Short answers, pulled from the story.
Leif Erikson landed in Vinland around AD 1000, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The date is drawn from the Vinland sagas and confirmed broadly by radiocarbon dating at L'Anse aux Meadows, which places Norse occupation at the site around 1000 CE.
Vinland refers to a coastal area of North America explored by Norse Vikings, but its precise location is disputed. The only confirmed Norse archaeological site is L'Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland, though the sagas and scholars have proposed locations ranging from New Brunswick and Maine to as far south as New York City and New England.
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad discovered the remains of a small Norse encampment at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland in 1960. Excavations in the 1960s and 1970s found wooden objects, jasper fire-strikers traceable to Iceland and Greenland, and three butternuts. In 2021, wood from the site was shown to have been cut in 1021 using metal blades.
The two main Vinland sagas, the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, record multiple Norse expeditions to Vinland but contradict each other on key facts. They agree that Thorfinn Karlsefni led a major expedition with livestock, that the party traded with local inhabitants, and that Gudrid gave birth to a son named Snorri during the stay. The sagas were preserved by oral tradition for roughly 250 years before being written down.
The meaning of Vinland is disputed. The most widely accepted reading derives the name from the Old Norse vín with a long vowel, meaning wine, based on reports of wild grapes growing in the region. A competing interpretation, introduced by Sven Söderberg in 1898, reads it as vin with a short vowel, meaning meadow or pasture. Most scholars, including Kirsten Seaver and Erik Wahlgren, have rejected the pastureland reading.
The Skrælings were the Indigenous people the Norse met during their expeditions to Vinland. Both sagas describe initial peaceful trading, in which the local inhabitants exchanged furs for milk and other goods, followed by violent conflict. The Norse were ultimately driven from their southern settlement after repeated attacks; in one account a single piece of iron retrieved by a local person and then discarded was noted as a detail of the encounter.