Erik the Red

• 1. Introduction

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  Erik Thorvaldsson, known to history as Erik the Red, arrived in Greenland as an outlaw. Exiled from Iceland around 982, he had nowhere to go but west, toward a land that even other Norse adventurers had tried and failed to settle. What he found there, and what he built from scratch, would outlast him by centuries. But the story of how Erik got there is one of violence, grudges, inherited bad luck, and one man's talent for making the worst situations work in his favor. Who was this exile who named a frozen island to make it sound inviting? What drove him from two countries before he finally stopped running? And why did the settlement he planted survive long after he was gone?

• 2. Father and Son

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  Erik was born in 950 CE in Rogaland, a district in western Norway. His father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was not a man who stayed out of trouble. Thorvald was banished from Norway for committing acts of manslaughter, and took his family west across the sea to Iceland. Erik was ten years old when they made that crossing. They settled at Hornstrandir, in northwestern Iceland, and Thorvald died there sometime before 970 CE.

  The father's exile planted the family in unfamiliar ground, and Erik grew up knowing what it meant to lose standing in a community. He would repeat that pattern more than once. After Thorvald's death, Erik married Þjódhild Jorundsdottir and moved to a place called Haukadalr, where he built a farm named Eiríksstaðir. Þjódhild was the daughter of Jorundur Ulfsson and Þorbjorg Gilsdottir, and the couple would have at least three sons together: Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein.

  The question of Erik's daughter Freydís is murkier. The Saga of the Greenlanders calls her a full sister to Leif, while the Saga of Erik the Red describes her as a half-sister. The sagas disagree, and neither version has been settled. What is clearer is that Erik and Þjódhild diverged sharply on religion: Þjódhild converted to Christianity and commissioned Greenland's first church, while Erik remained devoted to Norse paganism. The sagas record that this disagreement had a personal cost. Þjódhild withheld intercourse from her husband over his refusal to convert.

• 3. A Pattern of Violence

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  The chain of events that got Erik exiled from Iceland began with his thralls. They caused a landslide on a neighboring farm belonging to a man named Valthjof, and Valthjof's kinsman, Eyjolf the Foul, killed the thralls in response. Erik killed Eyjolf in retaliation, and also killed a man called Hrafn the Dueller, known in the sagas as Holmgang-Hrafn. Eyjolf's kinsmen pursued legal action, and around 982 Erik was banished from Haukadale.

  Erik moved to islands on Breiðafjörður, off the west coast of Iceland. There, a dispute over inherited pillars pushed the conflict further. He had left his setstokkr, ornamented pillars of mystical value that his father had brought from Norway, with a man named Thorgest for safekeeping. When Erik's new home was ready and he went to retrieve them, Thorgest refused to give them back. Erik took the pillars anyway. Thorgest gave chase, and in the fight that followed, Erik killed both of Thorgest's sons and several other men.

  The two sides assembled allies. Styr, Eyjolf of Sviney, Thorbjorn Vifilsson, and the sons of Thorbrand of Alptafjord backed Erik. Thorgest drew support from the sons of Thord Gellir, Thorgeir of Hitardalr, Aslak of Langadalr, and Aslak's son Illugi. The dispute was settled at the Thorsnes Thing, a legal assembly, which outlawed Erik from Iceland for three years. Many of the men who had sided with him would later join him on his voyage to Greenland.

• 4. Naming a Land

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  Popular history has sometimes credited Erik as the first European to discover Greenland, but the sagas themselves push back on that. Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, also known as Gunnbjörn Ulf-Krakuson, is traditionally credited with the first sighting of the landmass, after strong winds drove him toward a set of islands between Iceland and Greenland roughly a century before Erik. Those islands were later named Gunnbjörn's skerries in his honor. Because the encounter was accidental, Gunnbjörn has been largely overlooked in accounts of Greenland's history.

  Roughly eighty years after Gunnbjörn, an outlaw named Snæbjörn galti had sailed to Greenland and attempted to settle there. A saga about that attempt has since been lost, but it records that galti led the first Norse effort to colonize the island, and the expedition failed under the hardships of the winter. Erik therefore arrived as an exile heading toward a land with two failed or accidental prior visits to its name.

  During his three years of exile, Erik rounded the southern tip of the island, later known as Cape Farewell, and worked his way up the western coast. He found stretches of coastline that were largely ice-free, with conditions that reminded him of Iceland. The Saga of Erik the Red records his movements precisely: the first winter on the island of Eiriksey, the second winter at Eiriksholmar near Hvarfsgnipa, and in the final summer he explored as far north as Snaefell and into Hrafnsfjord.

  When Erik returned to Iceland after his exile ended, he gave the land a name designed to attract settlers. "Greenland" was a deliberate piece of salesmanship. In Erik's own words, people would be more willing to go there if it had a favorable name. He understood that a successful colony required as many willing hands as possible.

• 5. The Settlement

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  In the summer of 985, Erik left Iceland for Greenland with a fleet of 25 ships. Only 14 arrived. Some turned back, but others were likely lost at sea. The survivors established two colonies on the southwest coast: the Eastern Settlement, called Eystribyggð, in the region now known as Qaqortoq, and the Western Settlement, close to present-day Nuuk. A Middle Settlement eventually grew up between them, though many historians consider it part of the Western Settlement. Only the eastern and western locations proved suitable for farming.

  In the Eastern Settlement, Erik built an estate called Brattahlíð, near present-day Narsarsuaq, in what is now called Qassiarsuk. He held the title of paramount chieftain of Greenland and became both wealthy and respected. The settlement grew to 5,000 inhabitants, spread along Eriksfjord and the neighboring fjords, as groups of immigrants from overcrowded Iceland joined the original party.

  During summers, men from both settlements traveled to Disko Bay, above the Arctic Circle, to hunt seals for rope, walrus tusks for ivory, and beached whales. The colony functioned for centuries. It survived until the Little Ice Age made the land increasingly hostile to European farming in the 15th century, shortly before Christopher Columbus made his first voyage to the Americas in 1492. Pirate raids, conflict with Inuit moving into Norse territories, and Norway's withdrawal of support all contributed to its eventual disappearance.

  Erik himself did not live to see the colony's long arc. A group of immigrants who arrived in 1002 brought an epidemic with them that killed many of the settlement's leading citizens. Erik died in that epidemic, during the winter following his son Leif's departure for the land Leif would call Vinland.

• 6. What the Sagas Record

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  Erik's son Leif Erikson became the first Norseman to explore Vinland, a land believed to correspond to the area around modern-day Newfoundland in North America. Leif invited his father to come along. Erik agreed, but on the way to the ship he fell from his horse and read the accident as a bad omen. He stayed behind and let Leif continue without him.

  The sagas that preserved Erik's story do not always agree with each other. The Saga of Erik the Red and the Greenland saga both cover the later expeditions to Vinland, but they diverge on key details. The Greenland saga describes separate expeditions, while the Saga of Erik the Red consolidates many of them into a single voyage led by Thorfinn Karlsefni. The two accounts share recurring figures, including Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, and both give Gudrid, Thorvald, and Freydís significant roles.

  The locations of the Vinland settlements also differ between the two texts. The Greenland saga names Vinland as the settlement site, while the Saga of Erik the Red describes two base camps: Straumfjordr, where the party spent a winter and a spring, and Hop, where they encountered the people they called Skrælings. Neither saga resolves into a single authoritative account, but together they preserve the outline of a Norse presence in North America that Erik's founding of Greenland made possible.