Leif Erikson

• 1. Introduction

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  Leif Erikson, known as Leif the Lucky, is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America. That was about half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. His claim rests on a place called Vinland, usually interpreted as coastal North America. The sagas that describe it disagree about how he got there, and even about whether he arrived first. So who was the man behind the name? Why was he called lucky? Which telling of the voyage deserves belief? And does a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland belong to him?

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• 2. Born to Exiles

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  Thorvald Ásvaldsson, Leif's grandfather on his father's side, was banished from Norway for manslaughter. His family went into exile in Iceland, which Norsemen, mainly from Norway, had colonized during the century before Leif's birth. Among Leif's distant relatives was Naddodd, the man who discovered Iceland. Leif's father was Erik the Red, and his mother was Thjodhild.

  Around 970, Erik cleared land in the Haukadalur Valley, where Thjodhild's family was based, and built a farmstead called Eiríksstaðir. Leif's own birth is usually dated to the 970s, though the sagas never say where it happened. Iceland is the likely answer, perhaps near the edge of Breiðafjörður, where his parents probably met.

  Erik was later banished from Iceland, so he sailed west to a place he named Greenland. After a brief return to Iceland to fetch his family and other colonists, he founded the first permanent settlement there in 986. Leif grew up on the family estate of Brattahlíð in the Eastern Settlement. He had two brothers, Thorstein and Thorvald, and a sister named Freydís. A thrall named Tyrker was trusted with the care of Erik's children, and Leif later called him his "foster father." Tyrker would one day make a discovery that gave a new land its name.

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• 3. Two Rival Sagas

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  The Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders are both thought to have been written around 1200. Each gives a detailed account of voyages to Vinland, and the two sometimes conflict. Scholars generally treat them as works of literature rather than purely historical records, and they debate how accurate they are.

  Adam of Bremen's historical treatise, from about 1075, and the Book of Icelanders by Ari the Wise, from about 1122, hold the only known strictly historical mentions of Vinland. Both are merely passing references.

  In the Saga of Erik the Red, Leif finds Vinland by accident, blown off course while sailing from Norway to Greenland. The crew went ashore on an unknown coast and explored it. They found wild grapes, self-sown wheat and maple trees. They loaded the ship with samples and sailed east to Greenland, rescuing a group of shipwrecked sailors on the way. The saga says he earned the nickname Leif the Lucky for that rescue and for converting Norse Greenland to Christianity. Leif did not return to Vinland in this telling, but others from Greenland and Iceland did, including Thorfinn Karlsefni.

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• 4. Retracing Bjarni's Course

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  In the Saga of the Greenlanders, Bjarni Herjólfsson and his crew were sailing from Iceland to Greenland when wind and fog overtook them. They missed the southern tip of Greenland and came upon an unknown coast. Believing it was somewhere other than Greenland, they did not go ashore. They sailed on and found two more coasts that did not match their idea of Greenland. Then they turned back east, reached their original destination, and told of what they had seen.

  Roughly 15 years later, Leif approached Bjarni, bought his ship and gathered a crew of thirty-five men. His father Erik planned to sail with them but fell from his horse on the way to the ship. The fall was read as a bad omen, and Erik dropped out.

  Leif followed Bjarni's route in reverse. His first landfall was a rocky, desolate place he called Helluland, or Flat-Rock Land, possibly Baffin Island or northern Labrador. Next came a forested place he called Markland, or Forest Land, possibly near Cape Porcupine in Labrador. Two more days at sea brought him to an island to the north, possibly Belle Isle. He then returned to the mainland and passed a cape on its north side, perhaps Cape Bauld.

  West of that cape lay a green land with a mild climate and plentiful salmon. As winter approached, Leif decided to camp there and sent out parties to explore. During one of these journeys, Tyrker found that the land was full of vines and grapes. Leif therefore named it Vinland, or Wineland. The crew built a small settlement, which later visitors from Greenland called Leifsbudir, or Leif's Booths. In the spring Leif sailed home to Greenland with a cargo of grapes and timber.

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• 5. Faith and Succession

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  The Vinland sagas describe Leif as wise, considerate and strong, with a striking appearance. When he came of age he went to Norway, probably to serve King Olaf Tryggvason as a retainer. According to the Saga of Erik the Red, his ship was driven to the Hebrides, where he and his crew waited much of the summer for favorable winds. There he fell in love with a noblewoman named Thorgunna, who gave birth to their son Thorgils. She stayed behind, because Leif refused to take her along without her family's permission. Thorgils was later sent to Greenland, but he did not become popular.

  At the court of King Olaf Tryggvason, Leif converted to Christianity. The Saga of Erik the Red and Olaf Tryggvason's Saga in Heimskringla both say the king then sent him back to convert the settlers in Greenland. In the first of these, the storm that carried him to Vinland struck during that errand. Back home, Erik reacted coldly to the idea of abandoning his religion. Leif's mother became a Christian and built a church called Thjóðhild's Church.

  A different version of Olaf Tryggvason's Saga, found in Flateyjarbók, never mentions a storm or Vinland. It says all of Greenland was converted, Erik included. Some versions add that Leif brought a priest and clerics to help.

  The winter after Leif's return from Vinland, Erik died, shortly after 1000. That made Leif paramount chief in Greenland. The Saga of St. Olaf mentions him alive in 1018. By 1025, according to the Saga of the Sworn Brothers, the chieftaincy of Eiríksfjǫrðr had passed to his son Thorkell. No saga records how or when Leif died, only that he probably died in Greenland between those two dates.

