Leif Erikson

Leif Erikson was a Norse Greenlander who, around the year 1000, sailed to a coast he called Vinland and is generally accepted as the first known European to reach mainland North America, roughly five centuries before Christopher Columbus. His voyage is known mainly from two Icelandic sagas, and archaeology in Newfoundland has since confirmed that Norse people did reach the continent in his lifetime.

Leif's parents were Erik the Red and Thjodhild. Erik's father had been exiled from Norway for killing a man, and the family settled in Iceland, where Leif was probably born in the 970s, perhaps near Breiðafjörður in the west. When Erik was himself banished from Iceland he explored the land to the west, which he named Greenland, and in 986 led colonists to found its first permanent settlement. Leif grew up on the family farm at Brattahlíð in the Eastern Settlement.

According to the sagas, Leif travelled as a young man to Norway, where he joined the court of King Olaf Tryggvason and was baptised. On the way his ship was blown to the Hebrides, where he had a son, Thorgils, with a local noblewoman. The sagas say Olaf sent him back to Greenland to spread Christianity; his mother is said to have accepted it and built a church, while his father held back. Some scholars think the missionary story is a later embellishment, probably traceable to a single Icelandic writer.

The Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders were written down around 1200, two centuries after the events, and they disagree. In the first, Leif found the new land by accident when storms drove him off course on his way home from Norway. In the second, another sailor, Bjarni Herjólfsson, had already sighted an unknown coast, and about fifteen years later Leif bought his ship and set out deliberately with 35 men.

The Greenlanders' saga describes three landfalls: a barren, rocky country Leif called Helluland, a wooded one called Markland, and finally a mild land with plentiful salmon, where the party built houses and spent the winter. Because grapes or vines were found there, Leif named it Vinland. Modern guesses identify Helluland with Baffin Island or northern Labrador and Markland with the Labrador coast. Both sagas say he rescued shipwrecked sailors on the way back, which earned him the name Leif the Lucky. He never returned, though his brother Thorvald and later Thorfinn Karlsefni did, and their attempts to settle ended in conflict with the local people.

The sagas are literature, not record, and the only strictly historical mentions of Vinland are brief ones by the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, around 1075, and the Icelandic historian Ari the Wise. Hard evidence came in the early 1960s, when the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, located the remains of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, in Canada. Radiocarbon dating places it between about 990 and 1050, and tree-ring analysis of cut wood points to the year 1021. It may have been a ship-repair station on the way to richer lands around the Gulf of St Lawrence; whether it is the camp of the sagas cannot be proved.

Erik died soon after Leif's return, shortly after 1000, and Leif became the leading chieftain in Greenland. He is last mentioned as alive in 1018, and by 1025 his son Thorkell had succeeded him, so he probably died in Greenland between those years. In the 19th and 20th centuries he became a symbol for Nordic Americans, and since 1964 the United States has marked 9 October as Leif Erikson Day.

Our 1000 map shows Norway and Iceland as the Norse North Atlantic stood when Leif made his voyage; the short-lived Vinland camps were too small to appear.