Leif Eriksson

Explorer

• Born: c. 970
• Birthplace: Iceland, possibly in Haukadal
• Died: c. 1035
• Place of death: Probably near Julianehaab, Greenland

Norwegian explorer

Though probably not the first European to encounter North America, Leif made the first deliberate exploration of the North American continent and provided the main stimulus for later, unsuccessful attempts at permanent settlement.

Area of achievement Exploration

Early Life

Very little is known of the early life of Leif Eriksson (layv EHR-ihk-suhn). He was the son of Erik the Red (Erik Thorvaldson) and Thjodhild, and he seems to have had two brothers, Thorvald and Thorstein, and one sister, Freydis. His father’s career, however, is well-known. Erik was born in Norway but was forced to flee from there as a result of “some killings.” He settled first at Drangar in Iceland but then moved to Haukadal. At that time, though land was still readily available in Iceland, the country had been known for more than a century and intensively settled for perhaps eighty years; there were many powerful and well-established families in all the areas where Erik attempted to settle.

In Haukadal, he became involved in several conflicts, killing at least two of his neighbors, Eyjolf the Sow and Hrafn the Dueler. He was driven out, tried to make his home elsewhere, killed another neighbor in an argument over timber, and was then not unreasonably outlawed together with his family.

Erik then made the momentous decision to try to find an unsettled land. Seafarers blown off course had reported land to the west of Iceland, and in 982, Erik sailed, together with his family, to find it. He landed in Greenland near what is now Julianehaab and spent three years exploring the country. In 985, he returned to Iceland, and in 986, he set sail again with twenty-five ships to found a permanent settlement in Greenland. Only fourteen of the ships arrived, with perhaps four hundred people, but this landing formed the basis for the later colonization of the eastern, middle, and western settlements of Greenland, which lasted until changing climate and Eskimo hostility exterminated the colonies, probably in the early 1500’.

Nevertheless, this colonizing move had transformed Erik from a hunted outlaw in a land severely afflicted by famine to the undisputed head of a new nation, the patriarch of a land with reasonable grazing (in the more temperate climate of the late tenth century) and unparalleled hunting, trapping, and fishing opportunities. It seems reasonable to suppose that the total change of lifestyle also made an impression on his children, including Leif, who may have wondered if they too could not become great men or great women by similar daring seamanship.

Life’s Work

To reconstruct Leif’s life, two Icelandic sagas are indispensable: Groehnlendinga saga (c. 1390; The Greenlanders’ Saga, 1893) and Eiríks saga rauda (c. 1263; The Saga of Erik the Red, 1841), the latter existing in two different versions. These sagas do not tell quite the same tale, but reasons for their deviations can often be seen. According to The Greenlanders’ Saga, which was composed much earlier than its late fourteenth century transcription date, America was originally sighted not by Leif but by Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had been blown off course on his way to Greenland. Bjarni refused, however, to land at any of the three places he sighted (to the disgust of his crew) and finally made his way to his father’s farm, located about fifty miles from the farm Erik and Leif had established at Brattahlith. Bjarni’s sightings caused much discussion, and some time later, probably around the year 1000, Leif came to him and bought his ship presumably thinking that if the ship had reached this strange destination once, it could do so again. Leif hoped to get his father, now a man of fifty or more, to lead the expedition, because of his famous good luck, but on his way to the ship, Erik fell off his horse, hurt himself, and refused to go any farther. It was not his fate to discover more new lands, he said. He would leave that to his son.

The Greenlanders’ Saga then relates that Leif and his men came in succession to countries they called Helluland (flatstone land) and Markland (forest land), finally arriving at a place where they stayed for the winter and by which they were much impressed. It had sweet dew, no winter frost, outdoor grazing for cattle all year, and sun visible as late as midafternoon even in midwinter very different from the short midwinter days of Greenland or Iceland. Finally, an old attendant of Leif, the German Tyrkir, was found one day almost incoherent with delight: He had found wild grapes, from which the land was given the name of Vinland, or Wineland. Leif and his men loaded a cargo of grapes and timber the latter in very short supply in the treeless northern islands and went home. On their way, they sighted and rescued a wrecked ship’s crew, again men who had been blown off course.

The story cited above is probably close to what really happened. In later years, however, the rather haphazard nature of the expedition was considered insufficiently inspiring, and The Saga of Erik the Red added a rather pointless tale of a love affair between Leif and a Hebridean woman named Thorgunna, which left him with a son, Thorgils, and a tale of how Leif went to Norway to the court of Olaf I Tryggvason, the missionary king, there to be converted to Christianity and sent back to preach the new religion in Greenland. On his return, says this saga, Leif was blown off course, sighted a land with wheat and vines on it, rescued a ship’s crew, and finally arrived in Greenland to preach the faith. One can see that in this story the stubborn, unenterprising Bjarni Herjolfsson has vanished; Leif has been given entire credit for discovering Vinland, and the whole story has become vaguely tied to the advantages of Christianity. Very little is said about geography, however, and it is not at all clear how Leif had time to go to Norway, be converted, go to Vinland, explore it, and get back to Greenland, all in one short northern summer. Almost certainly the tale of Leif and the conversion of Greenland is a later addition. It is not known when Greenland was converted, but it probably occurred after the conversion of Iceland in 1000. Leif probably died a Christian, but he was probably still a pagan at the time of his landing in North America.

