Leif Erikson and the Norse in Vinland (c. 1000)

Around the year 1000, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson sailed west from Greenland and reached the coast of North America, a land the Norse called Vinland. He and other Greenlanders made several voyages there over the following years, almost five centuries before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Their story survives in two medieval Icelandic sagas, and since the 1960s archaeology at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland has confirmed that the Norse really did reach the Americas.

Background: from Norway to Greenland

During the Viking Age, Norse seafarers from Scandinavia spread across the North Atlantic. They reached the Faroe Islands, then settled Iceland from about 870. Around 985 or 986, Leif’s father, Erik the Red, led a fleet of colonists from Iceland to southwestern Greenland, where two settlements were founded, the Eastern and Western Settlements.

The Greenland colony was small, with perhaps 2,000–3,000 people at its height, and it lacked one vital resource: timber. Greenland had only scrub birch and driftwood. Norse farmers needed wood for houses, boats and tools, which gave them a strong practical reason to look for new land to the west.

Leif himself was probably born in Iceland in the 970s and grew up in Greenland at his father’s farm, Brattahlíð. According to the sagas, he travelled to Norway around 999, where he joined the court of King Olaf Tryggvason and was baptised a Christian.

The two Vinland sagas

Almost everything known about the voyages comes from two Icelandic sagas, together called the Vinland sagas. The Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) was probably first written down around 1200 and survives in the late fourteenth-century manuscript Flateyjarbók. Erik the Red’s Saga (Eiríks saga rauða) was composed in the mid-thirteenth century and survives in two manuscripts, Hauksbók and Skálholtsbók.

Both were written more than two centuries after the events, drawing on oral tradition. They agree on many points but differ on others, including who first saw the new lands, how many voyages were made and who led them. Historians treat them as valuable but not literal records.

Earlier written evidence also exists. Around 1075 the German chronicler Adam of Bremen mentioned an island called Vinland, where vines grew wild, on the authority of the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson. The Icelandic historian Ari Thorgilsson also referred to Vinland in his Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók), written in the 1120s or early 1130s.

Leif’s voyage

In the Saga of the Greenlanders, the story begins with Bjarni Herjólfsson, a merchant who was blown off course on his way to Greenland around 986 and sighted unknown wooded lands to the west without going ashore. Years later, Leif bought Bjarni’s ship and sailed with a crew of about 35 men to find these lands, probably around 1000.

Leif first reached a barren coast of flat rocks, which he named Helluland (“Land of Flat Stones”), generally identified with Baffin Island. Further south he found a low, wooded coast with white beaches and named it Markland (“Forest Land”), usually identified with Labrador. Sailing on, he reached a land with rich grass, salmon in the rivers and mild winters, where his crew built houses and spent the winter.

The saga notes that on the shortest day of the year the sun was up for much longer than in Greenland or Iceland, which suggests a latitude in the region of Newfoundland or further south. One of Leif’s companions, a German named Tyrkir, found grapes or vines, and Leif named the country Vinland. In spring the expedition returned to Greenland with a cargo of timber and grapes. On the way Leif rescued shipwrecked sailors, which earned him the nickname Leif the Lucky.

Erik the Red’s Saga tells the story differently. In this version, King Olaf sent Leif to bring Christianity to Greenland, and on his way home Leif was blown off course and came upon a land with self-sown wheat and vines. In both accounts, Leif is the first Norse leader to set foot in Vinland.

Later expeditions

According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif’s brother Thorvald led the next expedition, using Leif’s houses as a base. During a second summer of exploration the Norse came into contact with Indigenous people, whom they called Skrælings. Fighting broke out, and Thorvald was killed by an arrow.

The most ambitious attempt to settle was led by the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir. The sagas say they brought men, women and livestock and stayed for two or three years. Their son Snorri was born in Vinland, making him the first child of European descent known to have been born in the Americas. Trade with the Skrælings turned to conflict, and the colonists eventually gave up and returned.

