CHRONOFRAME
Two Icelandic sagas tell how the son of Erik the Red sailed west and found a land of forests and grapes. For centuries it sounded like legend.
Around the year 1000, the Norse world reached farther west than ever before. Iceland had been settled for over a century. In the 980s, Erik the Red, banished from Iceland for killing two men, led settlers to the southwest coast of Greenland. From those Greenland farms, his son Leif would sail on to a coast that no European had ever explored.
The two sagas
We know Leif's voyage mainly from two Icelandic texts, the Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red's Saga. Both were written down in the 1200s, about two centuries after the events, and they disagree on many details. Read together, they describe a series of expeditions west from Greenland over a few years.
In the Saga of the Greenlanders, a trader named Bjarni Herjolfsson is blown off course on his way to Greenland and sights an unknown, wooded coast, but never lands. Leif later buys Bjarni's ship, gathers a crew of about thirty-five men, and sets out to find that land.
Three lands in the west
The saga names three places. First came Helluland, the "land of flat stones," a bare and rocky shore. Next was Markland, the "forest land," with low white beaches and woods. Finally the crew reached a place with mild winters, salmon in the rivers and, according to the story, wild grapes. Leif named it Vinland, the "land of wine," and built houses there to spend the winter.
Many historians link Helluland with Baffin Island and Markland with the coast of Labrador. Vinland is harder to pin down. It may have been a wider region rather than one spot, stretching from Newfoundland south toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where wild grapes do grow.
After Leif
Leif returned to Greenland and did not go back. Others did. His brother Thorvald led an expedition and was killed in a clash with local people, whom the sagas call Skraelings. Later, a trader named Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid tried to found a lasting settlement. Their son Snorri, born in Vinland, is remembered as the first child of European parents known to have been born in the Americas.
The settlement did not last. The sagas describe trade with the Indigenous inhabitants that turned to fighting, and the Norse, few in number and far from home, eventually withdrew to Greenland.
From legend to history
For centuries, Vinland lived mostly in these stories. That changed in 1960, when the remains of Norse buildings were found at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, and again in 2021, when tree rings dated Norse woodcutting there to the year 1021. The sagas are not a precise record, but their core claim, that Norsemen from Greenland sailed to North America and lived there for a time, is now confirmed.
In the United States, Leif Erikson Day is observed each year on October 9, by presidential proclamation since 1964. It honours a voyage that, for a long time, many people assumed had never happened.
Watch this story as a short film on our Facebook page. Scenes in our films are AI reconstructions; the history is real.