The stories after the discovery deviate even further, but one can make out some consistent elements. Leif could and did tell people how to reach his winter settlement at Leifsbuthir in Vinland a “booth” being the Norse term for a temporary hut. He had in fact left a house of sorts there and was prepared to lend it to people, especially family members, but not to give it away; he seems to have felt the need to keep a claim of sorts on the country. Yet later visits were not successful. Thorvald, Leif’s brother, was killed by an arrow. The Greenlanders’ Saga says it was shot by a Skraeling; The Saga of Erik the Red, with its usual attempt to improve a story, says it was shot by a “uniped.” Nevertheless, many sources agree that the native inhabitants of the country, the Thule Inuit or Neo-Eskimos, called contemptuously Skraelings (possibly meaning “wretches” or “punies”) by the Norsemen, became increasingly hostile after early attempts at trade and in the end forced the Norsemen out. Another would-be colonizer, Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had married the widow of Thorstein (Leif’s other brother), tried to settle near Leifsbuthir but was also compelled to leave. Finally, an expedition that included Leif’s sister Freydis ended in mass murder when Freydis provoked and wiped out the crew of her companion ship, herself killing five women with an ax when no man would do it. She tried to hide the matter from her brother, but when the party returned to Greenland, Leif discovered the truth and, though reluctant to punish her himself, made the killings known. The visits to Vinland had proved unlucky, and Leif and his family attempted to settle there no more as far as is known from the sagas.

Significance

In a sense, Leif Eriksson did very little to earn his later reputation, or even his Norse nickname, Leif “the Lucky.” He did not “discover” America; Bjarni Herjolfsson did. He did not try to colonize it; if anyone can be given credit for that, it should be Thorfinn Karlsefni. What Leif did was to explore the Labrador-Newfoundland-Nova Scotia coast and to publicize his exploration. In this at least he was a master, and stories rapidly became attached to his voyage: The turning back of his father, the discovery of the grapes, the use of a pair of trained Scottish “runners” given to him by King Olaf to scout large areas of land quickly and cheaply without the bother of shipping horses. Some of these stories are probably in essence true. Others were attracted to the saga by the interest taken in these western discoveries.

Furthermore, Vinland may have been visited more often than the sagas state. In the 1950’s, scholar Helge Ingstad made a careful search of the Newfoundland coast for relics of Norse settlement, trying to reconcile the geography of the area with such carefully described places in the sagas as Furdustrandir, the Wonder Beaches (perhaps the long expanse of sandy beaches south of Hamilton Inlet in southeast Labrador). In the end, Ingstad found what are claimed to be clear signs of Norse building at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland. Whether these are Leifsbuthir or some later establishment cannot be determined.

Finally, Vinland remained marked on maps drawn in Iceland at least up to 1590, a century after Christopher Columbus. At any time in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries any Englishman, Italian, or Portuguese who bothered to ask an Icelander about northern geography would probably have been told that there was a large, fertile country west of Greenland. Whether anyone did ask is not known. Yet it cannot be ruled out that, for example, Columbus had sailed “beyond Thule,” or Iceland, and in his 1492 expedition was encouraged by dim memories of the voyage of Leif the Lucky.

Further Reading

Barrett, James H., ed. Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003. Presents an analysis of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of the North Atlantic by the Vikings. Bibliography and index.

Gad, Finn. Earliest Times to 1700. Vol. 1 in The History of Greenland. Translated by Ernst Dupont. London: C. Hurst, 1970. A stirring account of the history of this doomed colony. Closely follows the Christianized version of Leif’s adventures, perhaps wrongly, but the author has interesting archaeological information on the nature of Erik and Leif’s farm at Brattahlith.

Gathorne-Hardy, G. M. The Norse Discoverers of America. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1970. A conflated account, originally published in 1921, of the different saga versions, making for an easier story to read but also rather obscuring the genuine discrepancies. There is a sensible discussion of textual problems and of such issues as the nature of the Skraelings.

Haugen, Einar, trans. Voyages to Vinland: The First American Saga. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942. This work is a translation of the various sources together with a long account of the evidence. Though largely superseded by the work by Jones, this book remains attractive for its clear style, and valuable because of the author’s own status as a scholar of Norse.

Ingstad, Helge, and Anne Stine Ingstad. The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. This account explores the story of what is often regarded as the only convincing Norse archaeological site in the New World, at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland.

Jones, Gwyn. The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and America. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Traces the story of the Norse discoveries of Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, with interesting details on seamanship and on the successive and half-planned nature of Norse exploration. The book includes translations of both The Greenlanders’ Saga and The Saga of Erik the Red as well as translocations of minor tales, including Eskimo ones. The most useful single work on this period and milieu.

Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Pálsson, trans. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America. New York: Penguin Books, 1970. This work also gives translations of The Greenlanders’ Saga and The Saga of Erik the Red, using as its basis for the latter the fuller if later Skalholtsbok version. There is also an excellent introduction about the relationship between the stories and the probable motives of the Christianizers of Leif.

Mowat, Farley. Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. An exercise in wringing dry the sagas in which every paragraph is translated and commented on often to the extent of hypothesizing the conflict, anxiety, or other motivation behind the bare facts recorded. Leif’s settlement is firmly located at Tickle Cove Pond in Newfoundland.

Seaver, Kirsten A. The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, circa A.D. 1000-1500. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Questions earlier interpretations of hostile contacts between the Inuit and Norse. Suggests that the Norse abandonment of Greenland was probably voluntary and not due to pressure from Eskimos.

Tornoe, Johannes K. Norsemen Before Columbus: Early American History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965. One of many analyses of the sagas, this study is particularly good on ships, sailing directions, and other details, including Norse observations of the sun and the account of the “wild grape.”

Wahlgren, Erik. The Vikings and America. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Part of the Ancient Peoples and Places series, looks at the Viking discovery of North America. Bibliography and index.

Related articles in Great Events from History: The Middle Ages

850-950: Viking Era; 11th-12th centuries: First European-Native American Contact.