
The son of Erik the Red, the founder of Greenland, Leif Eriksson was probably born in Iceland in the late 970s and moved with his family to Greenland in 985 or 986, settling at a place called Brattahlid on the southwest corner of the island along the Eriksfjord. Icelandic sagas describe Eriksson as “tall and strong and very impressive in appearance. He was a shrewd man and always moderate in behavior.” Eriksson earned the name Leif the Lucky for his exploits. An expert sailor, he was the first Viking to sail directly from Greenland to Scotland and then to Norway, and back again.
The Norse explorers used familiar landmarks and the shortest distance between two points as navigational tools. In the summer of 986, Bjarni Herjolfsson sailed from Norway to Iceland to meet his father, who had unexpectedly moved to Greenland; without charts or compass, Herjolfsson turned toward Greenland but strong north winds and then fog threw his ship off course. When the sun broke through, the ship sailed another day before land was sighted: it was not mountainous but full of forests and low hills. For two days Herjolfsson moved along the coast where the land remained lined with trees. He did not go ashore. A southwest wind carried his ship three more days to mountainous land with glaciers. A strong wind then carried the ship for another four days to Greenland.
Herjolfsson’s journey fueled the imagination of Norse explorers who believed land existed beyond Greenland. The distance between the present-day Cumberland Peninsula and Greenland is just 200 miles across the narrowest stretch of what is now Davis Strait. From mountains beyond the eastern settlement, land to the west could probably be seen. To the family of Erik the Red, Herjolfsson’s story called for action. Leif Eriksson purchased Herjolfsson’s ship and asked his father to go with him on a voyage of exploration; however, Erik the Red fell off his horse on his way to the boat, breaking the bones in his foot. Eriksson departed without him.
In 1001 Eriksson left Greenland with a crew of 35, sailing in reverse order of Herjolfsson’s course. He landed first at a place he named Helluland (“the Land of Flat Stone”) which is thought to be on the southern end of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. From there he went to a place he called Markland—(“Wood” or “Forest Land”)—which is thought to be somewhere on the coast of Labrador. He then landed on an unnamed island, which is possibly Belle Isle in the Strait of Belle Isle, which separates Labrador from the island of Newfoundland. According to legend, “There was dew on the grass, and the first thing they did was to get some of it on their hands and put it to their lips, and to them it seemed the sweetest thing they had ever tasted.”
Eriksson and his companions reached a part of the New World that he named Vinland (“Land of the Vine” or “Wineland” or, possibly, “Pastureland”) in the fall of 1001. Scholars agree that Vinland is on the North American continent, but its exact location is in question. Eriksson’s party landed at the mouth of a river on the west of a large peninsula pointing north and followed the river upstream to a lake. This geographical description was the only one given of Vinland, but the astronomical readings show that it was south of Greenland. The site could be L’Anse aux Meadows on the northeastern tip of Newfoundland, where remains of a Norse settlement were found in the 1960s, but no clear-cut archaeological record exists.
No one theory explains the existing evidence of Vinland. In Greenlanders’ Saga, the explorers found grapes in Vinland and brought a boatload back with them; although grapes cannot grow farther north than 45° N, Jacques Cartier (see entry), who discovered the St. Lawrence River, found grapes on both sides of the river in the 1530s. Eriksson’s expedition spent the winter in Vinland and built a large house and temporary buildings at a place named Leifrsbudir, or “Leif’s Booths”; these were the first structures built by Europeans in North America. Eriksson’s expedition returned to Greenland in the spring of 1002.
The year following Eriksson’s voyage, his brother Thorvald returned to Leifrsbudir to explore the region more extensively, spending the winter of 1003-04 there. The next spring and summer he explored Vinland, finding it beautiful and well-wooded. After spending the winter of 1004-05 in Leifrsbudir, Thorvald went north to Markland the following spring. There the Norsemen encountered and clashed with the Skraelings, who were either Native Americans or Eskimos. When Thorvald was killed by an arrow, his crew returned to Leifrsbudir for the winter and then sailed back to Greenland in 1006. Learning of Thorvald’s death, his brother Thorstein tried to sail to Markland to recover his body but ran into storms that drove his boat back into the North Atlantic. Thorstein died on his return to Greenland.
In 1010 Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had married Thorstein’s widow, Gudrid, sailed from Greenland with 160 men and some women on board three ships to found a settlement in Vinland. They built houses at Leifrsbudir, and in the summer of 1011 Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri. At first the Norsemen traded for furs with the Skraelings but soon warfare broke out in the winter of 1011-12. The Norsemen returned to Greenland in 1013.
Following the return of Thorfinn Karlsefni, Erik the Red’s illegitimate daughter Freydis went into partnership with two brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, to trade for furs and wood in Vinland. Once in Leifrsbudir, Freydis had her supporters murder Helgi and Finnbogi and their followers. According to the saga, when the men in her party refused to kill the women, she did it herself. Freydis then confiscated her enemies’ goods and returned home, living off the profits.
In Greenland, Leif Eriksson had inherited his father’s estate at Brattahlid along with his position as leader of the colony. When confronted with the news of Freydis’s crimes, he could not bring himself to punish his half-sister. Upon Eriksson’s death in about 1020 the estate was passed on to his son, Thorkell.
This is the complete article, containing 1,160 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
