Erik the Red

Erik Thorvaldsson, remembered as Erik the Red, was a Norse outlaw from Iceland who led the first lasting European settlement in Greenland in the 980s. The farming colony he founded survived for roughly four centuries, and his son Leif carried Norse voyages on to the coasts of North America.

Almost everything about Erik comes from Icelandic writings set down long after his death. The most sober are Ari Thorgilsson's Íslendingabók, whose author says his uncle had spoken with a man who sailed to Greenland with Erik, and the Landnámabók, the "Book of Settlements". The two family sagas that tell his story at length, the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, were written down later and disagree on several points, such as how many children he had and how the voyages west unfolded. His approximate dates, born around 950 and dying around 1003, rest on these accounts. His nickname probably referred to red hair and beard.

According to the sagas, Erik was born in the Jæren district of Rogaland in Norway. His father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was banished for manslaughter and took the family, including the ten-year-old Erik, to Iceland, where they settled at Hornstrandir in the remote northwest. Erik later married Thjodhild Jorundsdottir and farmed at Haukadalur, near Breiðafjörður in the west of the island.

The sagas describe a run of violent disputes. When Erik's slaves set off a landslide onto a neighbour's farm, the neighbour's kinsman killed them; Erik killed him and another man in return and was driven out of Haukadalur. After moving to islands in Breiðafjörður, he quarrelled with a man named Thorgest over a pair of carved household pillars and killed his two sons. Around 982 an assembly outlawed Erik and his allies from Iceland for three years.

Erik used his exile to look for land in the west that the sailor Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had glimpsed nearly a century before, and that another outlaw, Snæbjörn galti, had tried and failed to settle. The Landnámabók says he sailed from Snæfellsnes in 982, reached the east coast, then turned south round the cape now called Farewell and followed the western coast, where he found ice-free fjords. He spent three years exploring. Back in Iceland, he called the country Greenland, saying, according to the saga, that an attractive name would draw settlers.

Around 985 he led a fleet of 25 ships west; the Landnámabók records that only 14 arrived, some having turned back and others probably lost. The colonists founded two colonies on the southwest coast, the Eastern Settlement and a smaller Western Settlement near present-day Nuuk. Erik built his farm at Brattahlíð, at the head of the fjord named after him, and was recognised as the colony's leading chieftain. Excavations in the 1930s uncovered a large complex there with a long hall and byres for some fifty cows, and the site is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage area.

The sagas say Erik remained loyal to the old Norse gods even as his wife and son Leif became Christians; Thjodhild was credited with Greenland's first church. When Leif set out for the land later called Vinland, Erik is said to have fallen from his horse on the way to the ship, taken it as an ill omen and stayed behind. He died in an epidemic, said to have been brought by newcomers, that struck the colony around 1002 or 1003. The Norse settlements lasted into the fifteenth century, until shortly before the voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Our 1000 map shows the North Atlantic world of Norway and Iceland in the years when Erik's Greenland colony was taking root.