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• 6. Evidence and Doubt

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  In the early 1960s, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, identified a Norse site at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Known as L'Anse aux Meadows, it has been suggested as Leifsbudir. Carbon dating estimates its age at 990-1050 CE, and tree-ring analysis points to the year 1021. The Ingstads showed that Norsemen reached North America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

  Later archaeological evidence suggests that Vinland may have covered the areas around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On that reading, L'Anse aux Meadows was a ship repair station and waypoint for voyages there. This does not rule out Leifsbudir, since the two sagas appear to describe Vinland as a wider region with several settlements. The Saga of Erik the Red names two more: Straumfjǫrðr, beyond the Kjalarnes promontory and the Wonderstrands, and Hóp, farther south. Most researchers agree that Vinland lay in North America.

  Leif is, in all likelihood, a historical figure and the first known European to set foot in continental North America. Other details of his life are debated. Several scholars suggest that Freydís and Tyrker are works of fiction, along with their roles in the Vinland sagas. His commission as a missionary to Greenland may also be fictional. That part of his story is often traced to Gunnlaugr Leifsson's version of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, which likely served as a source for some of the other sagas that mention Leif.

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• 7. Those Who Followed

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  Thorfinn Karlsefni led a colonizing expedition that, in the Saga of Erik the Red, included Leif's brother Thorvald. Leif himself had no contact with the Indigenous peoples of Vinland. Later Norse explorers did, and called them skrælingi, an archaic term for "wretches." In this account the Norse first traded with them. Weeks later the settlement at Hóp was attacked, and Karlsefni decided to abandon it. The group retreated to Straumfjǫrðr. One morning a one-legged native shot an arrow that killed Thorvald. He is famously said to have pulled it out and recited, "This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my entrails," before he died. On the return to Greenland, Karlsefni's crew captured two native boys and took them along.

  The Saga of the Greenlanders gives Thorvald the first contact. While exploring the coast, likely in the Markland area, he and his crew found nine natives asleep under boats. They attacked, killing eight, and one escaped. Shortly afterward, in an apparent reprisal, an arrow killed Thorvald. Karlsefni later led a colonizing party that traded with the natives at first. Relations soured when a native was killed trying to steal weapons. The natives retaliated, and Karlsefni abandoned the colony.

  Leif's successful expedition encouraged other Norsemen to make the journey, and the Norse became the first Europeans to colonize the area. No settlement became permanent, though sporadic voyages at least to Markland, for forages, timber and trade, possibly lasted for centuries. Adam of Bremen based his mention of Vinland on reports from the Danes. Christopher Columbus claimed in a letter to have visited Iceland in 1477. It has been suggested that knowledge of Vinland survived in European seaports in the 15th century, so he could have heard the stories.

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• 8. Monuments and Memory

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  In 1887, the first statue of Erikson, by Anne Whitney, was erected in Boston. Eben Norton Horsford pushed for it, and he believed Vinland could have been on the Charles River or Cape Cod. Not long after, another casting of Whitney's statue went up in Milwaukee. A statue in Chicago followed in 1901. It had been commissioned for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, to coincide with the arrival of a reconstructed Viking ship from Bergen, Norway. Christian Krohg painted Leiv Eirikson Discovering America for that same exposition. A Leif Erikson Memorial Association in Chicago held it until it was given back to the National Gallery of Norway in 1900. These stories shaped the identity of later Nordic Americans and Nordic immigrants to the United States.

  At the 1925 Minnesota State Fair, President Calvin Coolidge told a crowd of 100,000 that Leif had indeed been the first European to discover America. The occasion was the centenary of the first official Norwegian immigration to America. More statues followed at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul in 1949, near Lake Superior in Duluth in 1956, and in downtown Seattle. In 1930, the United States gave Iceland a statue of Leif for Reykjavík, to mark the 1,000-year anniversary of Alþingi, its parliament. It now stands in front of Hallgrímskirkja.

  In 1924, four men, a Swede, an Englishman and two Americans, set out to copy Leif's voyage in a 40-foot vessel named for him. They were lost after reaching the west coast of Greenland. The Exploration Museum in Húsavík, Iceland, has presented the Leif Erikson Awards annually since 2015, for achievements in exploration and in the study of its history. Ships carry his name too, including a Viking ship replica, a commercial ferry and a large dredger. Robert Frost's poem Wild Grapes recalls him as Leif the Lucky.

  Fiction has claimed him as well. He is the main character of the 1928 film The Viking and of Henry Treece's juvenile novel Vinland the Good. Nevil Shute's 1940 novel An Old Captivity gives him a dream sequence. Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire wrote and illustrated Leif the Lucky for children in 1941. He appears in Makoto Yukimura's manga Vinland Saga and in the Netflix drama Vikings: Valhalla, where Sam Corlett plays him. In The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Hagbard Celine's golden submarine is named the Leif Erikson.

  In 1929, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a bill making the 9th of October "Leif Erikson Day" in the state, and several other states adopted laws to observe it. Congress considered a federal day in 1935, but amended the bill so that it applied only to that year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation then. Later attempts to make it annual failed until 1964, when Congress authorized and requested a presidential proclamation of the 9th of October every year. Each president since has issued one. The sagas say only that Leif made landfall in the fall. Christian A. Hoen of Edgerton, Wisconsin, suggested the date because it was already historic for Norwegians in America. On the 9th of October 1825, the ship Restaurationen had arrived in New York Harbor from Stavanger, carrying the first organized party of Norwegian immigrants.

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