A final voyage was led by Leif’s half-sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir. The Saga of the Greenlanders gives a dark account of it, in which Freydís had her partners killed in a quarrel. After this, the sagas record no further attempts at settlement. Leif himself never returned to Vinland; he took over Brattahlíð and is thought to have died around 1020, though the date is uncertain.

What archaeology confirms

For centuries, many scholars doubted that the sagas described real journeys. That changed in 1960, when the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, guided by local residents, identified overgrown house ruins at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. They excavated the site between 1961 and 1968, and Parks Canada carried out further excavations in the 1970s.

The L’Anse aux Meadows site contains the remains of eight buildings of turf over wooden frames, built in the Norse style of Iceland and Greenland. Finds included iron rivets, a bronze cloak pin, a stone spindle whorl used for spinning wool, and evidence of iron smelting and woodworking. The settlement may have housed around 70–90 people, but it was occupied only briefly, probably for a few years at most.

Butternuts were also found there. These nuts do not grow in Newfoundland; the nearest trees grow around the Gulf of St Lawrence and in New Brunswick. This shows that the Norse sailed further south, and many archaeologists think L’Anse aux Meadows was a gateway or base camp for the wider region the sagas call Vinland.

In 2021 a study published in the journal Nature used a spike in atmospheric radiocarbon caused by a solar storm in 993 to date wood cut with metal tools at the site. It showed that the trees were felled in 1021, the first precise date for Europeans in the Americas.

Timeline

• c. 985–986: Erik the Red leads colonists from Iceland to Greenland.
• c. 986: Bjarni Herjólfsson sights land west of Greenland, according to the Saga of the Greenlanders.
• c. 999: Leif Erikson visits Norway and becomes a Christian at the court of Olaf Tryggvason.
• c. 1000: Leif sails to Helluland, Markland and Vinland and winters there.
• c. 1000s: Expeditions of Thorvald Eriksson, Thorfinn Karlsefni and Freydís.
• 1021: Wood is cut at L’Anse aux Meadows, the earliest exact date for Europeans in the Americas.
• c. 1075: Adam of Bremen mentions Vinland, the earliest surviving written reference.
• 1347: Icelandic annals record a Greenland ship that had sailed to Markland.
• 1960–1968: Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad identify and excavate L’Anse aux Meadows.
• 1978: L’Anse aux Meadows becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Myths and facts

The story of Leif Erikson has attracted many myths and forgeries. The Kensington Runestone, “found” in Minnesota in 1898 and claiming to record a Norse expedition of 1362, is regarded by most scholars as a nineteenth-century hoax. The Newport Tower in Rhode Island, once claimed as a Norse church, has been dated to the colonial period of the seventeenth century.

The Vinland Map, an apparent fifteenth-century world map showing Vinland, was announced by Yale University in 1965 as a sensational discovery. Scientific tests over the following decades raised doubts, and in 2021 Yale confirmed that it is a modern forgery, because its ink contains titanium dioxide, a pigment not used before the 1920s.

It is also sometimes said that the Norse “discovered America” in a way that changed history. In fact, Indigenous peoples had lived in North America for many thousands of years, and the Norse contact was brief and had little lasting impact. It was the voyages after Columbus in 1492 that began sustained contact between Europe and the Americas.

Legacy

Leif Erikson became a hero in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially among Scandinavian Americans, who saw in him a symbol of their heritage in the New World. Statues of him stand in Boston, Seattle, Reykjavík and elsewhere. In 1964 the United States Congress authorised Leif Erikson Day, celebrated on 9 October each year by presidential proclamation.

The Norse settlements in Greenland themselves were abandoned in the fifteenth century, and knowledge of Vinland survived only in Icelandic manuscripts. L’Anse aux Meadows, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, is today the only confirmed Norse site in North America.

Why it matters

The Vinland voyages were the first known crossing of the Atlantic by Europeans and the first meeting between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas. They show the remarkable reach of Norse seafaring, and the rare case in which archaeology has confirmed the core of a medieval saga, while also showing why a small colony at the edge of the world could not hold on to a new continent.